Abdal Hakim Murad – Conference Welcome Address

Cambridge Muslim college training the next generation of Muslim

thinkers.

Thank you very much. Yeah, all up and welcome everyone and welcome

you on behalf of our

trustees chair at the moment. So Leila demery, is a Trinity Hall

person and is sending you her blessings from her current

professorial position and to begin in, in Germany, and this is as you

know, the second of our conferences on linked themes. This

weekend, we will be pondering the

plumbing the depths of the topic, artificial intelligence and

consciousness.

A few words about who we are and why we are the platform for this

event. Unlike most other institutions in the city, we are

extremely young kind of infant really in Cambridge terms. We

began an operation only nine years ago. But Unusually for a recent

institution, we started off in a rather old fashioned kind of way,

rather as Cambridge colleges began

seven 800 years ago as small groups of theologians wanting to

get in a huddle looking for ways of speaking sense about the large

and often difficult claims made by religious faith. What makes our

institution

still more unusual. And this conference is in a certain way, an

emblem of that is that we seek a reasoned understanding of faith in

an Islamic not a Christian idiom that makes us even more eccentric

in Cambridge terms. Old Fashioned though face often seems and sounds

bringing Islam to the table actually is rather an up to date,

if unusual thing to do. Cambridge is a community where scholars

Converse seriously in a way that ultimately serves and enlightens

the society in which they live reflects the demography and the

diversity of wider British society, which is changing a pace.

And Muslims are now Britain's largest majority, largest

minority, and often anxious to join the existing conversations,

to see what happens when the winnowing winds of modern thought

are directed at or against their systems of thought. And also just

possibly, to find ways of reciprocally enriching the cities

very long standing debates about issues which, like those which we

are coming to grips with today actually matter a good deal.

Now, our college is not a seminary. That's why we're in this

city. We do not expect or impose any kind of given creed or

position of our students or scholars. There are plenty of

other Muslim places where one can find that. Instead, we insist on

keeping our doors and our windows open. And this is in fact exactly

why we chose to be in Cambridge where for centuries, some of the

most vital and challenging conversations between faith and

science and philosophy have been worked out. We are seeking

challenges we are looking for trouble if you like.

We recall and again, this might be a theme which will recur in our

discussions today and tomorrow that Islam which is

stereotypically figured, as the West dark other, has, in fact very

often been its most recurrent and significant conversation partner,

medieval Cambridge curricula ODEP to Muslim, philosophical and

scientific writings, undergraduates knew about Anselm,

but also about epicenter. In the 17th century, the Cambridge

Platanus were fascinated by Avaroa says doctrine of a common soul, or

at least by the particular understanding of it. Three

Cambridge men in particular considered themselves indebted to

this doctrine about the mind which reached Cambridge from Muslims

mean, they will Ralph Cudworth, John Smith and Nathaniel

culverwell medics to were part of this exchange at Addenbrooke's, a

staple of the curriculum was the continent of Abu Zakaria, Razi,

which also has things to say about the role of mind and emotion in

diagnosis and healing.

So Islamic civilization has in past centuries made itself useful

here, and it's our determination to try and revive and perhaps even

surpass those early precedents.

The conference which we're going to be enjoying today, and tomorrow

is as I say, the second which we have organized on a scientific

topic. As such, we have been careful to explain to everyone

that the science or the best discussions about issues which

remain fiercely and fascinatingly contested, stays at the center.

While they're still

I'll make the logical ramifications and reactions take

the form of a gloss or a series of reflections. In line with the

driving philosophy of our college we are not venturing a set of

solutions to the questions being asked by science in this area of

cognition. Instead, we recognize that both science and religious

philosophy harbor internal disagreements on issues such as

the nature of consciousness.

The religion science dialogue cannot be allowed to become some

kind of zero sum game, nor must it ever be content with closure.

Instead, we seek to discover what it means to discuss the same

issues in two registers two vocabularies, traveling together

on the same path, ultimately enjoying the journey, and hoping

to become better thinkers wherever the road may turned.

On the diversity of scientific theories here I am hardly

qualified to pronounce. I note that there's no shortage of fierce

anti Cartesians who agree with Daniel Dennett, that our thoughts

are information bearing events in the brain, since that's all that's

going on. MRI scans show that different types of mental

processes happen in different parts of the brain. A severe

reductionism nowadays challenging to religionists it's fashionable,

but the sheer difficulty of the concept of consciousness seems to

produce many dissidents. Consciousness certainly needs the

brain. But for many, our introspection seems to generate a

mode of knowing that simply is not reducible to observable brain

events for many religious or secular, some sort of dualism.

However, implicitly perhaps materialistic in the end still

seems to be helpful.

So Muslim thought, is no more united on this difficult issue of

consciousness. The heritage, particularly in classical what we

call Kalam, theology is rich and suggestive. But Muslims do not

never have spoken with one voice. Among the theories, one that

certain recurrent patterns present already and enrich abundance in

medieval thought, some of which are certainly irretrievably

quaint, but others of which are of abiding interest and I think do

deserve to be reframed in contemporary and defensible ways.

Muslim scripture directs much attention to the question of

ethics and thus to the mind, which makes moral choices and to the

complex and among the commentators unresolved relationship between

raw spirit and neffs self

to terms such as the famous flying man argument, proposed by Abba

Sena as proof of the minds capacity to be itself in isolation

from sense perception. The principle of knowledge by presents

a name for Laurie found an important part in Islamic

psychology.

The system establishes the reality of mind by accepting the intuition

supplied by experience as a first order truth. Intention, which for

the likes of Elizabeth Anscombe in Cambridge, lies at the heart of

the philosophy of mind is the moral core of our activity. As a

hadith, the saying of religions founder says actions are by

intentions. Today, some Muslim theologians such as Matt de Erie,

continue to treat this concept as foundational. Others, however,

inclined to his skepticism about the reality of the human self,

which at times can seem almost Buddhistic. It is a diverse

tradition.

But I don't propose to say anything more about this. Our

purpose today, as I indicated, is to be hosts to be hospitable to

listen, and to learn and to provide a free space in which

ideas can be explored

in the contemporary religious world, and also it sometimes seems

in a modern secular Academy, where measurable practical outcomes are

demanded by government funding bodies, such as space is, I think,

insufficiently populated. But here we are, and we're grateful to you

all, and particularly to Dr. Jakob Choudry, our convener and also to

our funders, the Templeton Foundation for their kind support,

but also to everyone who's come to instruct and to share their vision

over what I think promises to be an extremely stimulating weekend.

Thank you.

Cambridge Muslim College, training the next generation of Muslim

thinkers