Jonathan Brown - Is Sharia Law Barbaric?
About this lecture
In the current age of increasing anti-Muslim sentiment, it has become routine to hear ignorant pundits and bigoted political activists make baseless claims regarding the reality of Islam. A conscious effort is underway to paint Islam as inherently violent and its legal system as archaic and prehistoric. Far more alarming for Muslims, the greatest avenue for introduction to the faith, the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم is caricatured as a warlord by using false historical narratives and taking other true reports out of historical context. These claims could not be further from the truth. The immense canon of Islamic History from the pluralistic societies of medieval Cordoba to the small British Muslim community of Abdullah Quilliam in the early 20th century testify to the fact that Islam is a powerful force for peaceful coexistence and social equality. As Muslims, it is now incumbent upon us to remove the falsities from the truth and show that our faith is peaceful and fair, our legal system just and equitable and that our founder was "a mercy for the worlds".
Jonathan AC Brown is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. 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 Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia and Iran, and he is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 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). He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islamic Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include the history of forgery and historical criticism in Islamic civilization, comparison with the Western tradition; and modern conflicts between Late Sunni Traditionalism and Salafism in Islamic thought.
All lectures by Jonathan Brown →