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Is Islam pro-democracy, anti-democracy, or neutral? And what is Islam’s position on slavery? Today two noted Islamic scholars offer fresh arguments.
First hour: Blake Archer Williams, who studied with UC-Berkeley professor Hamid Algar, has published a long list of books on topics related to Shia Islam. Today he discusses his new (introduced and translated) book Rational and Scriptural Proofs for the Validity of the Principle of Majority Rule in Islam by Masʿūd Imāmī. We may also veer off on a political tangent by considering Pepe Escobar’s new review of Emanuel Todd’s new book The Defeat of the West.
Second hour: Last minute schedule change! Charles Upton, John Andrew Morrow’s Covenants of the Prophet colleague, will stand in for Dr. Morrow, who will instead appear on next week’s show.
John Andrew Morrow‘s work on The Covenants of the Prophet showed that Muslims have been under a solemn injunction to protect other religious communities, starting with Christians, almost since the beginning of Islam. Today he joins us to discuss is new book Islam and Slavery. He observes: “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. As God asks in the Qur’an: ‘What will make you know what the steep path is? It is the freeing of a slave.'”
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