San Marcos Mercury | Local News from San Marcos and Hays County, Texas

November 9th, 2009
Sarwat Hussien to speak at Texas State

STAFF REPORT

Sarwat Hussien, president of the Council on American-Islamic relations, will speak at Texas State at 7 p.m. on Nov. 17.

Hussian is an American citizen living in San Antonio. She  has been outspoken about the errors that Americans make regarding those in the Islamic faith. Her lecture is entitled “Islam: Stereotypes and Misconceptons.”

The event will be held in the Taylor-Murphy Building in room 104. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Sponsors of the event include Common Experience and the Middle East Culture Club. For more information, contact Amjad Mohammad, Arabic language coordinator at Texas State, at arabicclass@gmail.com.

Email Email | Print Print

--

0 thoughts on “Sarwat Hussien to speak at Texas State

  1. “The errors that Americans make regarding those in the Islamic faith”.

    What a concept.

    How about also discussing the errors that those in the Islamic faith have made regarding Americans? I can think of one about eight years ago and then another just last week….

  2. Well dano, maybe you can schedule a lecture to explain to everyone just exactly what misconceptions the Islamic faith has made regarding Americans. Seems like a plausible idea except for the fact that its getting more and more difficult to defend the so called “righteousness” of our country. Today, its hard to even recognize the nation we inherited from our ancestors. But we won’t change a thing, we’ll continue to vote for leaders who are in it for glory, fame, power and influence. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, ect… these are all two sides of the same damn coin. Has the slippery slope become to steep and too slick already?

  3. Jeremy, you’re right that there are misconceptions on both sides. We probably need two lectures.

    You may be in the right frame of mind to exchange the “same damn coin” of westernism for Islamic coinage. But consider carefully that you will be offered only one lecture, one political candidate, and no opportunity to post comments in the online newspaper. Last night’s lecture on the campus didn’t mention this so I wanted mention it here.

  4. The presentation was very poor, she seemed unbelievably aggressive towards questions and she repeated the same information over and over throughout the speech. Her Power Point presentation was worse than a high school child’s attempt with consistently misspelled words and bad grammar throughout. She lacked pin pointing some of the more common misconceptions and instead focused on how righteous every Muslim was and that there were no Muslims in the world that commit terrible crimes .She even tried to explain that there are no problems at all with gays in the middle east, they apparently walk around just fine and everyone knows. She also stated that no women in the Middle East (except S.A.) are forced to wear a head scarf or anything else. Not to mention the handful of times she decided to mention how terrifying it was for her to come to our campus. The entire presentation seemed like dry propaganda. She seemed to be using the same stereotypes against average Americans as she was telling us not to use about average Muslims.

  5. I was happy with the presentation. That is, I was happy it was humorless, disorganized, repetitive, sophomoric, defensive, self-pitying, filled with stale or unverifiable data, unpleasantly decorated, obviously false on some points, immaterial on other points, bigoted, and generally unpersuasive.

    Now if I were Muslim, I would be very angry with CAIR.

    One person tried to bring up something specific from the Koran. She responded with the old “it’s Arabic so you can’t understand it” argument.

    One thing might have helped her presentation, despite the many failings: a show of concern and grief for the murders of 9/11 and Killeen. Her acknowledgment of those evil crimes and their cost seemed trite. She worked hard on absolving the larger Muslim community. She did nothing to explore the societal or religious complexity of our world.

    Just a minute of silence would have been something. But since I’m not wishing her success, I shouldn’t offer any tips.

  6. At the same moment we were listening to CAIR, a few buildings over our local university was hosting a lecture by Dr. Marci Bowers.

    Dr. Bowers is “one of the nation’s leading gender-related surgeons, specializing in sex reassignment surgeries.” I don’t have time just now to unpack all the depressing ironies.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

:)