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(DAY 2) The Royal Conference - Seminar Theme 4
Session Ten: Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid
Session Eleven: Prof. Dr. Bilal Kuşpınar
Session Twelve: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Khalif Muammar
Seminar Theme 4 Q&A
A Case for Palestinians
Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid
Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid was Chair of the Board of the Parliament of the World’s Religions from 2010 to 2015. Imam Mujahid has been selected four times as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world. He is among the original signatories of the 1993 Parliament declaration “Towards a Global Ethic.” As a leader in the interfaith movement, he has also addressed the Parliaments at Cape Town, Barcelona, and Melbourne. He is the founding president of Sound Vision, a public relations not-for-profit of Muslims which produces Chicago’s daily “Radio Islam” on WCEV 1450 AM, in addition to documentaries. He also leads Muslim Peace Coalition USA. He currently chairs Burma Task Force USA, a coalition of 19 organizations committed to stopping the genocide of Rohingyas in Burma. As the national coordinator of the Bosnia Task Force USA, he successfully led efforts in collaboration with the National Organization of Women to declare rape a war crime. He has authored more than 400 articles on interfaith, Islamic living, domestic violence and public policy, Islamophobia, and Islam-West relations.
Justice and Adab in Sufism
Prof. Dr. Bilal Kuşpınar
Despite their substantial contribution to the understanding of justice in general and its significance for the wellbeing of society in particular, the philosophers’ treatment appears to have been rather confined to the fields of ethics (akhlaq), economics (tadbīr al-manzil), and politics (siyāsah). As compared to the philosophers, Sufis, however, though they have initially agreed with them on the general definition of justice as ‘putting a thing in its proper place,’ have conceived it not just simply ‘rational’ and ‘natural,’ devoid of any purpose, but first and foremost as a metaphysical wisdom that is eternally implanted in the universe by God, Who is absolutely Just (al-‘Adl) and absolutely Wise (al-Hakīm). Along with justice (‘adl), there is another pivotal concept for Sufis, that is, wisdom (hikmah) and adab, which ought to be taken together with the former. In our study, we shall at first highlight general characteristics of justice and other interrelated concepts as delineated in the classical sources of Islamic spirituality and Sufism and then concentrate on the interpretation and illustration of these two terms mainly within the context of the prominent Sufi poet, Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi’s masterpiece, the Mathnawi.
Environmental Justice in Islam
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Khalif Muammar
In the history of human civilisation, two opposing views regarding nature have persisted: (1) one view regards nature as a subject, endowing it with sacredness; and (2) another view reduces nature to inert matter, an object subjugated entirely to human dominion (anthropocentrism). This paper aims to elucidate a moderate perspective that is articulated in Islam, between the two extremes of deification of nature and deification of man. The just and correct view is to put nature in its rightful place as God’s creation, serving as His signs (āyāt). The current environmental crisis has awakened a global consciousness, especially among the scholars, to the urgent need for a robust environmental ethic to govern human conduct and activities on earth. The advent of secularism and modern moral philosophy has only deepened this estrangement, rendering humanity a far graver threat to the environment than ever before. The present author posits that the real solution to this ecological quandary lies in the environmental ethics of Islam, a tradition deeply rooted in the Qur’ān, the Sunnah, and the interpretive wisdom of Muslim scholars.