A Faith‑Sensitive Approach in Humanitarian Response

Alastair Ager holds academic appointments as Director of the Institute for Global Health and Development at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh (where he is Director of the NIHR Research Unit on Health in Situations of Fragility), and as Professor with the Department of Population and Family Health at Columbia University.

Ager discussed A Faith‑Sensitive Approach in Humanitarian Response: Guidance on Mental Health and Psychosocial Programming (2018) at the April 2022 Windsor Dialogue conference. He was a project consultant in the development of the guidance, which provides practical support to humanitarian actors who seek to consider and be sensitive to the faith perspectives and resources of communities with which they work. The guidance is closely aligned with the IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings (2007)—a general framework familiar to most global humanitarian actors. Neither of these documents is legally binding on humanitarian actors, but the IASC Guidelines have been extremely influential in coordinating and directing refugee response efforts, and there has been increasing interest in fulfilling the sensitivity to faith implicit in this guidance.

(more…)

Continue Reading A Faith‑Sensitive Approach in Humanitarian Response

Why Iraq Should Enact Laws Criminalizing Genocide

Aldo Zammit Borda is Associate Professor at City, University of London. He has published extensively on international justice issues and, most recently, has co-authored a report on State responsibility for the Yazidi genocide. The following is an edited summary of his remarks at the April and July 2022 Windsor Dialogue conferences.

We know the heavy psychosocial toll that the genocide perpetrated by ISIS (Daesh) against the Yazidis has had on this small, religious community. That genocide, which began in the early hours of 3 August 2014, was intended to destroy the Yazidis in northern Iraq on account of their religious beliefs and their depiction as “devil worshippers.”

Under the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide may be committed through a number of underlying acts, including killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s physical destruction. In 2016, a UN Commission of Inquiry report found that ISIS fighters had committed genocide against the Yazidis using all of the methods envisaged by the Convention.

(more…)

Continue Reading Why Iraq Should Enact Laws Criminalizing Genocide

Islamic Views on Music

Fitzroy Morrissey is a historian and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he teaches Arabic and Islamic Studies courses. A specialist on Sufism, modern Islamic thought, and Muslim-non-Muslim relations, his most recent book is A Short History of Islamic Thought (Head of Zeus 2021). The following is an edited summary of his remarks at the July 2022 Windsor Dialogue conference.

The status of music in Islam has long been controversial. Writing in the twelfth century, the Islamic jurist Ibn al-Jawzi observed that “people have talked on and on about singing (al-ghinaʾ): some have said that it is forbidden, others have deemed it to be permitted, while others have deemed it to be permitted but disliked.” These debates, which have covered the permissibility of both singing and musical instruments, and have featured some of the most important names in the history of Islamic thought, have gone on into the present day. They offer an illuminating perspective on the relationship between law and religion and freedom of religion in Islamic contexts.

(more…)

Continue Reading Islamic Views on Music