FROM ONEJAX April 15, 2010 Dear Jacksonville Friends and Supporters, We at OneJax, an interfaith organization whose mission is to promote respect and understanding among people of different religions, races, cultures and beliefs, must go on record to express our dismay and disappointment at the actions of the City Council regarding the delay of a vote to approve the...

Video of Rules Committee Meeting, April 19, 2010 Florida Times Union, April 20, 2010By Tia MitchellUniversity of North Florida President John Delaney said he decided to speak up in public for Parvez Ahmed not just because he is an employee but because he felt an upstanding man was being vilified. “He’s a person of peace,” Delaney said after speaking...

I was nominated by Jacksonville Mayor John Peyton to serve on the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission. The nomination needed to voted by the Rules Committee of City Council. In advance of this meeting, one of the Council members named Clay Yarborough sent me a bunch of irrelevant questions asking me about my views on “Under God” in the Pledge of...

In AltMuslim, March 29, 2010 Throughout the current economic and financial crisis one contrarian statistic has stood out. Financial assets offered by the Islamic Financial Services Industry (IFSI) and generally classified as “Shariah-compliant,” were less affected by the crisis. Economist Loretta Napoleoni during a lecture at the University of New Mexico...

Distributed by Common Ground News Service. Published in Daily News Egypt A role for Muslim Americans in preventing extremism?by Parvez Ahmed05 February 2010 Jacksonville, Florida – A recent report by researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) states that the number of Muslim Americans vulnerable to radicalisation is...

Forthcoming in The Message International.Also in AltMuslim.com and The American Muslim. Homegrown Radicals: Complacency is not an Optionby Parvez Ahmed* An army major at Fort Hood guns down fellow soldiers, five young men arrested after traveling to Pakistan to join radical elements, a coffee vendor charged in a New York terror plot and a terrorism suspect in North...

Published in The American MuslimAlso on Huffington PostAlso on AltMuslim Let “God” be “God”! by Parvez Ahmed, Ph.D. and Lucinda Mosher, Th.D. Last November the Malaysian government refused to release 10,000 Bibles it had seized because they contained the word Allah to refer to God. The Herald, a publication of the Roman Catholic Church in Malaysia, challenged...

Interview by IslamOnline.net. Dec 2, 2009 Unfolding Dubai’s Debt CrisisBy Amr Taha, Staff Writer-IslamOnline.net On November 25, 2009, the Dubai Government asked Dubai World, a government-backed conglomerate, to agree to delay its repayments until May 2010. With the number is so much unconfirmed, Dubai reportedly owes the world more than $60billion of external...

An abridged version appears in Islamic Horizons, Nov/Dec 2009 Issue. There is virtually no major organized opposition to legalized gambling, except from Focus on the Family and similar evangelical Christian groups. Given Islam’s prohibition of gambling, Muslims should work with other concerned organizations to educate people about the ills of gambling and advocate...

An abridged version appears in Islamic Horizons, Nov/Dec 2009 Issue. What lies behind the beaming lottery winners and oversized checks is misery, says Ellen Goodstein (Bankrate.com). Television commercials and media stories depict winning the lottery as an American dream. But having piles of cash does not necessarily bring happiness, as pointed out by Ellen...

Published in Huffington Post. November 13, 2009 The news that one of US Army’s very own has shot to death 13 fellow soldiers and wounded 30 others is just as shocking and puzzling as the many random shootings that preceded this. Do we know why the killers at Columbine gunned down their fellow classmates? Do we understand why a shooter at Virginia Tech...

This article is based on a lecture given at the Press Club in Kolkata (Calcutta), India on September 24, 2009. The lecture was sponsored by the American Center in Calcutta, India. First Published by AltMuslim. October 23, 2009 This year due to a coincidence of the lunar calendar, Eid-ul-Fitr and Durga Puja, two major religious festivals of India, were celebrated...

The Financial Express, October 7, 2009 A recent Bangladesh Bank (BB) policy paper asserts that moving into the future, Bangladesh will have to rely heavily on capital markets to raise the necessary money to fund capital expansion projects. Capital expansion projects need a lot of money and relying solely on banks to raise that money is inefficient. In Bangladesh,...

Huffington Post, Sep 11, 2009Also on AltMuslim The latest survey from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press shows an unmistakable trend of Americans slowly but surely beginning to appreciate the challenges and aspirations of its fellow Muslim citizenry. Perhaps this trend is a result of nearly half of Americans saying that they personally know someone who...

Islam Online. Aug 5, 2009 Easy credit and risky derivatives are the apparent factors that triggered this once-in-a-generation global financial crisis. However, the fact is that responsible and reputable institutions, that are otherwise risk-averse, engaged in extremely risky trades without adequate protective measures, which points to something more fundamental...