Abdal Hakim Murad – How Islamic is Islamic Studies
AI: Summary ©
The Muslim-led leadership development program aims to produce graduates with a deep understanding of the Islamic faith and society, and is fully funded by a large amount of money. The program has a sad and sad story, with negative outcomes, and a sad and sad story as well. The "will" in Islam is used to force people to change their behavior, and the "will" in political settings is used to force people to change their behavior. The "monster of truth" concept is a virtual collapse of the Enlightenment vision of the United States, and the school is trying to convince students to pursue the digital medium while also promoting the Islamic story.
AI: Summary ©
Friends, guests Salam aleikum wa rahmatullah.
It's a real honor and a privilege to be here tonight.
Many will know that this is where I completed all my education.
My undergraduate degree was from just across the road, I did my
masters here, and recently I completed my PhD here as well.
This place is of course more important and better known than
educating the son of the farmer from the backwaters of present day
Bangladesh.
Amongst other notes of fame, this place is of course, a significant
reference point in our popular culture.
Apart from
many films being filmed here
those that know their English literature,
who have read George Orwell
and his dystopian novel 1984
will know that this is represented
in that novel as the ministry of information.
We are, of course, in one of the most important rooms of this
building, the Ministry of Information. I'm not sure what
this means and what it says about our proceedings here tonight.
That said, it's a real pleasure to be here tonight. And to chair this
inaugural professor or lecture by Professor or some of us know him
as Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Murad
recently appointed the disease foundation professor of Islamic
Studies.
I'd like to say just two things before I introduce Professor
Abdullah Kane tonight.
Firstly, something about the disease Foundation, after which
this professorship is named.
Disease foundation is the sponsor and the funder of this
professorship
disease Foundation is a very visionary family Charitable
Foundation funded by a very visionary family, who have been
involved in philanthropic work for generations now. And I'm very,
very pleased that tonight with us we have brother Asif Aziz, who has
been the inspiration behind and the founder of the disease
foundation.
Disease foundation is seeking to be a model for Muslim family
charitable foundations within the UK.
There was a time when we envied the likes of organizations like
the Red Cross and Christian Aid.
As a child, I would often ask, why cannot we Muslims have similar
organizations like that?
Well, we have them now. We have Islamic Relief. We have Muslim
aid, we have many appeal, nationals are caught on nations.
And I'm told that there are more than 100 charity organizations
like that here in the UK, doing wonderful things across the world.
As a teenager as a young adult,
I looked at organizations and often envied organizations like
the Joseph Roundtree and Barrow, Cadbury trust.
And I often asked, why can't we Muslims have foundations like
that?
Well, it's happening now. We have the disease Foundation, we have
the renderer Charitable Trust, which is represented here tonight.
We have cancer of we have some very foundation, all of whom are
represented here tonight.
Disease Foundation has led the way in building such family
foundations. I've been honored to lead some of that work over the
last four years.
I come to the end of my stint at disease foundation at the end of
this month. So I'm particularly pleased to be able to chair this
event tonight.
Disease Foundation is a grant making foundation. But it is a lot
more than that. It is also a development organization takes key
it takes interest in key issues in Muslim communities.
And one of those issues is the development of a Muslim
leadership, development of Muslim leaders here in the UK.
And one area of that leadership
is development of
Muslim faith leaders.
And parallel to that development of Muslim institutions to produce
those faith leaders, Muslim institutions involved in higher
education and the production of the leadership for the future.
So the second thing that I wanted to say was a little bit about the
Muslim leadership development program. A program
that's been developed at the disease foundation over the last
three to four years.
It started off with a reflection on an advert. Some of you will
have seen circulated in Muslim communities. The advert is for an
imam in an ottoman mosque
and the advert seeks an imam who knows religious sciences, but also
knows the human physical sciences.
An imam who is good looking and has good recitation
and Imam who is sporty and fit a an imam who is an all rounder
faith leaders who are all rounders.
Again, as a young man, I used to look at bishops and rabbis in this
country and how they spoke on televisions.
Later on, I would look at people like Rowan Williams and Jonathan
Sacks. And again, ask myself the question, why can we Muslims not
have faith leaders like that? Faith leaders were able to marry
the Religious Sciences with the human and social sciences are able
to speak to the nation make sense to the nation make sense of the
issues facing the nation.
So it was only natural that when I started a disease foundation, I
took a particular interest
in this faith leadership development program or Muslim
leadership development program.
This foundation is fully behind this program. And I'm very, very
pleased that the family was so firmly behind this program. As it
became with us to meet Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Murad, at Cambridge
Muslim college should say something about us but he doesn't
go isn't doesn't travel very far from his office. But for him to go
all the way to Cambridge Muslim College, his father came with us
to Ibrahim College
is
a signal of the importance that the family placed
in this program, Muslim leadership development program by visiting
these institutions, and the amount of money they have committed to
this program is the largest within the Azeez foundation. So it's a
very significant commitment. And it shows the importance that the
family places behind this program.
The program seeks to develop leaders who have an understanding
a deep understanding of the Islamic faith,
but also a deep understanding of society.
It's a program that seeks to produce
Muslims,
whether in the secular public sphere or the community's affair
or the religious affair that can take our communities to a better
place.
But to produce such leaders requires a lot of thinking.
To produce such leaders requires institution fit for purpose.
And it is for this reason that the disease foundation appointed a
professor of Islamic studies will take the responsibility for this
vision will take the responsibility for guiding some of
the leading institutions in this country that seek to prepare such
leadership
responsibility for the curriculum, but much more than the curriculum.
And that position was given to Professor
Abdullah Kimura.
I want to say a little bit about Professor lucky Murad before I
asked him to speak, to give us something of that vision to give
us something of how we may achieve what we seek to achieve here.
Produce institutions produce curriculums produce people who
will serve us as good leaders into the future.
profesor de la que Murad, for many of us needs no introduction.
But just in case there are people here who are not aware of his
background. He is the dean of Cambridge Muslim College,
formerly the Director of Studies, Theology and Religious Studies at
Wilson College, Cambridge, where he was also the Sheikh Zayed
Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University.
He is the founder inspiration behind the Cambridge mosque
project.
He was educated at Westminster School himself graduated with a
double first from Pembroke College, Cambridge, and thereafter
studied at Azhar University, as well.
But more important than that,
Professor Abdullah Hakim Murad
has a unique ability to relate traditional learning
and as a routing in contemporary Muslim communities,
both of which he's able to relate to current contexts in a way that
I've certainly not seen many other Muslims in this country do.
And he does that equally well, whether in the local context of
Cambridge, or the national context or the international context, and
I've had the pleasure of listening to him in all three contexts.
He is an example of the kind of people that we'd like to see in
the future, somebody who is able to balance what he once said to
me, the alcohol and the knuckle.
With a small introduction, I call them Professor Shehata, Lucky
Murad, to address us tonight on how Islamic Islamic studies the
troubled history of an academic discipline in Europe.
Smilla rahmanir rahim.
Evening everyone.
Well, I'm grateful, first of all, to the Azeez foundation for
showing spirit of sheisty such ventures and initiative as well as
very considerable generosity in making this event possible.
Quite a bit of the story that I intend to relate to this evening
may be found somewhat dismal or alarming, but charitable
educational enterprises such as theirs do intimate I feel. In the
midst of our current age of crisis, when things are falling
apart. The Mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world the
possibility that perhaps just perhaps there might be a happy
ending to an otherwise well, the melancholy and even ominous
narrative.
I'm going to propose to you this evening, a travelogue, a kind of
Alan whicker documentary, in which a commentator picks his way
through ravaged postwar landscapes to point out to the wonders of
what used to be, and to report perhaps on rebuilding efforts here
and there that presents recovery or at least the appearance of a
worthwhile surrogate
Islamic civilization, strange and nostalgic category that looks to
modern scholarship rather like the Ozymandias of Shelley's poem, from
whose shattered visage, we infer the power and mood of a great
bygone Empire. The poet is just one in the army of romantic and
perhaps sorry travelers who, particularly on the 18th century
grand tour took delight in the contemplation of ruins.
Not a few of them turned east that is contemplating David Roberts's
picturesque and evocative visitors of late autumn and decrepitude,
enlivened, here and there by a few turban figures, smoking that she
books, he depicts them sunk in an oriental repose, peaceably
contemplating the moldering ruins of the Temple of Karnak, or the
Mosque of bitebank.
This is the wistful and moralizing tale made ideological again and
again, in more recent travel literature. It's very salient for
example, in William Dalrymple's laments for a dead mogul
magnificent or Eric newbees short walk in the Hindu Kush one is
pleasantly dazzled by the remaining pleasure domes of an
ancient glory but that the gaze with irritation from the
pickpockets and dacoits who seemed to infest them today,
so there'll be something of what Roloff Beny called the pleasure of
ruins in our journey this evening for the orientalist and the Muslim
nostalgic bears seem to stand enthralled by them, their seminars
and sermons attempting a kind of sales which communicates with
greatly missed dead.
And yet our traveler tonight is not ultimately a tourist he is no
Washington Irving, dreaming of the Alhambra of Bob deal for me to
accompany a seeker who is on a quest a pilgrimage even is a
metronome seeking only his last Leila Farhad, crying out for
sharing.
I propose to follow the steps of a Talib Island, a secret knowledge
engaged in the emblematic Muslim customer of regular and academic
expedition, seeking the holy grail of the truth is snad and
therefore, the authentic sage
as he picks his way through the ruins of as Montgomery what put it
the glory that was Islam, what roads can he nowadays tread and
what may he still expect to find at his journeys and
the seeker follows the Leyland merge known legend in
And indicative weighs in his arm is version parents argue with him
and counsel sanity, family honor and state propriety yet to the
youth insists on his wild and apparently senseless Odyssey
brought up in the wasteland of today's unreal cities. This
Golding is shriller by far our society's become monetized
instrumentalized incentivized by performance indicators and career
benchmarks among the young. Mental illnesses such as depression rise
again and again. Britain to has become a Prozac nation, things
fall apart, the center cannot hold.
Yet our Mad River still leaves his home in Ilford or small Heath
following the rumored fragrance of a Prusa pine who is alive and
still fair, but hidden underground during the present Winter of the
World. Hundreds of a young madman now roamed the earth. British
mendicants of this sort are a familiarly exotic site in Delve
and Cairo, Malaya and the madrasahs of toolbar Dar Salam
and inexorable demography and moreover, may be relied upon even
to increase their number. Last year's pew research reports
suggested that British Muslims today 4.1 million will number 13
point 4 million by the year 2050. And they are diverse. The Office
of National Statistics tells us that 10% of British Muslims are
black and almost 8% of them are white. And they are young and it
is the young who catch metronomes disease and defy tribe and logic
to seek what they call sacred knowledge.
That has ignore the fundamentalist among them and the traumatized
identity seekers are those thirsting for simple answers to
help them cope with a complex world. They are like Salomon in
Mala jam is tail Salomon and observe who is in love with his
nursemaid who symbolizes the comforts of the ego and the world.
The identity seeking seeker after secret truth is in fact just
pursuing his own lower self, which he has to immolate before he can
progress. Here is Fitzgerald, translating Jami.
Although the better 14 came at last to see all the work, you had
every wise man knows such conservation never can be here.
Salah man fired the pile and in the flame that passing him
consumed upside like straw died his divided self. Nowadays we
might talk about cognitive dissonance instead but
pathology as the same.
Instead, let us see where the true merge non might go. If he seeks
what may be seen as pre modern Muslim normativity defined simply
as what may be perceived by historians as a rough matrix of
recurrent patterns. As Laila been scarred or slain by modernity, has
it throw an acid in her face when she simply heavily veiled and
secluded in some Eastern Oasis or lost city of brass, a summer can't
imagined and awaiting it to discover. And the use of we're
told found her in Mauritania, or at least a Mauritania of 30 years
ago.
But does she still live, though held captive by a foreign empire?
And by the global reductionism of a totalizing mammon, whose agency
is everyone
shall have admired for one seems to doubt this. For him the mental
culture of modern Islam is no longer the true Laila. She is
wrinkled, demented, almost or actually dead. After noting
furiously, the recent demolition of the historic cities of Mecca
and Medina, and thus the symbolic erasure of centuries of cumulative
culture and institutions, he writes this
the considerable loss of the multi dimensional speciality of
Revelation is increasingly the light motif of modern Islam, and
is precisely what makes it difficult for the practitioners of
modern Islam to conceptualize pre modern Islam in a manner that
coheres with a human at historical phenomenon that they conceptualize
as Islam.
So she has gone and for most of us forgotten as well. But at least he
notes that a spirit of plurality formed a determining element of
her subtle charism.
She can be helpfully described in 1000 ways. Ahmed argues for
something akin to what Marshall Hodgson famously described as the
Islamic hate but cast his net even wider, Islam should be interpreted
as being everything that Muslims have defined as their relationship
to what they imagine Islam to be. Answered includes the study of
Persian kingdom wisdom Plotinus, botany and borrowed Midrash ik
tales to impose our own assumption that Islam is ultimately a linear
exercise in Quranic commentary is he says, A characteristic illusion
of modern Muslim ideologies, and an elderly Orientalism.
It is part of the invention of a centralised de historicized
religion decried by Carol Smith and more recently and thoroughly
by Tomoko mussels. Our
our Majnoon, however, is unlikely to be incentivized by such a fuzzy
and all inclusive definition of what he seeks a field of
signifiers which are determined only by each other and become
fully explicable. Only in faculties of History and
Sociology.
He seeks a narrative with claims to transcendent truth and to
Tyrion logical power.
And here, I think one might propose an alternative to Athens
flattening and as it were, D religion icing of the landscape.
What if we were to imagine a vision of the soul and the deep
human reasons of those also, which did in fact enable an even
advocate a heterogeneity, which might not embrace all the cultural
features of Massachusetts Dipak puts in his grab bag of Muslim
things, but most of them, and particularly the most humanly
important,
it seems to assume an eternal tension between the numerous
centric boundary loving on a map and the hard facts of Muslim
cultural history. He does show that the format like Apple sold
could acknowledge the parent Omean alternative and non juridically
detailed routes to access divine charisma and Muslim kingship.
But we will need to take a further step for our imagined on who may
love the jurists as the indispensable custodians of an
Islamic essence, those jurists whom athma disdainfully describes
as trapped in a confined undertaking.
A first example, we've already cited more than Jeremy recent
scholarship on the so called Timurid renascence, of which he
was certainly a part has demonstrated his normativity in a
hugely urbane, and cosmopolitan, Harat sociality, which united the
assault on will say in bicara, Mala Kashi, that great belletrist
and adore of the El beIt in a way which in gathered Sunday, and she
and the Chagga type poet Alishia never II Mala Jami correspondent
of Sultan Mohammed a 30 and a great hero for Ottoman Grand Mufti
is was another Harat polymath, who wrote a manual of irrigation
techniques, a major grammar text, and the half hour on the seven
thrones of which the Solomon at Uppsala legend forms one part. He
combines the systems of the notch band even Araby, even Cena,
Tarzan, he and Plato. He knows the diversity of the FIP and the four
part harmony of the med hubs. He writes an epic poem on the death
of Alexander the Great and praises the old Persian kings. He is a
nice old man of Islam, and yet, he remains more than a germy staple
of the mother as a syllabus across the Islamic age, Republic of
Letters by versity, hybridity polyphony agglomeration were woven
inseparably into the fabric of Timurid scholarly culture.
Consider another case, this time taken from the Arab universe in
the form of a remarkable new study by Conrad Hersha, who by studying
a medieval Denison catalog has done that demonstrated the
cosmopolitanism of the scholars and patrons associated with Middle
Eastern libraries.
Noting the ironic temper and intellectual curiosity of Syrian
jurists in the 13th century, he writes, this tolerance made it
possible to accept opposing systems of values and norms,
without necessarily insisting on the exclusive truth of one's own
system. intellectual life in these societies was thus less
characterized by the quest for the one and only truth, but rather by
searching for probable and likely answers.
Here's his point is that the polyphony of the culture was
integral to the Urbane jurists understanding of what Islam was.
Another instance is a book to be published later this month by
Fawzia Bora, a former research fellow at the Cambridge Muslim
college. A study of Mamluk historiography demonstrates the
willingness of Muslim scholars to transcend sectarian polemic, and
to seek to offer an accurate and fair minded account of the views
of Muslim others, including the Fatah mid dynasty, who the to
regnant in Egypt and Syria.
Oddly, less decisive is the 2011 monograph by Thomas Bower,
entitled The culture of ambiguity, which is becoming something of a
classic in the field competing, some already claim with Edward
Saeed story but rather problematic manifesto Orientalism
Bala documents the refined and intellectually curious culture of
pre modern folk who inhabited what he termed an ambiguity tolerant
religious space, in which legal and theological options were
multiplex and executes frowned upon zealotry and exclusive
closure.
For instance, considering medieval Islamic acceptance of different
vocalized readings of the Quranic text Bible shows
Have the leading Quran expert of the medieval period eternal jaziri
dies in 1429 understood the Quran textual variations that there are
at as a divine gift. He then contrast this with a modern jurist
Evanoff, a mean, who dies in 2001, who attempted to advocate for a
single authorized version of the text.
Similarly, he explores the Quranic commentary of Alma Waldie, who
does in turn 58, who accepted that the Quranic text could be
interpreted in many diverse ways, and compares this ironic approach
with the same Ibn NorthBay means in systems that only one meaning
can ever be correct.
The shift from an ambiguity tolerant Islam to an ambiguity
intolerant alternative, synchronized with the impact of
modernity, as Muslims sought to combat enemy and scientific
challenges with a simplified and unified truth. You date the
transformation just to the last century and a half, although he
acknowledges that classical Islamic understanding still
prevail among the remaining traditional scholars. Indeed, that
claim is almost a tautology.
In this world of policymaking, enabled or even enforced by a God
who had bestowed complex scriptures, which often seem
difficult to interpret, Muslim intellectuals wondered whether all
possible opinions, if reasonably and sincerely held might somehow
be acceptable to heaven.
One tendency called them ohata propose that only one
interpretation was in fact correct, and have fulfilled
Whitehead they held to be a self evident truth.
Yet for the majority, this view came to be discarded in favor of
the conclusion of another grip style the most on Weber, who
believed that every qualified jurist conclusions were in some
sense, correct and approved by God. So Harris Aditi, who has
studied at the Cambridge Muslim College, as written well on this,
perhaps this served to make a virtue out of necessity, but it
deeply colored pre modern Islamic understanding of societal and
legal norms, and the divine purpose is towards humanity, which
was to flourish in diversity and ongoing debate. In many ways, it
sat well with other ubiquitous tendencies in the culture, such as
the so called command, ethics of Usher ism, which held that moral
truths are not magically intrinsic in the material world, but are
determined by divine speech, which does of course, manifest policymap
speech permits ambiguity, where matter cannot
it also cohabits with Sufi inwardness, which in ways often
convergent with ASHA, right apparatus ism, frequently accepted
the inevitability of diversity in strategies of design of describing
the spiritual path and the design of literature's a typical Sufi
poem ran, our expressions are diverse, but your beauty is one
and all these words point to that same beauty, a barato nashit our
hosts nakawa who don't wear cologne Illa Cal Gemelli you
Shiro.
So imagine if he seeks normativity ought to seek out this learned
culture which tolerates and even rejoices in diversity. Truth is to
be known, but its pathways and expressions are likely to be many.
He or she, for women today increasingly attempt this errand
tree, adding to the confusion of parents must seek the face of the
1000 aspects.
Bearing this in mind, we keep company with our traveler to pick
our way through the wreck landscape of modern madrasa
education.
In some places favored until five years ago by dozens of British
students, the mother assess themselves are ruined in a literal
way. Dozens of UK talab will fondly remember them that had an
effect in Damascus. Now it scholars former diasporic
community, and many are unlikely to see their city and their houses
again. In Iraq. The Imam Azam University once maintained 5000
students at his Qatar rebuilt sub campus in Mosul. In 2013. The
NAWAPA dia drove in, demanded the keys and gave the scholars 24
hours to leave. Then their students tried to continue in
Arabic, over the frontline in Iraqi Kurdistan.
When they visited the trenches, not far away in scenes, perhaps a
little redolent of the First World War, they could hear the margaree
prayers being recited on both sides.
Today, coincides with the Molad whose historically evolved
commemoration began centuries ago in the city of Mosul. But in that
city this evening, those who celebrated huddled secretly in
houses for the zealot mohatta, armed with knives still proud of
the streets after dark, looking for infractions.
Most of Yemen too, is now imploding in fitna civil strife
and invasion.
Libya, where some Westerners trained is now fought over by a
remarkable 93 factions, surely one of the most
complex and fissiparous civil wars in human history. So four major
Arab countries and are academically as well as
economically, politically and spiritually shattered.
But a further disincentive is hard to mistake, not only in the Arab
world but across the Dar Al Islam and this we might call curricula
heteronomy.
While Haluk has reminded us of the structural Gulf, which must
separate Shediac from traditional satanic power, the jurists are
from communities, they are not agents of the ruler, there is no
Caesar or pietism This is the judges law cardies gift, which so
disgusted Vabre and with the mother says It is likewise
occasional satanic walk forgiving, might endow mother says promoting
a particular theology, regarded as politically expedient is almond
milk is the oft cited example, or hand causes first madressa in
Iznik might be another, but no amount of Royal Theatre could
readily dictate what was taught.
Hence the historic role of the mother as a as a bastion of the
people's culture and values against the depredations of power.
In the Mother Teresa, the Muslim moral self was cultivated to speak
freely in the judges chair or the mosque pulpit. The scholars and
their scholarship comprised society's voice and the soul time
could only listen and perhaps tremble. In Muslim society, the
Vox dei was ventriloquist by the Vox Populi, but the soul tans
voice remained just another Muslim voice.
Alex work intends to show the structural incompatibility of
Sharia with the Westphalian order and the nation state and his
argument is persuasive. But his logic may readily be extended to
show that the corporatist post colonial policies of the Muslim
world have also subverted the historics on the insistence on
what we might call academic freedom from state intervention.
Faced with a colonial French manipulation of religious leaders,
what the Pentagon nowadays called religion building, after metal
Bamba had cried, do not kneel before the rulers, and famously
laid his pen next to a French cannon in St. Louis, writing his
great qasida Yeah, that'd be shout it to indicate his confidence in
God support for independent and unbowed scholars who could speak
truth to power and who thought that God's religion ought to side
with the helpless is terrible exile in Gabon, which followed was
a 19th century high please have a very long tradition of scholarly
resistance. A tale which had seen Malik Ibn Anas flogged by one
Ambassade, Commander of the Faithful, who had unsuccessfully
instructed him to change his factor on involuntary divorce.
state actors across the modern Muslim world now actively seek
agency in fact, our production and madrasa curricula often clutching
the fig leaf of counter radicalization.
So in 2010, King Abdullah issued a decree giving the Saudi Council of
Senior Scholars a legal monopoly over fatwa making in his realm.
Independent scholarship there is all but impossible under the
basilisk gaze of this compliant counsel. Salmonella elder was
arrested in September 2017 For upbraiding. This ties on de Klerk,
others have followed into exile or the gulag, the summons of a Caesar
of papers. Clerici insist that the state's boycott of Qatar for
instance is Islamically mandated, the rest is silence.
Moscow Sam assembly and the freedom to preach are also
increasingly circumscribed. The 2016 attempt by Egypt's military
rulers to impose a single Friday Sermon had to be rolled back in
the face of popular and azurite outrage, but the effort may be
repeated. In Morocco, state control of religious curricula is
now ubiquitous, with Imam training centralized in the vast Mohammed
the six Institute in Rabat, whose curriculum is shaped by civil
servants. Hence, all imams are expected to be Malachy Ashley and
Sufi in orientation, as this is thought to support that Islam
shall be the popular religion which has historically been averse
to insurrection. It is the state to which funds the rebuilding of
Morocco is often derelict Sufis hours and notably supports the
Bucha Vichy order with his estimated 2 million members.
Abdullah elap. Austria has written extensively on this in a recent
study.
Welcome to spiritual delusion by the national elite that magazine
is quite recent, under percent the second there have been an
acceptance that Islam shabby would continue to decay and be replaced
by kind of hygienic literalism coming from the Gulf.
In his remarkable article, the reshaping of Moroccan national
identity, Michael Ben Sasse. Don't write this person
The second encourage the penetration of Wahhabism in
mosques and schools to strengthen the religious legitimacy of the
monarchy. The sociologist Mohammed Al IRD analyzed the effects of
this policy on Moroccan young men.
What are the thoughts of love Lauren wonder, turn to distant
Bangladesh, perhaps the land of his ancestors. There has been in
that country since 1979 and madrasa education board a quango,
which has augmented the essentially Deobandi curriculum of
the Alia madrasahs. With what it calls modern subjects, generating
a two track epistemology, in which traditional topoi are largely
undisturbed, with little conceptual interaction with new
subject areas such as science and Bangladesh studies. State surgery
aims at excision and addition rather than subtle metabolic
adjustments, which might allow the new transplants to take. Last
year, the government appointed a committee to review the thick
textbooks and removed the chapter on jihad, despite the protests of
Alia madrasa teachers, that it was necessary for students to be able
to differentiate classical normative teachings on Jihad from
modern Vinod militancy.
In a further intervention, that Awami League government is moving
to take independent, non Alia mother assess the so called Omi
madrasahs. under some form of centralized ideological oversight,
a further government commission is offering to accredit madrasa
degrees in exchange for the acceptance of a new state
curriculum of some kind. The comi madrasahs, which currently educate
an estimated 1.4 million students follow a dose in his army syllabus
which culminates for a few in the dollar, a hadith. This is now to
be recognized as a master's degree. Since this is an entirely
traditional memorization based course luckily, not actually. In
the traditional parlance, very considerable pedagogic and
philosophical emendation will surely be required. The aim
transparently is to reduce and perhaps ultimately eliminate the
fully independent heritage of madrasa learning. If students want
to be employable, they must study an approved curriculum, there is a
risk that ultimately the state will increasingly function as the
Majapahit picking the texts and determining right religion.
The process is happening also in Singapore. Last year again, the
Singapore government formally established an assertive that
recognition board which issues permits to preachers and religious
teachers, and disciplines or retires those whose messages are
deemed unacceptable or who teach without authorization. Such a
permit is required for teaching Islam even to one other person,
unless it be a family member. Overseas speakers if their subject
is Islam must apply for a separate permit supplying the text or at
least the substance of their lecture in advance.
Through such processes that madrasa world is mutating. It
continues its historic function in mediating between power and
parishes, but increasingly represents the former to the
latter not vice versa. Recurrent and thus normative historic
structures are inverted, and religious authority becomes
monopolized, or at least subaltern to the portrait state.
If pre modern Islam was never theocratic, insofar as the
structures of state and religious knowledge were carefully
segregated, but was not secular either, an ironic entailment of
this third world attached ism is a type of illusion of sacred and
profane authority and knowledge production. The culture of
ambiguity is abolished in favor of homogenized religious narratives
deemed favorable to regime survival.
Western pilgrim will not find his holy grail in such establishments.
His government may even tacitly approved the regulation of the
colleges, and the censorship of the learned, thinking that this
forms part of the emerging global security architecture 27 French
imams are now being taught at them hammer the six Academy with many
more to follow their Islam. Their reception of revelation to the
scholarly debates and conscience of centuries, may turn out to be a
composite engineered product influenced by the often clumsy
simplifications and reflexes of government acting in self defense.
Even if students are persuaded that such a product is authentic,
it is likely to incorporate inconsistent manipulations and
asymmetries which cannot settle comfortably as the grounds of a
coherent and credible theology.
If regime survival rather than love of God, and the believers
sways exegetical choices and influences as stiff San Masilela
and are, then fix, as classically understood has come to an end. And
countries with singular religious authorities directed by the ruler,
which penalize independent shapes who teach in the traditional
way of cut their Senate the chain of transmission with all
antecedent Muslim learning.
This process may one day be so universal that students will no
longer even be able to guess how Islamic pedagogy always used to
be.
This applies a photo right to the Saudi universities, which
historically have attracted dozens of British seekers. The Saudis are
a special and controversial case. And at this point before I
proceed, I believe that we need to take a break at this halfway point
on our voyage in order to interrogate some of our familiar
Nexus.
I believe that much current literature and almost all recent
journalism deploys taxonomies which obfuscate and elide? Let me
briefly assess a few of these misnomers so familiar in the media
to explain why I will not be using them in the rest of this
presentation.
Firstly, the term Islamism, almost ubiquitous seems to denote an
ideology which commends the imposition of Islamic legal norms
by the state.
That seems to be the assumption of the contributors to for instance,
the journal current trends in Islamist ideology published by the
right wing Hudson Institute, and yet Morocco whose Monique bears
the key level title Commander of the Faithful, and which states
that it applies a variant of Sharia through the Moodle when a
code is not described as Islamist by most western discussions,
particularly those special leaders who typically infest the so called
security industry, neither even more strikingly, is Saudi Arabia.
Yet Turkey, according to the regnant discourse, is in the grip
of a kind of soft Islamism, despite the fact that President
Erdogan has not enacted a single Sharia law.
Clearly, something very curious is at work in late modernity semantic
Hall of Mirrors, one can only presume that the term Islamist is
deployed as a thin description pejoratively to indicate an agent
of some policy associated with believing Muslims which is
uncongenial to the west. Hence, it seems evident that the term cannot
be used academically unless it is very carefully and probably
unconventionally defined
still still more paradoxical is the category of the jihadist or
the jihadi, used throughout the scholarship by Jews Capelle
bounded Hey Carl, and the rest for a terrorist claiming Muslim
motivation. This and a fortiori the use of jihad as a synonym for
Islamist terror confounds Muslim discourse, which classically would
deploy the term Hiraga reserving jihad for very different military
mechanisms, incorporating strict jus in bello rules for civilian
protection and the rejection of spectacular revenge killings.
I propose Furthermore, at least a partial retirement of the word
tech theory.
After all, tech fear the acceptance that some people are
outside the fold of Islam is a possible procedure in every school
of classical Islam. Imam Al Ghazali famously, attributes
disbelief to some Hellenized Muslim philosophers for their
apparent refusal of the idea that God knows particulars, and will
resurrect humanity for judgment.
The term tech theory then surely joins the list of terms which
confused rather than elucidate and describe.
But because I cannot ignore Saudi educational options, my real focus
in this subsection on the language we use will be the words will be
on the word Wahhabi and Salafi. Both are conventional and
conventional in the scholarly literature. For example, we have
David Dean commons, his book the Wahhabi mission, and role majors
text global Salafism, Islamic new religious movement, which both
appeared in 2009. We also have the very influential article by
Quinton Wiktoria Vic's anatomy of the Salafi movement published in
studies in conflict and terrorism in 2006.
Now it is clear that the adjective of web adjective Wahhabi can in
fact have an academic application simply to denote movements, which
very deliberately traced the inspiration back to the
hermeneutics of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab in the way that Chef A's for
instance attribute themselves to Imam a chef A and B it in
divergent ways.
But the word cellophane, originating from studies on
Salafist themselves also begs a rather central question, since it
implies that Sunday's were not selfies are not followers of the
self, earliest Muslim generations. Yet any investigation of the
methodological manuals of Hanbali Hanafi, Maliki and sherfane
jurisprudence will reveal that all believe in the primacy of the law
and doctrine of the earliest Muslims wherever this can be
reliably established. After all, that's not the azurite creed of
Ibrahima laconic contain the nine for Kulu Hadrian viktiga humans LF
or Kullu, Sharon fib. Tada.
Amen, hello, or good is to be found in following the early
believers. All evil lies in the innovations of late comers.
And yet, as Aaron Spivak has recently reminded us Lacan he was
actually Maliki Sufi. And all these monikers disparaged by
groups nowadays identified with Sophia Olsen, these are correctly
speaking selfies. Insofar as the primacy of the methods of the self
are undisputed. There may possibly be true and false selfies, but all
our selfies nonetheless, they diverse their diversity,
reflecting the diversity of the seller for themselves. Western
accounts are very often failed to note this.
Moreover, self is in the conventional sense, despite so
much of the literature or not adherence of a single method or
approach, fundamentalism is fissiparous. William Shepherd has
documented this admirably showing that interpretations of the way of
the early faithful are legion, earliest long was intensely
diverse and followed. No single heuristic may clash morani And
Omar Abdullah have shown this decisively by looking at the most
ancient Sharia manuscripts.
So I will propose now we have broached the subject of Saudi
colleges to avoid the vague and often pejorative Salafi label and
to hone in on two rival tendencies, perhaps extremes
within that movement, the mud Valley and the neuropathy. The mud
valleys are approximately the group identified by Quintin
Wiktoria VIXX as purest self is a term which once again seems
ambiguous given that everyone mutatis mutandis claims to follow
a pure teaching, they are clearly apolitical and urge obedience to
establish political authority.
The nawada dia, however, are the revolutionaries. Their focus is on
the book No aka the Islam of Ibn Abdul Wahab, a work which was
famously distributed by douche following their capture of muscle.
The short track list of 10 ways in which Muslims cease to be Muslims,
and is a point of reference for militants everyone. For instance,
Abu Omar Al Baghdadi in his book How to heat up the reader to know
woman head unit, which is a Darish instruction manual focus is
preeminently on the no alkynes teachings. So today as Tolkien
Ali, the leading Mufti of Darish, who was trained in Saudi Arabia,
and emphasized the centrality of the know arkad as a kind of
manifesto for modern Islam.
British much no one who visits Saudi campuses and makes inquiries
at the admissions office will already be aware of this tension.
The Saudi agencies tread a narrow bridge over the current
fundamentalist Inferno. One scholar calls them arsonist and
firefighters. And during the dash crisis, Saudi scholars such as a
Sharif al oni, and Adil Kobani, pointed out the genetic links
between the Saudi theology and that of Darish. After all, did not
die she was Saudi textbooks in their schools. The Saudi
authorities even before the Crown Prince is current shift and
undefined, moderate Islam have been editing the curricula in a
generally Madhavi direction.
While this is a polemical and exclusionary reading of Islam, it
is certainly not inclined to terrorism, and Muslims and others
should be clear about this. And it's a two fold problem for
British seekers remains. Materialism is a hard version of
mohatta Islam, ambiguity intolerant, disinclined to affirm
diversity. And the mohatta, we have suggested quite often attract
the suitors of abseil not of Laila.
Secondly, there is the poorly studied phenomenon of conversion
from mechanism to the no Arkadia. A recent study by Michael Walden
Mariam has shown how apolitical Saudi backed schools in Somalia in
the early 1990s, known as the Etihad schools mutated very
suddenly into nurseries for the movement that became known as
Shabaab. Similarly, Boko Haram founder Muhammad Yusuf began his
preaching in Maiduguri with a metabolism he had acquired during
his studies at Medina university, but converted to a no aka the
interpretation
of the cases could be cited. But my purpose in this parenthesis has
been to show just two things firstly, that not all so called
Wahab ism is politically extreme, and secondly, that are sicker
after pre modern Muslim authenticity, after inspecting the
Saudi campuses is rather likely to look elsewhere.
One evident elsewhere is of course, Western universities, some
of which maintain in various forms, programs in what is called
Islamic Studies.
As instability grows in the Middle East, and curriculum are subjected
to regime encroachment, it is likely that our Majnoon will
consider this option more seriously than you might have done
20 years ago. It entails for a western model.
A kind of Hijra within. Not too far away Mother says in a ruined
Dar Al Islam, but to a different habitat, where freedoms are more
actual, and in fact claims to be zealously guarded.
Remember the poem of Abdullah ibn or Harris given refuge from
quotation Ethiopia
called London culinary in Iberia de la hemos Tauheed on be bought
Nima Katana Korean one of Tony in WA jedna Billa to La he was here
atan tune G Menardo li Wallmark 30 While honing
each of God's servants is today pressed hard in Mecca is Vale
defeated, subjected to tribulation. We have found God's
earth to be wide, saving us from humiliation, shame and a basement.
So could it be in a rather strange way that a Hijra from rather than
to the Dar Al Islam, and it's wrecked institutions is now to be
advised. Morocco? Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and elsewhere are after
all, locked into what Seamus Heaney musing on Northern
Irishness called the tight gag of place. That particularities our
intolerably parochial, controversial views as suffocated
by local culture, as well as by regimes.
What can we say about Islamic Studies in the modern Western
Academy and here we use the adjective Western in the
non-geographic sense for one can take nowadays, many courses in
Islam at for instance, the Abu Dhabi campus of New York
University, where every student has to take at least one Islamic
Studies module. This is rather a Distinguished Program it seems
where the ambiguity tolerance of pre modern Islam is recognized.
Hence, one can study text by even Araby Rumi by Dawei Razi. Another
medieval thinkers are typically shut out by fundamentalists and
the diversity of us. The lecturers are mainly non Muslim Americans.
And the approach is rooted in Islamic studies as presented in
American Area Studies Department policy, which seems generally
favored in the Gulf region.
One can take modules usually ignored by madrasa curricula such
as Islamic understanding of disability, for instance, or
Islamic art and architecture. Surely, this is an attractive
alternative.
In the Abu Dhabi syllabus, one sees her modern approaches to the
great theatre drama of Islamic civilization in its diachronic and
synchronic heterogeneity, again threaten the viability of the
adjective Muslim and Islamic themselves.
Anthropologists such as Clifford get delight in interrogating these
markers as relics of an older theological essentialism, and
propose that even Hodgins Islamic eight which we referred to earlier
must be dissected into an endlessly variegated field of
moods and motivations.
In the academy in the academy, while Orientalist departments
sometimes seek to conserve the study of a medieval canon,
historically Ambassade in its focus, as the most proper concern
of Islamist, we note the bewildering and revealing
proliferation of the study of aspects of the Islamic hate, and
an increasing range of arts faculties, including philosophy,
theology, history of science, sociology, politics, and even
English history.
It's not clear whether the idea of Islamic studies can adequately
survive the realization that most Muslims live east of Karachi. And
that post Ambassade intellectual life is more interesting and
orientalists like Krauss just down ever imagine.
Lately Layla here doesn't really exist at all or like the C model
of autonomous conference of the birds. She is in fact found within
a self which projects the object of its quest Islam outside itself
into the world of indefinitely multiple significations.
Still, Islamic studies departments do tend to make claims for some
form of coherence in their discipline.
And for Muslim seekers. One difficult axiom of this has been
the Orientalism. Its roots deep in philology. Vicent Shafi, her
calling politics analysis always insisted on it outside of status.
It's not Muslim.
With Richard Rorty Skyhawks, it swings up above the personal
commitments of ongoing insiders and surveys Islam from the
Olympian detachment of a seminar room
around us still campaigns to maintain the purity of this
ideology and loyalty on campuses, including the new American ones in
the Muslim world. Ken does appear to present a magisterial exegesis
on behalf of an enlightenment Imperium, and this is exacerbated
by the refusal to allow theology or context in such colleges in the
Emirates A land of insiders, outside of discourse is to
monopolize pedagogy, at least in these traditionalist enclaves
of Occidental reason.
Christian theologians are unimpressed by this kind of
positivist totalism.
Listen, for instance, to the critique of Mike Hickton, in his
book, a theology of higher education, for Hickton, assailing
the secular positivistic assumptions of the academy, the
university that they envisage does not actually allow each citizen to
speak on his own behalf if he is not allowed to speak as the member
of the particular positive religious and secular traditions
that have shaped him.
The very structure that the romantic theorists erect in order
to preserve free sociality is one that makes it impossible.
And yet, despite this very paradoxical rule, the Western
Academy has typically internalized a kind of Avarice dual truth on
the nature of religious claims. There are spaces where views from
somewhere are entertained. Orientalism doggedly sticks with a
Kantian and Berlin model. But in America and Europe, if not in
branch campuses in the Gulf, that also tend to the faculties of
theology, or of divinity, which in complex ways, permit religious
traditions, not just to be seen, but to be heard.
These faculties are for historic reasons dominated by Christian
paradigms and the advocacy or exploration of Muslim truths as
truths is still seldom attempted within their walls. But surely
Here we see an opportunity, not some kind of Sallyport for
unscholarly fight ism, but an invigorating broadening of the
episteme.
This possibility of a Muslim theology and modern universities
benefiting from a real culture of academic freedom seems reinforced
by the decline of the old Humboldt in ideology as it withers under
the impact of various styles of deconstruction and social change.
Most recent philosophy is an accessory to the progressive
interrogation, or abolition of the discipline of Islamic studies as
an objective exercise in historiography by the detached
Western self. There are many dealers Ian's who insist on
challenging the Enlightenment assurance without any truth is
bearing fixity and relationship to public reason for this Dillards
would have us think is always a region carved out of the
irrational. Even in the natural sciences, facts are always
attributable to those who advocate them, the truths to which Islamic
or any other studies inclined however, forensic ly supported by
apparatus and annotations of the various kinds required in the
Guild are only cultural facts. And this perhaps accounts for the flux
of thesis and antithesis in intellectual fashions and ideas,
for instance, about the origins of Islam.
Our findings inhabit a metaphysical bubble floating in
the spume of principio chaos, where medieval and auto
enlightenment universities of the Humboldt and type assumed an
orderly physical creation, which philosophy should mirror and
match. The quantum revolution seems to be the ontological ground
of the modern humanities, where movements are never decisive, and
everything oscillates.
The wider Western culture which is the Academy's life support system,
also seems to underpin this. We no longer look to humanities
departments for guidance towards truth. And certainly Muslim
students who think that joining academic Islamic studies will
supply membership of a mandarin aid, which advises state and
society will very quickly be disabused. Recall this sobering
fact, the US government's Middle East portfolio has been handed to
Jared Kushner, a 37 year old estate agent who has never even
been a civil servant. Recent Western politics has probably been
more influenced by Cambridge Analytica than by the University
of Cambridge. There is much on this and more in Zeynep Tufekci,
his excellent book, Twitter and tear gas, Tom Nichols book, The
Death of expertise is also sobering and very timely.
It's not only fundamentalists, but just about everyone now who lives
in knowledge silos. And this is the social context for the
postmodern crumbling of the brave Kantian assurances about universal
autonomous reason, and the possibility of truth being
discerned through the weaving together of the discoveries of a
community of three minds.
Western universities in the eyes of many writers are ruined, hardly
less than the mother says. But there is potential here, useful
energy is generated by the force of the implosion, we find that
theology often claims to be taking a second wind.
Having discussed the internal contradictions of the Kantian
model, Heaton then documents what he sees as the virtual collapse of
the Enlightenment vision of the university as a coherent community
of seekers of the public truth. The pursuit of truth has recently
been set at the margins, either due to the monetizing of the
academy or because of hyper specialization and weak
interdisciplinarity or because of a general postmodern culture in
which
pursuit of truth is dismissed as a fool's errand
for Hickton, fragmented expertise is the coin of such a university
not truth, any strong version of a commitment to truth, strong
enough, that is to guide the university past the lure of
problematic funding sources to drive it beyond fragmentation to
offset the temptations of the purely pragmatic and utilitarian
turns out to flounder, when removed from the water of robust
conceptions of the human good. And so to be among those things bound
eventually to become extinct in the realm of attenuated public
reason.
Stanley Howe of us is further pursued this discussion of the
failure of the Humboldt and Academy to secure the secure the
pursuit of public truths on the basis of a thesis that
universities require a symbiosis with what Alistair McIntyre calls
a learned public.
Universities pursue truth in order to train students in virtuous
service to society. We are told cancer assumption was that this
wider society would naturally exhibit a care for truth, a common
coin in his world. In the 21st century, however, this common coin
has been debased or abolished in favor of other forms of credit for
Rowan Williams. Speaking of the British case, it isn't clear what
the university's paymasters think the university is, therefore, they
only know that they wanted to give value for money.
The Howard was a university able to resist the mystification is
legitimated by the abstractions of our social order will depend on
the people shaped by fundamental practices necessary for truthful
speech. For him, and also for Hickton, the radical decay of a
general public sense of what truth might be underlines the legitimacy
and even the importance of a renewed theological project within
the academy. Zygmunt Bauman is culture of liquid modernity cannot
supply the external measures of the public good, which the
Enlightenment academic schema presumes, for how us the church
contributes by developing a people capable of bearing the burden of
honor and truthfulness of people without which the university as I
conceive its task cannot exist. Heat and further accepts that such
a blood transfusion into a truth starved instrumentalized modern
Academy cannot be a purely Christian perquisite thinkers of
all traditions must offer their own capacities for the production
of virtue and have the incentive to seek truth.
The fact that we are startled or inclined to cynicism when told
that the modern Western University began as a project for the seeking
of public truth reminds us how far we have traveled from that ideal.
In the context of Islamic Studies. However, it should be evident that
the remnants of the VSAN shufti de Alavi which demands that I
participate only as myself and not as for example, as a Marxist or
Christian or an Ashari, and no longer sufficient to suffocate the
plurality of a modern Islamic Studies program or to limit its
future horizons.
We should look then to the promotion of Islamic studies
within divinity schools, not as a replacement or rival to the older
Oriental Studies, but as a necessary and very contemporary
opening up of the epistemic horizon. And in various complex
ways. This is already in progress, the significance of the work of
yeah Hamish short, for instance, at Hartford seminary, who
successfully combines an unmistakable voice from somewhere
with trenchant academic rigor is one case in point. universities
such as Edinburgh, Brandeis and Yale also provide space for Muslim
theologians, the step has been taken.
Muslim intellectuality in the western Academy is already a
salient and influential fact. thinkers like Sherman Jackson, for
instance, enjoy a wide following in the Islamic world. Western
universities are almost certainly better habitats for research and
creative thinking than Eastern institutions. Yet, our Talib is
still seeking an undergraduate theological and theoretical
training, and few Western universities can yet accommodate
that.
Hence, the urgent need for carefully hybridized spaces, which
can benefit from academic freedom and contemporary research methods
while still offering an education which recognizes the curricular
and vocational needs of insider believing students. One of these,
it seems, is the faculty of Islamic studies on the education
City campus in Qatar. Another is the Ibn Khaldoun University in
Istanbul. Neither seek to replicate either a siloed madrasa
thought world or a faculty of Oriental Studies. The Cambridge
Muslim college and Ibrahim college also tried to invigorate Muslim
scholarship by standing at the management of Bahrain. The isthmus
between the two universities of discourse, one result is
necessarily the return of a culture of diversity is intrinsic
to that
authentic and uncompromising Muslim pursuit of truth.
So is this finally Journey's End is our tale of woe to have a happy
ending after all, that remains I think, only in prospect not in
fact for these tender new shoots visibly rising from the ashes left
by fundamentalist or modernist forest fires need careful
nurturing the zeitgeist lost and polarized absolute will not
support them. They must remain free of political interference,
but however tentative maybe their efforts they stand on the horizon.
Not a citizen of brass, certainly, but as refugees for a few and
paradigms of something demonstrable, achievable. Whether
they're students or found their beloved, as they imagined her to
be is for posterity to judge but meeting them and asking them a few
questions may be an unreliable Guide.