The Kuwait News Agency released a favorable story on the Secular Islam Summit in English and Arabic. The agency provides stories for Arab Times and Gulf Times in Kuwait, as well as other English- and Arab-language papers in the region.

In the article, Summit co-organizer Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi described the gathering as "a sanctuary for a lot of people who have been intimidated by the Jihad and radical Islamist forces, " that would



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An article in the Friday, February 23 edition of the weekly newspaper Muslim World Today discusses the Secular Islam Summit in the context of the "dialogue of civilizations.":

Peace-loving people at the United Nations and everywhere had hoped that "inter-faith dialogue" would serve as a corrective and alternative to Samuel Huntington's famous thesis of the clash of civilizations. But here they were guilty of the kind of oversimplification of which Huntington is so often accused. If there is a fault to be found with Huntington's formulation, it is not with the "clash" but with the "civilizations," for civilizations cannot be parsed neatly along religious lines.

The world that the global jihadist movement seeks to undo is not Christendom as such, it is secular modernity itself--the world built of critical reason, science, and humanist values. From Iraq to Bangladesh to Indonesia, the contest of the culture of totalitarian faith with the culture of secularism is also a struggle within Islamic societies, and its warriors claims the highest number of innocent victims among fellow Muslims.

Read the article online.

The Syrian-American psychiatrist and Middle East commentator Wafa Sultan will be among the delegates at the upcoming Secular Islam Summit.

On February 21, 2006, Dr. Sultan appeared on Al Jazeera's weekly discussion program "The Opposite Direction" to debate Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli. The New York Times estimated that the video of her appearance has been viewed at least one million times. In 2006 she was included in Time magazine's list of 100 influential people in the world "whose power, talent, or moral example is transforming the world."

On his Friday, February 9 broadcast, a one-hour special with Irshad Manji, CNN Headline News' Glenn Beck announced that he would broadcast his primetime show from the Secular Islam Summit on March 5. In a wide-ranging interview, Manji discussed her upbringing, her work for reform within Islam, and the upcoming PBS documentary "Faith Without Fear."

The chair of the Secular Islam Summit, the acclaimed author Ibn Warraq, has announced his latest book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism.

From the publisher:

This is the first systematic critique of Edward Said's influential work, Orientalism, a book that for almost three decades has received wide acclaim, voluminous commentary, and translation into more than fifteen languages. Said’s main thesis was that the Western image of the East was heavily biased by colonialist attitudes, racism, and more than two centuries of political exploitation. Although Said’s critique was controversial, the impact of his ideas has been a pervasive rethinking of Western perceptions of Eastern cultures, plus a tendency to view all scholarship in Oriental Studies as tainted by considerations of power and prejudice.

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