The CSRE at City University is delighted to host Professor Behzad
Yaghmaian's Public Lecture 'Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim
Migrants on the Journey West' on 1st February 2007 at 6.00pm. To confirm
a place at the lecture, please email Liza Schuster on
[log in to unmask] or Jane Adlington on [log in to unmask]

See below for a more detailed description of the event. In addition, a review 
by Liza Schuster of Prof. Yaghmaian's book is available in Ethnic and Racial 
Studies, vol.30, no.1 (January 2007):

Embracing the Infidel: Muslims on the Journey West

Thursday 1 February 2007 at 18:30

Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre, The City University,
Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB

Tea and coffee from 18:00; a drinks reception will follow the lecture

Behzad Yaghmaian, an Iranian-born American citizen, is Professor of Political 
Economy at Ramapo College in New Jersey and author of Social Change in Iran: An 
Eyewitness Account of Dissent, Defiance, and New Movements for Rights, as well 
as Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West.

He left Tehran in 1979, returning for visits after 1996, and a prolonged stay 
in 1998. This was cut short when he was forced to flee following the 
suppression of the students uprising the following year. His experiences of 
migration and flight, and the stories he heard from others in similar 
situations, finally prompted him in 2002 to go to Istanbul, to pick up and 
follow the threads of other journeys and tale those tales.

In his lecture on the 1st February, Yaghmaian will tell some of the the stories 
of migrants from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan on their journeys west into Europe, 
chronicling not only the many difficulties and barriers they faced, but their 
extraordinary resilience, courage and tenacity.

Yaghmaian’s humanises what is all too frequently presented as a faceless 
streams of others washing up against Europe’s borders. At the same time, by 
following the trajectories of a dozen individuals, he illustrates the problems 
common to all. Yaghmaian relates the stories of the mostly young men, some 
older men and few women he meets in Istanbul, Sofia, Athens, Patras, Rome, 
Paris, Calais and London. One is struck by the warmth of the relationships he 
forges with the people he encounters, and re-encounters on these journeys, and 
by the degree of trust they grant him. Yaghmaian does not romanticise, but 
creates a carefully nuanced picture of the people he comes to know.

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