Palestine and the Quest for Justice

In the light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, is there a duty on Muslims to be politically active or is quietism the correct religious response?

These and other questions will be tackled by an expert panel headlined by Dr. Jonathan A.C. Brown, one of the west’s foremost academics in the field of hadith literature, who is currently writing a new book on the concept of justice in Islam.

He will be joined by Professor Ilan Pappé, a leading anti-Zionist Jewish historian and author of the seminal The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which sets out how Palestinians were systematically removed from their homes to make way for an exclusivist Jewish state.

Earlier this year, addressing an anti-genocide meeting held by IHRC, Prof. Pappé said he feared that the oppression of Palestinians has moved to a new level both in terms “of the discourse employed by Israel, and the intensity and the purpose of the eliminatory policies. There hasn’t been such a period in history, this is a new phase of the brutality against the Palestinians,” that surpasses even the Nakba.

The conference will also hear from Laila al-Arian, a Palestinian-American journalist. Laila will speak about the western media coverage of Palestine/Gaza and the situation for journalists in Gaza.

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About the speakers:

Jonathan Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He received his BA in History from Georgetown University in 2000 and his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006. Dr. Brown has studied and conducted research in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, South Africa, India, Indonesia and Iran. His book publications include The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon(Brill, 2007), Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oneworld, 2009) and Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Bridging Cultures Muslim Journeys Bookshelf.His book, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld, 2014), was named one of the top books on religion in 2014 by the Independent. He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari.

Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948.

Laila Al-Arian is a Washington DC-based journalist and the executive producer of Fault Lines, an award-winning current affairs program on Al Jazeera English. She has produced documentaries on subjects ranging from the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the impact of the heroin epidemic on children and an investigation into factory conditions producing garments for Walmart and Gap in Bangladesh. For her work, she has been honored with two News and Documentary Emmys, a Peabody Award, a Robert F Kennedy Award in journalism, Overseas Press Club award, National Headliner Award, and has been nominated for 19 News and Documentary Emmys. Prior to joining Fault Lines, Laila worked for Al Jazeera English for four years, covering everything from Guantanamo Bay’s youngest detainee to the re-settlement of Iraqi refugees in the U.S. She received a BA in English literature from Georgetown University and an M.S. from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The Independent, and other publications, and she is co-author of the book Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.

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