Parvez Ahmed is well-known in Jacksonville.
He is a University of North Florida Coggin College of Business professor of finance, a former U.S. Fulbright Scholar and a community leader on civil discourse.
Ahmed gained a higher profile as a two-term member of the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission and a frequent writer and speaker about Islam and the American Muslim experience.
Last year, OneJax awarded him the Humanitarian silver medal for his work toward overcoming bias, bigotry and racism in Jacksonville.
What brought you to Jacksonville?
Beautiful weather and the great waterfronts. Jacksonville was not a well-known city, and the university was not on my radar until one of my friends gave me a call and said that there’s a position opening here. The only thing that I’d heard about Jacksonville prior to that call was the Jacksonville Jaguars. Everything looked pretty interesting and inviting. The University of North Florida is smaller and you can make a bigger difference.
You’ve taken a highly visible role in Jacksonville. What motivates you to do so?
As members of the human race, we do have an obligation toward each other, regardless of what racial background we belong to, regardless of what national identity we identify with or our religion. We all have an obligation toward each other and it becomes more so in a globalized village like today. I was raised in a family where having a social responsibility was important and it’s part of my faith. All of that combines to inspire me to try and do as best as I can.
Who were your mentors?
I was the only child of my parents but I grew up in India with a lot of extended family. A typical family weekend gathering could easily be 20-plus people. Growing up in that environment you obviously learn to respect differences. We have people spanning all ends of the spectrum, from the hard left to the Islamist right, and so our family gatherings were very interesting conversations. Being in that setting gave me the ability to have the patience to hear all sides of an argument, and also understand the power of civil discourse in trying to find common ground with others.
I have a blog - forcommongood.com. People naturally have differences in opinion. What I try to do is to figure out where the common ground is and what we can do once we discover that common ground. I’m very fortunate in this city that there are many, many good people that are engaged in this work.
Mayor Lenny Curry calls for “One City, One Jacksonville.” How do you see yourself becoming a part of that on the Human Rights Commission and in any other positions that you might take?
I think it’s a very noble aspiration. The challenge is, how do we get there? We see that Jacksonville is a divided city between races; on religious grounds we are often quite divided, and also perhaps more so increasingly divided along our economic lines. It will certainly take mayoral leadership and I wish Mayor Curry the best. I’m quite struck by his integrity. The challenge will be how we all can cooperate to make this vision a reality for everybody so that we can move past some of the divisive history of this city and be a city and a community that we all deserve.
Do you have any political aspirations?
No, none, zero.
At UNF you’re a popular professor, and you’ve been chosen as an outstanding teacher. What is your approach to reach students?
I think the most important is having mastery of your content. My primary goal is to help my students learn. To that end I try to be innovative in my teaching methods. However, the most important predictor of student success is what they bring to class. So partly what the student gets out of a class depends upon what they bring to the classroom. I’ve been fortunate at UNF. We have very, very good students and I enjoy teaching them.
What advice could you offer the city for its economic development efforts?
Economic development needs to take into account Jacksonville’s most precious assets, which are our natural resources. We have to be much more conscientious about our stewardship of the environment, and also more conscious about our social responsibility toward each other. I direct a center at UNF for sustainable business practices, which is a three-legged stool of people, profit and the planet. If we can balance those three elements, in whatever development we undertake, whether it is dredging the port, or whether it is Downtown redevelopment, or trying to attract new businesses to the area, I think we will be better off.
You wrote for the Case Western Reserve Journal on “Terror in the Name of Islam: Unholy War, not Jihad.”
This was a writing that I did based on a conference that I attended and was asked to present at that conference with the same title. I tried to rely on data to shape the narrative, because there’s a lot of conversation about terrorism and national security, justifiably so, after 9/11.
But there’s a lot of fear-mongering, and there is a lot of hype about to what extent are we truly threatened. Is this an existential threat for us? Is this threat based on the disposition of certain religious groups? Those are questions that I don’t think that we have had adult conversations on.
We generally tend to polarize ourselves into political camps. My intent was to let the data speak for itself in terms of assessing the threat.
Many researchers began to answer that question saying the chances of us dying from a terrorist attack is far smaller than the chances of us dying out of a traffic accident, or even slipping in a bathtub.
In some sense we have an exaggerated sense of the threat. But if we accept our values, and our values are shaped by our freedoms and our liberties, then we have to also have a measurable amount of tradeoff, that sometimes the liberty and the freedom will make us vulnerable. To what extent there’s a tradeoff, it’s also a good debate to have.
The second part of the question was to what extent Islam shapes this violence. Undoubtedly, the 19 terrorists (on 9/11) were Muslims, but to what extent did religion motivate this, and to what extent were there other motives behind it?
My conclusion, again looking at vast amounts of data, and since then I’ve updated the report, the answer has not changed: Religion may be a factor, but it is certainly not a sole motivator.
In other words, if you remove religion from the equation, would we remove this threat of terror? And the answer is no. So religion does allow the terrorists to shape a certain narrative, it does help them recruit certain people, but it is not the sole and primary motivator for what they do. There are other sociopolitical factors that motivate their actions.
What’s next for you?
I have a couple of book contracts that I need to get done. This summer has been an extraordinarily busy travel time. I’m looking forward to the coming months to catch up on my writing and then I want to also spend a little bit more time traveling, particularly to parts of the world that helps me with my writing about Islam and the American Muslim experience, not only overseas but also around the country.
What else would you like to share?
Jacksonville is a great town and all of us need to do our best so that we can, in sharing our time and our treasure and our talents, help make this city even better.
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First Coast Success: Parvez Ahmed
The Daily Record interviewed Ahmed for “First Coast Success,” a regular segment on the award-winning 89.9 FM flagship First Coast Connect program, hosted by Melissa Ross. These are edited excerpts from the interview.
The interview is scheduled for broadcast this morning and will replay at 8 p.m. on the WJCT Arts Channel or at wjctondemand.org.
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About Parvez Ahmed
Age: 51
Background: Born and raised in Kolkata, India.
Education: Bachelor’s degree, engineering, Aligarh Muslim University, India; MBA, Temple University, Philadelphia; doctorate in finance, University of Texas at Arlington.
Teaching experience: UNC Charlotte; Penn State; University of North Florida since 2002
Published work: “Terror in the Name of Islam: Unholy War, not Jihad” in the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, 2007, updated this year; co-authored the book “Mutual Funds – Fifty Years of Research Findings,” published in 2005.
Papers have been published in the Journal of Portfolio Management, Financial Management, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Investing, Financial Review, Applied Economic Letters, Global Business and Finance Review, International Review of Economics, Managerial Finance, Journal of Wealth Management, and Journal of Alternative Investments.
Family: Wife and two children; daughter is a sophomore at Florida State University; son is a freshman at Stanton College Preparatory School. Both were home-schooled by their mother before entering Stanton.
For fun: Watches football, soccer and movies; attends Jacksonville Jaguars games; coached son’s soccer team; favorite show is the House of Cards Netflix series. “I thought that was a brilliantly made - often exaggerated – series.”
On being asked by former City Council member Don Redman to “pray to your God” at a council meeting confirming his appointment to the Human Rights Commission:
“I don’t think that Councilman Redman meant it the way it came across. He apologized for that, he sent me a letter, it was a very gracious letter. I thanked him for that apology and so I think we have all moved on from that.”
On criticism of his 2005-08 chairmanship of the nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations:
“It was quite unfortunate how that association became front-and-center in the conversation because nothing about my chairmanship itself was in contention. It was kind of disturbing because it was very un-American in my view. It was guilt by association. We as Americans take pride in not doing that. We try to judge people by their individual abilities, and their character, not based on who they associate with.”
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