Hatem Bazian

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Hatem Bazian lecturing

Dr. Hatem Bazian is a senior lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and an adjunct professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches courses on Islamic Law and Society, Islam in America, Religious Studies, and Arabic language. During the Spring of 2006, he taught Middle Eastern Politics at the East Bay's Saint Mary's College of California. He also teaches Arabic and Maliki Fiqh at the Zaytuna Institute. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from UC Berkeley, specializing in Islamic Law and the history of Muslims in Jerusalem.

Bazian emigrated from his hometown of Nablus in Palestine to the United States. He arrived in the U.S. in pursuit of higher education and to escape what he considered to be the daily indignities to which the occupying Israeli army subjected him and other Palestinians.

His twenty years of experience as a Palestinian activist have earned him the role of a local media spokesperson on Middle East issues. Bazian has also played a significant role in the civil rights, anti-Apartheid, anti-NAFTA and affirmative action movements in the Bay Area.

Bazian has translated al-Waraqat in Usul al-Fiqh and is currently working on a book on the Muslim history of al-Quds (Jerusalem). He is also near completion of a book called Virtual Internment: Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians, and the War on Terrorism.

[edit] Intifada Controversy

During an April 10, 2004 anti-war protest in San Francisco, Bazian gave a speech in which he said:

"Well, we've been watching intifada in Palestine, we've been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don't have an intifada in this country?" Because it seem[s] to me, that we are comfortable in where we are, watching CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox..... every one of those lying, cheating, stealing, deceiving individuals are in our country and we're sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it's about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know every – They're gonna say some Palestinian being too radical – well, you haven't seen radicalism yet!" [1]

The speech was posted on the weblog Little Green Footballs by a member who had been present at the rally to record it. Anger over the use of the term intifada, which many perceived as an endorsement of terrorism against the United States, led to an outpouring of vitrol directed at Bazian. He claims to have received over 100,000 emails in response to the speech, of which at least nine were threats against his life. [2]

To defend himself against charges of endorsing terrorism, Bazian appeared on the O'Reilly Factor on April 19, 2004. He claimed that his use of the term intifada had "to be put into context" as he actually "was calling for a political intifada similar to the statements of calling for regime change, political activism."[3] He said he did not support any violence, and that he had "been (an) activist for the past 20 years or so. And I have never engaged in any violence. And non violence is the method that I choose for political change."