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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Join host Professor Sahar Aziz in her conversation with Professor Maryam Jamshidi about the political and legal implications of Israel and the United States' unprovoked military attacks against Iran on February 28, 2026.

As Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu publicly admitted, the Israeli government has been preparing for a war to topple the Iranian regime for over 30 years. Knowing they do not possess sufficient military capacity to do it alone, Israel unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the United States to start a war of aggression against Iran under the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations.

The reasons for restraint by past US administration were often the same. Iran posed no direct threat or conducted an imminent attack toward the US that legally justified an offensive war of aggression. The risk of a global economic downfall and the exorbitant price tag of a major war far outweighed the benefits of removing a hostile government. And perhaps most importantly from a military perspective, the United States had no exit strategy.

Indeed, these were the same reasons that led to the Democratic Party winning the White House in 2008 after expensive and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Republican politicians campaigned on an America First platform in the 2021 elections by explicitly rejecting wars of choice in the Middle East that cost American lives and treasure. And yet, Republican President Donald Trump violated that promise to his constituents and granted Israel its 30-year dream to start an offensive war on Iran despite no credible evidence of an imminent threat by Iran.

The result has been predictably catastrophic for the Middle East and the global economy. The war has engulfed the Gulf states, the Strait of Hormuz is closed to the 20% of global supply of oil and natural gas, energy prices are skyrocketing across the world, Tehran is being bombarded daily by Israel, over 1300 Iranians have been killed thus far, and the war is costing American taxpayers $1 billion per day.

Additional Readings:
Maryam Jamshidi (2025), A Transformational Agenda for National Security, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 2024, Article 5.

Maryam Jamshidi, Whose Security Matters, 116 AJIL Unbound (2022).

Middle East and South Asia Lectures, Center for Security, Race and Rights

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There is a dire need for an interdisciplinary examination of the human cost of occupation through the lens of daily Palestinian experience in the West Bank. This episode explores the critically acclaimed work of Nathan Thrall, whose immersive narrative provides rare insight into the lived reality of Palestinians navigating Israeli systems of control that define life under occupation. There are prefixed structural inequalities embedded in the segregated apartheid landscape of Jerusalem and the West Bank that Palestinians including those within the diaspora must face daily—displacement from ancestral lands, violence from settlers, and systematic discrimination. Thrall's Pulitzer Prize-winning book explores the personal dimensions of a conflict often discussed in abstract geopolitical terms.

Through intimate portrayals of individual Palestinians confronting institutional barriers and daily dignitary harms, his work humanizes the ancestral consequences of policies that separate communities, restrict movement, and create parallel legal systems based on ethnicity and religion.

In his conversation with Professor Sahar Aziz, Nathan Thrall shares powerful excerpts from his work that capture the apartheid conditions experienced by West Bank Palestinians who live under military occupation while neighboring Israeli settlements enjoy full rights and protection. His narrative approach moves beyond headlines and statistics to reveal the emotional and psychological toll of occupation on individuals and families caught in systems designed to maintain separation and inequality.

Join Sahar Aziz and Nathan Thrall in a conversation that offers listeners a deeper understanding of one of the world's most contested regions through the transformative lens of personal narrative and lived experience.

Recommended Reading:

Nathan Thrall,A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy(2023)

Resources on Palestine and Palestinians -RutgersCenter for Security, Race and Rights
resources/palestinefacts/

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Apartheid #ICC #HumanRights

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A central paradox has plagued and continues to plague the American right to vote: the American republic has always conditioned participation in the democratic process on an antidemocratic ideology of worthiness needed to exercise the rights of citizenship. This reality has shaped debates around the right to vote in the past and in the present and has made it more difficult for the law to embrace the rhetoric of a universal right to vote—that is, a right for all citizens to participate freely and fairly.

This is the defining dilemma of voting rights in American history. Indeed, the histories surrounding voting rights admit to the progress that was required to gain a more expansive right to vote for all American citizens, yet at the same time recognize that these rights are inherently and constantly contested. The continued contest around voting rights is ultimately attributable to this paradox.

An expert on voting rights law, Professor Atiba Ellis provides the historical, legal and political backdrop against which voting rights of racial minorities continue to be curtailed through manipulation of state laws. Professor Ellis explains how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shifted from a powerful tool for affirmatively ending racial discrimination especially against African American voters to an ineffective safeguard against rising disenfranchisement of racial minorities.

Listen to the conversation between Professor Sahar Aziz and Professor Atiba Ellis about a topic that will shape the hotly contested November 2026 mid-term elections.

Recommended Readings

Atiba R. Ellis, The Voting Rights Paradox: Ideology and Incompleteness of American Democratic Practice, 55 Georgia L. Rev. 1553 (2021)

Atiba R. Ellis, Voter Fraud as an Epistemic Crisis for the Right to Vote, 71 Mercer L. Rev. 757 (2020).

Atiba R. Ellis, Tiered Personhood and the Excluded Voter, 90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 463 (2015).

Sahar F. Aziz, The Blinding Color of Race: Elections and Democracy in the Post-Shelby County Era, 17 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 182 (2015).

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In today’s episode, guest host Nermin Allam, director of Women’s and Gender Studies and associate professor of political science at Rutgers University – Newark, speaks with Rusha Latif, author of Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution, to reflect on remembering and commemorating the January 25th uprising.

The January 25th uprising, which led to the ousting of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, remains one of the most consequential moments in Egypt’s modern political history. The uprising restructured political imagination, reordered lives, and briefly redefined what felt possible.

Every year, January 25th asks something of us. It asks us to remember. It asks us to reckon. And it asks us to return carefully and critically to a moment that continues to unsettle our present. This episode is part of that reckoning. As we mark the anniversary of the uprising, we are joined by Rusha Latif to revisit the experiences of the young people who animated that moment and who carried its weight forward long after the chants faded and the public space closed.

The conversation invites us to resist simplification and to honor the complexity of a revolutionary moment whose political afterlives still shape how we understand protest, possibility, and loss. It invites listeners to consider what it means to commemorate a revolution in a time when its promises remain unfinished.

Biography

Rusha Latif is an Egyptian-American researcher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on social movements and revolutions in the Middle East, with an emphasis on leadership, organization, and collective action across lines of class, gender, religion, and ideology. Her research has been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya. Her book, Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution is published by the AUC Press, in 2022).

Bio Link: https://rushalatif.com/

Publication: https://rushalatif.com/tahrirs-youth/

Nermin Allam is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. She is a nonresident fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Allam’s research focuses on gender politics and social movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Allam’s work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Mobilization, Politics & Gender, PS: Political Science & Politics, Democratization among other journals.

Link:

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The true test of a democracy is the extent to which civil rights in law are enforced in practice for the most vulnerable groups in society. As members of Congress demanded mass arrest and expulsion of college students exercising their free speech right to dissent against U.S. foreign policy in Gaza and the West Bank, the racial fault lines in American democracy were yet again laid bare.

Similarly, university presidents are buckling to external political pressure to violate academic freedom of Muslim and Arab faculty targeted by external anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli groups and politicians. In this episode, Distinguished Law Professor Sahar Aziz examines how Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism intersect to produce systematic assaults on the civil rights of racialized communities.

These concerted efforts to quash the nonviolent Palestine Solidarity Movement set dangerous rights-infringing precedents that are now being weaponized against immigrant rights advocates and supporters of diversity, equity and inclusion. The same conservative groups and politicians who complain about the erosion of free speech in America are now spearheading the policing of viewpoints and speech expressed by progressive students and faculty on college campuses.

Listen to Professor Aziz as she explains the origins and harmful consequences of the Palestine Taboo on all American’s free speech and political freedoms, which is the basis of her forthcoming book on the topic.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #PalestineTaboo #FreeSpeech #AcademicFreedom

Suggested Readings

Sahar Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom (2022)

Mitchell Plitnick and Sahar Aziz, Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine Israel Discourse (2023)

Sahar Aziz, Racing Religion in the Palestine Israel Discourse, AJIL Unbound , Volume 118 , 2024 , pp. 118 – 123.

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