Abdal Hakim Murad – Get Ramadan Ready Keynote Speech
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Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala Rasulillah Ali he was
after he won and Wella Rubia Sarawak India Kareem of Taquile
Huxley in Calcutta hula alim.
So we're in the kind of for courts of Ramadan
or the changing rooms perhaps before we take the plunge.
Some of us have been fasting a bit, kind of out of respect for
the
fragrance of the month as it approaches. And the theme at CMC
in our free public presentations this year is going to be the
Quran.
Ramadan is the month of the Quran.
The month in which it was revealed and the month in which we
experience it most intensely and insha Allah by the Grace of Allah
most deeply.
Islam is the religion of the Quran, it's the gift of the Quran,
everything that is significant in doctrine, practice everything is
that
what I'm going to try and explore this morning is that Ramadan is an
opportunity to reflect on the way in which we relate to this gift.
And the way in which perhaps we can set our situation right in the
face of the mydriatic challenges that face us as individuals as
communities, as many Adam sharing this planet.
We're not in good shape.
The Quran,
ostensibly emerging in the seventh century, but in reality,
predating all of the centuries
is not just a set of propositions about the ideal life,
how to live in harmony with human beings with a creator with a
natural order,
with ourselves.
But it's also
a full con, we often hear this operand for con for con is one of
the many names of the call and it gives itself that name does lol
for Khan,
the differentiator,
differentiating obviously truth from falsehood.
There is one, there are not many.
There is life everlasting, there is not a terminus to
consciousness. There are universal values and ethics not just stuff
that human beings make up to suit themselves or to suit the
perceived utility of a particular time about you and I refer to a
minute with a
truth stands distinguished from falsehood.
But the full con also in a kind of cosmic way,
explaining where we stand in the enormous sweep of the history of
our species,
and indicating ways in which we might
restore ourselves in this age of my read sicknesses.
One of the interesting paradoxes of the age is that although
officially, we all still believe in progress.
Not everybody is convinced that things are getting better.
Look at the salary BBC report on their website last week. So dismal
I could hardly get to the end of it. The mental health crisis in
modern Britain, especially amongst young people, that 18 to 24 age
group, particularly hard hit
50 years ago, it was the other way around. as you got older, you felt
kind of depressed, anxious, things maybe weren't working out for you.
But now overwhelmingly, it's the younger time when there was once
carefree friskiness and optimism and health. No longer is this so
26% of men of that age group now have diagnosed mental health
conditions in the UK 41% of women.
What happened to all of the Liberation's that we were
promised? We have more gadgets, we have more rights. Maybe we have
more options and possibilities, we can reinvent ourselves in radical
new ways. But happiness seems to elude us an age of plenty, an age
of melancholy.
And if religion ultimately is the divine strategy to coax us out of
our selfish ways that yield happiness and into a form of life
that does that.
For an religious sanctity, the engagement with the sacred is
actually more relevant, more up to date more therapeutically
essential probably than ever before.
The Holy Quran
is an unusual scripture in many ways. And if you're Muslim and
you're brought up with it, you tend not to notice how unusual it
is.
As you would expect from the final revelation, which is gifted to
mankind, it has a certain summative quality
and it always reminds us of what went before and an affirmation of
what went before Mossad Lima Albania de minute or RT will
indeed, confirming the truth of what came before it if the Torah
and the Gospel. This is all familiar.
Not familiar if you're generally aware of the way in which sacred
texts particularly for prophetic absolute nature, work or
generally,
everything before them is regarded as diabolical and problematic or
an in its prophetic absoluteness is strikingly generous, and
inclusive of what went before.
And the Quran
in this affirmation, because it is the real the scripture of the
Tamiya the final ceiling episode of human sacred history
emphasizes the Abrahamic.
This is what we mean by Al Hanifa to somehow which the Holy Prophet
sallallahu alayhi wa sallam tells us he is sent with the, the
tolerant Abrahamic way. What's the best stab at a translation I can
attempt at that boy to be a honey fear to somehow somehow doesn't
mean kind of generous, hospitable, inclusive, forgiving, and the
Abrahamic way, is the monotheism that yields that rather than
stands in the way of it. This is, he says, the essence of what he
has been sent with.
And the stories of Satan or Ibrahim Halle Lola, are really
central. The key events of his life the fact that the follow of
truth is typically outcast, unconventional, unloved by
establishment.
We can feel that nowadays as we consider
the inequalities of today's world, what's happening in the Middle
East, what's happening everywhere and the establishments,
entities from which we are necessarily alienated. That's just
Abrahamic method. Sometimes you have to go out into the desert,
leaving behind family familiar relationship, your Echo Chamber
your comfort zone and head out into the unknowable beyond. This
is part of human maturation, and part of what it means to have a
conscience and to be committed to tell the truth, to be ready to
make every sacrifice, in order not to compromise with Nimrod and the
establishment of His Imperial, profane, destructive world to go
out on your own.
There is a certain way in which being hurried
is part of the life of the believer, even though we crave a
comfort zone and affirmation and status and MBAs and whatever the
establishment might console us with prophetic religion. It's
never really been about that. It's about being a troublemaker for the
sake of truth. Having in mind, a better, more compassionate, more
spiritual world.
So there is that Abrahamic overturning
and the sacrifices that lead to the to sacrifices of the two sons.
Ismail and his heart, both sort of sacrificed in enormous and
obviously extremely traumatic ways. And for us, the Israelite
covenant, which is the meaning of the
repair, or the upliftment of the harem in babka,
which is the first house set up for mankind and the headshell
culminating ritual is retracing of those steps. Yes, you have to be
uncomfortable. Yes, you have to wear stuff that you're not
familiar with. You have to make all of their sacrifices because
that's what it is to be an Abrahamic believer. I'm afraid. If
you think that just going to be beer and Skittles. It's never like
that you will always receive fitna tribulation, temptations
compromises
and the Abrahamic ways not to do that. It's unsettling to all of
us. We all know that we all make compromises and
It's not to be like that
alone with your son in the desert was undamaged the temple
Hotjar sacrifice on her own between Safa and Marwa how
difficult that must have been her, the mother in her absolute self
giving these are all symbols of the giving the sacrifice the
danger that is entailed by being faithful to the spiritual way
which is Abrahamic.
But this cut Tamiya
must go beyond that.
So the religion is the religion of honey fear to some heart, but also
the religion of fitrah. The Quranic term frequently
encompassed and we know that Islam is Dean or fitrah.
What does that mean? That means beyond the Abrahamic behind it in
older ages,
the religion of the Hitomi must seal everything and manifest and
affirm and bring to the surface and purify everything that is good
and noble and true and compassionate about the human
condition.
In other words, the idea of the Latha
the Adamic calling.
So this to me is something that we Intuit very strongly from the
Quran.
Part of the blessing of Ramadan is that we engage with the Quran more
if we know Arabic, or if we don't know Arabic, we can read
translations and this becomes very salient and it is, unlike earlier
scriptures was not the Kalima Albania day he Yes, affirming
al Kitab a respectful term to use. It is an honorific but beyond
that,
the Hitomi of the Holy Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is a
subtle thing that reaches back into nameless ages peoples and
generations into the primordial.
This is an important part of what is distinctive about the religion
and distinctive about its practices.
Yeah, you held Edina ama no cootie Bali Kumasi and will come katiba
Island Edina Minn, publikum Allah, Allah canta taco are you who have
Iman fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for
those who came before you that perhaps you might have weariness
consciousness of the Divine, that's the effect that it has
led them in public on those who were before you. Indeed, we can
see not just the fasting and Christianity and Judaism, Yom
Kippur, etc, etc. Of course they have it, they know its benefits.
But before that, it's very, it's a very primordial human practice,
ancient part of the fitrah.
To step back, it's an intermittent fasting, not just because you've
run out of the gazelle, that the leader of the tribes hunters is
just killed, and you're hungry for a bit. But because of
a conscious determination to step back.
So fasting is something that connects us to the anciently human
and the primordial, and therefore to the natural,
but makes us distinct from the other species, because they don't
fast unless they have to see
each body, we have cm strt, we can choose to hold back whereas no
other order of the animal world can do that, or needs to do that.
This is part of our Khilafah status as part of what it is to
have a sacred culture whose function precisely is to restore
us to the fitrah.
And restore us to our balance place the Meezan in the order of
creation.
So primordial peoples, you know, always had fasting, it seems to be
universal.
And if we look not just at their practices of fasting, but the
other things that they do,
and we're not talking here about demeaning, stereotypical images of
stone, age, man, kind of Fred Flintstone, or whatever stereotype
we have of how things were. But at the example of the peoples who
still just about managed to survive, or who have been
documented by 19th 20th century, anthropologists, those who were
intoxicated by race theories of various kinds, to see how they
were as a kind of mirror of how humanity was in the 10s, of 1000s
of years before the hundy fear before the Abrahamic, the ancient
times.
Then we start to see what we really mean by Islam as the
religion of fitrah. The primordial natural disposition to many
syllables there, but how else can we translate it? It's one of
those, well, all of the params key terms don't work very well in
European
languages whose sensibilities and categories and priorities have
been shaped by a completely different, sacred and or secular
tradition. It's always a problem translating the primordial natural
disposition.
fitrah Tala hint that he Fatah, nessa or later the Quran says
Allah is fitrah which he created human beings upon, in other words,
what was natural what's indigenous was primordial within us. So look
at those communities. Some of you may have been to Dar Al Islam in
New Mexico, the famous North American Muslim retreat center,
quite close to the Navajo River Reservation bit to the north.
400,000 of them, it's the biggest of the Native American tribes, the
red people, they have fasting for sure.
And we know what their form of bring being primordial or Fitri is
because they're still doing it. Some of them.
McDonald's has made inroads, evangelical Christianity has made
inroads. Alcohol has certainly made inroads but you can still see
their thing.
And by visiting those places, you get a sense of why we call
ourselves and why the Quran emphasizes this idea of fitrah.
And something like the ancient timeless magnificence of Ramadan
really reconnect us with that.
The Navajo people, DNA people, they do a lot of fasting.
And the fasting tends to be connected to natural cycles.
They have a big fast where there's an eclipse. They have a lot of
other fasts.
And generally, they're forms of worship, that acknowledgement to
the human body of the natural forms of nature and their
environment, a cyclical
lunar calendar, very important, not a solar calendar, which
doesn't coincide with what you can actually see and what's going on
at night when you're hunting. Lunar Calendar, quote, and it's
very emphatic that you don't mess with that. Ramadan another way of
reconnecting us to that
the dawn chant.
The Navajo elder gets up in his heart that Gollum Hogan's and
sprinkles water over his family to get them up to the dawn chant.
The blessing way,
the memorization, they don't they sit there with books. It has to be
memorized. And some of that ceremony is gone for seven days
and it's memorized and the chants and the stories of the origin of
the world and their ancestors. Very primordial.
When you see that, do you get a clearer sense of what the Quran is
doing when it says you are to be of the religion of the fitrah
reconnecting for sure, affirming selectively with way of the Bani
Israel, the way of the people of Asa Alayhis Salam, for sure.
alayhi wa salam.
But there's something about the religion of Islam that insists
that we reconnect in some way with something much, much more ancient.
One of the positive things about being alive in the modern world is
that we know how ancient our species is.
If you go to, interestingly, the land traditionally associated with
the birthplace of Ibrahim alayhis salam,
the town of Orpha, Shandler, Orpha, in Turkey, beautiful place,
suffered a bit in the earthquake, may Allah heal their sorrows.
You can pray in the little Mosque, which is the cave where Ibrahim
kalila is said to have been born. You can see the place where Nimrod
was supposed to have confined him in the fiery furnace, the catapult
it's all kind of there in the sacred geography of the city of
Orissa.
Lovely place to spend time.
A few miles away.
There is an archeological dig, which for the last 20 years has
been pretty clear that this is the oldest settlement ever.
Karahan tipper
they've only dug up
archaeologists, they tend to work with toothbrushes, so they take
their time. 20 years they've dug up 5% of the site, they think 5%
of it.
And there's houses and their streets and there's what may or
may not have been temples. Remember this is really ancient.
They think probably about 10,000 BCE. All the traditional theories
turned on their heads about the origin of civilization. This is
almost three times as old as the pyramids. This is really ancient,
no writing. This is the pre pottery Neolithic.
They don't even have a name for that.
Cultural that civilization, they're still working it out.
Difficult without writing without inscriptions, there's animal
things. And leopards seem to have been a big thing in that culture,
but they didn't really know who they were, what they were or what
their sacred way was, of course, people have been
there maybe 12,000 years ago,
before there were wheels before there was agriculture before there
was anything. There were these people and ritual worship.
Relationship to Sun and Moon, cyclical existence, we have to
assume as Muslims and this is not some kind of Erich Von Daniken
fantasy. You have to filter what you read on the internet about
these ancient peoples because flying saucers appear sooner or
later, I don't know why. The western mind likes to attribute
everything interesting from the ancient world to aliens, no idea.
But if you look at the actual scientific facts and what they've
dug up
clearly these are many Adam, human beings, with all of the concerns
of normal human beings, reproduction, fertility,
ceremonial burials, grave goods, therefore, presumably belief in
life after death, many Adam really old, the Oliver of the Muslim
Middle Ages didn't really think that humanity was that old. But
now we know that they were And presumably, older still.
That was a civilization that they think there's 120 such settlements
in that part of Turkey must have been magnificent in its way before
wields before crops, different people, but then he Adam. So it's
important for us theologically, when we read the Quran to have in
mind not just the Abrahamic, Hanifa thing, which is very
specifically the way in which we configure our understanding of
monotheism what Native Americans often refer to as the great spirit
but something older still
the Quran Strathmere its
proclamation of the endtime revelation beyond which nothing
will be necessary because it's all in this jam out. This
comprehensive book incorporates that as well.
And as we go through the Quran in Ramadan with this in mind, we see
so many signs
one of them is the emphasis on the natural world
in the Quran
or in min che in there's nothing Illa you said before behind the
but that it hymns allows praise? Just be is the proclamation of
Allah's otherness his glorification is Tenzin
the Quran is saying everything is doing that.
Tell this to DNA elder in New Mexican no say absolutely. Can't
you hear it? The praise is everywhere. You just need to put
your phone down and be still and be aware of the mountains and you
hear it it's the most fundamental obvious human truth you hear it
just be have everything in eternal *.
And then every animal
will mean Debrecen. There is no animal on the earth when our
thought Arundhati Ruby Jana highheeled, uma moon and fellow
CO, ma Ratna Fiocchi, Tabby mean shape. There is an animal that
crawls on the earth and no bird that flies with its two wings. But
there are nations like yourselves.
We have left nothing out of the book. Maybe this is an indication
that this is the necessity for the people of Islam to reconnect with
that ancient thing. Which cynics will call animistic and
shamanistic and primitive doesn't matter. Those are not crude
people. Those are very refined people.
Look at any 19th century photograph of some grinning
anthropologist or cowboy or circus entrepreneur, standing next to any
elder from any Native American tribe, and you'll see the shifty
smokiness of the white face and the intense dignity and immobility
of the Native American spacing. See who's primitive here.
Who is the primitive?
Who is the savage?
These are refined people they just don't need we all saw something.
This is normal humanity for 99% of the history of Benny Adam. That's
how we have been, it's normal.
So the Quran isn't sorted and arm is telling us and if you look at
the tough series, you can see the Allamah are kind of taken aback by
this.
What does it mean for the animals and the birds to be nations like
yourselves? Well, really? factored in Rosi lists six possible
interpretations
are
The move has zero and have others. He says, Well, they're nations
like ourselves because they have basic biotic functions like
reproduction and eating and they die. So they're like ourselves. So
one interpretation.
Another one is that they have senses like ourselves, unlike,
say, the plants.
Another one is that they have some kind of consciousness 10 years.
But then the verse goes on
to say, then they will be resurrected to their Lord. And
that's when the traditional Tafseer writers kind of almost
blow a fuse animals resurrected.
What is the light sector, of course, I have no problem with
this because of their idea of a word. Because God is just every
animal that suffered in the world has to be resurrected to receive a
just compensation. And then God is just, we don't have that kind of
mechanistic idea of, sort of
automated idea of salvation, that kind of karmic view, it's not like
that the Divine is free, not constrained.
But what does it mean for them to be resurrected? What is this is
certainly not biblical. We're here beyond the Yeah, hold one Dasara
into some different space, where the biotic is central
nations like yourselves, then resurrected unto God. Well, you
can read the tough series for yourself and see what they say.
But it's an interesting example of the radicalness of the Quran,
causing stress to the formal patterns of exoteric
interpretation. But in any case, we know as we read the text again
and again references to the natural world and also the
requirement to contemplate that
not just the biotic but the minerals the celestial in the
field is similar what you want out of the work Tila filet Lee on the
hydrilla yet in the all in and bed, truly in the way the heavens
and the earth have been created and the succession of night and
day are signs for people of
another untranslatable Quranic term.
Loop Al Bab. It means like a seed a core, which has the sense of
something that is we're not within us that wants to be more than it
currently is to flower to race, whatever. It's quite a pregnant
kind of work. There's something within us
that craves signs, and even the succession of night and day the
cyclical world everything is science, the whole world is made
of science. And in our traditional Kalam, our feed, we have this very
radical view of everything being nothing other than the direct
unmediated action of a ramen everything, there isn't really any
cause and effect, moments are not causally connected in every
moment. He recreates and therefore is absolutely present in his
purposes and in His name's discernable to the audience and
beb
this has to be something that we pay attention to in Ramadan is it
seems to be an axiom that the Quran is trying to tell us this
particular style of spiritual way which is the Islamic way which is
the Mohammedan way the way of the one who lived in pure nature
primordially et al Madina, Munawwara,
the one who left many teachings about animals, the one who seems
to communicate with them the Hadith in Abu Dhabi called which
again, kind of mystifies the commentators, Holy Prophet alayhi
salat wa salam in the green city of Medina, here's a commotion and
he goes to it.
And a farmer's camel has kind of run amok, foaming at the mouth,
uncontrollable, everybody's afraid to go into its field and to deal
with it.
And he goes in sallallahu alayhi wa sallam
puts his hand on the animal's head.
Animal is still
the comes out again. And he says this animal tells us that it's
been overworked and overburdened.
Owner of the camel comes up in tears, probably saying it's true.
Yeah, Rasul Allah, and so out of respect for the Holy Prophet and
out of a sense of sense of guilt. He kind of puts that camel into a
luxurious retirement never has to do any work again, gets the best
kind of fodder. Many Hadith like this, and that's just an
outworking of the Quranic insistence Native nations like
yourselves and said the man of Medina, this primordial man of
fitrah, as well as the honey fear, is telling us something about our
relationship to the body.
artistic world which is kind of something rather important and has
to be an essential part of following the Sunnah.
This is part of what it means to be a true emulator of the chosen
once on Allahu alayhi wa sallam, whose life is shaped through the
bed or by the rising and setting of the sun, by the phases of the
moon, primordial people in the midst of the modern uproar, still
connected.
This is part of the Quranic gift, the style of this final OMA is to
be a kind of primordial style, and return to whatever is best and
purest and monotheistic about the truly ancient, unnamed peoples who
were with other rumors that first in particular, go to any Native
American reservation. And they'll smile, of course, that people like
ourselves as the people of the Eagles and other speakers that
people have, that's exactly how they see it.
Again, this is not really something you find in earlier
monotheistic scriptures, not really, it's one of the cosart is
one of the special features of Allah's book.
And of course, in the contemporary sort of green theological world of
everybody caring about nature and buying aloe vera, organic shampoo,
and that whole commercialized inevitably cults of pretending to
be in harmony with nature, it's actually very beautiful. It's a,
it's an authentic way of doing it, in other words, a ritual sacred
way of doing it, rather than just voting for the Green Party and
being like everybody else, it's an authentic enactment of the reality
of our ineluctable belongingness to the magnificence of creation.
So what can we say maybe a little bit more theoretically, about what
the Quran is inviting us to partake in the banquet of
creation?
That seems to make it distinctively Islamic.
Well,
there's a famous book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,
which I was looking at recently, the Birth of Tragedy,
where he's reflecting in his usual polemical way about the decadence
and mediocrity of bourgeois modernity.
And how do things go terribly wrong? Why are we so miserable.
And he looks back to ancient Athens, where he sees in the
theater, a kind of world affirming, embrace, of tragedy,
and humor, and the sacred, all rolled together in a single
cultural form.
And then he says, the problem with the West since then, is that
they've put those things apart and they can't relate them
holistically. Life is fragmented, and therefore our consciousness
suffers. melancholia ensues. And he looks around for cultures that
he thinks perhaps have taken us back to that embrace of the
tragic, and the comedic, and the sacred, and everything and the
natural world. can't really find it. But he has this
differentiation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian,
which is all over Western philosophy, feminism as well.
These are the two sons of Zeus who are kind of opposite principles in
pagan mythology. The Apollonian is linear, rational, individualistic.
The Dionysian is not linear, but it's cyclical, is to do with
nature to do with reproduction, its ecstatic.
And he's looking for a culture that puts these two together and
does not deny as he thought, worthwhile, European germanic
culture in the 19th century definitely done, preferring the
Apollonian, the individualism of the Enlightenment, the idea of
linear time leading to a shining future when there'll be steam
engines everywhere and good dentists or whatever. They thought
they had to look forward to.
The triumph for the master race. It was that age.
He wants to bring back the donation.
Not quite sure how, how can you embrace life with its pain, as
well as its amazingness in a single attitude?
So modern, I mentioned the feminist writers have worked with
this. Camille Paglia actually definitely worth looking at. She
has a lot of Chatty videos on YouTube and you might think she's
at the opposite pole of anything Muslims believe in lesbian
atheists, feminist, etc, etc. She's really smart, actually.
And she in one of her most famous books, appropriate this Nietzsche
and dichotomies, come diagnose
says if the modern schizoid personality
as a gendered thing. The Apollonian is the linear male
individual thrusting, striving, triumphant looking to the
horizons. The Dionysian is the phonic she prefers the word
cathodic. That is the earth based, feminine, cyclical, fertile,
ecstatic.
So, the view is the view of the whole course of civilization as
being the progressive fight of the male principle against the female.
You can imagine a lot of feminists who'd like to see things getting
better not being comfortable with this, which is hugely
controversial in that world. But it's an interesting read.
But she still doesn't know how you really put those together. And
modernity doesn't. The linear Apollonian thing in our world is
so absolute. That that's all you see now. Walk through a modern
cities, nature has been banished maybe in the lawyer's office,
there's a small sad looking as per district in a pot somewhere with a
few cigarette ends in it may be, that's all that that Dionysian
that nature is allowed to be. And probably health and safety are
going to say, take it away for some reason, a trip hazard or it's
whatever the triumph is of the steel, the glass, the concrete,
the linear, the masculine
and what she's looking for some way of reintegrating the biotic,
the chaotic the ecstatic.
I don't know if she looked good in a hijab. But you know, we tend to
speculate Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar, Neil Armstrong became
Muslim, that kind of weak minded Muslim triumphalism. But what's
important is that these thinkers, whether it be the very discrepant
figure of nature, or the very discrepant feature, Camille Paglia
are aware of this dichotomy in our culture
of the linear against the cyclical.
So when we read the Quran, in this blessed month,
a kind of alchemy affects us. And we read those verses. And we have
to challenge ourselves. Are we really taking this Hitomi
seriously? Again, and again, the Quran speaks about the natural
world and about the cycles of the day and the nights and Ramadan is
cyclical and everything is cyclical, the sun and the moon,
determine our whole pattern of life in Ramadan, especially, we
are forcibly reintegrated into normality.
But what is the state of our communities? If we're, if we're
diagnosing modernity, as the divorce between the linear and the
cyclical?
Where the modern Muslims locate themselves? Well, I think it's
fairly obvious, because of modern influence and because of
frightened reflex against not an inference we tend very much to be
linear, to be absolute, to be quite individualistic.
To be progress oriented, it's complex for the Ummah that almost
does not have a single point of view. But the ecstatic the biotic
the generative, the erotic, which was very major in the Middle Ages
is kind of pushed out.
I saw a long list of things that you can't do in Ramadan on a
Braille V website the other day long list and it's right we do
need to know that stuff. But never on the list was the obvious
reference that should be that anything erotic.
shameful, don't mention it. They couldn't bring themselves to say
certain things if you do them in Ramadan break the fast. Boba Toba?
I think the expression is
that strange. Any medieval thick tax will put that at the top of
the list
after not eating kebab for lunch, obviously, it's an important part
of the CM. So we've moved in a kind of puritanical Victorian
direction and some historians even speak of the Victorian Ising of
Islam. The American Palestinian Orientalist Joseph Massad has
spoken about the Victorian Ising of Islam, that kind of
puritanical, tight lipped, very unex static type of religion which
is normative today. And we're not just talking about the Salafi as
against the rest, I'm talking about just about all of us, kind
of tightness that has emerged. And then we look at our classical
literature and we think,
why is it the ancient Arabian qasida? Is beauty beautiful, but
has a mystic melancholy kind of thing.
Has at the beginning this erotic
renewed the nosleep
and when the Arabs go into Islam, that's the bit they conserve and
it becomes Majnoon Leila and it becomes the whole world of amatory
verse that as well, which then goes into Persian and Turkish and
Urdu and it's kind of the central theme.
Leila Majnoon is the kind of key emblematic story of the religion
and it's in half is and Santa E and had been commodified and it
kind of repeated maybe too often, but it clearly satisfied the
Muslim soul.
Why have we got away from the cyclical the cathodic, the
feminine, the reproductive and move towards this kind of linear
glass tower thing?
Why is it that so many Muslims increasingly find that kind of
culture on
the cover kawaii culture even, which is maybe one of the world's
great examples of Dionysian religion. Everybody can't stop
moving around when they hear that stuff. It's all ecstatic,
Dionysian cathodic religion
kind of fading away. It's folkloric, it's bid ah, it's not
quite right. We'd rather do something strict and narrow
because that makes us feel better and less secure is a reflex across
the OMA.
That's not how the Alma was in its glory days when it wasn't subject
to Western influence or Western anything, but was itself.
The Dionysian was what we are was what we were cyclical, nature
oriented, reproduction, it's there in the Sierra. It's the story of
the debate. It's axiomatic to us.
So something's gone wrong. And maybe that's the kind of
fundamental diagnosis for everything else that seems to be
going wrong. The desire for the linear for dichotomy is that I'm
right and everybody else is wrong. All of these kinds of new
Victorian Apollonian ideas are something that we need to get away
from, and back into the world of
urban authority.
But after we were EJC low looking, this will hurt Alaska Scott. I'm
Dr. Liwa, Delica Rockmore. To hit the ball, UCLA, Canada. Mirtha.
Yeah, daddy, be her. The target will ask Me Malala who has more?
There's a zillion verses like that. The Ecstasy of coughing the
wine, it's Dionysus himself. The wine of divine love. Baroda, Hoda
Nast ova de SHA Rob, the man of God is drunk without wine. But
it's the intoxication of that fundamental awareness that
everything partakes in every instant in the Divine Beauty and
the divine command. How could you not be ecstatic when you see
things? As the Quran orders you to see them?
And remember that Kula Yeoman, who if he Schatten, every moment is
doing something is doing everything.
That's an ecstatic state. Sorrows, melancholia, fly away when you're
in that state, but we're taking causality too seriously. There's a
lot of health and hozen we're withdrawing from that, or any
consistence that we see everything as what Allah is doing. In Allah
Allah cliche in Kadir Allah is over all things powerful doesn't
mean that he can do anything he wants. It means he does do
everything is very clear in our theater and clear throughout our
literature. In other words, everything is fine, even though we
may be pretty uncomfortable, everything is what he is doing. So
the whole finale him will haunt me after I know.
The Quran says the people who are truly close to Allah, there is no
fear upon them, neither do they grieve. Fear is about what might
happen in the future. Grief is about what happened in the past
there in the moment. Still, no fear, no grief. So this old idea,
this idea of Wilaya maybe we should expand the meaning of it to
include the embrace and the honoring of the primordial the way
of the traditional sage in the rainforest, or ever who is
completely in harmony with everything because he sees
everything as being simply the latest beautiful movements of the
waves on the surface of the sea. That's ecstatic. That's Dionysian.
So insha Allah in this month of Ramadan, we'll start to think
deeply about this book, and about what the book is telling us about
the nature of this religion, and about what it's telling us about
the two marks that we see around us. That doesn't mean that we
don't strive for justice, as the Holy Prophet did, but it does mean
that we don't let the two Mark go
too deeply into our souls. Because the Muslim soul is aware that
everything ultimately is what God is doing. That's the ultimate
healing. That's the only real therapy for the stress amongst
young people and old people today, learn how often I lay him. Well at
home the afternoon returned to the idea of Islam as the religion of
the Hitomi. So may Allah subhanaw taala give us a really great,
serene, profound, successful Ramadan, but He grant us spiritual
breakthroughs. May He give us the joy, that is part of Ramadan, the
sugar that is part of Ramadan, make us people who are bringing
together these two principles the linear or the cyclical in the
perfect balance that is the setup must have been of Islamic Allah
accept all of your fasting bring you safely and soundly with your
families in sha Allah to bless it aid and many age thereafter was
salam or aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato.