Brookings Saban Center Announces Doha Conference Will Kick Off U.S.-Islamic World Forum

1/6/2004

From: Saban Center, Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World, Doha2004@brookings.edu, 202-797-6462; or Colin Johnson of the Brookings Institution, 202-797-6310

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 -- The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution announced today that former President Bill Clinton and Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, will be the keynote speakers at the inauguration of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum.

Hosted by the government of Qatar in Doha from Jan. 10-12, the forum is a new initiative of the Saban Center's Brookings Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World. It will open with a conference of U.S. and Muslim leaders that will stress the need for frank diplomacy and concrete action to improve relations between the United States and the Islamic world.

Over 150 leaders from the United States and 38 Muslim countries plan to attend the conference. Top American and Muslim world figures from the fields of politics, business, civil society, academe, and the news media will participate in both plenary sessions and smaller working groups, examining such issues as the Iraq war, the Middle East peace process, free trade and economic development, education, and the role of the private sector in easing tensions between Muslim countries and the United States. The forum will follow up the Doha meetings with a series of joint initiatives aimed at strengthening ties between the Islamic world and the United States, as well as outreach, research, and publication activities.

Among the speakers scheduled to appear in Doha are Hamad Bin Jasim Al Thani, foreign minister of Qatar; Marwan Muasher, foreign minister of Jordan; Mohammed Dahlan, former minister of security for the Palestinian Authority; Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Qazi Hussein Ahmed, ameer of the Jamaat-e-Islami Party of Pakistan; Lorne Craner, U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, labor, and human rights; and Surin Pitsuwan, former foreign minister of Thailand.

Peter W. Singer, the forum project director and a National Security Fellow at Brookings, called the conference, "an important step in bringing together both policymakers and opinion-shapers from the U.S. and across the Islamic world, something that is all the more critical given these trying times." Saban Center Director Martin Indyk and Brookings senior fellows Stephen P. Cohen and Shibley Telhami are the Forum's co-convenors and will serve as moderators at the meetings.

Members of the media and public are invited to attend the opening and closing sessions of the conference. Further information on the forum and video downloads of its public roundtables and keynote speeches will be available at: http://www.us-islamicworldforum.org.

Brookings would like to express its deep appreciation to the Government of Qatar, Haim Saban, the Ford Foundation, and the Education and Employment Foundation for helping to make the Forum possible.

The Brookings Institution is an independent, nonpartisan organization devoted to research, analysis, education, and publication focused on public policy issues in the areas of economics, foreign policy, and governance. The Saban Center's central objective is to advance understanding of developments in the Middle East through policy-relevant scholarship and debate. The goal of Brookings activities is to improve the performance of American institutions and the quality of public policy by using social science to analyze emerging issues and to offer practical approaches to those issues in language aimed at the general public.