Abdal Hakim Murad – Giving Good News
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the crisis of digitization and the importance of finding strong steps up, smile, and show respect for others in addressing the "theology crisis" of the UK's leadership. They also touch on issues of modernity, demography, mental health, and the natural world, including the cornucopia of natural world and the creation of stars and the earth. The speakers emphasize the importance of shaping Islam to see what it is like and how it can be rough met on. They also discuss the need for science to save the planet and reduce the physical world.
AI: Summary ©
Smilla rahmanir rahim. Thank you very much Abdullah and Bilal, and
it's nice to be in the
Holy of Holies of Barclays Bank. My family has bank truth Barker's
since I still have my grandfather's bank book from 1910,
or something, not sure why it's a family tradition. But I was
wondering when I came into this building, whether somewhere in the
building, there is the man who asked me why I have forgotten my
mother's maiden name.
I do know my mother's maiden name that he thought I got it wrong.
Anyway, I'd like to meet him one day.
Enough. Good that we began with this reflection on British Muslim
identity and the connection connection with CMC and its
aspirations, its educational purpose, its agenda and also the
reference, of course, to the war now raging in Eastern Europe.
CMC actually has connections with that part of the world we were
honored to receive
the deputy Mufti of the Russian Federation, who has read more he
didn't have and his team several years ago now. And we returned the
compliment by visiting the Islamic University in Moscow and
exchanging notes on how you do Islam successfully in the context
of European culture. And it's interesting to reflect again, in
the context of this idea that many people think Islam is. The new kid
on the block doesn't belong in Europe, that most Muslims in
Europe actually live in those three countries, Belarus, the
Russian Federation, and Ukraine. And Islam actually reached Russia
before Christianity did. So in those places, which is most
European Muslims, the discourse of Islam as new, the immigrant
doesn't apply at all. It's a very different and distinctive place.
And I think we need to build connections with them. And we have
to hope that they will survive this current conflagration there's
plenty of places I'd like to visit the famous Mazhar Muslim shrine of
* contests, which is in the north of Belarus, which is very
ancient, which is visited not just by Muslims, but by local, Jewish
and Christian communities, as well. I'd like to see the famous
18th century tafsir in the Belarusian language, which is
written in Bella recien. But using the Arabic script, really like to
see that there's ancient village mosques in Poland, Lithuania,
Belarus, many people in Western Europe don't know that Islam is
European. They think that these are people who fell off the boat
sort of with the Windrush generation. It's not the case.
It's not the case, Islam is part of the European story, we really
have to pray that those adjust and decent piece that are minorities,
usually in times of conflict, are the ones who suffer most anyway.
So CMC is trying to theorize this overlap zone.
And those Eastern European places show that there is a sustainable
overlap zone between authentic muscle illness and belongingness
to the European reality. Now both of those things are fairly vague
helpfully, and there is an overlap. And there has been an
overlap since Cordoba, and even fatherland and Muslim Sicily, and
it's not a new exercise.
But perhaps its present today in particularly intensified form.
Because we're now not surrounded by and large by the FLL keytab.
But by something else, people without a cutter, keytab Athlon
bearberry keytab.
And that poses additional challenges, technocratic, high
paced, development oriented, materialistic and modernity, or
consumer society, new attitudes to the family, to gender, to
sexuality to everything being upended, in ways that can make us
feel that we're not quite sure in what sense we do belong.
So it's actually important work. If you've visited us, you'll know
that we're pretty small physically. But the cultural and
theological work that needs to be done is necessarily enormous. But
it's fascinating, of course, because you can see that there are
medieval overlaps. You can see the way in which enlightenment thought
in Europe and enlightenment art and literature was inspired by the
Islamic world. You can see the Rumi phenomenon now in the United
States. At a time when America has finally given up on Afghanistan,
there's shocking and degrading scenes in Afghanistan is
represented as the archetype of the non western non white, non
Christian other. It's the kind of dark opposite it's Mordor to me
Many in the United States, the most popular poet in the United
States is actually from Afghanistan. Jalaluddin Rumi, who
is a mosque Imam with this amazing if hole agents of loving poetry
that are somehow leapfrogged over boundaries, centuries and
civilizations to become transformative and helpful to so
many middle Americans. So interested in bridges like that
that already exist.
But the work is quite urgent. It's even political. Although we're not
political. We're not sectarian. We're not Braille V or Deobandi or
any of those things. We're just interested in helping people to
learn and then they can make up their own minds about where they
want to be in the Muslim family.
But at the same time, we recognize that Islam is increasingly a
question for many of our fellow Europeans.
One reason why the Brexit vote went the way it did was certain
well timed panic stories coming from the UKIP camp, about Turkey
joining the European Union, and millions of kebabs seller suddenly
appearing in
Tunbridge Wells. That effectively is the story that put us where we
now are know that this building has been upended as a result of
Brexit. Brexit is an important central part of our reality. Now,
we haven't yet seen the numbers crunched from last year census.
But I'm pretty sure that the main story that comes out of that will
not be racial diversity, or gender or whatever other issue might
arise economic stratification. It will be how many of those Muslims
are there now in this country, because that's what it was in
2011. When those figures were released, the Daily Mail
hyperventilated, when it saw the number of Muslims in the UK has
increased by 60%. In the last 10 years, that was true Office of
National Statistics is producing a kind of curve that seems to be
logarithmic and middle England is not quite sure what that will look
like in 50 years time. But the chances are that it will produce
all kinds of stresses and strains. And it's important that our
community, which can't really control much of that sort of
psychic turbulences have sort of
you Kip mentality, but we can deal with our own issues, or we should
be able to, it's essential of the very first importance that we have
a leadership that can talk sense. And that can stop shouting, and
can recognize that this future engagement with proliferating
Muslim demography, admits the increasing crisis of a collapse in
the birth rate of the liberal classes in the UK, that that is
handled well.
And that's really up to us. And the traditional moldy sob probably
doesn't even know that this is happening. And if presented with
the bright lights on news night, and given 20 seconds, to justify
the Muslim presence probably won't do a very good job. Let's put it
no more strongly than that. The firebrand from wherever, will
probably play into the hands of our adversaries, it's really
important that in the midst of this rapid change, we have leaders
who can keep their cool, reassure everyone until the muslims to
Allah Allah become, relax, don't panic, there's too much panicky,
freaking out in our communities at the moment. And we should not be a
community of that where the people have to heed and tackle after all,
the people who are supposed to be able to deal with any kind of
misfortune doesn't always look like that if you go on some of the
chat groups and 4chan discussion boards and the subreddits. And
we're jumping and shouting and swearing as much as anybody else
is. And that's not that doesn't present Well, I think, for the
future of this conversation. So yes, very small institution in
Cambridge, hardly noticeable.
But the work we're doing, if we can expand to employ enough people
on to create a proper critical mass of thinkers, and throughput
enough students could make a very considerable even historic
difference because I don't really see anybody else who is doing
this. Islamic studies in universities is Oriental Studies.
You can study Arabic conversion and acid poetry and Mameluke
history fine, but it doesn't deal with these issues.
But the data alarms and those institutions abroad where many
Muslims flocked to study are not really geared up to creating this
new voice either. If you come back from a madrasa in Indonesia,
easier or India or Mauritania, or wherever you will come back with
whatever the chef's that have been able to teach you, but it's
unlikely to be able to deal with what may be an increasingly
fraught, even threatening discussion. In any case where
people have optimism, early Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa
sallam Can you hype Will Ferrell used to love optimism, and we
should see this as a new frontier for Islam, a new way of engaging a
new way of helping societies rather than just hoping to be
helped by them, we should be reflect on what she felt as the
poor and says a mercy and a healing. That's not always the
intention that many of us need when they came here or converted
to Islam here. But that should be the intention. We're here to help.
We should be a therapeutic presence, rather than just
grumbling about this and that and begging for stuff, nobody will
really respect us for that. And a culture of victimhood will make
things even worse, because nobody really respects people who are in
that particular silo. We have to be strong step up, smile, show how
we can help in this society that is suffering from so many
dysfunctions.
So maybe that is the way in which I'm going to get into the formal
subject of this evening's discussion. And I don't want to
make this too academic. I saw some people last night were
nodding slightly as I read my script. So I'm going to try and
extemporize a little bit.
One of the ways it seems to me in which we can most centrally
contribute to
the current discussions in the West, is to recognize that there
are a number of crises afoot.
100 years ago, when Muslims started to formulate the sometimes
rather apologetic, or defiant responses to modernity, the
timeless assayed, Ahmed Han, Muhammad Abdul Afghani, that
generation, the West was rather different because it was really on
a roll. It had conquered the world. Literally, it had the
Gatling gun, and the steam, gunboat. And nobody could resist.
And there they were, the pink faced English policeman, with his
solar home helmet on the streets of Alexandria directing the
traffic he was in control. And there was a different kind of
mindset, which made many Muslims think Well, is it a case of if you
can't beat them, join them. And the whole process of the
secularization of the Muslim elites then began with a certain
sense that this was inevitable. It seemed to be part of the
historical process, some kind of Darwinian process had mysteriously
made these people who used to be these sort of painted savages in
the muddy forests of northern Europe, where nobody really wanted
to go to explore those places, much nicer to certain Muslim
Spain, with the fountains and the orange trees and the sun, who'd
want to go up there. But those people ended up conquering the
world,
Anglo Saxon Germanic civilization, who would have imagined it, but
this is the situation that we have been confronting, the worm has
turned.
So we have these elites throughout the Muslim world, sometimes
maintaining certain sentimental forms of muscle impiety, sometimes
spinning complicated stories about how well we contributed a lot to
the Renay sauce. And we invented water clocks, and we translated
Aristotle, and so somehow we, we have a little bit of, we can take
a little bit of credit for this thing a
little bit pathetic, really, an inferiority complex, very evident.
We invented so many things, so please love us a little bit more.
It's fairly transparent.
And the other reaction of course, the salient reaction was
explosions of rage. Let us retreat from this godless civilization
into the strictest, possible interpretation that we can find in
our libraries of our religion.
Nevermind all of those nice Sufi poems, nevermind the mercy of
traditional Islamic ethics, nevermind for med Hubsan the
diversity, the ambiguity loving culture of pre modern Islam, let's
find something that really can act as a megaphone for our
insecurities. So we can shout and shout and shout at anybody who
disagrees with us even slightly, when that's taken many forms and
there she as well as Sunday versions of it, and that hasn't
really worked out too well, anywhere at all, but it's
generated wars on terror and global polarizations reinforced
regimes and it's not really had a very happy outcome, the kind of
roll up into a ball like a hedgehog if you're threatened and
be as quickly as possible. It's not really helping. It should be
evident that in there
is age we need to resource those generous aspects of our
civilization. Those which are more dialogical those which are able to
be flexible, those which do not hammer home the strictest
interpretations of fit, but find dispensations for people who are
really challenged and struggling in a fast moving modern,
complicated, weird, Canary Wharf.
This is where people are logic and the purpose of religion the
Makkasan of the Sharia indicates that we should be making things
easier. And that's the prophetic commandment. Yes, zero Allah to
zero he used to say
best shiru Allah to not Pharaoh. It's commandment in a sound.
Hadith make things easier. Don't make them harder. give people good
news don't repel them.
Nowadays a certain type of traumatized furious, enraged
Muslim soul is not happy with that and wants to turn it around. Let's
look for the hardest possible interpretation. And when I found
it, let me spend the whole afternoon on YouTube attacking
people for not following the strictest possible interpretation.
And then perhaps some peace comes to my soul because I'm feeling
superior, at least to somebody.
It's not really real religion. Only prophets instruction is
clear. make things easier, don't make them harder.
Mahira Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam Medina Amrhein
Illa Ouattara a surah Houma Mala Mia confy ism. Never was a Holy
Prophet. Never the Hadith says given the choice between two
things, but that he chose the easier of them as long as there
was no sin in it.
Nowadays, we were a little bit suspicious of people like that.
Sometimes even this Deobandi Barelvi thing looks like an
exercise in competitive narrowness.
That's not real religion, read a minimal khazali Kitab, the medical
roar in the air here to see how he hammers scholars who are
competitively strict. This is not prophetic religion, this is just
the ego playing tricks, and they can Gods religion harder for
people to carry, which is not the point. So there are these two
alternatives that we find and that reflect themselves and curricula
of various sorts, surrender, and just bring in the French
curriculum into Algeria,
or spit and curse and find something infinitely tougher than
medieval fit and Islam in the hope that somehow that will make the
problems go away. No, those things are alive and well, across the
Muslim world, the middle ground, which is prophetically mandated
and the meaning of a Serato stopping seems to be less and less
populated. But if you go into the libraries, as I do,
you find the extremes are almost impossible to find.
I remember once in Timbuktu, in one of the great libraries there
just before the Ansara Dean, extremists took over and messed
everything up, went to the library, and I went with a couple
of the guys who I'm sure later on became these. Jihad is
who went into the library. And this is a library with 80,000
manuscripts.
And there are a call the city of scholars in the middle of the
Sahara Timbuktu
and these two guys
went quieter and quieter. And I could see that they were really
angry. Because there wasn't a single book that we saw that they
could agree with.
Maliki Fuck no, actually theology, no. Sufi poetry. No, no, they were
embossed 80,000 books. No.
This is the situation we're in. And it's sometimes very difficult
for younger people to know what the tradition actually is. It's
beautiful culture of diversity and respect amongst the ALA mother,
the beauty of traditional cosmopolitan Islam. The only thing
they liked was the Koran manuscripts. And then they saw the
rewire which they couldn't read, and they kind of got sad again.
So something like that, of course, generates an enormous
psychological explosion, because they think the Allamah are all
guilty of treason. All of these scholars who wrote these 80,000
books wrong, and we're right.
Strange, you're semi literate guys brought up in a stony desert, and
you know better than fecundity and all these people, that mentality
exists and that also generates a further sense of panic and rage
and desire just to destroy everything. So, that possibility
is here and the guy who killed David Amos, not too far from here
is something that is in our communities. And that is something
that we need to create a scholarship
that can resolve it. That's an urgent need prevent isn't going to
sort it filling the prisons with radicals isn't going to solve the
problem, they just convert other people in the prisons and it
becomes worse. The solution has to come from us. We have to go to
those people. Some prevent social worker who's done a
course in psychology of religion
goes to some extreme radical and works, that doesn't work, you have
to get into the heart of the thing, or N sunnah. Hadith,
everything. Because that's the only language they'll understand.
And you can't expect non Muslim sociologists or spooks or various
kinds of security services people to be able to do that they can't.
Anyway. So we pride ourselves on the idea that what we are called
to do at CMC is important. So to get back to the issue of how we
can be rough met on washy, fat, Mercy into healing into society,
rather than just a kind of
pain in the neck, is to see that this society is not where it was
100 years ago, in the heyday of empire, when these docks were
filled with ships that were going to Canada and Australia and India,
and this was the biggest port in the world and the greatest city in
the world and the biggest empire in the world. It's a bit different
now. more ambiguous, more mercantile, less ideological,
certainly less Christian, it's something else. And it has a lot
of problems.
So what if we reshaped the agenda of our Islam to see not how we can
campaign for better halal meat in the primary schools or whatever it
is that were usually on about things aren't quite as bad as
that. But even 20 years ago, they were and to see what are the the
painful issues that are causing dysfunction here? And what do we
have by way of resources to try and help people?
Can we be helpers?
Is that even just useful? Because maybe it reduces the possibility
of them getting fed up and putting us on a boat and sending us
somewhere?
Well, I would say yep, better to be helpers. Ramadan, where she
fat.
So and there are so many issues, this crisis of modernity, a lot of
Muslims don't really realize it. Your average golf ruler, when he
waddles around Harrods, once a year, with his flunkies and just
this,
you can see them
doesn't know what's really going on this culture isn't really
interested, he just wants it. He wants this shopping mall, he wants
to skyscraper he wants, because he just sees the surface of things
that is kind of shiny as like a child.
Many of the Muslim elites are like that. But there's a lot of
problems here. If you've been brought up here, you'll see people
are talking about it all the time.
A crisis in identity.
Look at this week's copy of the New Statesman. It's all about
British identity.
What are we quotes from George Orwell? And it's quite well done,
actually. And the answer is, well, we aren't sure. Americans kind of
have a clear identity and the American dream and McDonald's and
it's sort of you can see what it is. What is a British identity in
these times of devolution, and Brexit and
not sure that's worrying. Because when people are not sure what they
are, that tends to be when they find external enemies.
That's when their own sense of insecurity makes them look for
scapegoats. We need to watch out for that.
Other crises that seemed to be a foot world, the collapse in the
birth rate,
whatever happened to the sexual revolution, everybody's having
babies things gone a bit wrong. Whatever happened to their
biology ism,
like claim, the kind of Steven Pinker view that all we are is
biological blobs that exists to replicate themselves. That's all
we are.
Well, we're not even doing that. So what are we exactly?
Well, we've got a premier banking card from Barclays and we're doing
something but if we're not even replicating ourselves, something
is really wrong.
I went, this is a mixed environment and I would suggest
ways in which we Muslims could directly try and solve that issue
that maybe it will occur to some of you.
Other crisis issues. demography is always one of the big things in
history that causes of course, the breakup of the Soviet Union. It
is a big thing.
What about
mental health crises? Dr. Abdullah was talking about this a bit this
afternoon.
We're really sick. We have a crisis in the university sector,
particularly amongst young women, who are just
having more problems with body image issues with cutting, with
self harming, with darting disorders, with panic attacks,
with anxiety with depression. Why is that? 50 years after women's
liberation? Why are they also sad? Why is there this absolute
explosion of referrals to mental health services at the NHS when
women's lib women could do anything, they can go to the space
station, what's going on?
Nobody's even even define what gender is any longer. Kier.
Starmer certainly ducks that question in Parliament. That's a
fundamental lack of awareness. Well, whatever the definition
might be the should be one.
That's another issue. Another problem, another fundamental
crisis.
Other issues come to mind? What about existential risks to do with
technology, whereas the Victorian triumphalism that said are the
steam engines, and vaccination and whatever is going to usher in a
world of happiness not really happening.
We have these existential risks, nuclear weapons people are
worrying about again, but microplastics various forms of
subtle pollution, something in the water supply. The whole
environmental catastrophe, which is really a catastrophe is
something that the modernists in their heyday 100 years ago didn't
really expect and the Muslims who went along behind them and are
kind of wondering where the Pied Piper was leading them.
They toddle along happily and obediently behind Western
cavalcade into the new promised land and it was turning out to be
dangerous.
Our professor of astronomy University of Cambridge Martin
Rees has a book called our final century is the Astronomer Royal,
significant person. He thinks probably humanity will wipe itself
out within the next 100 years.
Not because of some asteroid collision, no other Hollywood
scenario, but because we'll wipe ourselves out.
So he has chapters on all of the things that are going to threaten
us.
new strains of illnesses escaping from some laboratory
antibiotic resistant forms of TB, maybe
issues to do with artificial intelligence. Stephen Hawking's,
also in Cambridge said, stop, stop that research, because he believes
in the sort of matrix, Nightmare dystopian possibility that sooner
or later, the internet is going to wake up and say, I'm smarter than
you guys. I'm in charge, and we can't do without it. So we'll do
what we're told.
He thinks that's a real possibility. So something that
we're studying the possibility of an AI super explosion that wipes
us out. Much of science fiction is about that from the Terminator
onwards, it's a fear in our culture. Again, the Victorians
never expected that.
Questions to do with nanotechnology.
machines so small that you can hardly see them or you can't see
them at all. Great, you can put them inside the bloodstream, and
they can sort out somebody's
blocked arteries. Brilliant. And they can build themselves, they
can build other machines that are the same, they're already doing
that. Even under the atomic level, they can put atoms together and
make tiny atomic size machines. Another problem, according to
Martin Rees,
that what's to stop these machines making more and more of
themselves?
How do you stop one little micro machine from making another one
that makes another one? How do you stopped that process? So we have
what they call not quite humorously the gray goo scenario.
It's the kind of phrase that scientists like to use so that
people pay attention to them.
In other words, the whole world is taken over by one of these
machines, which replicates itself until there's nothing left at the
planet but gray goo. It seems to be a real possibility.
Climate change, let's just get back to that. So what we're seeing
is the consequence
Is of increasing human technical capacity, more and more
cleverness, without a matching increase in human wisdom. And
certainly without any kind of public discourse about limits to
growth, about saying enough.
Sustainable development
doesn't ask the question whether development is sustainable. Maybe
it isn't. Maybe if all of these third world countries switch to
our mode of production, the environment will collapse
overnight, because, at the moment, the climate crisis is not really
the third world's fault.
The average Westerner consumes 70% 70 times as many resources as
the average Bangladeshi.
Unfortunately, the average Bangladesh is the one who's going
to be suffering most because his village is disappearing
underwater. Because the river is misbehaving as a result of the
melting of the Himalayan ice caps. It's going to be the poor and
particularly if you look at the geography, the Muslim poor, who
are going to suffer the most. The third pole, they call it the
Himalayan ice cap, big new United Nations report with 300 Scientists
signed off on it. Within 40 years, the river valleys of Pakistan and
Bangladesh will be uninhabitable. Because the rain that rain that
fell as snow that will be trapped in the ice and released slowly to
allow agriculture in the subcontinent. It's not going to
happen any longer. Instead, you'll get these catastrophic flash
floods that will make those countries uninhabitable. The
report online and makes sobering reading. So clearly, that's one of
the big dysfunctions that science technology development has imposed
upon us. Increasingly, the old Victorian generally Eurocentric
triumphalist vision of progress.
That the white man, the European, and the various people who settled
in the ethnically cleanse colonies, North America, South
America, Australia, New Zealand, bits of South Africa, Siberia,
they've triumphed. They ruled the world, they solved the problems.
Well, they solve some problems.
They have nice dentists, for instance, which is pretty good.
But the problems that they're generating are threatening us in a
way that was never imaginable before.
The world was this incredible, complex balance of species, and
the climate and the currents of the sea, and the tide, and it was
sustainable for millions and millions and millions of years,
with exuberant Cordia copia of living things. Human beings were
part of that we can live as part of that, then the Paleolithic, we
were just part of the biological complex. But now we start to look
a bit like a cancer, we're kind of one bit that's got out of control,
and we're sick, and we're destroying everything else, to the
extent that the cancer may destroy the host organism.
Which is why even the materialists are kind of waking up and saying,
well, it wouldn't be so great. If there was no air for our
grandchildren to breathe, it becomes as to be that primitive
before they actually get their snouts out of the trough and start
to think this endless proliferation of consumption and
gadgets.
has to stop. human desires are infinite have no limit. But the
Earth's resources are finite. And sooner or later, there'll be a
crisis. And we're starting to see that already. So
we find that this incredible, supremely beautiful ball of green
and blue, this jewel that God has put in the velvety darkness of
space, this enormous thing alone Declan arugula, he was here.
That's not God's earth been brought
isn't quite enough for our greed.
So Elon Musk says, well, we'll just go to Mars.
In other words, he wants to move because of climate change to a
planet that has already been destroyed by climate change. There
used to be water here and maybe something was growing. You want to
move there? I don't think so. If that's really planet be not very
appealing. That's what this earth may well be if we can't get out of
this rut.
So that it seems to me is one of the areas in which we can offer an
input.
Those of you who were with us last night at LSE will recall my
rehearsing of the familiar or Anneke verses and the Hadith about
to the natural world,
and natural world, which is not just there to supply treats for an
endlessly greedy and egotistic humanity. But a natural world
which exists on its own terms, as an endless cornucopia of
proliferating and endlessly different and unique divine signs
in the vehicle is similar to work the laffy Layli when the heart is
in the oil Bab so much of the Quran is about this nature, you
didn't find much of that in the New Testament, really, except the
bit where Jesus casts out demons and they go into pigs, and they
jump off a cliff which a lot of evangelical Christians find a bit
uncomfortable.
Because they like to have the
Big Mac with bacon. So when they realized Jesus wasn't into that,
it makes him a bit twitchy. But otherwise, there's not much about
the animals in the New Testament. Why is the Quran full of this
truly in the succession of night and day,
and the creation of the heavens and the earth, signs for people of
understanding.
It is the book of nature.
Throughout, many people comment on this, have they not seen have they
not seen have they not seen and that's for us as well. Even though
when you walk around Canary Wharf, they suffer from what you might
call nature deficit disorder,
as a bird sell.
Otherwise, not a blade of grass.
It's what it is. It's not good for us.
Because there's something about being surrounded by natural
materials and natural things which triggers in us a recollection of
how we were for 99% of human history, which is hunter
gatherers. We respond to nature, which thoroughly nourishes us.
This morning, I was walking to Oxford.
They have these beautiful old walls of ash last stone.
And I was reflecting on the fact that the older they get, the more
beautiful they get
bits of grass and kind of mold even if the mold is cut, it's it's
all beautiful. And then you see the concrete buildings from the
1970s. And the older they get the uglier they get really interesting
that something in the brain has that instinctive reaction, that we
are programmed to respond positively to what is natural
because we are biologically part of the natural world and because
that's how our forefathers for 10s of 1000s of generations lived. The
child wants to touch the animal is amazed by the doggy and the duck.
That's natural to us. But we're suffering from this nature deficit
disorder because this crazy runaway turbo capitalism is
killing the animals, the last Rhino or the last whatever, and
there's some nice Attenborough documentary about how the last
Siberian tiger has been saved and risk versus hurray the last one.
It's like genocide. If the Quran is saying
that the birds and the animals are all meme on and Thurlow calm, as
it says in Surah, an arm nations like yourselves,
then to wipe them out. It's a kind of genocide, I guess. They're also
unmas.
That in itself is sufficient argument against this thing called
progress.
But they don't get the vote. Nobody goes to the
hedgehog that's trying to cross the A 14 asking it if it really
appreciates the modern world, we don't really ask them we just
squash them.
Globally, this is a huge holocaust of the other armors that have been
created to praise and to worship God and to testify to his unity
and his creative power wiping them all out. So as well as destroying
our life support system. We are also destroying God's signs by
which He reveals His nature to us.
Because the Quran says 18 year old Al Bab it's an argument from
design but it's not so much terrible or spiritual.
When you're surrounded by Virgin nature, you inhale something that
you know is cleansing. And that will lead you on.
Read any narrative from Native American spirituality or people
who are still still remember how things were before the white man
came and the local Windows was opened and Dairy Queen and alcohol
and the thing became decrepit how things used to be and it's all
All about experiencing the sacred in nature, in the animals in the
mountains. And that's normal for human beings. If we're wiping it
out, then we wipe out that theology, no longer accessible. So
that's why to get to the end of this, this point that I'm trying
to make,
we should be leading the charge against climate change.
Not just because we want our grandchildren to be able to
see fish, or to breathe air that isn't going to give them asthma or
whatever is in store for us. But because those other orders of
creation have a divinely appointed right to be here, and because they
sustain our faith, beauty indicates its source. As Plato
said, beauty is the splendor of the truth. When contemplating
beauty, the heart is stilled, and we see beyond the surface of the
thing to the order, which makes it beautiful. All of Islamic art is
about that. We can no longer do that, because the whole world is
Canary Wharf, or we're living underground on Mars, or whatever
Mr. Musk thinks is the solution, that's not going to be so easy.
So that's why not just Muslim religionists generally, but
particularly, I think we, as proud holders of the Quran, this book,
which is all about nature, should be on those Greenpeace ships, we
should be on those marches, we should be protesting, really
protesting. For these reasons, Muslim world is going to be
destroyed first. Because our faith depends on the ongoing beauty of
the spiritual life support system, which the natural world
represents. And also because be nice if our grandchildren could
see fish and birds and be pretty nice. So that's really what I'm
getting at, we're not paying the rent,
in this earthly home, and the landlord is fed up with us.
Finally, really patient, hundreds of years of chimneys, and God
knows what going on in the depths of the ocean, every last bit of
it, we have to interfere with it. That finally I guess the divine
patience is running out, we're not paying the rent. And so the
property is not being maintained. And eventually, we may get the
eviction order. Too bad buddy Adam, we gave you this planet.
But you're not really looking after it terribly well at all. And
so well, maybe that's the end. Israel field does his thing on the
rock of Jerusalem. That's the end on human beings. Of course, these
calamities maybe
nobody knows the future, except the designer of the future. But
the point is, I think,
rather elementary one, which is that instead of being in these
Western countries, kind of hoping for crumbs from the banquet of the
materialistic elites. Instead, we should be seeing what we can do to
reduce the neuralgic consequences of modernity. All of these
depressed young people worried about climate change worrying
about all of these other existential threats. It's not a
happy
generation. And if we've been brought MOBA Shireen, bring us
good news, bash util Wella. Tuna Fierro, the prophet commands us
give people good news. cheer them up. Don't repel them, repel them?
Well, that's the job of the Taliban or the guy with the
suicide belt is really successful in repelling them. Great job.
Don't need all of these Islamophobic think tanks, just one
of those guys has a bigger effect. But this beshear will
give people good news. Yeah, that's what we should be doing.
That should be the slogan, the motto really, of every mosque in
England and around the world? How can we sort out the problems of
our neighbors using the riches of our tradition?
Do we really understand them? Do they understand us? Have we
conveyed the message? Have we invited them to our if Tyrus do
they know about what we represent? Have they read those amazing
passages in the Quran about the animal orders and the fish and the
birds and the book of nature?
Probably not. Usually not. They see this strange building on the
street where people can't park properly. It has a kind of pointy
dome and they think, well, we have to be multicultural. That's as far
as it goes. Usually. No, we have to go a little bit beyond that. If
we want to survive. If we can show that we really useful and we can
stop God from sucking us off the planet.
If we can do that, then people will say you're a blessing. Hydra
Olmert in Oak Ridge Atlin as the best of communities raised up for
mankind, we have these resources for an sunnah, the incredible
literature, art, thoughts of classical Islam, those libraries
in the desert with 80,000 books, we can use that as the energy
banks for a new
sort of Islam, in these places, where we stop being defensive and
start to embrace, stop complaining about our own pains and see how we
can help the pains of others. This is Quranic Lee mandated it for
that ability here absent, repel hostility with something better.
And then you will see the one between whom you and him was
hostility. Get in the hallway, Leon Hamid, it will be as if he's
your closest friend. That's the way to defeat Islamophobia. And I
can't see a better way of doing that than reconfiguring ourselves
as the green OMA, the green Dean who care about these things
because you have to care about them, leading the charge rather
than sheepishly following at a distance. So in short, a lot we'll
think about that and Barclays financial institutions with
ethical codes of responsibility have their own ways of looking
about these things. They recognize the gravity of the threat that we
face, and it's one of the things that we care about at CMC as well.
Green hook that sustainability hoppers. Let's see how we can stay
on this planet that kind of hot but I think is important