Abdal Hakim Murad – AlGhazali Paradigms of Leadership
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So,
if there's been any unifying
thread in this cook's tour of some very
far flung human corners of the history of
this, gigantic diverse
Ummah. I guess it has been that,
this principle of leadership,
a very modern, really un Islamic
category,
is something that,
can be applied, but only indirectly
to certain people who, from a secular optic,
would be regarded as leaders, leaders of jihad,
leaders of thought, leaders of
iftar,
leaders
of their own way within Islam, the kind
of William Williamson approach. We've seen a number
of stormy petrels. Is there a a unifying
principle? Well, I think that as we began,
we should end by recognizing that the modern
conception of leadership,
is incompatible
with the Islamic view simply because it excludes
the possibility of tawfiq and divine agency.
The prophetic model itself
is not a model of leadership in the
sense that would make sense, say, to the
Judge Business School or the Palace of Westminster,
because,
his leadership, alayhis salatu wassalam, is a leadership
that was thrust
He didn't make a large inaugural
address,
lapping up
the flash photography.
He was reluctant. He did not wish for
this,
responsibility,
and we saw the famous,
sound hadith
in which he says,
do not ask for leadership.
Isn't our life nowadays predicated on filling in
forms and asking for promotion and nagging our
boss and looking for a better job?
How does
that cohere at all with that very absolute
prophetic
commandment.
And in their varied ways, we have seen
that
the leadership paradigms
that we have mapped out in the history
of Islam are people whose success
consists in the fact that they weren't really
interested in glory.
It just kind of happened as a side
effect
of their journey, but it was not their
destination.
Hopefully, that's been clear, but, of course, so
many others, thousands, thousands of other individual leaders
in the history of this Ooma, those whole
centuries and whole cultural realms that we haven't
yet,
broached,
would make this clear
that, the one is a model of leadership
through ego,
pharaonic leadership we might say, the only paradigm
recognized now.
And the other is the leadership that comes
about
when that is subjugated, and
the nafs is overcome as the false self,
which means really negating modern ideas of
individualism.
And the true self, which is the Ruhr,
deeply buried
beneath layers of
rubbish in the hearts of most of us
nowadays,
is activated,
and
whether that person wills it or not, carries
that person up.
So it's a defiance of gravity. It is
the influence of heaven,
as it were, melting the dew. The dew
doesn't get the choice, but it moves upwards
because of the power of what is happening
and its own, inherent
nature.
So this, of course, presents us moderns, those
who are flying desks in a modern
company,
or university,
or parliament with a real paradox.
What is,
the legitimacy
of what we take to be our
natural right, wanting to see our hard work
rewarded and to
slither up the greasy pole,
competing with others.
This doesn't seem to be the Islamic model
at all, ever. This kind of Darwinian paradigm,
which prevails in modern capitalism, is not something
that we respect.
It's not that there mustn't be people who
lead,
because the hadith goes on to say, because
if you are given it
without asking for it, you will be given
success
in it.
But if you
achieve it through asking for it, it will
be given authority over you.
In other words, you'll be subject to its
rules and its
competitive dog eat dog mindset.
The spiritual hardening,
the kingship of the ego will inevitably eat
you alive.
And you can see that
as power
corrupts,
not just in politics, but in any other
aspect of life that we see it in.
Brexit negotiations, a ridiculous circus of damaged,
naked
egos
squabbling with one another. We see it with
people who are swallowing their own political convictions
for the sake of promises of cabinet positions
under Hunt or Johnson, and it's very unedifying.
It's the endless human zoo of the ego,
the animalistic.
It's kind of naked and obvious
and unifying and ominous, of course, because those
are not people who are going to be
given telferic from heaven. So our paradigm is
really different as we've seen, and we need
somehow
at least to be aware of that
as we move through the world. That ours
is a radical,
discordant,
dissident perspective as it has to be because
we believe strongly in the divine omnipotence,
something which doesn't occur to most authors of
CVs or readers of CVs. It's it's that
alien principle
that nonetheless,
looking at the history of the Ummah is
that which
makes things happen.
So
we began with that,
disorienting thought,
maybe even that humbling thought.
Maybe it even coincides with our sense that
however well laid our plans may be, they
tend to go astray.
Perhaps we have the wisdom to recognize that
it is Allah's plans alone,
which are an accurate map of the future,
and our own are just
vain and incompetent,
usually egotistic dreamings.
Maybe as we go through life, we have
the humility and the wisdom to witness that,
maybe through painful setbacks.
But, in the context of
our own sense of how we do things
in this current social matrix, where everything is
Darwinian.
Dog eats dog,
devil take the hindmost
the American dream,
means that there are some people who don't
make it to the top and live a
nightmare,
end up in prison, or as members of
a despised ghetto community for whom there is
very little,
mobility. There isn't a dream without the nightmare.
And,
with the growth of what they call the
precariat in modern Britain, we're seeing that as
well.
Lots of people for whom this hugely competitive
and heartless animalistic
lure of the jungle view of how leadership
is achieved
are the left behind
and end up in situations of of considerable
personal and familial and economic distress. And that
gulf is widening all the time partly because
of this deficient and Darwinian and ultimately heartless
vision of
how to get to the top, how to
assume positions of a manner
and responsibility.
It's an ugly process,
But,
because it
releases our lowest,
most,
avid energies,
has created a civilization
that is of enormous, perhaps unprecedented
power, that its energy sources, the lower part
of us, not the higher. And we will
see what its long term outcomes
might be.
In any case,
what I want to do today is to
look at somebody who is kind of,
a paradigm
for somebody who actually
abandoned
the slippery poles, seeing it for what it
is,
and decided to,
turn within.
And, of course, this has happened to very
many people in the history of the OMA,
but in a sense, in his life, it
becomes the defining
act of his,
resume. This, of course, is Hochat al Islam
al Ghazali,
of whose life we remember particularly his
crisis, his disillusionment,
and his climbing down from the pole.
He'd already reached the top in order to
go off in
humble, dervish like poverty,
taking the hippie trail,
wandering off, looking for truth,
doing all of those,
prophetic,
but,
not leadership
like things. So I want to close this
series. Who knows? If there's good feedback, we
might look at some more
people next year,
because it's quite a good way of getting
into certain principles in religion by seeing how
they have,
interacted with and been
bodied forth in actual human biodata.
It's an accessible way of looking at principles.
But in the case of Imam Ghazali, what
I want to do is not just go
over the
details of his life again because you've seen
the movie, and no doubt this is
familiar already, but rather to see,
what we might learn
if we are to address this
current crisis,
that afflicts the soul
whenever we
seek to better ourselves,
whenever we
write
that CV.
I'm a great team player, and I really
enjoy new challenges, and these are my hobbies.
And they're all the same, because the system
tends to produce
what sociologists call them monoculture.
Because it's a math culture, everything ends up
being the same. And you can
download a standard CV from the Internet with
all of those stupid phrases,
and in a sense, you have to do
that. You can't say, actually, I'm not a
good team player, and I get tired easily.
And I have unusual ideas, and I rock
the boat, and a lot of people don't
like me to can't do that. There's no
way in which Ikhla, sincerity, a genuine self
betrayal required religiously.
Remember, you're not allowed to sell a house
in Islam unless you indicate all of its
defects to the buyer. We're quite quite
narrow in our moralism.
So this
economic leadership model, which of course infects and
corrupts politics as well,
of people just making things up and making
promises and flattering
themselves,
is something,
which we view as very considerable
disquiet and distaste. But then,
hey. How do you write a CV if
you need a job?
There are certain practical considerations.
We know what our ideals are. They are
the traditional ideals of sacred humanity shared by
people in other traditions as well.
But how do we live by them
in a world that is,
fanatically materialistic?
Well, let's,
try and address this by taking a step
back,
and looking at
what and where we are as
believers,
as people who are still interested
in what is behind
the surface of things,
at this particular,
in many ways, unsettled and extreme point of
human history.
Just about everything is unsettled. Even the natural
world is unsettled, which is really new for
human beings.
It's interesting,
for those who are considering their identity as
minorities
in the middle of this sort of mammon
civilization,
to reflect on what has been done to
them.
To what extent are we actually in continuity
with the sacred past? And to what extent
are we just a kind of mildly Islamic
or eccentric version of
the mainstream Western machine?
Worth thinking about that.
What where really are our roots?
Well,
recently, I went for the first time to
the new Bukhary Galleries at the British Museum.
And this is the heart of the Islamic
Art
displays at the British Museum.
2 big rooms, which, thanks to a Malaysian
donor family, have been handed over to the,
presentation
of some of Islam's great treasures.
And of course, it's all
incomparable, and it's about the busiest gallery next
door. There's the amazing Anglo Saxon and Celtic
stuff, which is also
pretty astonishing
when you think of the dark ages or
pretty
pretty shining, some of those things. But
the Islamic gallery, even though Islam is kind
of the paradigm of that which makes everybody
kind of anxious,
is it safe to go and Islamic. Oh
my god. Where is that adjective normally used
in the media? 99 times out of a
100 or a 100 times out of a
100, it's attached to something scary. But
they go in, and they go in because
it is the luminous heart
of the museum. The ancient Egyptian stuff is
fun, and children look at the mummies and
this all of that.
The Elgin Marbles,
there's some people in there, but
alright.
I guess lumps of the Parthenon,
alright. More,
a kind of
status experience to look at those,
like going to a particularly
difficult experimental
modern opera. Something to talk about the dinner
party in Islington,
but after 2 hours
of serialist
evocations
of sonic chaos.
The kind of enjoyment factor might diminish, but,
hey, it's something to talk about. I went
to the new Philip Glass
opera. Yeah. I had really good reviews, didn't
it?
It's it's all about you know, it's like
birdsong. You just produce this chatter that demonstrates
your place in the
social
matrix, but,
intrinsically, it may not,
do much for you.
But, when you go to those Islamic galleries
okay. So the world's great city
has its great museum, and at the center
of the great museum, there's these
galleries, and there you see
the Qur'an's and the carpets and the manuscripts
and the,
glassware, and everybody is crowding. You have to
wait to get,
to see some of the stuff because it's
so busy.
That's an interesting question. What is it about
the artifacts of our civilization, which presumably body
forth the world view and the spiritual states
of the craftsmen who are producing that stuff
that everybody nowadays in 21st century individualistic
mammon land finds
so delightful.
An interesting question, even though it's Islamic.
Isn't that like Islamist?
We're brought up
to have certain reflexes about that, but people
can't get enough of that. But what you
don't see there, and this is perhaps the
most interesting thing in the Bukhary galleries,
is many Muslims.
That's really also an interesting cultural statement.
Lots of Japanese and Chinese,
and
American tourists, and Europeans, and Dutch, and English
kind of lapping up
all of this stuff, and looking at the
Qurans, and the woodwork, and the fritware, and
the mameluke glass, and it's it's all astounding.
But even though one in 7 Londoners is
a Muslim,
maybe 1 in a 100 visitors to the
Bukhary Gallery is Muslim, but they don't always
seem to be the most religious one. So
that's a kind of interesting
reflection on our state.
Where do we really belong?
Are we actually
more comfortable in Starbucks, or watching Wimbledon, or
doing some sort of purely Western thing? And
when we see the extraordinary
cultural,
summit achieved by the ancestors of most Muslims
in London, we're kind of,
a bit uncomfortable.
The world's greatest fritware
fritware? Is that Islamic brother? What's fritware? Is
this haram?
We really don't know. Even though your average
kind of chattering class is an intern person,
probably has some in his home, and he
can tell you the difference about the or
Islamic carpets on his floor, but we aren't
in that space.
That's an interesting,
condemnation,
I guess,
that we complain so much about hostility to
the east and to our heritage,
but we're not really inhabiting our heritage. We
don't know it. We don't we don't seem
to be interested.
And it's the same at the Victoria and
Albert Museum, where they have some
equivalently amazing things. You don't see many London
Muslims there. Even the kind of high flying
city types
who maybe rub shoulders with people who do
go to galleries, but, no, it's not not
what we do.
So we begin with this interesting sense of,
a consensual
divorce,
that probably the the default demography of London
Muslims is probably 60% of cases subcontinental.
And you could say that the deep culture
of Islam in the subcontinent
may be the greatest summit of human civilization.
How do you measure these things in terms
of the music,
the food, the textiles,
the architecture?
Yeah. Taj Mahal is the world's number one
tourist
destination. That culture,
their ancestral culture,
certainly beats anything that,
the British did in India, for heaven's sake.
No no comparison at all.
But the new generation
do not inhabit that. Don't respond to it.
Find it all a bit kind of
disquieting.
They leave it to the white folks to
get have Islamic art in their homes. Whatever
it is,
odd. That's an interesting circumstance,
that despite the religiosity
of much of subcontinental
London Islam,
there doesn't seem to be much interest
in pride in that staggering North Indian,
Mughal,
Khaledid, whatever it is, heritage. They just don't
much respond to it or want to know
much about it and talk to the young
people.
And they can't name any of those rulers,
and it's just some kind of
odd Arabian Nights exotic thing that nobody ever
tells them about, because their culture is just
the modern culture of
the Biryani,
the Khattam, the aunties,
that world.
But the greatness of that civilization,
which could be a very good way of
vindicating
their culture.
It's something that they choose
not to know about or they've never been
exposed to it.
One great way of dealing with Islamophobia
is pointing out the popularity of Islamic art.
But because it's not popular amongst ourselves, that
becomes a slightly problematic
argument. We don't respond to it much now.
An oddity.
I remember once
walking with my late father through,
Benelkastrein
Street in,
Cairo.
Cairo
has the world's highest density of medieval monuments.
Astonishing.
And there on all sides are these staggering
sort of,
Memeluk Cathedral scale
miracles,
and he's blown away.
And then he says, where did these people
go?
This is amazing. Where where did they all
go?
Good question.
They're not doing those things in Egypt any
longer or anything like. They build a few
shopping malls maybe and hotels for tourists, but
that, no.
Even when they build a mosque, it's not
that. It's a kind of
embarrassed,
pastiche
with a few half remembered
stereotypical
motifs. They don't relate to that.
So that's an interesting,
if rather dispiriting,
realization.
The religion goes on, the civilization
is defunct.
The elites, particularly in Muslim lands,
are not in any way in continuity with
the world view and the cultural forms of,
the
historic elites.
Sometimes the working classes are in continuity with
the values that you might have seen 500
years ago in Cairo,
Lucknow, or wherever, but the elites, no.
Neither do they particularly
wish to reengage with that stuff, which is
a shame
because they need,
a PR break.
But they're not really going to use that
stuff because it no longer speaks to them.
So that's one,
rather sobering realization about the precarity,
the oddness of our situation
that we no longer represent a civilization,
really.
But there's lots of piety around. But generally,
our lives tend to be well, we pray
and we fast
and we have a kind of Asian style
colorful,
tinsley, nikar.
But basically, the substance of our lives is
is a kind of Western thing.
And that,
dissonance
produces many of the discomforts in the
contemporary Muslim soul. And on the modern, the
real side of it, this,
aspirational model of leadership is
coercive to the soul because because it's not
natural for the believer to get to the
top by trampling others underfoot and by boasting
about his or her real or imagined,
skills.
So
we,
recognize this, but then we also recognize that
the elites
and those Muslim diasporas in the West
that should be proud of their ancestors, but
in practice don't seem interested at all,
have been dislocated
from colonial experiences, post colonial,
inferiority complexes
in favor of a narrative,
that seemed, certainly the 19th, early 20th century,
to be absolutely insuperable.
The traditional monchi
goes to the new railway station in Lucknow
for the first time, and there is this
enormous black
dragon of a steam engine, and he feels,
oh, we'll never compete with this civilization.
And that complex begins,
and the,
bifurcation
between religion and civilization
becomes a kind of sting in the soul
of very many, perhaps most Muslims. Very few
people are serenely and uncomplicatedly
just a part of the narrative of Muslim
civilization
any longer. They're all kind of discontinuities
and compromises and tensions that
agitate people's souls inevitably,
cognitive dissonance.
So that was
the white man has this enormous steaming machine.
I just got my old horse at home.
We're we're we're done for.
That narrative of progress
with its, shall we say, fatalism.
In other words, this is inevitable.
A social Darwinism.
Just as Darwin said that we begin with
primordial
sludge, and then we produce,
well, people like himself
wearing a top hat and playing bridge, obviously,
the climax of a 1000000000 years. Who could
deny that?
This idea of
despite
the meaninglessness
of stuff and the fact that stuff is
taken to be all that exists,
there is this bordering principle,
becomes a kind of surrogate religion. So people
think, well, eschatology,
head and *, that's difficult. But, hey. Things
are getting better.
This quasi religious miracle of
order emerging from natural chaos is really exciting.
And we're gonna base our music and our
art and our sense of ourselves,
our optimism
on this. The strange
collaboration
of atheism and materialism on the one hand
with the kind of optimism
about the human future,
is an interesting
sign of our times
and sometimes
accelerated.
When 20th century man wanted to step on
the gas,
he tended to go for something like Nazism
or communism, which were just attempts to speed
up natural selection
and make us better at high speed.
It didn't really work too well, but we
still believe in the underlying
teleology of getting better
progressism,
what Rene Guenon calls,
the fatalism of progress. You can't do anything
about it. Things just are going to get
better and
go along with it. And perhaps retain a
few fragmentary nice things from your grandmother's
pieties, but basically,
the future is,
is is the reality.
So that
was
the counternarrative
to the Islamic civilizational narrative
really until very,
very, very recently,
and even a generation ago, people like Francis
Fukuyama, the idea of the end of history.
The West has actually cracked it. We understand,
the meaning of life, life, universe, and everything,
and things are going to get better. Liberal
democracy, science, secularism
will prevail everywhere.
As the iron curtain came down, that seemed
to be inexorable. But now they tend to
look a little bit,
doubtful
about all of this.
And this is what makes being Muslim in
our time
particularly
intriguing,
if not particularly comfortable.
So in the 19th century, the old narrative
of the Mughals and the Ottomans, the great
climaxes of everything
collapsing. And people suddenly think, well, the white
man has better cannons
and representative government and human rights, and we're
feeling really
put upon by all of this. And we
have to redefine Islam as we invented human
rights. All the Koran very scientific and that
kind of apologetic
manipulation,
which doesn't really convince anybody,
or the sort of mad fundamentalist
Luddite
reaction, which is causing
the the complete systemic
implosion
of an increasing number of Muslim societies and
and countries now.
Instead of that, we now have the other
narrative,
the narrative that said that it had the
answers,
itself
imploding,
not just because of the philosophical
collapse of the of the enlightenment
idea of how to get ethics
into the postmodern
relativization
of everything, which very simply, very easily becomes
the kind of
nihilism or,
relativism.
But because of what science, which is the
kind of the dominant jewel in the crown
of the western alternative to the sacred paradigms,
is now presenting.
So
yesterday, you might have seen, possibly on the
BBC,
Michelle Hussein,
who comes to CMC sometimes. She's a kind
of CMC
supporter, a serious person,
Interviewing
James Lovelock.
That's interesting encounter, not just because he's like
5 times older than her. He's having his
100th birthday this year, but still really coherent.
You know, you wouldn't want to cross mental
swords with him on a dark night. He's
a very bright man. He's the one who,
a couple of generations ago, came up with
this Gaia hypothesis,
which is popular in some sustainability green circles,
which is the scientific reasons for regarding us
as part of
a planetary organism.
A lot of people thought this was
a kind of interesting idea, even though it's
kind
of obvious that the ecosystem is one
unitary thing. But it was a helpful breakthrough
at the time when people still thought of
human beings as somehow categorically
exceptional,
and has been a leading campaigner for
nuclear energy,
and
for what he calls rational displacement.
It's worth thinking about if you have relatives
in a Muslim country.
Global warming is gonna hit the Muslim world
much harder
than it will,
these frozen latitudes.
And he says it's not going to be
stopped by technology or by anything.
And therefore, we need to adopt what he
calls a process of rational displacement.
Evacuate countries like Bangladesh and find other places,
to put all of those people because you
can't save those low lying places. New Orleans,
don't bother.
Pakistan
is going to be destroyed by global warming
because the Himalayan ice cap is coming to
an end. It'll be uninhabitable
20, 30 years. Don't even think about science
coming up with a solution. These places are
toast.
So rather dismal, but he sees things very
much as a futurist.
With, sufficient international cooperation, we can relocate to
those populations. The countries will be gone, but
the populations will be, I don't know, somewhere
near
Omsk in Siberia where they can grow oranges.
This is the kind of
prospect that he is,
holding out.
The optimism of some scientists is quite
encouraging perhaps.
In any case, what he was talking about
with Michelle Hussein yesterday, and she was kind
of a little bit
gobsmacked by this, is artificial intelligence.
He says the real solution to the wipeout
of Homo sapiens by climate change, which which
he sees as inevitable, is going to be
that there's nothing special about us. We're just
one species amongst 10,000,000. We'll come to an
end, but what's important
is
consciousness.
That's the only thing that's interesting about us,
And we're gonna produce consciousness through artificial intelligence
that he says will be 10000 times as
quick as the the pathetic meat machine that
is the human brain.
And this new cybernetic consciousness, which will replace
ourselves,
will go on forever because it won't be
particularly dependent on any biological,
infrastructure.
So at the age of a 100, he's
still
looking to the future, and Michelle was kind
of nodding, not wishing to be too impolite.
But, of course, it's a,
shockingly
outrageous idea.
But my point is that the old sort
of Victorian
Herbert Spencer idea of social Darwinism and progress,
instead of these funny little sacred traditions and
your mogul design and
your meditative music, your contemplative
civilization.
Get on board this train, which is going
to the real paradise, which is the great
future. Land and milk of milk and honey,
which science and reason and liberal democracy are
opening up to a hitherto benighted
human race.
No longer the case.
Now if the science itself is saying, well,
actually,
we've,
erased our future,
But something else is gonna take over, so
it doesn't really matter.
There's nothing special about us anyway.
Then that whole narrative of progress
is no longer
the irresistible
seductress that it was for
Indians and Egyptians a 100 years ago, but
it's looking as if it's run into the
buffers
and is far more threatening
and inhuman
than anything that
even the most aberrant traditional sacred civilization
dreamt up. It is
genuinely biocidal,
threatening not just ourselves, but most other life
forms,
outrageous.
What
Lovelock said was outrageous.
So that's
the kind of dialogue that we're having now.
Not the dialogue that say,
Jumaladin Avrani had a 100 years ago with
Reynold at the College de France where it
was,
enlightenment,
steam engines,
the National
Republic,
the imperial
vision of uplifting the colonies
against
just Jimaladin Afongani
trying to justify Islamic civilization and not really
making a very good fist of it.
Now the dialogue is different. The dialogue is
now between
the completely crazy futurist,
with his predictions of a utopia,
but not for us.
And on the other hand, Michelle Hussein with
her Islamic thing, which is real, and her
work at the BBC, and her desire for
career projection
progression, which is entirely legitimate. She's good at
her children. That conversation is is very different
to the conversation we were having a 100
years ago. It it is more disquieting.
And from the materialistic point of view, it's
not nearly
so triumphalistic.
So my point is the simple one, which
is that we find ourselves in a new
situation.
It's not just
tradition and modernity,
progress and conservatism.
It is a model of life that for
all of its failings,
produced sustainable
civilizations
that believed in a higher reality and produced
a staggering cornucopia
of art, music, and other things that indicate
the profound serenity and happiness of the souls
that generated
those artifacts
against
a global catastrophe,
climate emergency,
not to mention all of the other
potential threats,
that science represents. You should all go and
watch Doctor Strangelove, which is Kubrick's greatest film,
which is his kind of prophetic vision of
human cleverness,
outsmarting,
human wisdom.
If you don't know the story, it's, the
head of an American nuclear bomber
airbase
who decides,
that
the
virility of the American man is being compromised
by the addition of
fluoride
to drinking water. And because of this evil
conspiracy,
he is going to bring down the establishment
by launching his nuclear bombers against Russia. They're
gonna launch a counter strike. The whole world
will go up, but there won't be any
more fluoride in our water, and the virility
of the American man is going to be
restored. It's kind of amusing,
but it also is indicative of the kind
of wonky paranoia,
that exists, particularly on the other side of
the Atlantic,
as its finger
drifts somewhere
egotistically near,
the red button.
It's quite a prophetic, although it's a black
comedy, really. We should all watch it as
an example of a secular critique of
of the
catastrophic risks, that modernity and science can present
to us. So
so the point is the old progress in
science and reason and human
happiness against reaction, religion,
sexism, conservatism of the family,
primitivism,
That dialect isn't really in place any longer,
and things were a lot more complex,
which means that religiosity
of the Islamic option
is about,
not a kind of nostalgic
retreat into grandma's
pieties.
But in the real world of work or
whatever,
you
go along with
the the the world view of the dominant
civilization
that has to involve us in a, a
more radical and existential
dissidents.
Not the kind of blow yourself up in
the street mad Al Qaeda,
aberration, but something rooted in the spiritual
depths of our civilization
rather than just in our capacity to get
really angry.
So Imam al Ghazali comes in, and as
I said, I don't want to go through
the biodata. It's,
pleasantly familiar.
But,
the the key
tension in his life, of course, is
the mind and the heart.
Even when he was a teenager
in
Central Asia,
during the day, he would attend
the majlis of,
Imam al Haramain al Juwaini,
the greatest philosophical theologian
in the world at the time, with the
crack students of the age who'd come to
sit at his feet from everywhere.
And it was
forms of the syllogism, the construction of arguments,
analogy,
very
refined,
elaborate
mental gymnastics,
which have their place in our civilization. We
like to construct good arguments. We've always emphasized
logic.
And then
the classes were over by the Zohar prayer,
and he'd get on his donkey or his
mule
and trot off to the suburbs
of the city,
in order to sit with a Sufi,
Abu Ali al Farmadi,
where a different,
sort of journey
was being celebrated.
Not the way of the mind, but the
way of the heart.
Not the way of logic chopping and demonstration,
apodictic proofs,
but instead,
the affective,
possibly that which is closer to what makes
us most paradigmatically
human.
Daught in a rose garden.
This is Persia
after all. It's mostly poetry.
It's ecstatic.
People are sitting in a circle,
and as it were, the metaphorical flagons of
love are being passed around. You don't get
that kind of intoxication in a logic class.
It's dry, and it has to be dry.
You have to exclude
your humanity and your emotions from
the rigorous intellectual construction of of arguments in
law and in
metaphysics.
But in Faramad, it's gathering. It's the Sufi
thing,
and the Persian Sufi thing, which is the
climax of that, civilization,
certainly in terms of its literature.
And that bifurcation
was, of course, on everybody's mind,
and leads to his famous crisis. Am I
sincere?
Why do I enjoy sitting in front of
the best students in the Islamic world?
Why am I accepting the patronage of Nizam
al Mulk, the most powerful man in the
world, probably?
Why am I hobnobbing,
walking the corridors of power,
taking the state's,
dinars,
when quite possibly, I'm just digging my own
spiritual and moral
grave. I really enjoy my professorial
chair
and the Odeon Academicum
that goes with it. And famously, in the
middle of a lecture, he's kind of thunderstruck
by this experiences
what we would probably call a breakdown and
just leaves
to
the consternation
of his students who want him to
finish the argument, but,
he leaves.
And he goes,
well, not back to the rose garden, but
God's rose garden, the wider world,
which is where the believer
finds his spiritual nourishment, because this is in
the Quran.
The Quran tells us
that faith
is gifted by heaven
to those who humbly open their hearts to
the signs of of God in the natural
world and in human beings.
That's the current argument. Argument from design, but
not really philosophical, but rather
existential.
Shaking us and saying, leave aside all of
your clever syllogisms.
Look at all of this.
Does it look as if it just
emerged from some
primordial
nothing?
Not very likely, is it? That's a kind
of argument that's deeper than arguments. It it
appeals to that which is most commonsensical
and real about human beings.
And incidentally, it's another thing for us to
think about in our world,
part of whose ethos has been human mastery
of nature.
We want to control nature.
We queue up to get to the top
of Mount Everest
at vast expense and personal risk.
Why should we want to do that? Because
we want to stand on top of the
world, and this makes us feel that we've
dominated nature, and part of our civilization
has said, that's how we will achieve happiness,
because nature is
threatening. It's got tigers in it. And,
but there is,
of course, in nature,
in its threateningness,
as well as in its
soft rabbit
aspects,
a lesson for the soul.
During Ramadan, I was in
the Malay world, and
somebody in this gathering said, look what I
saw when I was driving.
Had his phone.
He'd been sitting behind the dashboard in the
car, and the car stopped,
and there was a tiger in front of
his car.
And the tiger had her cubs by the
side of the road, and people had stopped
just to look at this thing. What was
interesting is you could immediately see the kind
of,
what he said, the majesty
of this animal, and its complete
existential
indifference to our own egotistic
cleverness. The
the majesty of it just being a tiger
and challenging us and making us realize our
smallness. It was a sacred moment. And this
is what the Quran is
telling us. Even in something that could
eat you,
there is something that is going to spiritually
bring you to life. And so the believers
have always enjoyed
nature.
Muslims have always loved gardens,
and we've always tried to bring the indicativity
of nature into our
homes and our sacred spaces.
The mosque doesn't have pictures,
but the mosque has
indications
of the geometric
indicativity of nature.
Islamic decorative art, which is the essence really
of
our
architectural civilization,
is about stylized vegetal motifs, tessellations,
arabesques,
the exploration of the strange platonic mystery of
symmetry
and,
geometry
brought to the surface.
That's what Art does.
It says, an infinitesimal
distance behind the surface of things,
which seem to be kind of messy,
there is
order, symmetry,
perfection.
There is a kind of platonic space where
everything is ordered and geometry
prevails, not just the snowflake, but the atom.
And Muslim art has always sought to remind
us of the orderliness
of God's creation,
and it it's very effective. And that's one
reason why
people like to crowd out those galleries at
the British,
Museum
because on some level, they're being told
there's something really interesting about the fact that
creation is orderly
rather than just you what you'd expect from
a
world without an order, which is
either nothingness, which is the only logical thing
to expect, but some kind of
radical
fractal chaos. But no, there is
order. There are physical constants. There's the speed
of light. There is gravity. There are triangles.
There are 8 pointed stars. There is
real order is part of the fabric of
things. And that's what Doctor. Khan is saying.
Science for people who have loved the deeper
part of ourselves,
which is activated
through contemplation,
not through cleverness. It's not really a function
of IQ.
It's a function of whether you can overcome
the jumping thoughts and the distractions
of the lower self, and allow the loop,
the real self, to ponder these things
and to be nourished by them.
So another question
in our contemporary reality, since that seems to
be the
the puzzle that we set for ourselves today,
is
if modern man has
ransacked nature
and intimidated it and terrorized it, so that
probably that tiger has now been killed or
something because
it's on a public highway.
If we are the terroristical
enemies of just about every other species apart
from those that we can
enslave because we like
chicken nuggets or something. If this is our
our function
on the planet,
not to be Khalifa and stewards, but to
be,
rapists
and mass murderers.
Because the Quran says the other species are
nations like yourselves, which when you think about
it,
it's a pretty radical statement.
The world of rabbits has its own integrity,
and it's right to have a global distribution
just like the world of human beings. They
have their own logic, their own consciousness, their
own integrity, their own right to be here,
and they're not just there for us. They're,
autonomously
as
another way in which creation testifies to the
majesty of its author.
But we don't see that, so we just
run them over on the a 14 or
maybe eat them or shoot them, just whatever
it is we do. But we we can't
just let them be, because modern civilization doesn't
see the point of letting anything be.
Make money out of it, enjoy it,
treat it as some kind of leisure activity,
Go hunting for elephants in Botswana, but
just capitalize everything. What's its monetary value?
And the consequences
for the poor old vandalized natural world are
something that even the most,
sort of crazy atheistic scientists like
Lovelock have to acknowledge. They just say, oh,
we'll come to an end because of all
this cleverness, but there'll be something even smarter,
so let's be optimistic.
It's a kind of,
weird
eschatology.
So,
the question is, if humanity treats nature as
an enemy rather than as just something that
we are part of
and are spiritually nourished by,
how do we find our way to that
contemplative
tafakkur,
which the Quran says is how you absorb
faith.
How do you get a natural belief if
you're in
terminal 5 at Heathrow, for instance?
Maybe if you look out of the window,
you can see beyond the smoking runway. There's
a few trees out there. Otherwise, nature is
decisively
abolished.
Even the food is kind of
god knows how many additives and things have
been added. And part of the weirdness of
the modern food industry is that
the
more
they manipulate the food and the more they
add to it, the cheaper it gets.
Should be the other way around when you
think about it. This
is the inversion that we're living. So
how do you remember your Lord in these
modern spaces that are the consequence of the
radical
ransacking
and disenchantment
of the world? Well, you do it through
the Quranic verse that says,
We shall show them our signs on the
horizons and in themselves.
I was talking to the prison chaplains a
few days ago. In prison,
you really are detached from nature.
You don't have a spouse, you don't have
children,
maybe you can see a bird occasionally through
the window
in a high security prison. That might not
happen very often. You don't breathe fresh air.
If you've been to a prison, you'll see
how at least the white folks are whiter
than ever before, because they just don't go
outdoors.
How can they,
enjoy this organic
celebration,
this feasting on the signs of nature?
An interesting question, pastorally for them, putting it
together. It's in other human beings.
That is where the real sign is to
be found. The inward universe is even more
interesting than the outward universe,
And this is the meaning of and Imam
al Ghazali says this.
It's one of the key points of his,
Ihya al Mu'malat.
There's a whole section on Muamalat,
and he talks about
the preference of being with others over being
on one's own.
Other people are pain, aren't they? I mean,
most of our grumbles are about other people,
and
what they say about us, or what
they've done to us, why not just
be on your own?
Like this new novel,
Individutopia,
which is doing quite well at the moment,
which is about a future in which nobody
ever talks to each other.
In the shop, in the bank, whatever,
everybody is an individual
on their phones. There's no human to Amol.
Isn't that better? Other people are just a
pain.
No?
Well,
in the in Imam Ghazali's vision, it is
nature, and of course he spends 10 years
in the wilderness,
that restores
our contemplative
functionality.
But also,
the
inward horizon.
So there's the outward horizon,
the few beech trees that you can see
on the other side of the runway at
Heathrow.
The inward horizon, which by definition
is what you are, and you can't get
away from it. So inwardly,
there is a dhikr, just as outwardly there
is dhikr. But also inwardly, in our transaction
with others,
we intuit transcendence.
And this is really important in our civilization,
which emphasizes
soba
and engagement with others.
What is interesting about the external world
well,
I guess mountains and trees and those things
are pretty interesting.
What is really interesting is
the existence of other,
little points of light, other consciousnesses,
other
phenomena, miracles, arroir, that also have self awareness,
and to which you have moral obligations.
That's why the ethical is so inextricable
from the spiritual
in Islam, because the whole process of
Imam Ghazali makes this very clear, is about
recognizing your own
inward weaknesses
and failings
and needs
by engaging with the mirror of the heart
of somebody else. And this is the famous
hadith, the believer is the mirror to the
believer. Mir'atul Muqman.
That when you're with other people,
you are challenged and brought out of yourself
far more reliably than if you're just on
your own or looking in a mirror or
taking a selfie, which is what we,
nowadays seem to do, which is very characteristically
modern
sort of narcissism.
Center of Cambridge yesterday.
Everybody's taking photographs.
I would say 90% of them are taking
photographs of themselves,
because it's the me generation and the self
is the center
of our concerns. But, actually, the other is
more interesting.
And Immanuel Vasili puts all of those chapters
in the IHIA,
the adab of traveling.
That sounds like a rather kind of pedestrian
thing, but a whole book on it.
The adab of eating.
Really?
This is the greatest spiritual text of the
greatest monotheistic.
He's got a whole chapter just on
eating.
Marriage,
CASP,
what we call business ethics, I guess.
These are important,
not just because God is testing us to
see whether we follow the rules when we're
with annoying other people,
but because in
the human intuition
of the
inalienable
integrity
of the other's spirit,
there is a reminder of the unseen world.
This is important in Ghazali's Sufi Sufism and
generally in Tarsal Wolf.
There are reminders in the geometry of nature,
and that can be a philosophical argument. It's
also a spiritual nourishment.
But the great sign of transcendence in the
world is that to which the angels bow
down.
Human beings
seems improbable.
You created him of clay, but the angels
bow down to
any Adam or to that which is within
us. So it's the the. And says that's
what it's all about, but he's not gonna
talk about it
because it's something that cannot be encapt
encapsulated in the net of words.
But really the whole of the is moving
towards a position in which we have sufficient
self awareness,
mindfulness,
you might see nowadays,
and sufficient compliance with the outward forms of
the prophetic perfection
for the contemplative
mechanisms within ourselves to operate properly,
and for us to see transcendence
in and through and with other people.
God's hand is with the congregation, and this
is a collectivist
movement. The holy prophet was not a hermit.
He comes down from the mountain, comes down
from the Maharaj, and his greatness is with
his people.
Not because that's a kind of
necessary
nuisance,
but because it's in the intuition
of the miracle of the other
consciousness that you most reliably
grasp transcendence.
Beauty of the world, beauty of other people,
that's all,
abundantly celebrated
in Ghazali's subsequent
Sufi tradition. The idea of the shahid,
beautiful human being who bears witness
to the beauty of his or her creator,
for sure.
So in the airport, you can look at
babies and so forth. That's a very Islamic
thing to do, because
the miracle of beauty and the purity of
the young is certainly a shahid.
But
the engagement with the proximity
with the human other, which is only ever
possible if the ego is mastered, because the
ego is the veil that shuts you off
from seeing
the integrity and the need of the human
other.
Really to see the miracle of somebody else's
existence, to be close to that person,
your teacher,
your grandfather,
your child,
your lover,
your
colleague, your fellow tariqa member, whatever it might
be. And thereby, really to experience the perfume
of transcendence
in your
quite ordinary human activities,
the ego has to go away,
because it just gets in the way.
It is the rust over the heart.
That's the Quran and the Hadith puts it.
That's what it does. The heart is
the eye
which perceives,
and
that which is a kind of cataract over
its surfaces are egotistic
interest
in doing our own thing. And when we
engage with somebody else,
the ego is activated, the spirit is activated.
And he talks about this in the Kitab
of Mahaba.
2 thing 2 parts of us are engaged
naturally when we meet another human being.
When we meet another
element of creation,
a dog
or something,
certain reflexes are triggered. But when we meet
another human being, there's certain instinctive human,
consciousnesses
which come to the surface.
Attraction might be one of them. Fight or
flight might be another. These are obvious things,
but there is also spiritual
osmosis, and that's twofold.
Firstly, the ego thinks, is this person a
threat?
Am I better than this person?
Can I emerge from this encounter with my
status intact?
Is he earning more than me? Blah blah
blah. All of those things, which are normal,
out of
natural humanity.
It's the,
the the Darwinian aspect within us. But also
the,
which is interested because of its nature in
seeing the beauty and the integrity of the
other.
And that's the difference
between the profane regard
and the sacred
regard. The eye of the heart,
is what brings us,
the happiness, which Imam al Ghazali says. This
is the path of sadah.
To the extent that you're happy and as
well spiritually happy, The abode of sadder happiness
is necessarily yours in the next world, and
this is what you've kind
of established
as your
priority.
So
the
wants to see the faults in others and
all of the 7 deadly sins, and vices,
and pride,
and envy,
and all of that are activated and triggered
by that whenever we meet another human being,
we feel insecure,
and all of that stuff, which we often
spend most of our lives,
trapped by and made
stressed by.
But the ruh,
to the extent that it can still see
anything at all, is looking to see the
other ruh and to see the beauty, because
the ruh is from the almul arawar, from
the divine realm, and its natural habitat is
beauty.
It's in a space where there is only
beauty.
And its natural gravitation in this world is
to see other tokens of beauty.
So in the meanwhile, in
Kitab Shar Hajjah ebel Kalb, which is maybe
the heart of the the Ihir, he calls
it the exposition of the wonders of the
heart,
asks us
how we would be
if,
that was our
automatic way of dealing with human transactions.
If in all of these,
we engage with another human being,
Somebody who's reading my passport or somebody who
stops me for speeding or whatever other profane
thing it might be. And instead of the
ego being activated,
the ruach is activated. And there was another
miracle of a ruach to which angels bow
down, etcetera, with me at
the day of interesting.
In other words, an experience of solidarity
and of beauty and of intersubjectivity,
which is necessarily the case even if that
person is
poking you in the eye. That person still
has a somewhere,
and there's always spiritual interest in that situation,
whether it's Jaman or Jalal.
And the nourishment that we would experience,
this is what I was saying to to
the chaplains, even in a prison situation,
where the external
horizon
signs are really abolished.
But the human engagement,
the the Muamala
engagement between souls is still something that the
believer is interested in. And if you spend
time with people who are
spiritually
trained and refined,
you will notice how much they seem to
enjoy
learning about human beings.
They really
smile when a new person joins their majlis,
and they want to know who they are.
What is this person really about? And you
ask them questions about job and children and
so forth, and these are the kind of
standard ritual,
formulas,
particularly in eastern cultures that are exchanged. But
it's not really about that. It's let me
see
what this person is and what god means
by this unique
human being and how I can be nourished
spiritually,
how this person can contribute
to the Maglis'
pouring out of the wine of divine
recollection, because
that's
the only thing worth drinking.
And this,
actually is the way to read the Ihir,
and you get a sense of what happened
to Imam al Ghazali on those 10 years.
Many of which were spent, it seems, kind
of in a state of seclusion.
That he understands,
that we are ourselves
when we are in accordance with our fitra,
which is naturally
God
inhaling,
nourished
human beings. We're not designed to
be rocks or stones. We're praisers.
Ibad,
slaves of God is
what we should be and what makes us
most healthy, spiritually, even physically. It's just good
for us. It's our natural way. It's our
the,
the air, the mixture of gases into air
that we are designed to breathe, unlike the
unpleasant
mixture that modernity gives us. It's,
it's it's right for us.
And that in this environment,
life is endlessly
interesting
because of these Muamalat,
that you can turn
your evening in
a dusty caravan Sarai
with a bunch of merchants from who knows
where, and they're noisy
camels, whatever that experience is. You can turn
it into an integrated part of your,
experience of God, not just your search for
God
through keeping moral boundaries and courtesy, but your
experience of God, because human beings are
yet are signs stronger
than anything else in the the physical world.
And this goes for all of the other,
Muhamalat, all of the other kinds of transaction
that he indicates that,
and it happens, of course, in relationships,
particularly.
Nowadays,
relationships
not working particularly well, even though it should
really be the easiest thing for us.
The male and the female naturally belong together.
There is a kind of magnetism there that
should make that the easiest thing. But often
it's one of the most hard things,
usually because the ego is activated.
Does she look like this? Does he have
this job? Will he buy me a car?
It's all about what can I get out
of this rather than what is really interesting,
which is seeing
a miracle of another soul
with its
needs
that's more interesting than the other stuff? Nafs
is an animalistic thing ultimately,
and is no more interesting than just
watching a dog or a cat. It's it's,
very predictable after a while, but the roar,
yeah, is, of course, reflecting
eternity.
So he says that,
we need to shift our optic.
And in our engagement with others, including engagement
with with spouses,
figure out
what that person really is, and enjoying the
miracle of closeness
to another sort of paradox of consciousness, which
is the deepest mystery in the physical world.
And, Imam Zabidi, who has the great commentary
on the,
talks about this, where he talks about the
the nikah and the rules of nikah and
what what is really going on in this
this mystery.
And it's also the case, I think, that
Imam Ghazali, in his understanding of the fiqh,
and there are quite a lot of fiqh
things in here,
insists that you can only really understand
the Sharia, or begin to understand it, when
you see it as a form of life,
which is there to represent,
human beings who try to be egoless,
and are trying to look for ways of
improving things and others,
rather than looking at the world as a
kind of endless supermarket from which they can
take things for themselves.
You can't understand the Sharia
if you're in a frame that says, well,
what about what about me?
It is a way of service. It is
a way of sacrifice.
And sometimes, privileges are granted, but those privileges
are there in order to convey certain onerous
responsibilities.
And,
nothing really in
the sacred law of Islam can be understood
outside that. And Henry Beaman in his book,
The Secret of Islam, talks a lot about
this. The Sharia is just there
as an expression
of God's love for human beings
through the holy
prophet. Every one of these rulings is based
on the divine compassion and love.
But to understand that, we have to get
into the space that,
Allah wishes us to be in, which is
a space of finding our true happiness through
service and the noticing
of other people and their needs.
If we treat them as just more phenomena
out there that we observe with our senses,
you're not going to figure out the way
the shari'a is at all.
It's not designed to be that. It's not
designed to be judged like that. And,
that's a very important aspect of the Ghazalian
perspective.
So we're beginning to see
that the story that the imam sort of
enacts for us, and there's something quite
iconic about it,
turning away from exoteric
learning
in favor of,
contemplative
knowledge,
and then a return to the exoteric
armed with the awareness
that it's only the esoteric that gives the
outward
meaning,
is really the key
contribution of his life, and of course so
many other things.
He is a warrior.
He is passionate for truth in a prophetic
kind of way.
He writes a book in which
he corrects the Christians on the basis
of the text of the New Testament. He
writes a book which corrects the philosophy
of Ibn Sina. Based on the philosophy of
Ibn Sina, he writes books that correct the
Ismailis and all of these other paths to
knowledge
that he thinks are not worthy
of human beings.
All of this is done through the spirit
of,
of compassion.
And,
towards the end of his greatest work, which
is the, which is also kind of polemical
work,
And the target of this book is not
the Ismailis or the philosophers or
whoever.
The target of this book is
Muslims who underestimate,
what Islam is giving them
by just going through the motions,
as if Islam is just a list of
10,000
sort of disconnected, sometimes difficult, sometimes familiar things
which we do
in order to get treats in the next
life. Well,
there is a next life in God's
mercy, and that is an important part of
the here and the way in which he
incentivizes us. But it's very much about
how we live in anticipation
of the dara saada, the paradisal world of
happiness
in this world.
How can there be a garden in our
hearts,
in our relationships, in our tariqas, in our
circles of knowledge, in our government, even? How
can we make things
come to life
so that there is,
verdure
in these,
earthly
transactions. And, of course, the duty
to do that, to plant these sort of
gardens, as it were, to create
an easy indicativity of the creator's presence
in apparently profane things in this world is
something that continues even today. This is one
of the meanings of the hadith that says,
if the hour comes upon you when you
are planting a tree, finish planting it.
Planting of trees is an important thing in
the sunnah.
And if you look at
the idea of the tree in the sort
of a dictionary of hadith, you'll see there's
a lot about trees in Islam. But the
point of this hadith is that even at
the end of time,
you continue to work for the greening and
the repristenation
of creation because it's just what human beings
should do.
It's a trigger for environmental action against global
warming, I guess. You have to do this
thing. Planting trees is actually much more effective
than any,
more spiffy scientific high-tech remedy for climate change,
because,
trees capture so much carbon. And this is
prophetically mandated
in the end times. But that's an indication
of the larger pursuit that the believer has
to have, that
remembrance of God creates a garden of paradise.
According to the famous hadith,
are. Circles of remembrance of God are gardens
of the gardens of paradise.
In the place where God is remembered,
even if his name is not spoken, but
where people are remembering God through a due
courteous engagement with each other
and are in tune with their hearts and
their inner nature. That's a garden of paradise,
and that's a
a tiny anticipation,
a waft from the fragrance of the of
the. This is part of the joy of
the believer and the sweetness
that the believer should find,
when present with other people who have this
higher aspiration.
So that essentially, and I could talk about
Muhammad Ghazali for a very long time, is
what I believe to be the deeper message
of the IHIA. And this is a kind
of leadership
that is about the renewal of the whole
of the religion through
recapturing of its holistic, ambitious,
universal purport. It's not just about what you
do in the mosque, and it's not really
relevant to what you do in other aspects
of your life. You'll be uncomfortable
and stressed if that's your reality.
Instead, it is,
the determination of a sacred purpose to hide
everything which is ethical,
which is for the human other, which is
about Muamalat,
which is living in compliance with the prophetic
boundaries, which show the best form
of of human dignity and human flourishing,
and is also based on the activation,
the liberation
of the ruh, the spirit. Because
the nafs,
by its nature, looks for ugly things,
and the Ruh, by its nature, wishes to
see what's beautiful.
And the modern world is
increasingly generating a mass culture,
which makes money
for an oligarchy
from the lower self's desire to look at
ugly things,
and to look at manifestations
of the ugliest, most impure,
most perverse,
most private aspects of human beings
that naturally wishes to see stuff like that,
and increasingly that's what the entertainment industry,
fashion industry, so much of our culture is
about lyrics of so many popular songs,
because it's easy and the lower self finds
it sweet. But the higher self, the Rur,
looking for archetypes, looking for order, looking for
contemplation,
is actually the self that we should inhabit
if we're going to find Sa'adah.
So the Talba is turning away from that
which makes us miserable
and distracted in a zillion different directions,
because there's no unifying principle to appetite,
and which turns us back to the one,
the true source of beauty and love. As
Mahmoud Ghazali says in the book of Mahaba,
I'm gonna do so much reading today, but
I haven't even started.
Everything that is loved in the world is
loved because it's a kind of metaphor for
the divine beauty,
and therefore, it is a sacred thing.
Even if you love your cat,
there's an aspect there of love for that
aspect of whatever it is about cattishness or
what the cat does, which ultimately
speaks of its divine
source. It may be a zillionth of a
percentage point of the real thing, but it's
still there. So we need to turn away
from the ego, which wants to dislike and
to be envious and to be superior and
to turn towards the spirit, which is about
love and which is about beauty. As he
says, love, longing, intimacy, and contentment, and mahaba,
or shalq,
or uns, or riddar.
If we have some share of those four
things, we'll get some sense of what the
imam
achieved or was given
during those 10 years of his, peregrination
and his return
to human beings and to society, just as
the holy prophet alaihis salatu wasalam
came back,
from the mountain and came back from the
Mi'raj, because
it is with human beings
that we find not just our greatest challenges,
but also potentially our our greatest,
consolation and our paths to God.
So that's
maybe 1% of what Imam Ghazali is saying
in his absolutely gigantic and colossal, almost miraculous
output
of books that that changed that were game
changers for the Ummah.
A leader?
Yes. But somebody who
specifically
renounced
leadership
in the academic world where egos tend to
be more tender and big than in most
other areas, and it was painful for him.
But he specifically renounced that, and by saying
no
to the leadership of NAFs,
by tearing up his CV,
he became de facto a leader unto God,
and he was given this tawfir that the
hadith indicates. And if Muhammad Ghazali is not
hudratil Islam, then I don't know who is.
And he has led countless souls
from ego to ruh, from ignorance to truth,
from jahiliyah to Islam, and that, the power
of that transformation
continues to
spread out in the wider Ummah.
So,
I wanted to finish with Mahmoud Ghazali partly
because he,
as it were, encompasses,
so many other ways of having a human
story,
a public human story.
And, of course, here's our wujudid and our
waghi tal Islam,
radiAllahu anhu wa arada. So, it's the end
of this year's courses. Thank you for your
patience, for staying with us. Inshallah, there has
been benefit
just by rehearsing the stories of the great
souls
that the prophetic
moment
made possible in in this world. And, inshallah,
there will be many more to come, and
may Allah, inshallah, grant us
peace,
serenity with our families, with our neighbors, with
the world in these
troubling times, in the summer months and in
the future.
Cambridge Muslim College,
training the next generation of Muslim thinkers.