A timely topic will be on deck for the 2002 Jellema Lectures at Calvin College.

"State, Society and the Family: A Qur'anic Worldview" will be addressed in two different lectures by Aziza al-Hibri, a philosopher, professor of law and Muslim feminist from the University of Richmond Law School.

She will speak on April 3 at 7;30 p.m. on "Gender and the Family in the Qur'an." On April 4 at 3:30 p.m. she will speak on "Religion and the State in Islam." Both lectures will be held in the Calvin Seminary auditorium and are free and open to all.

The lectures, named for former Calvin professor of philosophy Harry Jellema, are being co-sponsored by the philosophy, sociology, religion and political science departments at Calvin and the school's gender studies committee.

In Aziza al-Hibri the school has chosen a dynamic and significant speaker for the annual Jellema Lectures. She has written extensively on the subject of women and Islam and has served as a guide on the topic for a wide variety of media outlets, including PBS, CNN and the BBC, as well as organizations and government groups. She is founder and executive director of Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights and founding editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

She has published widely on human rights, Islamic law and the rights of women in Islamic legal systems. She has traveled and lectured extensively throughout the Muslim world in support of Muslim women's rights and participated in conferences and various workshops on topics relating to Islamic jurisprudence, democracy and women's rights and Muslims in the United States. She also has thought for years about issues related to terrorism. In fact, in 1995 she testified before a House of Representatives committee on "The Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995." A couple of summers ago, she traveled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to meet with Afghani women and men and was briefed on the situation in Afghanistan.