The Rumi Forum presented "Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization" with Dr. Reza Aslan.

**Books will be availale for purchase and signing following Dr. Aslan's talk.

Free and open to the public (registration required)

Light lunch will be served

Dr. Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is a contributing editor at the Daily Beast (thedailybeast.com). Reza Aslan has a B.A. in Religions from Santa Clara University, a M.A. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from University of California, Santa Barbara. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He serves on the board of directors for both the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues, Abraham’s Vision, an interfaith peace organization, and PEN USA. Aslan’s first book is the international bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been translated into thirteen languages, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award in the UK, and nominated for a PEN USA award for research Non-Fiction. His other books include How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism) and Tablet Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Named by the Smithsonian Institute as one of 35 Innovators Under 35, Aslan is CEO of Aslan Media Inc, whose holdings include BoomGen Studios, a mini motion picture studio and media company dedicated to fostering creative content from and about the Middle East; Mecca.com, an on-line social networking site for young Muslims; and Appovation, which develops mobile phone apps for developing world. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles where he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside

Moderator :

Jamie Tarabay, National Desk Correspondent for National Public Radio. After reporting from Iraq for two years as NPR's Baghdad Bureau Chief, Jamie Tarabay is now embarking on a two year project reporting on America's Muslims. The coverage will take in the country's approx 6 million Muslims, of different ethnic, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, and the issues facing their daily lives as Americans.

In January 2007, Tarabay was part of the NPR News team that won the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of Iraq, the only news organization so recognized.

For the past nine years, Tarabay has been a foreign correspondent covering — and living in — some of the world's highest-profile regions of conflict. In September 2000, she arrived in Jerusalem as a correspondent for the AP just days before the second intifada broke out. She captured her three years of reporting on Palestinians and Israelis in her first book A Crazy Occupation: Eyewitness to the Intifada which was published in Australia in 2005 by Allen and Unwin. It is now available in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

Tarabay is one of the few female Western journalists to have made a career as a war reporter. In that time she's been arrested, proposed to by militiamen, interviewed everyone from world leaders to armed fighters, been shot at, felt the blast of an IED and the punches of demonstrators as well as police.

Australian by birth, and Lebanese by heritage, Tarabay grew up in Sydney, Berlin and Beirut. She has a BA in Government and French from the University of Sydney and can speak Arabic and French. She lives with her husband and son in Baltimore, MD.