Hussein Rashid, a Queens-born Shiite Muslim with a blog called islamicate.com, said that if the talk turns to the Middle East, he would fall back on the experience he had coexisting with a college roommate “who was incredibly pro-Israel. We argued and we fought, but at the end of the day we realized it was a political dispute, and we agreed to disagree.”
Rashid considers himself “a voice of Islam’s silent majority.” A doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Rashid said the conference “will allow us to talk across traditions. That is the wonderful thing about this.”