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These interviews, conducted in Istanbul in September, 2002, are part of the Islamic studies program webcasts at the Library of Congress. They highlight the achievements of six exceptional Muslim women from Afghanistan, the Arab world, and Turkey who not only have worked hard to attain personal success but have done much to help other women in their communities as well.
Mary-Jane Deeb (Interviewer) Mary-Jane Deeb joined the Library of Congress as Arab World Area Specialist in 1998 from the American University in Washington DC, where she taught for 10 years. She also taught at Georgetown and George Washington Universities as Adjunct professor in the 1990s. In the early 1980s she worked for UNICEF and USAID in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. She holds a Ph.D. in International Affairs from the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the John's Hopkins University and is the author of several books and more than 80 articles, book chapters and book reviews on Middle Eastern politics. She is a frequent media commentator and is listed in the Marquis' Who's Who in America since 1997.
Abla Amawi is a young, single mother of a 10 year old girl, and an Assistant Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) based in Amman, Jordan. Raised in a conservative family in Jordan, she received a Ph.D. in Politics from Georgetown University and turned down an academic career in the U.S. to work on problems of gender and poverty in the Middle East. She often takes her daughter on assignment. (11 min. 34 sec.)
Akile Gürsoy is the Chair of the Department of Social Anthropology at Yeditepe University in Turkey. She is currently the head of the Turkish delegation to the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and the founder and president of the Association for Social Sciences and Health. The granddaughter of the first Prime Minister of Turkey under Atatürk, her research work has focused on poor working women in urban areas. (14 min. 03 sec.)
Najat Arafat Khelil is the president of the Arab Women’s Council Research and Education Fund and is a trained nuclear physicist who obtained her doctorate from the State University of North Texas. She has taught at the University of Algiers, George Washington University and Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina and has lectured on women’s issues around the world from Jerusalem to Moscow and Toronto to Beijing. She is a former Fulbright grantee. (8 min. 45 sec.)
Gülsün Saglamer was elected by the faculty to the presidency of Istanbul Technical University in 1996. Not only is she the first woman in Turkey to hold this position in the prestigious 225 year old engineering and architecture institution, but she is the only woman in Europe to do so. She runs the university, teaches, writes and has designed many of the new buildings in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey. (13 min. 59 sec.)
Laila Enayat-Seraj, the daughter of a former Afghani ambassador to Egypt, studied at the American University in Cairo. Returning to Afghanistan, she got married, but when the Russian invasion took place she fled to the U.S. where she continued her studies in International Affairs. She joined the United Nations in Geneva and worked for various organizations including UNDP. But her real love was art and poetry, and she has just translated from Persian the poems of an Afghani poetess who wrote 1,000 years ago. (11 min. 23 sec.)
Sima Wali is the President and CEO of the Refugee Women in Development organization that focuses on re-integrating women living in conflict and post-conflict societies. Herself an Afghan refugee to the United States, she is the recipient of Amnesty International’s 1999 third annual Ginetta Sagan Fund Award and served last year as one of only three women delegates to the UN peace talks on Afghanistan. (15 min. 00 sec.)
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