World Organization for Resource Development & Education
WORDE Publications include books, commentary, and reports authored by WORDE Specialists. They also include Our WORDE (public policy newsletter), Press Releases and Public Statements.
October 10, 2011 | Press Release
This summer WORDE Specialists Mehreen Farooq and Waleed Ziad travelled to 35 cities and villages across Pakistan to explore avenues for developing civil society’s capabilities to counter extremism. They met with over 100 organizations, from Peshawar, Swat, and the tribal frontier, to Kashmir, southern Punjab, and Sindh to discover how Pakistanis are using madrassas, mosques, shrines, and public debates to counter radical narratives at the grassroots level.
November 2, 2011 | By Specialists Mehreen Farooq and Waleed Ziad
Swat’s success hinged on an integrated approach, which should be replicated at the epicenter of Pakistan’s war against extremism, the tribal belt. There as in Swat, civil society actors, including religious and political leaders, elders, and educators, lead daring resistance efforts against all odds. We visited a flagship madrasa within a network of anti-Taliban educational institutions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
October 2011 | By Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi
Although mainstream Muslims worldwide wholly condemn radical ideologies, a sect of extremists has been working for almost a century to use religion as a weapon of war. This enemy is not an individual or group, but rather a complex transnational network of organizations that share a common ideology.
October 24, 2011 | Press Release
This summer WORDE Specialists Mehreen Farooq and Waleed Ziad travelled across Pakistan to explore avenues for developing civil society’s capabilities to counter extremism. They met with over 100 organizations, from Peshawar, Swat, and the tribal frontier, to Kashmir, southern Punjab, and Sindh to discover how Pakistanis are using madrassas, mosques, shrines, and public debates to counter radical narratives at the grassroots level.
October 21, 2011 | By Specialists Waleed Ziad and Mehreen Farooq
In a pristine, remote valley in Kashmir, far from the theaters of war, some families are abandoning their religious and cultural traditions in favor of extremist ideologies.
By Specialist Ziad Alahdad
Far removed from the reductive and excessively alarmist rhetoric pervading foreign policy discourse, Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State” offers a sober and comprehensive appraisal of the problems plaguing the Islamic republic. What sets this book apart from others on Pakistan is its detailed account of the country’s intractable crises, accompanied by lucid, compelling, and empirically supported policy recommendations that, in a time of tremendous uncertainty, may illuminate a pathway to hope.
In fifteen centuries, Islam has never sanctioned any form of family violence. How then did this scourge become widespread in the Muslim community? As in other religions, Islamic law forbids such practices has been systematically decontextualized by patriarchal scholars whose dogma dismisses the socially inclusive, inalienable rights bestowed upon women by Islam.
September 1, 2011 | By Specialists Waleed Ziad and Mehreen Farooq
In southern Punjab, a fierce battle rages for the future of Islam. For the first time in this region’s history, its 700-year-old blue tiled Sufi shrines are being challenged and overshadowed by hundreds of new mosques and madrassas espousing jihadi ideologies.
August 11, 2011 | Keynote Address By Specialist Ziad Alahdad
The fast in Ramadan consists of abstinence from eating or drinking from dawn to dusk and, more importantly, abiding by certain principles of purity. Imam Johari in a recent article in the Washington Post wrote: “Iftar, the breaking of the fast, is like having Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner every night for 30 days.” – a fitting tribute to the very strong tradition of hospitality which, Emre Bey, you alluded to earlier…