Fī Subul al-Salām: Pacifism and Nonviolence in Contemporary Islam

After a successful panel! Parliament of World Religions!

Tom will be presenting on “Non-Violence in Contemporary Islam: Between Human Rights and Moral Resolve" for the Parliament of World Religions

Before joining the University of Manchester, Dr Tom Woerner-Powell completed his doctoral work at the University of Oxford. He is the past recipient of awards including British Association for Islamic Studies De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World and the Prix Fondation Ousseimi de la Tolérance and is the author of what has been hailed as the foremost scholarly analysis of Algerian national symbol ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazā’irī (Abd el-Kader).

His interdisciplinary research examines religio-political dimensions of Islamic thought and Muslim experience in colonial and post-colonial contexts. It explores confluences and boundaries between ostensibly religious and political practices, ideas, and frames of reference. It engages with on-going representations of Islam and Muslims through the category of ‘religion’ in the modern period, with particular focus upon the political effects and hermeneutic contexts of discourses on mysticism, religiously sanctioned violence, and principled pacifism.

Dr Tom Woerner-Powell is currently Principal Investigator in an international AHRC-funded research project exploring varieties of pacifism and nonviolence in contemporary Islam.

Abdullah Alaoudh is presenting on Civil Struggle in Islamic thought in Saudi Arabia at Parliament of World Religions

Abdullah Alaoudh serves as the Saudi Director for the Freedom Initiative. He was a Visiting Adjunct Professor at the Elliott School at George Washington University and served for two years as a Senior Fellow at the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He also was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School at the Center for Islamic Law and Civilization between 2017-2018.

Before joining the Freedom Initiative, Alaoudh served for three years as Director for the Gulf at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), the nonprofit organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi.

Alaoudh is the Secretary General and co-founder of the National Assembly Party (NAAS), Saudi Arabia’s first openly declared political party, which calls for an elected parliament and constitutional safeguards in Saudi Arabia. He is also a signatory and one of the drafters of the Saudi People’s Vision for Reform, a blueprint for democracy and human rights in Saudi Arabia.

Alaoudh has published extensively on Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf and appears regularly in the media as a commentator. His work has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy.

Alaoudh obtained his S.J.D. and L.L.M. from the University of Pittsburgh in comparative international law. While at the University of Pittsburgh, he completed his dissertation on religious institutions and the influence of the ulama (body of Muslim scholars) in post-revolutionary Arab countries. He received his B.A. in Islamic Law from Qassim University in Saudi Arabia.

Amneh will be presenting on Nonviolence in Syria in Parliament of World Religions

Amneh Khoulani is a leading human rights defender and consultant with several Syrian civil society organisations. She holds a Master's degree in History as well as a diploma in Education from Damascus University. Amneh is co-founder and former director of the Families for Freedom movement. She is also co-founder and Vice-Chairman of Madaniya. Amneh serves as a consultant to the Syrian British Consortium, Hurras Network, and the Syria Resource Group.
Recently, she is the executive director of the Adalati Program, an initiative to support women's participation in building justice and democracy strategies in Syria.

In 2020, Amneh received the International Women of Courage Award from the US State Department for her efforts to achieve justice, peace and democracy. She was honoured that same year by the Alabama House of Representatives for her efforts in non-violent struggle. She took part in the first official session held by the UN Security Council in 2019 on detention in Syria and she has been participating in many international conferences about the Syrian issue.

Amneh joined the civil movement in Syria when it began in 2011, while coordinating with the Darayya local council. She is a survivor of the Syrian regime's prisons, after being detained with her husband for her human rights activism. Her three brothers are still forcibly disappeared. Amneh served as the director of Justice Network for Syrian Women while in Lebanon.
Before the Syrian revolution, she worked in the field of education in Damascus high schools and co-founded the Darayya Youth Group in 2003 for peaceful change.
She lives in the UK with her family

Livestream now!

We are live!

The conference will begin with the keynote speech at 9:00 am London time.

We will be livestreaming the event on this space. If you have not yet registered to attend via Zoom you can watch it here.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Ms Tawakkol Karman will be giving the keynote address at the conference.

A. Rasheid Omar

Towards an Islamic Theology of Nonviolence: Reflecting on the Engaged Sufism of Rabia Terri Harris

In contradistinction to the plethora of studies focusing on Islam and violence, a limited amount of research is attentive to Muslim peacebuilding. Hardly any engage women who espouse an Islamic theology of nonviolence. This case study fills an epistemological lacuna. It critically examines the theory and praxis of Rabia Terri Harris, founder of the Muslim Peace Fellowship (MPF) located in the United States of America. Harris embodies a distinctly Islamic approach to nonviolence that asserts the critical importance of individual spiritual refinement as a sound platform for engaging in struggles for social justice By highlighting the work spearheaded by Harris and the MPF, this essay seeks to correct the erroneous images of either a violent or passive Islam that currently pervade conventional wisdom. This study demonstrates that Islamic religious theology can provide a sound basis for a credible nonviolent jihad for just peace. It furthermore, suggests that an “Engaged Sufism’ lends itself more readily than other Islamic theological orientations to nonviolence and peacebuilding.

Seif Alislam Eid

“Radicalization and De-Radicalization indicators of The Islamic Prisoners in Egyptian Prisons After 2013”

This paper is trying to examine the determinants of the radicalization and de-radicalization of the Islamic prisoners in Egyptian spread jails after the military coup of 2013. in other words, this paper is trying to indicate what makes the political prisoner who’s coming from an Islamic background and got into jail, radical afterward, or a non-radical who adopts peaceful and non-radical world views to vital and important cases such as “political regime change, social change and relations with the other non-Islamic components of the society”.
Taking the Egyptian jails after the 2013 military coup held by general Sisi, as a case, this paper is trying to shed the light on the factors which make Islamic prisoners radical, or non-radical from inside the prisons. Beginning with theorizing the Radicalism and non-radicalism, and defining what do we mean by the two variables in the context of the Egyptian prisons, then the Paper indicates how life goes in the prison “daily life of the prisoners” and how the continuous penal system and Continuous discipline affects the way that prisoners thinking based on Michelle Foucault's framing of how prisons are working as a disciplinary and punishing penal system. adding this to intellectual scramble happens inside the Egyptian prisons between the Different ideologies of the prisoners, which can be taken as a factor of Radicalization and De-radicalization process. I also argue that the after prison life which is considered a part of the political prisoners life forms the tendency of adopting radical of non- radical ideas.
The paper also argues that prisons are not only made to radicalize Islamists, nor de-radicalize them, and the Radicalization or De-radicalization outcome is a long complicated process that needs to be deconstructed, through some research tools such as semi-structured interviews, and Critical Discourse Analysis of the letters written by a group of Islamic Political detainees in August 2019 that could run away of the strict measures of the prisons and address the Public about the danger of the Radicalization and “Daeshanat” of the prisoners. Based on 20 interviews with Ex-prisoners and current imprisoned Islamists, moreover analyzing 8 letters written between August 2019 and 2021,the paper concludes the factors leads to radicalization and de-radicalization of the Islamic prisoners.

Tazeen Ali

Addressing Gender Violence at the Women’s Mosque of America

This paper argues that the Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), the first female-only mosque in the US established in 2015, serves as a nascent site for the production of a new Islamic discourse on sexual violence. This new discourse moves beyond textual approaches to law and treats Muslims’ experiences as a valid source of Islamic knowledge. In their reformulations of Islamic exegesis and law concerning sexual and domestic violence, WMA khateebahs (preachers) foreground the lived experiences of Muslim women even as they also draw from Islamic sacred texts. In so doing, WMA khateebahs argue for overcoming legal frameworks that take for granted women’s bodily vulnerability and susceptibility to violence. I draw on the concept of embodied authority based on women’s experiences, drawing on Sa’diyya Shaikh’s tafsir (exegesis) of praxis and Black feminist epistemology. I analyze two khutbahs (sermons) that address sexual violence and domestic abuse through the lens of female embodiment. I frame WMA khateebahs’ interventions in their khutbahs as filling a critical gap in which specifically feminine forms of Islamic authority, predicated on vulnerability, have been missing. Within this feminine form of authority, women’s bodies serve as important sites of knowledge through which to approach Qur’anic exegesis. Overall, I demonstrate how the WMA community confers authority on its khateebahs by viewing them as in a privileged position to comment on particular subjects in sacred texts on the basis of their experiences as women. These subjects include, but are not limited to, motherhood, grief, and gender violence. Women at the WMA view its khateebahs as particularly authoritative because of their gendered experiences, not in spite of them. In so doing, the WMA promotes a feminine model of authority.

Safoora Arbab

Nonviolence as Islamic Enlightenment: The Khudai Khidmatgar language of resistance in the North-West Frontier of British India

The Khudai Khidmatgars, or the Servants of God, were an anticolonial movement led by Abdul Ghaffar Khan—known more globally as the Frontier Gandhi; they formed the largest nonviolent “army” in British India during the 1930s and 40s. The majority of the volunteers in this movement were the Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier Province who, most surprisingly, embraced and embodied the framework of nonviolence with great alacrity, at the grassroots levels and as a way of life despite colonial, as well as South Asian, representations of the “Pathans” as an intrinsically violent and martial race. Although allied with the All India Congress Committee, the Khudai Khidmatgar framework of nonviolence cannot simply be reduced to, or understood as, a mimesis of Gandhian ideology; instead, by reading their vernacular literature, it becomes clear that nonviolence was interpreted and made legible through local registers; in particular, it was seen as the more authentic expression of Pashtunwali—or the customary and normative codes—and of Islam.
Reading excerpts from the movement’s popular Pashto journal, Pūkhtūn, especially the contributions of women poets, as well as poems by the modern Pashtun poet Ghani Khan, and the autobiography of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, will illustrate the vernacular registers through which the framework of nonviolence was interpreted and embodied. Moreover, because the initial impetus for the formation of this movement was to radically change the Pashtun habitus, self-transformation, altered subjectivity and shifting normative values were seen as the means to creating the desired socio-political change. In other words, inner change was seen as the gateway to producing outer change, in alignment with Sufi (and other) mystical traditions. Even more interestingly, the Khudai Khidmatgar women’s resistance was not anticolonial per se but rather directed against local patriarchy and they, in particular, voiced the discourse of an enlightened Islam to demand their emancipation from archaic Pashtun customs that subjugated, disenfranchised and invisiblized them.