ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Afghanistan’s former Minister of Education, Rangina Hamidi, will visit Muhlenberg College’s Seegers Union Sunday afternoon. The writer and women’s rights activist is slated to give a public lecture about education in Afghanistan.
- Muhlenberg College will host former Afghan education minister Rangina Hamidi Sunday
- Hamidi will deliver this year’s Wallenberg Tribute Lecture, “Schools and Madrasas: The battle for education in Afghanistan”
- The public lecture starts at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, at the college’s Seegers Union
Hamidi is currently a professor of practice at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. She served as Afghanistan’s minister of education from June 2020 to August 2021.
Hamidi is this year’s Wallenberg Tribute speaker, an invitation extended each year by Muhlenberg’s Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding to someone who has “demonstrated courageous moral action on the behalf of others,” according to the university.
The annual lecture is held in honor of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who worked in Hungary during World War II and is credited with saving thousands of Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps.
The lecture will be followed by an invitation-only dinner to raise funds for the Institute.
Born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Haimidi emigrated to neighboring Pakistan in 1981 to flee the Soviet invasion. She arrived in the United States in 1988.
She moved back to Kandahar in 2003, hoping to help develop her country in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the subsequent American invasion. She started a women-owned-and-operated embroidery business focused on giving Afghan women the skills and resources to be more self-sufficient.
Encouraged by a friend, she later served as the first principal of the co-ed Mezan International School in Kabul.
Haimidi told the New York Times she thinks the school’s success is why Afghan President Ashraf Ghani appointed her acting head of the Ministry of Education in 2020.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, Haimidi fled Afghanistan once again on a government evacuation flight to return to the United States.