Abdal Hakim Murad – Closing remarks

We have been pondering in some detail and with a range of often

quite brilliant and meticulous historical approaches this

interesting fact that perhaps uniquely amongst major Western

Muslim communities, British Muslims have this very

distinctive, sometimes eccentric, but sometimes quite passionate

prehistory. It will be difficult, I think, to imagine in the context

of many Western European countries such a constellation of luminaries

as Pickthall Quilliam, Parkinson and others, perhaps this is just

my ignorance, but it does seem that we have this dis advantage.

And I've also been very happy with the extent to which the speakers

have avoided the obvious temptation of proposing these

individuals as people who can simply be wheeled, wheeled out, in

order to generate solutions to the problems that communities are

facing today. We don't inhabit a world in which there is a an

Ottoman Sultan Kalish. We don't inhabit a world in which generally

the perception of Muslims is framed in the context of different

races. We don't live in the context of a triumphant British

Empire, our questions are different. But still, we find at

least in the energy of those people and the way in which in

their distinctive ways in their Victorian or Edwardian contexts,

they were able to find ways of recognizably unmistakably

undeniably inhabiting both spaces of as it were being amphibians,

very English are very Scottish, but also at the same time

unmistakably true and faithful to an Islamic passion as they

understood it. That I think is something that we can all take

away with us today. And hugely grateful to all of the speakers.

It's evident that some of them most of them, I think, really

worked very hard on their their presentations. My hope is that if

we speak nicely enough to them, they will allow us to take their

scripts from their, their clutches and put them together to create

what I hope will be quite an interesting collection of essays.

It's been a great privilege for us here in the college to be the

midwife of that. That project.

grateful to the organizers, my head, rather marginal roll myself,

but a lot of hard work has gone into this. Dr. Asif Abdul Aziz

Amara Davina and everybody in the office, of course Latif, the cook

who has been slaving away while we've been enjoying this

intellectual feast. And, of course, the incumbent at St.

Paul's Church here, we just inhabit the former vicarage. And

this is this is the main space of the complex. And my hopes that we

will be able to do this again looking at it from different

angles, but also conferences on other aspects of the British

Muslim experience is very much at the heart of what we do. And

thanks also those who have been contributing with with donations

and to the Nuffield Foundation, who have generously undertaken to

underwrite the main costs of this we're hugely grateful to everybody

for their goodwill and for their for their prayers. were accepted

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