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Home  >  Calendar  >  Standard lectures

Who Speaks for Islam? What A Billion Muslims Really Think

Event Date

  • 10/21/2009   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
    Please arrive early for registration

Location

  • World Affairs Council Auditorium

Address

  • 312 Sutter Street
    Second Floor
    San Francisco, California 94108
Speaker(s)
Dalia Mogahed, Senior Analyst & Executive Director, Gallup Center for Muslim Studies

Dalia Mogahed is a Senior Analyst and Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a nonpartisan research center dedicated to providing data-driven analysis on the views of Muslim populations around the world. With John L. Esposito, Ph.D., she is coauthor of the book Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think. Her analysis has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine, the Harvard International Review, the Middle East Policy journal, and many other academic and popular journals.

Mogahed leads the analysis of Gallup's unprecedented survey representing the opinions of more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide, including Muslims in the West. She also directs the Muslim-West Facts Initiative (www.muslimwestfacts.com), through which Gallup, in collaboration with the Coexist Foundation, is disseminating the findings of the Gallup World Poll to key opinion leaders in the Muslim World and the West.

Mogahed travels the globe engaging diverse groups on what Muslims around the world really think. Her audiences have included the High-Level Group of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, the Community of West and Islam Dialogue (C-100) group of the World Economic Forum, the Brookings Institution's U.S.-Islamic World Forum, British parliamentarians, American senators, and religious leaders from every faith. She has discussed Gallup findings with a wide range of opinion leaders, including Madeleine Albright, Deepak Chopra, Stephen R., Covey, Quincy Jones, and Jeffrey Sachs; Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman; evangelical leader Richard Land; bestselling author Karen Armstrong; U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel; Muslim activist and teacher Amr Khaled; and Sheikh Habib Ali al-Jifri, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Her Majesty Queen Rania al Abdullah of Jordan, as well as two of the highest authorities of Sunni Islam, the Grand Muftis of Egypt and Bosnia, their Excellencies Dr. Ali Gomaa and Dr. Mustafa Ceric.

Mogahed is a member of Women in International Security, serves on the leadership group of the Project on U.S. Engagement with the Global Muslim Community, and is a member of the Crisis in the Middle East Task Force of the Brookings Institution.

Mogahed earned her master's degree in business administration with an emphasis in strategy from the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering. Upon graduation, Mogahed joined Procter & Gamble as a marketing products researcher.

Event Details

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Despite widespread media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global terrorism and events in the Middle East, little is truly known about what a majority of the world's Muslims really think and feel. What do Muslims have to say about violence and terrorist attacks? What do they have to say about democracy, women, and relations with the West? What are their values, goals, and religious beliefs? To help put to rest misunderstandings and present the often-silenced voice of the Muslim world, Dalia Mogahed joins the Council to discuss Gallup's largest study of Muslim populations. Based on six years of research and more than 50,000 interviews representing 1.3 billion Muslims who reside in more than 35 nations, this poll is the largest, most comprehensive study which challenges conventional wisdom and sheds greater light on what motivates Muslims worldwide. Mogahed has recently been appointed to President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

This event is co-sponsored by the Egyptian American Society.

Watch and listen to the program recording or visit our online archive for other event recordings.