Peer Talks with Dr. Qamar ul Huda | Podcast #41

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Peer Syed Mudassir Nazar Shah with Dr. Qamar ul Hda

Qamar-ul Huda is an American religious scholar.

As an assistant professor at Boston College, in 2002 he published a revised version of the dissertation with Routledge Sufi Series entitled, “Striving for Divine Union: Spiritual Exercises for the Suhrwardi Sufis” (London and New York).

He wrote a personal account of the new demands for his expertise following the attack on the USA on September 11, 2001. He was one of three American professors of religion who drafted letters to be submitted to Murat Kurnaz’s Administrative Review Board.

Huda joined the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Program for Religion and Peacemaking as a senior program officer.

The United States Department of State (State Department) hired Huda to be seconded as a subject matter expert to build up Hedayah: The International Centre of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

In 2012, U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, established a new office called The Religion and Global Affairs (RGA) to demonstrate the critical importance the role of religion plays in foreign affairs. In 2017, Huda with several colleagues co-founded the Center for Global Policy, a non-partisan independent policy think tank focused on U.S. foreign policy and national security and the geopolitics of Muslim majority countries in the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. He was the founding director for the Program on Conflict, Stabilization, and Development where the program focused on development issues, moving from conflict toward peace processes, conflict management, and new metrics to understand stabilization. For the Center for Global Policy, Huda authored over a dozen policy briefs and a policy report entitled “A Critique of Countering Violent Extremism Programs in Pakistan.” (August 2020). Based on this study, the Near East and South Asia Center Center for Strategic Studies (NESA) at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, DC, conducted an interview on the core findings of the countering violent extremism policy report, and on religion, diplomacy and global affairs.

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