RSIS Book Launch Webinar

“Religious Hatred: Prejudice, Islamophobia and Antisemitism in Global Context”

Author
Dr Paul Hedges
Associate Professor, Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies Programme,
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Opening Remarks
Ambassador Ong Keng Yong
Executive Deputy Chairman,
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies

Panellists

Dr Paul Hedges
Associate Professor, Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies Programme,
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies

Professor Ari Kohen
Schlesinger Professor of Social Justice and Director of the Harris Center for Judaic Studies,
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, United States

Dr Mohamed Bin Ali
Assistant Professor, Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies Programme,
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies

Dr Irm Haleem
Assistant Professor, International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research,
School Academic Integrity Officer,
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies

Closing Remarks
Ambassador Mohammad Alami Musa
Head, Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies Programme,
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies

Moderator
Dr Rafal Stepien
Assistant Professor, Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies Programme,
Deputy Coordinator of MSc (Asian Studies) Programme,
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies

About the Book

Why does religion inspire hatred? Why do people in one religion sometimes hate people of another religion, and also why do some religions inspire hatred from others?

This book shows how scholarly studies of prejudice, identity formation, and genocide studies can shed light on global examples of religious hatred. The book is divided into four parts, focusing respectively on: theories of prejudice and violence; historical developments of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and race; contemporary Western antisemitism and Islamophobia; and, prejudices beyond the West in the Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions.

The book focuses on antisemitism and Islamophobia, both in the West and beyond, including examples of prejudices and hatred in the Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Drawing on examples from Europe, North America, MENA, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, Paul Hedges points to common patterns, while identifying the specifics of local context.

The book is available for purchase from Bloomsbury, Wardah Books, and Book Depository.

About the Panellists

Dr Paul Hedges is Associate Professor of Interreligious Studies in the Studies in Interreligious Relations in Plural Societies Programme, RSIS, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Previously he was Reader in Interreligious Studies at the University of Winchester, UK, and had worked for other British, Canadian, and Chinese universities before that. He has worked with a range of stakeholder groups outside academia, including the Anglican Communion Network for Interfaith Concerns (NIFCON), the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, the Babaji Yogi Sangam, the Dialogue Society, the World Congress of Faiths, and the BBC. He is on the Editorial Board of both the Journal of Religious History and Studies in Interreligious Dialogue.  He publishes widely in interreligious studies, religious studies, and theology. Current research projects include interreligious relations in Singapore and the East and South-East Asian region, as well as interreligious and intercultural hermeneutics.

He has published fourteen books and over seventy papers dealing with issues relating to such fields as interreligious relations and method and theory in religious studies. Other recent books include Understanding Religion: Method and Theory for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies (California University Press 2021), Comparative Theology: A Critical and Methodological Perspective (Brill 2017), and Towards Better Disagreement: Religion and Atheism in Dialogue (Jessica Kingsley 2017).

Professor Ari Kohen is a professor of political science, Schlesinger Professor of Social Justice, and director of the Harris Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.. He is the author of In Defense of Human Rights: A Non-Religious Grounding in a Pluralistic World (Routledge 2007) and Untangling Heroism: Classical Philosophy and the Concept of the Hero (Routledge 2015). He is the joint editor of Unlikely Heroes: The Place of Holocaust Rescuers in Research and Teaching (University of Nebraska Press 2019).

Dr Mohamed Ali is Assistant Professor at Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies (SRP) Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His areas of research include Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamist ideology, religious extremism, inter-religious relations and rehabilitation of Muslim extremists. Well-versed in Arabic language and Islamic knowledge, Dr Mohamed obtained his Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Islamic Jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt in 2002, Masters of Science (MSc) in International Relations at RSIS, NTU in 2007 and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter, United Kingdom in 2013. Prior to that, he studied Islam and Arabic language at Aljunied Islamic School in Singapore from 1990-1995. Dr Mohamed also graduated with a Specialist Diploma in Counseling Psychology from Academy of Certified Counsellors, Singapore in 2006. Since 2003, Dr Mohamed has been involved in the rehabilitation programme of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) detainees in Singapore. He is the Vice-Chairman and counsellor of the Religious Rehabilitation Group (RRG), a group of voluntary Muslim clerics who provide religious counselling to detainees arrested for terrorism-related activities. Dr Mohamed has lectured and made numerous presentations locally and abroad; conducted courses and published widely on Islamic issues and issues of religious extremism and terrorist rehabilitation. He has also conducted field trips in many countries including Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines. Dr Mohamed is also actively involved in community-related works. He is currently Vice-Chairman, Geylang Serai Inter-Racial and Religious Confidence Circle (IRCC), member of the Syariah Appeal Board of the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS), associate member of MUIS Fatwa Committee, member of MUIS Wakaf (Endowment) Dispute Resolution Committee and member of Khadijah Mosque Management Board. Dr Mohamed was a former President of the Singaporean Students Welfare Assembly in Cairo, former member of Council for Asian Terrorism Research and former counselor at the Singapore Prison Department. He has also delivered lectures and sermons in many mosques in Singapore.

Dr Irm Haleem is Assistant Professor in the Strategic Studies Programme at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, and the RSIS School Academic Integrity Officer (SAIO) (2018-present). Her research is interdisciplinary and draws on political theory (notions of freedom, resistance, contentious politics, conformity), philosophy (ethics, moral philosophy, recognition struggles, philosophy of religion), sociology (social movement theory, iconology) and linguistics (discourse analysis). She is the author of the book The Essence of Islamist Extremism: Recognition through Violence, Freedom through Death (Routledge 2012; 2014 paperback), and the editor and contributing author of Normalization of Violence: Conceptual Analysis and Reflections from Asia (Routledge 2020). In her current book-in-progress, Contradictions of Freedom (under contract with Routledge, Political Philosophy collection), Haleem takes a critical look at the notion of freedom, its relationship to struggles for recognition, and proposes four new paradoxes of freedom that have thus far been overlooked, outlining the implications of these paradoxes for our contemporary times.

Dr. Haleem is a recipient of a research grant from the United States Air Force (USAF), Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development (AOARD), 2015-2016, which was awarded to facilitate the writing of her second single-authored book, initially titled Death as Existence, and currently titled Contradictions of Freedom.  Haleem has also been an invited TEDx speaker, at TEDxNTU, October 2017, Here’s to the Game Changers, where she spoke on ‘Love, Hope, and Human Agency’, dawning on her work on agency and personal autonomy from her book Contradictions of Freedom.