Abdul Rahman has deep ties to the Bronx. He serves as deputy imam at Masjid Al-Haram USA, a mosque in the borough’s Bedford Park neighborhood. He’s also affiliated with the Gambian Youth Organization, which was how he came to attend the Fordham Center for Community Engaged Learning’s annual back-to-school festival on Fordham Road last year. When he learned that Fordham was creating a role for a Muslim chaplain, the University’s commitment to the Bronx played a major role in his decision to apply.

“But what really made me want to join Fordham is the fact that it’s a Jesuit institution that focuses on faith and spirituality,” he said.

“The commitment to community service and creating a diverse faith community for students was very important to me.” 

What are your hopes for your first year?

I’d like to build a community where Muslims and non-Muslims alike feel comfortable and empowered to explore different faiths and ask questions. One of my immediate goals is to answer questions and dismantle stereotypes about Muslims. 

There’s so much that needs to take place to educate people about what Islam is. Islam is not something that one person gets to define; it’s a holistic way of life that is defined in the Quran and through the Hadeeth, which is a collection of traditions containing the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad with accounts of his daily practice. While different schools of thought will give different interpretations, at the end of the day, God has given each individual an intellect to be able to deduce conclusions from those interpretations

I want to make it clear that Islam is something that is for everyone, from students who are at different levels of faith to non-Muslims who can inquire and learn more about the practice and perhaps take a lesson or two to apply to their own lives. 

What do you see as your larger role at the University?

My role is to add to whatever existing voices there are here from a Muslim perspective and to promote a relentless effort to engage students with their faith and their spirituality. One of the things that makes Fordham amazing and unique is the fact that faith and spirituality are taken really seriously. It provides an environment where students don’t feel awkward for being someone who has faith. I’m also going to provide basic chaplaincy services, including counseling and pastoral care. 

You worked for the Interfaith Center of New York before you came to Fordham. Why is interfaith dialogue so important to you?

There’s so much polarization in our world today. It’s either black or white. Either you’re Republican or Democrat, you support Israel, or you support Palestine, and there’s nothing in between. All these topics really polarize our communities. I find that, especially within the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there’s a tie that binds and provides us with a framework within which we can work toward harmony and peaceful coexistence.

There is a mosque in the Bronx where the imam is from Senegal. Last summer, asylum seekers from Senegal were rushing there because that was where they felt at home.

The mosque did not have the capacity to feed them, so the imam reached out to us. We got a Mormon church to donate $10,000 worth of food. We couldn’t find anywhere to cook it, though, so at an event, one of my colleagues asked a Buddhist monk if they had a commercial kitchen. So we took food that we got from a Mormon church to a Buddhist temple and shared it at a mosque for Muslim migrants. That’s why a dialogue between faiths is important to me. Regardless of people’s faith, we believe that they’re the creation of God, and they have the dignity that God has given them. 

Muslim Life Events:

Beginning next week, Abdul Rahman will lead a weekly Jumu’ah prayer on both campuses from 1 – 1:30 pm. on Fridays. He will also lead a weekly Halaqa (circle) where participants will discuss topics relevant to contemporary Muslims’ lives. These will take place on Mondays at the Rose Hill campus and on Thursdays at the Lincoln Center campus. For more information, visit Muslim Life at Fordham or contact Abdul Rahman at [email protected].

That all changed when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody on Sept. 16 after she was arrested for wearing her headscarf—or hijab—improperly. The nation’s youth responded with peaceful demonstrations that were met with tear gas and bullets. At least 233 have been killed to date, according to the U.S.-based rights monitor HRANA.

“It’s terrifying. This regime is killing children, women, and men just because they’re protesting,” said Ali, whose last name is being withheld to provide anonymity. “You know, when they kill a 16-year-old girl, when they kill a 22-year-old woman, when they kidnap girls and then give their corpses to their families after 10 days—you can imagine how hard it is.”

Islamic tradition dictates that bodies be buried quickly after death, usually within 24 hours.

The tragic irony of returning the deceased to loved ones 10 days later in the name of morality is just one example of how these violent repercussions have nothing to do with religion, despite the claims of those in power, said Ali.

“This is not Islam. This is not any religion. This is nothing. This is just about power. They’re abusing a word–Islam. They’re abusing this word in order to exploit people. And they have done that for 43 years.”

The Concept of ‘State’ in the Muslim World

Ali’s passionate stance, that the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is anything but religious, is a complex subject to unravel, said Sarah Eltantawi, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology who specializes in politics and Islam in the contemporary world.

“The whole concept of a state is a modern, western invention,” she said. “Many modern states have been essentially imposed by colonialism on the Muslim majority world.”

She noted that the modern state is not an institution that had been envisioned by the early scholars of Islam, though they did talk about the necessity of political authority being rooted in Islamic legitimacy.

“In my personal opinion, trying to meld ideas of Islamic political rules with the modern state is a combination that is inherently a Frankenstein,” she said.

She added that the current protests cannot simply be framed as the result of zealous religious regulations. American sanctions have also played a role by damaging the Iranian economy and undermining the government’s ability to manage its economy. A strong economy makes strict laws a bit more palatable, she said.

“Everyone will say, ‘Saudi Arabia is only standing because it’s such an authoritarian kingdom.’ No, it’s because people are pretty rich.”

A Sophisticated Public Unaligned With its Government

She said Iran’s situation became combustible after the hardline government of President Ebrahim Raisi was elected in 2021 and tried to impose rules that the general public objected to, such as not showing a strand of hair from under their headscarves.

“Iranian women are very famous for barely even wearing the hijab in the first place,” she said.

Indeed, to compare Iran to places where rules like these are accepted, such as Yemen or Somalia, would be shortsighted, said John Entelis, Ph.D., professor of political science.

“Anyone who knows Iran has always understood its sophisticated nature,” said Entelis. “This is a very advanced society—always has been—that happens to be under the control of a theocracy.”

Indeed, Entelis noted that since the 1979 revolution, elected governments have come and gone without incident, though there always remained an “enormous” gap between the society and its government.

“What’s new is the degree to which society has been willing to respond and to protest the conditions under which they’ve had to exist for all these years,” said Entelis.

He noted that in today’s Iran, religion is often only understood in the context of politics.

“Politics dictates the religious idiom that is used to rationalize and legitimize the actions of those in power,” he said.

Throughout Iran women have been burning their headscarves to protest the government’s co-opting the headscarf as a way to control them. The women, however, do remain faithful to Islam. Their willingness to throw away the scarves should not be seen as an anti-religious act, it should be understood as a political act, he said.

“The women, to me, are an important agent of political change, especially young women,” he said.

Whether their efforts are enough to translate into a revolution is an ongoing question, he said. He noted that while many women in the Middle East region do not have the right to vote, Iranian women not only vote but they can also get elected to the Iranian Parliament. As such, they remain a significant power base. Nevertheless, Entelis said he’s skeptical of the ability of the women and their allies to be agents of change.

Elusive Change

“At the end of the day, the state’s ability and willingness to kill whoever it has to kill to stay in power makes me very pessimistic,” he said.

“And the longer the protests continue without some kind of resolution in their favor, the more difficult it will be for a transformation to take place of any kind.”

For his part, Ali remains hopeful, though he acknowledged the many hurdles. He said he’s seen many protests in his life, but he’s rarely seen them as regularly as he has over the past few weeks. Several protests have been held in New York City as well, with some Fordham students lending their voice to the cause.

And while Ali concurred with Entelis that political change may be very difficult to come by, he expressed optimism that a generational change is underway. Indeed, about half of Iran’s population is under the age of 30.

“When you look at the protests, then you see students who are the next generation of the country; they’re going to build this country again,” said Ali, who plans to return to Iran after finishing his degree. “Even if the revolution doesn’t happen now, it will happen in near future, because they will all remember this.”

Amy Uelmen, a lecturer at Georgetown University, was one of those in attendance. Uelmen, who would join Fordham Law School in 2001 as director of the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work, said she knew something big was afoot at the time.

“There was this sense of, how do we carry forward this thirst for integrity in our personal lives and our professional lives? I had the impression that there was a seed of something new,” she said.

“If you work for the poor or the homeless, it’s obvious in some ways how Catholic values dovetail with that, but if you’re working for large companies or in a large firm setting, it’s not so obvious. So, I think there was an opening to go to these areas that are less clear, and in some ways, a little bit more difficult to thread out the connections.”

A Reunion for Scholars

Uelmen will rejoin many of the attendees of that 1998 conference on Thursday, as the Institute marks the anniversary of it and a similar conference in 1997, at Religious Lawyering at Twenty, a two-day event sponsored by Fordham Law at the Lincoln Center campus. She will join the Honorable David Shaheed, retired Superior Court judge and associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, for a panel, “Humanizing Legal Education.”

On Friday, Fordham Law professor Russell G. Pearce, will lead a panel discussion, “Religious Lawyering at Twenty: In conversation with the next generation.” Pearce, who is also the Edward and Marilyn Bellet Chair in Legal Ethics, Morality, and Religion, was instrumental in organizing the original conferences.

Uelmen said that while Pearce had taken Tom Shaffer’s 1981 treatise “On Being a Christian and a Lawyer” and applied it to the tenets of Jewish Law, one of the noteworthy developments to come out of the 1998 conference was the involvement of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers, which had formed just two years earlier. One of the founders, University of Wisconsin Law School professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes, will be on the panel with Pearce.

When it comes to the past, she said she was excited to honor Howard Lesnick, the Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Lesnick, who retired last year, wrote core texts such as Religion in Legal Thought and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Moral Stake in Education, (BookSurge, 2009).

“We’re going to celebrate how Howard brought his insight into the implications for teaching pedagogical practice and helped students become more human, basically,” she said.

Looking Ahead to the Future

The conference will not only be a retrospective; Uelmen said she’s hopeful that the conferences’ panels, celebrations, and workshops will also highlight the work of scholars who are just getting started. Their input is particularly important, she said, because they’re working in an environment that is very different from 1998. In fact, Uelmen returned to Fordham in 2016 to co-teach a workshop on having difficult conversations.

“We’ve spent, in many ways, the last 20 years becoming increasingly politically polarized, which makes it difficult to meet each other, hear each other, and figure out how to exchange stories and ideas,” she said.

“It’s a wonderful thing to get together in person, and make some personal connections and figure out how we can bring ahead a really humanized approach to having difficult conversations where we might substantially disagree on important questions.”

Imitation can take on many forms—behavior, manner of prayer, and even dress, said Father Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham. He cited several traditional and conservative aspects of imitation that eschew modernity.

‘A Clear Path of God’s Command’

He noted that the dress and appearance of Hasidic Jews mirrors that of past rabbis, “mystical masters” known as zaddikim. And while their dress may look different from modern street clothes to an outsider, he said, it is through “their very difference that they demonstrate their imitation of past rabbis and their fidelity to God.”

“To imitate one’s zaddik, to walk in the paths of ancestors in the faith, lies close to the heart of what the faith of Israel has meant for nearly four millennia,” he said.

Likewise, in Islam, accounts of what Muhammad said and did were written down to guide “requirements of ritual purity” that validate worship and all other aspects of life.

“We have put you on a clear path of God’s command. Follow it and do not follow the vagaries of those who know nothing,” Father Ryan said, quoting the Qur’an (45:18).

“Muslims have taken [this]divinely guided way of proceeding in every aspect of life more seriously and more literally than have Christians; in this they more closely resemble Orthodox Jews,” he said.

Each religion varies on the degree to which the followers adhere to such imitations, he said. In the case of Christianity, he cited St. Paul: “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1).

He noted that the monastic movements in first-millennium Christianity withdrew from the “corrupting secular world” while “Carmelites Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, most prominently, sometimes engaged with the secular world but also withdrew from it into their convents from time to time.” In the late 14th century, however, starting in the eastern Netherlands, the Devotio Moderna movement appealed to laity and the lower ranks of the clergy, urging them to engage with the world but to eschew its corrupting standards, imitating the poverty and simplicity of Christ. The movement began with popular Catholic preacher Geert Grote, who died in 1384, but was most famously memorialized by Thomas à Kempis and his devotional book Imitation of Christ.

Father Ryan noted that in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the one making the exercise asks to “to imitate [Jesus] in enduring every outrage and all contempt, and utter poverty, both actual and spiritual.”

Imitation in the Age of Smartphones

Following the lecture, the conversation took a contemporary turn when the evening’s moderator, William F. Kuntz Jr., a judge of the Second Federal Court in the Eastern District Court of New York, reflected on whether it was possible—in this age of smartphones—to turn away from modernity and imitate God and the prophets in a traditional manner.

“What would each of the faith traditions say about the innovations of Facebook and the internet?” he asked.

“There’s a strand with every religion that has a problem with any innovation,” said Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., of Congregation Shir Chadash in Poughkeepsie, one of the lecture’s respondents. “There’s a tension between those that refuse to adapt and early adapters.”

Father Ryan agreed. “There were condemnations of the railroad in the 19th century by the papacy,” he said.

Yet times change and technology moves forward. So how is one to adapt to modern times and yet remain faithful?

Zaki Saritoprak, who holds the Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies of John Carroll University and was also a respondent, said that like any technology, its value depends on how it’s used.

“You have a car; you can drive to a good place or bad place,” he said. “If [technology]prevents you from your major duties, like your responsibility to pray, then it becomes problematic.”

And yet, the same innovations can help with prayer, said Rabbi Polish, noting how many religious texts are now available online.

“The extreme Orthodox have made use of cell phones to access vast storehouses of information,” he said.

He recalled a recent service within the Hasidic community. “When it comes time to pray, they all pull out the cell phone and open to the appropriate app,” he said. “We were praying literally off our phones.”

Related Coverage: Anthropologist Researches Internet Use in Ultra-Orthodox Communities

Herman, the first Rabin-Shvidler Joint Post-Doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies, delivered his talk, “Legal Theory and Revelation: Jewish Law in an Islamic Milieu,” at the Lincoln Center campus.

He explored the competing philosophies of two of the most influential Jewish jurists and philosophers of the Middle Ages, Seʿadya ben Joseph Gaon and Moses Maimonides. The two, though living in different centuries and in different locations, engaged in a raging debate about whether laws should be interpreted strictly as they were revealed in the Torah, or whether they should be open to debate by contemporary leaders (known as Rabbinic tradition). In Western terms, Seʿadya’s philosophy would be aligned with originalist thinking, while Maimonides would interpret laws as a ‘living document.’

Both men permeated their writings with contemporary Islamic legal trends.

Seʿadya, Herman said, reconciled differences in tradition by drawing on techniques developed by early Muslims. Like his Muslim contemporaries, Seʿadya suggested that disagreements among friends were not genuine disputes. Instead, they reflected temporary misunderstandings, incomplete transmission, or even a misinterpretation on the part of future scholars.

One of Seʿadya’s students, for example, proposed that in the future, a rule that Jews pray three times on weekdays, four on the Sabbath, and five on the day of atonement might be misinterpreted to mean one need only pray three times a day (regardless of the day).

For his part, Maimonides asserted that God charged each generation with a dual responsibility. First they must faithfully transmit revealed laws, such as those handed down to the Jewish people by Moses, alongside man-made norms of earlier jurists. Then they must draw on both categories to produce new norms. Early scholars of Islam were likewise debating the words that Muhammad had received and had written in the Koran.

“Maimonides defined this activity as Qiyas, using the exact Arabic term that Seʿadya had associated with improper derivations from divine law [that Seʿadya had]associated with charism,” Herman said.

To Seʿadya, the Talmud constituted received tradition; to Maimonides, it was meant to be a subject of debate.

Some of the two jurist’s differences undoubtedly stemmed from the eras they lived in, said Herman. Seʿadya lived from 882-942 C.E. in Baghdad, where he headed an ancient Jewish academy, while Maimonides lived from 1138-1204 C.E. Each of them would have been influenced by their institutional positions, too. Given Seʿadya’s position in Baghdad, it is no surprise that he upheld the continuity of tradition. Conversely, Maimonides, who lived in what is now Spain, undertook to defend his independence from rabbinic authorities in Baghdad.

Both, however, would have been heavily influenced by Muhammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, a Palestinian-Arab Muslim theologian, writer, and scholar, who lived from 767 to 820 A.D. Shāfiʿī insisted that only revealed text, such as the Koran or certain oral traditions, constituted acceptable legal sources.

“By putting Seʿadya and Maimonides in dialogue with Islamic legal thought, we can better understand their theories on their own terms, why their assertions were compelling to them and their immediate readers, and why later readers often struggled with their ideas,” Herman said.

Herman’s fellowship was made possible by the Stanley A. and Barbara B. Rabin Postdoctoral Fellowship Fund at Columbia University and the Eugene Shvidler Gift Fund at Fordham.

Additionally, the event was a joint effort, between Fordham’s Jewish Studies program, the Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyers’ Work at Fordham School of Law and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University.

Herman was joined by Fordham faculty members Kathryn Kueny, Ph.D., professor of theology, and Jed Shugerman, professor of law, who provided responses to the talk.

For more, watch here:

Father Patrick J. Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, suggested that the collisions of various empires might have signaled, supported, and even inspired reformation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

“Sometimes reformation has happened in reaction against colliding,” he said at the Nov. 14 lecture at the Lincoln Center campus. “At other times, the very collision of worlds has sparked reformation.”

Jerusha Tanner Lamptey, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Islam and interreligious engagement at the Union Theological Seminary, and Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., the spiritual leader of the Congregation Shir Chadash, acted as respondents to Father Ryan’s lecture.

A ‘tragic irony’

Father Ryan’s lecture, which coincided with the fifth centenary of the Lutheran reformation, took into account the reform movements that were incited by Kings Hezekiah and Josiah as well as the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. He also explored 19^th century Reform Judaism.

“Reform Judaism enabled many hitherto purely nominal Jews or immigrant Jews to understand two basic elements of the faith, the oneness of God and the call of the chosen people to spread the light of monotheistic faith,” he said.

In the case of Christianity, Father Ryan stressed that the collisions of both empires and cultures have been significant in the Protestant reformations as well as the Anglican and Catholic reformations. He said that in the late 15^th century, Europeans first encountered new worlds in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. But the agents of the Catholic reformation were more likely to evangelize these populations than Protestants, he said.

Father Ryan emphasized that Martin Luther was, however, eager to convert Jews after becoming convinced by Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans that salvation would come to the Jews only after the evangelization of Gentiles was complete. The Lutheran reformation went down a dark path in 1543 when Luther published anti-Semitic writings that called for the violent destruction of the Jews.

“All of us who call ourselves Christian, heirs of one or another reformation—Protestant, Anglican or Catholic—need to examine our past in such a way as to liberate ourselves and our world from imprisonment in history,” he said.

Rabbi Polish likewise acknowledged Luther’s anti-Semitism, but said he was also struck by the commonalities of Reform Judaism and Lutheranism. Just as Luther rejected practices of the church that were not directly mandated in scripture, early reformers of German Judaism rejected the notion of an authoritative rabbinical interpretation of scriptures.

“Both Luther and early Jewish reformers shared commitment to the vernacular,” he said, adding that early Jewish reformers believed in a “perfect symbiosis of their German culture and their Jewish inheritance.”

Of course, this became a tragic irony in the context of the Hitler era, he said.

“The futile aspiration of early reformers to be accepted by their fellow Germans ended with the extermination of their community,” he said.

Authority in the past, present, and future

In his assessment of reform in Islam, Father Ryan affirmed that the first Muslims in seventh-century Arabia saw Islam as “a reform of what had come earlier in the Jewish and Christian tradition of faith.”

“Muhammad’s prophetic vocation made him, in the Islamic theology of history, the last of a series of great prophets and especially of those prophets who are characterized in Islamic tradition by the term rasul, messenger,” he said.

Father Ryan noted that between the 15^th and the 19^th centuries, Muslims like the Egyptian polymath Jalal al-din al-Suyuti and the northern Nigerian Usumanu dan Fodio considered themselves to be mujaddids or reformers of Islam.

Self-described Mahdis or messianic leaders also started uprisings in Sudan and Saudi Arabia in 1881 and 1979, which coincided with the start of the 14^th and 15^th Muslim centuries.

Like the leaders before them, these reformers believed that they were responding to perceived threats to the Islamic tradition by great empires or repressive regimes, Father Ryan said. There are some echoes of this as well in the ISIS insurgency that assailed Syria and Iraq after 2014.

“That the partisans of ISIS first chose to create their ideal state across the borders of Iraq and Syria demonstrates how much ISIS is a delayed response to and reaction against European colonial parceling out of the central Arab world in the aftermath of World War I,” he said.

Lamptey cited trends in recent Islamic feminist interpretations of Islam as concrete examples of contemporary Islamic reform. She said these distinct interpretations were focused on egalitarian or a recovery of “real Islamic tradition’.”

“They argue that the Quran is fundamentally egalitarian, that it depicts an undifferentiated, ungendered human creation, [and]a divine sovereignty….and that the Quran is silent on any accounts of women in a secondary status,” she said.

While the Islamic feminist pioneers recognized that there were limitations and discrepancies in these interpretations, she said they attributed them to context and human interpretation.

“They seek to address those concerns by returning to the supposedly pristine beginnings and uncorrupted sources of the Islamic tradition,” she said.

“And Justice for All? The Promise of Religious Liberty in a Pluralistic World,” an event sponsored by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, featured

Thomas Berg, professor of law at St. Thomas University;

Carol Keehan, D.C., CEO of the Catholic Health Association;

Asma Uddin, director of strategy at the Center for Islam and Religious Freedom;

and Ani Sarkissian, Ph.D., associate professor of political science at Michigan State University and author of The Varieties of Religious Repression: Why Governments Restrict Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Berg lamented the fact that support for recent high-profile religious freedom cases has split along partisan lines. Liberals showed little interest in the rights of Christians in 2014 when the Supreme Court exempted Hobby Lobby from requirements to cover certain contraceptives for employees.

Conservatives, meanwhile, have shown little sympathy for a proposed ban of Muslims from entering the country, he said. If religious freedom is lumped together with arguments about race, class, and gender, “[it]will fail in one of its chief purposes, which is to provide ground rules where people of deeply diverging views can coexist,” he said.

Uddin pointed to police surveillance, anti-Sharia laws, travel bans, and prohibitions against teachers wearing religious garb as religious freedom issues facing Muslims. Between 2011 to 2015, she noted that 25 percent of U.S. land-use lawsuits involved discrimination against mosques or Muslim schools, even though Muslims make up just 1 percent of the American population.

Sister Keehan said the Catholic Health Association came out in favor of former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, putting her group at odds with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. She said the vitriol she was subjected to from extremists, even within her own religion, rattled her.

“We as people of faith have to be part of the solution,” said, noting that the church had expressly addressed the topic of communicating among faiths at Vatican II in the document Gaudium Et Spes.

Sarkissian compared religious freedom at home and abroad. She said that in Europe, the relationship between governments and religious institutions is one of partnership, whereas in the United States, the government is expected to stay out of religious affairs. Many U.S. religious groups want to be involved public life, but don’t want to be regulated.

Both continents find ways to favor or discriminate against religious groups, she said; she noted that Christian schools receive state funding in the Netherlands, France has banned face veils and burkinis, Germany has outlawed Scientology, and Russia has banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In Europe, however, discrimination is cloaked in rhetoric about foreignness, immigration, or protecting traditional culture.

“We share with Europe the idea that we protect religious liberty,” she said. “But often times our focus is on protecting liberty for the majority.

“The groups that we’re targeting with this rhetoric are often religious minorities. We’re not honest about that.”

Vincent D. Rougeau, dean of Boston College Law School, moderated the discussion.

Watch the discussion here.

But this concept of authority and impartiality, according to Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., evolved a great deal over the years. In “Judging Justly: Judgment in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions,” Father Ryan, Fordham’s Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, explored how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths contributed to that idea through their own unique traditions.

He framed his discussion of judgment with the tragic story of how three High Court judges in Ghana were murdered in 1982 precisely because they had given judicial redress to people convicted by a kangaroo court under a military regime.

In remarks delivered on March 28 and March 29 as part of the annual Spring McGinley Lecture,

Father Ryan delved into examples from scripture that illustrated how the faithful have struggled with concepts such as mercy and justice. In the Book of Genesis, he noted that God, whom Jews regard as the supreme judge, had a “crowded docket”: Weighing in on the fratricide of Cain, and condemning the corrupt and violent contemporaries of Noah yet sparing the ark-builder and his family.

In Christian scripture, he recalled an account in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is confronted by “the scribes and the Pharisees” asking him to judge a woman caught in the act of adultery. Jesus play-acted the role of judge, writing on the ground, and finally declaring, Jesus’ declaration “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” illustrates the importance of impartiality and fairness.

“When Jesus finally rises from his play-acting, he finds that all the guilty accusers of the woman have departed, ‘one by one, beginning with the elders,’” Father Ryan said.

“One possible reason that the placement of this Gospel passage in the New Testament has proven so problematic may be that the discipline of the early church, in cases of adultery, was much less merciful than that of Jesus.”    *       

In Islam, as in Christianity and Judaism, God is also the ultimate judge, he said. His command and judgment are closely associated with the commands and judgments issued by the Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad. That practice continued after Muhammad’s death via judges who were concretized as the caliphs’ appointees in the Sunni tradition from the seventh to at least the 13th century, and the appointees of the imams in the Shi‘i tradition.

A qadi, or judge in the Sunni Muslim tradition, was appointed by the caliphs in the seventh century, and gradually began to exercise judicial functions in the eighth century, said Father Ryan. When the Turkish government suppressed the caliphate in 1924, however, a central religious-political institution was lost. Since then, Muslim judges are often appointed by national or regional governments. This has led to some controversial rulings in Nigeria, in particular, he noted, involving the amputation of hands for sheep-stealing, as well as overly zealous accusations of adultery against women based on circumstantial evidence only.

“Better trained Muslim judges, with expertise in comparative law and a broader vision of Islamic jurisprudence, can be found in many of the Gulf States,” he said. “But there have been highly problematic judgments handed down by judges, not only in northern Nigeria but also in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in recent decades.”

Respondents to Father Ryan’s lecture included Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham, and Ebru Turan, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Fordham. Gribetz highlighted two passages from Genesis Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud and one from the Torah that illustrate the ongoing debate between mercy and justice in God’s mind. God is compared to a king who holds up two empty cups and notes that they will crack when filled with cold water and burst when filled with hot water. The temperatures are stand-ins for too much mercy and too much justice.

“[They] represent radical extremes-order and chaos, suffocating restriction and unbounded freedom. Each on their own is assumed to be too dangerous—so dangerous that it will shatter, crack or deform the world,” she said.

Turan further developed Father Ryan’s history of how the role of judge developed historically in the Muslim tradition. The Ottoman Empire, from the 13th to the early 20th century, developed a system of training legal scholars for such posts. With the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after 1918, modern Turkey appoints judges with a much more secular orientation.

Father Ryan said offered three conclusions from the faith traditions’ experiences with justice:

-Judges need protection from manipulative politicians, established ruling classes, and populist demagogues. He cited as examples the Roman-dominated Hebrew sanhedrins, Pope Urban II commanding Christian knights to go on Crusade, and modern “Muslim muftis” who “declare every military adventure of a Middle Eastern dictator a jihad.”

-Judges should have excellent legal credentials, a deep understanding of the law in their own tradition, and a sense of comparative law. There is no room in the courtroom for mediocre judges.

-Judges benefit from differences in legal opinion, or “ikhtilaf,” an Islamic concept being promoted by movements concerned with the status of Muslim women. This contrasts with the generally approved idea of Islamic  legal consensus, or “ijma,” relied on by Orthodox Jews, Catholic Christians, and the various Eastern Christian Churches.

But he always knew he wanted to leave his native Turkey to study here, and Fordham’s Bronx campus had a special appeal to him: Gültepe, the area of Istanbul where he lived, translates as “Rose Hill” in English.

He said the United States’ traditions of freedom of religion, inquiry, and speech were things that drew him here.

“In Turkey we are so divided politically, there is no space for talking freely,” he said.

After dabbling in courses in sociology, anthropology, archeology, and history, Kilicarslan, who is Muslim, is leaning toward a Middle East studies major. He’s already declared a minor in Jewish Studies, the first student at Fordham to do so.

Kilicarslan developed a particular interest in Judaism after having taken two courses: Jews in the Ancient and Medieval World, and History of Modern Judaism. He’s enrolled this semester in East European Jewish History, and last month he became Fordham’s first intern in the Museum for Jewish Heritage’s interfaith program.

As part of the internship, he helps facilitate dialogue between Muslim and Jewish elementary school students.

“In Turkey, I didn’t have a chance to study or even read about Jews and Christians. I had only some illusions about them, and some superficial knowledge. My goal here is to really understand these different cultures,” he said.

Magda Teter, Ph.D., the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and professor of history, called Kilicarslan “one of the most exciting and intellectually promising students” that she has met in 15 years of teaching. She’s added new images, maps, and study quotes to her courses in Jewish history course as a result of his queries.

“Since he’s coming from the Muslim tradition, in which the Qur’an was transmitted in Arabic— and not in different versions and translations as biblical texts were—he’s asked very poignant questions about the process of establishing scriptural canon, and about its fluidity,” she said.

“Some of his most thought provoking questions have led me to change the direction and focus of the course I’d taught for over a decade.”

Kilicarslan said one benefit of learning about Christianity and Judaism is that it helps him better understand his own faith. The Qur’an references Jews and Christians, he said, and he sees no reason why they can’t all live together peacefully. The conflicts and persecutions among members of the three faiths has tended to be the result of economics, or political interests or aspirations.

“I’m interested in the complex situations among different groups, and in finding solutions for these situations. What I see is that, like me, a lot of people have [to overcome]a superficial understanding of others.”

“When people of different faiths focus on our common ground and wisdom, such as accepting the same God, seeing violence as unfruitful, and the existence of compassion and love in all three traditions, our tensions will decrease,” he said.

Can a woman dress modestly and not inadvertently cast aspersions on those who dress more revealingly?

And what role should the law play in determining the rules?

In response to recent bans in France of “burkini” bathing suits, the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham on Sept. 9th held “The Body Politic: From Banning Burkinis to Designing Democracy.” The lively panel discussion ranged from the political ramifications of fashion through the years to the evolution of U.S. law on religious expression.

Sara Elnakib, co-founder of the label Beaute Cache, and Simi Polonsky, co-founder of the label The Frock, spoke on designing clothes aimed primarily at Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women, respectively. Elnakib displayed her company’s black and white burkini, an ode to actress Audrey Hepburn.

Elnakib cited a real demand for her label’s product among Muslim women who wish to express their faith by covering up, but who want to look good at the same time. She disagreed with the notion that covering parts of one’s body could be construed as a symbol of oppression. American fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, for example, both won a bronze medal at the 2016 Olympics and honored her faith by wearing a hijab.

Elnakib said the recent burkini ban in France baffled her.

“At the end of the day, it’s a personal choice. My relationship between me and God should not be intervened in by my dad, my husband, and especially not by a lawmaker,” she said.

Susan Scafidi, founder and academic director of the institute, shared some historical perspective on France’s clothing laws, noting that clothing has always been tied up with politics. During the French Revolution, men who fought against the French monarchy distinguished themselves sartorially by wearing long trousers while the aristocracy wore knee-length culottes and silk stockings. Their female compatriots, however, were prohibited by statute from wearing pants. (That statute was still technically on the books until 2013.)

The United States, she said, has always been more open to religious expression, as exemplified by founding documents such as the First Amendment.

“We do have a clear separation of church and state written into the Constitution,” said Scafidi. But compared to France’s “Trump-size wall separating church and state,” the United States operates along the lines of “more of a little picket fence.”

Scafidi said there were still plenty of issues and assumptions about clothing to be addressed. Among them are what constitutes decency, the discredited idea that a woman’s clothing choice indicates consent to sex, and whether non-Muslim women traveling abroad should wear a hijab to accommodate conservative Muslim sensibilities.

Panelist Asra Nomani, co-founder of the Pearl Project at Georgetown University, said that Muslim women who cover up are being sold a “bill of goods” by leaders in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Nomani read two translations of a verse in the Koran addressing the issue of covering up: One from an older volume that was arguably ambiguous with regard to women’s clothing, and another from a newer version—published in Saudi Arabia—that clearly elevated the burka, which covers a woman completely, over the hijab and the niqab, both of which leave parts of the face exposed.

“We value the idea of the dignity of women. We’ve all agreed on that. But if we accept an assumption that one person—that is the woman—has to be covered in order to protect her honor and to protect men from being sexually aroused by her presence, then we are essentially judging her by … [physical]standards,” she said. “The same as Western society.”

Nomani, a Muslim, said she was appalled that she and other women attending the trial of a 9/11 conspirator at Guantanamo Bay were encouraged to cover their hair, so as not to distract the defendant.

“This is not a debate between Islam and the West. This is a debate between values and ethics. I, in Guantanamo Bay as a Muslim woman, do not want to cover myself to please a man who decided that it was okay to drive planes into the World Trade Center.”