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Two notable American Muslim authors and spiritual leaders offer first reactions to today’s ICJ decision on emergency measures requested by South Africa to stop Israel’s genocide of Gaza, and discuss their recent writings.
First hour: Kabir Helminski, one of the best-known names in American Sufism, discusses “Gaza: Witnessing for Justice” and “What Would a Moral Israel Look Like?”
Kabir Helminski is co-director and co-founder — together with his wife Camille Helminski (also profiled in the Living Spiritual Teachers Project) — of The Threshold Society, a nonprofit educational foundation that has developed programs to provide a structure for practice and study within Sufism and spiritual psychology. He is a Shaikh of the Mevlevi Order of Sufis, which traces its inspiration to Jelaluddin Rumi, and has authored and translated numerous books. (more)
Second hour: Islamic scholar John Andrew Morrow, founder of the Covenants Initiative, discusses his new book Islam and Slavery.
Everyone knows Islam is against debt slavery, the inevitable consequence of usury. But what about other forms of slavery? One school of thought holds that since domestic slavery was ubiquitous and unquestioned at the time of the Prophet (saas) and is not clearly and directly banned by Islamic scripture, it is permissible. In Islam and Slavery Dr. Morrow takes the opposite view: “The Qur’an encourages and even requires Muslims to emancipate enslaved people. As far as the exponents of Islam’s spiritual, moral, ethical, and egalitarian tradition are concerned, the Qur’an, the Prophet, and Islam introduced a system that would reform the practice of slavery and abolish it entirely and forever.”