The complex history of slavery within Islamic legal traditions spans from pre-Islamic times through the nineteenth century, revealing how religious law intersected with economic and social systems that perpetuated human bondage across centuries and cultures. This comprehensive examination of Islamic jurisprudence demonstrates how Western abolitionist efforts, while well-intentioned, ultimately failed to address the theological and legal foundations that allowed slavery to persist within Muslim societies, rendering the notion of abolition nothing more than a cruel illusion.

Join host Sahar Aziz and Professor Bernard Freamon as they explore the groundbreaking legal history detailed in his book "Possessed by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures." The contemporary revival of slavery by extremist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram represents a disturbing exploitation of these historical legal precedents, highlighting how ancient justifications for human trafficking and enslavement continue to find expression in modern conflicts. This legal and historical analysis reveals the urgent necessity for Islamic scholars and communities to confront their own juridical traditions and achieve true abolition through internal reform rather than external pressure.

Biography:

Professor Freamon is Professor of Law Emeritus at Seton Hall Law School and Professor of Law at Roger Williams University School of Law. Professor Freamon has taught Islamic Jurisprudence at New York University School of Law and brings his unique perspective as an African-American Muslim scholar to examine slavery's persistence within Islamic legal frameworks.

Professor Bernard Freamon founded Seton Hall's Center for Social Justice, litigating civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, and representing underrepresented persons in constitutional law matters involving religious minorities, prisoners, and criminal defendants. Through his innovative teaching approach, including courses on slavery and human trafficking based in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and his recent election as co-chairperson of the Bristol Middle Passage Port Marker Project, Professor Freamon demonstrates how historical scholarship intersects with contemporary justice advocacy to address both past wrongs and present-day human trafficking challenges.

Recommended Reading:

Bernard Freamon, Possessed by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures (Brill 2019)

#Islam #IslamicLaw #Slavery #Abolition #MiddleEast #SouthAsia

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Opportunity hoarding occurs when advantaged groups secure and monopolize valuable resources—such as high-quality education, exclusive networks, or prime housing—to benefit their own members while restricting access for others. This behavior creates and sustains categorical inequality, often manifesting through exclusionary zoning, preferential hiring, or hoarding educational opportunities.

Advantage groups create exclusive networks, secure resources, and develop practices (like exclusionary zoning or elite school networks) that protect their advantages. Such opportunity hoarding contributes significantly to the widening gap between high- and low-opportunity neighborhoods and schools.

Join host Professor Sahar Aziz in conversation with Professor Sheryll Cashin about her groundbreaking book White Spaces, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding in the Age of Inequality.

Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Professor Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order.

Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.

Recommended Reading:

Sheryll Cashin, White Spaces, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding in the Age of Inequality (2021)

Sheryll Cashin, Brown v. Board of Education: Enduring Caste and American Betrayal, 4 Am. J. Law & Equality 141 (2024)

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On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel coordinated an unprovoked military attack on the sovereign state of Iran without any credible evidence of an imminent threat posed by Iran or a United Nations Security Council Resolution. On that first day of the war, the Israelis killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials, immediately transforming their attacks into a regional war. Iran invoked its right to self-defense under international law by launching missiles, drones and proxy attacks against U.S. and Israeli targets in the Persian Gulf and in Israel.

On March 2, 2026, Hezbollah entered the war by attacking Israel in response Ali Khameini’s killing, which has led to a major Israeli air and ground escalation in Lebanon. Also on March 2, 2026, the Iranian government effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, which cuts off the 20% of the world’s supply of oil and natural gas from the global economy.

In this episode, Professor Juan Cole and Professor Mojtaba Mahdavi critically examine the historical, political and economic origins and consequences of Israel and the United States’ war on Iran.

Guest Biographies

Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Professor Cole has written, edited or translated 21 books and authored over 100 articles and chapters. Among his recent publications are Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires (Bold Type Books, 2018) and The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East (Simon & Schuster, 2014). Professor Cole edited the volume ' Peace Movements in Islam, and is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian. He is proprietor of the Informed Comment news and analysis site.

Mojtaba Mahdavi is a Professor of Political Science and the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author and editor of numerous works on pos-trevolutionary Iran, contemporary social movements and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa, post-Islamism and modern Islamic political thought.

#Iran #Israel #Democracy #MiddleEast

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