Abbas, Hassan 1969-

PERSONAL:

Born April 4, 1969, in Peshawar, Pakistan; son of Ghulam (an educator) and Rafia (an artist and homemaker) Abbas; married, 1995; wife's name Benish Z. (a lawyer and human rights activist); children: Tehrim Z., Zahra, Shehrband. Ethnicity: "Punjabi." Education: Government College, Lahore, Pakistan, B.A., 1990; University of Nottingham, LL. M., 1999; Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Ph.D., 2006. Religion: Muslim.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Leominster, MA. Office—John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Government official in Islamabad, Pakistan, 1991-2000; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, research fellow, 2002-07. Independent consultant on the politics and culture of southwest Asia; media commentator for British Broadcasting Corp. and Voice of America.

WRITINGS:

Poleaxe or Politics of the Eighth Amendment, 1985-1997, Watandost (Lahore, Pakistan), 1998.

Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America's War on Terror, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 2005.

Also author of Sovereignty Belongs to Allah: Constitutionalism and Human Rights in the Islamic World, c. 2007. Affiliated with the blog Watandost: Inside News about Pakistan.

SIDELIGHTS:

Hassan Abbas told CA: "My motivation for writing is to contribute toward a renaissance in the Islamic world. Initially I was inspired to write about social and political issues in Pakistan and South Asia, as a witness to the worsening political culture. Later, my interest shifted slightly toward the crisis faced by the Muslim states in terms of the lack of democracy, the rise of extremist forces, and relations between the West and the Islamic world.

"My work has been influenced by the life work of great Islamic scholar of the eighth century, Imam Jafar Sadik; poet and philosopher of the early twentieth century, Dr. Mohammad Iqbal; Abdol Karim Sorough of Iran; and Jessica Stern and Seyyed Hossein Nasr of the United States."