Mustafa Gokcek isn’t about to deny the obvious.
Thanks mostly to the policies of the Bush administration, the great rift between the Muslim and Western worlds clearly has widened in the last year, acknowledges the 29-year-old Turkish native and UW-Madison grad student.
And there’s no better proof, he says, than the tens of thousands of angry protesters who greeted the president on his recent trip to India and Pakistan. But as worrisome as that may be, Gokcek says it also proves the increasing need for events like the second annual International Conference on Islam, “Dialogue vs. Conflict: Islam in the Age of Globalization,” which will take place March 24-25 at the University of Wisconsin’s Pyle Center.