Abdal Hakim Murad – Islam & the Population Emergency
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala Rasulillah or early
WASAPI, or Manuela.
So as a bit of kind of light relief after your serious work,
during today's program, I thought I'd offer some rather on academic
and randomly sequence thoughts about
how we might understand what, according to Elon Musk is the
principal threat facing human beings. He says it's not climate
change, it's not all of the terrifying things that his own
scientists are doing. It's not AI. It's not nanotechnology. It's not
nuclear conflict. It's
the collapse in the birth rate.
We used to think of the demographic crisis in terms of
Mother Earth sinking under the weight of all of those babies, but
things recently have taken an unexpected turn in the opposite
direction.
According to Mr. NASCO, he's doing his own bit, he has 11 children, I
think so we can't accuse him of hypocrisy in this particular area.
It's something that we need to think about. And see the
relationship which this aspect of human dysfunction might have to
some of the things that you people have been studying over the last
few days, in the last few months. To what extent is the problem
of reproduction up here somewhere? Oh, we messed up.
Some of you might have
averted their eyes after peeping at the opening ceremony of the
Paris Olympics last weekend.
I think if you watch the full four hours, you'd be in danger of
losing your immortal soul, because just about every one of the seven
deadly sins was gyrating and doing its stuff.
For the benefit of the global audience,
I kind of clung when you're the kind of Cabaret act that you see
later in the evening. And some of those clubs and more Mark has
to do with the fact that
in a secular society, all that remains to us is the physical, the
body. That's all we are. Even those things which the humanists
of the 18th and 19th century thought they could somehow tweezer
out of the clutches of the physical scientists,
consciousness, creativity, the romantic reaction against that
physicalism.
It's all collapsed, we are just the river out of viewed and The
Selfish Gene, the universe is nothing more according to this
dominant civilization, than matter and energy, or both.
So if this is where they are, in the city of the Lumia, the great
city of the first global reflex against religion, the city of D,
their whole revolution conduct, say the conversion of not mme into
a kind of funky temple of reason.
And they now have this to say, that is to say, the Olympics is
kind of the perfect modern festival because it's just about
the body.
Do you think that all of those bodybuilders and beach basketball
players or whatever they are could really hold their own inner
Phyllis philosophy seminar on? Probably not. That's not how
they're trained. It's but it's the body and in a sense, that's a
faithful representation. And it's like a modern pilgrimage, the
pilgrimage to the body.
Which is why the church banded of course in the time of the Emperor
Theodosius, because it was a physicalist fleshly thing that was
also associated with the paganism which Christianity in his day was
busily extirpating.
But in the heart of Paris, itself, France, the eldest daughter of the
church, not to Madame, the martyrdom of St. Denis, San Louis,
all of those major episodes in the evolution of Western Christian
civilization, the place where Thomas Aquinas studied Now all
they can represent is in this festival of athleticism. The body
gyrating, pierced tattooed,
perhaps eccentrically, shaped and gendered. And the combination of
it seemed to be
a kind of what Piers Morgan described as a kind of
but I forget his his his words
As a kind of drag queen inversion of the last topper in the
conventional image of Leonardo, so somehow the Festival of the body
and the functions of the body and the beauty of the body and the
discipline of the athlete, the way to introduce this as this kind of
Cabaret thing.
In the city of St. Denis, that's what remains. And this is why
Nietzsche said, we don't know what we have done by killing God. He
didn't actually say God is dead insofar as he was sure that he
didn't exist. Towards the end of his life he had with me sane life,
he had some very interesting, quasi religious epiphanies. But he
could kind of foretell where we were going, if all that was left
of us is just flesh and blood.
These this spectacular, this amazing thing, which didn't really
seem to signify very much seems to be where we now are.
But what you didn't see in this kind of celebration of slightly
kinky life,
which went on in the rain, for hours, even Kier, Starmer, kind of
got fed up and vanished after the umpteenth display of new
sexualities kind of paraded before him and kind of went off to find
an umbrella or something. It was kind of a bit repetitive and
generally, that sort of founders Yecla ancient Roman orgiastic
Dionysian thing is always pretty predictable. There's a limit to
how many things they can say. If they no longer believe in the
infinite, it's kind of recycling of old tropes, the Emperor Nero
would have been perfectly happy. And of course, one of the key
figures was the god, Dionysus. Naked, blue, not doing anything
particularly meaningful, of course, meaning deficit is what it
all signifies. But this indicates the strangeness and the
unprecedented, not even late Roman, because at least the Romans
had, they had the SU sign in mysteries and Bacchus and Dionysus
was actually the head of her particular kind of cult. Now, it's
just a symbol that symbolizes nothing. What has happened to the
human brain, now that it has been told that it's just another aspect
of physicality, it tends to go down into this cabaret world.
So we ponder the significance of this. But what you didn't see in
this endless series of different human forms, was anything that
related to the principle of life.
If we are physical beings, we are living beings, we are all organic,
with the exception perhaps of the fillings in our teeth,
or those of us who are moving towards the stage where we look
forward to hip replacements and that kind of thing. But basically,
we're, we're, we're organic beings, and we are part of the
normal cyclicity of the organic world.
And key to that, of course, is that cyclically, we reproduce
ourselves. That's the key aspect of our organic nature.
And yet, you didn't see any references to parenting in those
four hours, or to having children or the presence of children. It's
all just single adults, having fun. And the fundamental aspect of
our physicality of our embodied nature was kind of airbrushed out
as kind of middle class suburban bourgeois
parental stuff that is definitely uncool.
So there's something quite emblematic about this paradox of
modern civilization, which on the one hand, says we are only the
organic. And we only have one purpose from Darwin to Jared
Diamond and so forth.
Daniel Dennett, which is to reproduce ourselves because that's
the only purpose of living things everything in every aspect of
their lives and the adaptation to the world is simply there so that
they can reproduce and generate. But now we seem to be at a point
in civilization where we agree that we are only biology. And yet
in terms of the purpose of biology, we're failing.
Children are not there. And increasingly, children are not a
reality of the modern world.
One of the ironic twists of the turn to physicality is that we are
denying the fundamental tell us purpose, direction and of our
physical nature.
And you can tell people this your civilization has failed completely
because you say we are just biology and yet biologically we're
a fail. The species that has a collapsing birth rate is a fail,
according to Darwin, and it all of the others, they usually
like to be told that
and then missionary impulse towards trying to get everybody
else to conform to their ideas of gender and sexuality and the
family and opportunity and equality is undiminished by the
fact that they are heading towards kind of a black hole of
infertility.
Visit a typical British embassy in the Middle East, for instance.
Well, they do a few useful things like replacing your passport if
you lost it and that kind of thing or charging 4000 pounds for a visa
if you're visiting from wherever. But mainly, they seem to do two
things as far as I can see, firstly, they're kind of British
Aerospace dealerships, urging the purchase of new weapons and bombs
and jets and tanks on the local population that seems to be kind
of their main function. And secondly, they have these Ernest
commissars who were trying to encourage local populations, the
backward natives, the Muslims, whatever, to trade up to the west
ideas about gender, sexuality, the family, etc, etc, etc. couched in
terms of rights.
Very odd. So they're dealers in death, on the one hand, and on the
other hand, they're trying to do things with the traditional
structure whereby life is brought into the world.
But they can't think of not doing that, or how colonial they are, in
fact, with their claim that only their universals are true
universals. And the poor old Egyptians and Bangladeshis and
Congolese Causton have real universals, they have to accept
the universals of the West, they can't really accept that.
Because after all, what else do they have? What other message do
they have in their millennial mission to help everybody up the
chain of evolution to become as wonderful as their western selves
without that kind of bereft.
So it's become a very odd situation. And obviously,
something is wrong up here.
Now, there are physiological reasons for the decline in the
birth rates,
which have complex reasons which are poorly understood.
The sperm count in Western countries is going down on average
by 1% a year. Nobody really knows why microplastics hormone
pollution, the loss of male self respect, these are all theories.
Even I saw this one. The habit of keeping powerful mobile telescope
telephones in one's trouser pocket is allegedly a cause of this, but
we don't really know but it's statistically affect testosterone
going down 1% Every year, the traditional hormonal driver of
masculinity, psychic, as well as physiological, it's all dipping
and becomes a kind of crisis issue.
So it looks as if modernity is
what they call non communicable disease.
diseases like cancer, or thrombosis, or diabetes, that you
can't catch from people that in traditional people living in
rainforests or whatever, pretty unusual. People get communicable
diseases in the state of nature, but not, not these modern
diseases. So we can say anything that looks like an epidemic that
is affecting this fundamental aspect of our biological nature
is a kind of sickness, it's a disease. And Jung talked about
this a long time ago, many of you will know a lot more young than I
do. That the characteristic epidemic of modernity is the
meaning deficit.
From ancient times, human beings, and there's cerebral, and our
cultural adaptation has been rooted in the certainty that
everything means something.
You're living in the rainforest in the Upper Paleolithic, and you
know exactly who made what tree and what happens after death. And
what spirit lives it's kind of the world is, is spiritualized and
magical. And the brain is designed for that world to see stuff behind
the surface of things. But now with these first generations in
the 1000s of generations of mankind that doesn't have that any
longer, that suffers from this meaning deficit. Something's going
on up here. Something that seems to be reaching epidemic
proportions, so we can say secularity atheism, if you like,
is a kind of mental illness. That's not a political statement.
It's just how things are because we're not designed for it. We're
designed to find meaning and things whether you accept the kind
of Freudian interpretation of the origin of religion or the
Durkheimian view that it's all about coping with terrifying
forces and seeing that other people are making big sacrifices.
In order to keep the show on the road, these are all strikes me as
rather wild
examples of guesswork, it doesn't really matter. What's normal to
us, is to have belief. And that belief is usually associated with
natural cycles, and particularly the human cycle. Birth, Marriage,
conception, pregnancy, childbirth, death. It's kind of universal
aspects of our embodied biological nature. But now we've kind of
stepped outside that cycle because we can do other stuff. And so we
have what you might call the bio pause.
This is a crisis we met well give it a word. The bio pause seems to
me has two stages by pause one is where humanity malfunctioning
because of this non communicable disease, steps outside the normal
harmony with the other orders of nature,
and becomes a kind of parasitical destructive principle, sometimes
is called the Anthropocene, where we become a kind of virus on the
surface of the planet that that can't live in harmony with other
species, but exist at their expense. Unless of course, you're
a sheep or a pig in of factory farm, or something, which case or
things might be relatively comfortable, but overwhelmingly,
you're guilty of what the Quran would identify as a kind of
genocide. If the Quran says the other species, the birds, and the
animals are all mammon, and fellow con nations like yourselves, and
we know from the prophetic example that we have responsibilities,
moral responsibilities towards other living things, that kind of
people, so we can say, it's a genocide.
So that's bypolls number one. And that's got the world in a panic
because of the loss of biodiversity.
By a pause number two is where it kind of hits us as a species and
where we start to decline, despite the fact that the neoliberal
system which we've evolved with its considerable technical, and
administrative brilliance is exploiting the other biotic orders
of creation in order to make ourselves more comfortable and
live longer have better antibiotics or whatever palliative
care. The fact is, we're not doing this most fundamental thing, which
is having babies.
The reality of this is kind of dawning not just on Elon Musk, but
on everybody.
Last week, I was in Italy with the CMC group, we go there with our
Darrell along graduates, and we explore the wonders of the
Vatican, and they meet trainee priests and so forth a good part
of their training. And people, they're usually very hospitable
and tolerant towards us. But in Italy, the average woman only has
1.2 babies.
This isn't the homeland of the Catholic Church, which is supposed
not to let you use any form of what they call artificial
conception. And so you walk through the streets there. And
it'll everybody's very cool there in the latest kind of chic stuff.
And the shirt seemed to be perfectly pressed even in the
afternoon and nobody's overweight, really, it's kind of cool people
diet is healthy. And yet, you see a lot of closed schools, not many
buggies. Unless it's either tourists from America who do tend
to bring their kid you can see that or
it's the Bangladesh's who go to the catechu mosques, because
Melone has been closing mosques quite busily. And it's kind of
surreptitious, like Christians in ancient Rome, it's kind of in the
catacombs, and hiding, they said, we could say, whatever other
things that are math might be getting wrong. There's at least
one thing that we still know how to do.
Babies proliferating, this has become one of the key neurotic
issues for European politics. On the one hand, they know that the
elites are no longer reproducing. And on the other hand, they can
see that the only solution is immigration, which is political
suicide, and which is changing the entire political landscape across
Europe with LePen almost very nearly getting in last month in
France with a kind of Neo Vichy idea and deputies intention to
have a job ban, etc. The usual Islamophobic rhetoric which is
kind of normalized now. So Europe is really caught in this very
difficult situation. On the one hand, people are too cool now to
want to have families and babies it just gets in the way of living
the life
or their bio puzzle because of certain hormonal or fertility
shifts.
But on the other hand, the only possible solution which is to be
Bringing in young people from overseas that fancy that either
the Italian government has been spending billions trying to get
people to reproduce doesn't seem to work, the rate continues to go
down.
The replacement rate for humanity is 2.1 babies. Mother, the point
one is because there's infant mortality and other risks.
So it has to be slightly above the, the two that's the
replacement rate. But if it's going down to half of that, then
it's a problem. So the Italian province that has the lowest birth
rate is actually Sardinia.
And in inland Sardinia, there's nobody around the whole deserted
villages, maybe with one or two old people who are still hanging
on the young people. If there are young people, they've all gone off
to Frankfurt to flip pizzas or something, but it's kind of
deserted. So the second most common language now in upland
Sardinia is actually Kyrgyz. There's a fun fact for the day.
Why? Because there's nobody around to look after the sheep and do the
stuff that you do in the Italian mountains. And so the Kyrgyz
Embassy in Rome has a nice little number whereby they bring in
caregivers and everybody in Kyrgyzstan knows about goats and
sheep has kind of brought up with it. And so up in the mountains in
Italy, you find Kyrgyz Muslim herders. This is the the
strangeness of the situation that you're now knows that it's facing.
And in the Far East, it's even worse. The country with the lowest
birth rate is Korea at the moment,
which continues to tank into tank into tank.
When in sale the capital, the average woman has on average half
a baby, which is a quarter of what it ought to be.
And the Korean government has spent $200 billion trying to
change that with endless paternity leave and
tax breaks on nappies, doesn't seem to work. There's no political
solution to this. So they're going to have to bring in more
immigrants from Indonesia or the Philippines. And they don't want
that either. But what happens to an economy in that situation?
Well, you have an aging population. In Italy, the average
person is now 48 years old, and it continues to rise, you have more
and more people who need expensive health care and palliative care
and care homes, etc. And fewer and fewer young people to pay the
taxes who are going to support that, and you have an economic
collapse. And already countries like Japan are kind of a bit
weak economically, because
there aren't enough young people to pay for the care for the old.
In China, also really bad.
They're partly because of the one child policy which they had until
about 15 years ago, which really messed up their demographic curve.
But also because as a result of that policy, many parents were
legally or illegally aborting female children, you have 30
million more young men than more young than young women in China,
mass abortion based on gender.
And whatever they say about the Muslim world that generally is not
a statistic that you find you get in India you don't get in
Pakistan, et cetera, is something that we've been able to avoid.
So this is according to Mr. Musk, the number one problem.
And it's become suddenly the number one political problem for
Europe now. And the number one cultural problem because you have
for hours of gyrating, very expensive athletes, turning
cartwheels in the * in various new design forms of humanity. And
everybody says diversity, diversity
is diversity in terms that the elites understand diversity for
the elites means including everything that they think should
be included.
You didn't see any new carbs on trapezes. And that's, that's not
diversity. No.
It's very transparent.
So there's a number of things that ride on this. What is it? What's
the significance of this for the Muslim world? Well, as I said,
Muslims still are able to have children and by and large birth
rates are above the replacement rate across the Islamic world. And
actually, the country that has the highest rate in the world is
actually Nichelle. The average woman in Niger has like 6.5
babies, which is kind of that's the average, which is, I guess,
kind of makes you think.
But out of the six most fertile countries in the world for
actually Muslim, and two are not Muslim, Sub Saharan Africa.
They're still reproducing. So what does it mean when?
By the year 2070 on current
projections,
There will be more people in Nigeria than in the whole of
western Europe. And in Western Europe, it'll be mostly old folks
hobbling around on Zimmer frames helped by Mr. Musk's robots,
maybe, maybe that's the sort of solution, we're looking at
something that is very, very serious. So now dial in the kind
of Islamic interpretation of this.
What we note in
our Scripture is really a focus on the principle of life.
It's one of the most striking things in the Quran, it talks
about the cycles of nature. It talks about the springtime, about
the rain that comes down and brings up life from even the
desert. The paradisal realm is interpreted as an abode of life,
and higher weren't or an even call it Life with a capital L. So in
our timetable for the human story, we come from the Garden of Eden,
perfect life, like a botanic garden. But without the, the moths
that eat to Rosalie perfection, the archetype of of nature.
And we are heading
we hope for the final, pure version of that garden.
And in the interim, there is this rather complicated thing that we
find ourselves in.
So we see the human origin and return Alpha and Omega in terms of
life and life. And the fiery possibility, which is what happens
when we're not really interested in being in a harmonious situation
with ourselves with others with the other gender with nature with
God, that the fire that we kindled in our hearts is a kind of zone of
sterility.
And this is really a very characteristic feature of the or n
and it leads. The French Orientalist Louis Massino has
probably my favorite Christian theorist of Islam, some people say
he converted some people so he didn't this endless legends about
him he died about 60 years ago.
Looking at the core ends focus on nature.
And on the way in which the Muslim life is determined by the cycles
of nature, even when we pray is determined by what the Sun is
doing.
The lunar month is the month that we use which is even the Romans
didn't use the lunar month that goes way back. It's it's archaic
shamanistic primordial, something he calls Islam, the great high
monta the going back up to an ancient style of religion.
Looking at this focus on nature, and this focus on the sun and the
moon, and it's monotheistic, it's not shamanistic, but there's
something ancient about it, which he thinks relates to the fact that
it is the final. He did believe this cycle in Revelation, which is
not just encompassing the monotheistic Abrahamic thing,
mosaic, Jesus, etc. But encompassing all of those nameless
human generations before the wheel before writing when we were just
part of nature, and the buyer pauses and impossibility.
So that's helped us to understand why the man is always talking
about the natural world and the creatures that creep on four legs
and the birds that fly with two wings and being nations like
yourself has nothing like that in the biblical narrative at all,
certainly not in the New Testament. Nature is something
that wishes to draw our attention to,
and wishes us to be attentive to, in stillness, yet have a Corona if
you help me. So my word you will think about the way the heavens
and the earth are created. Have they not seen have they not seen
all of these things? That really invitation to go out into virgin
nature and just not do very much like primordial humanity? They
usually wasn't very busy because of sitting around, picking lice
out of his
wife's hair or something by a stream in the New Guinea
rainforest, whatever it is, they did but they had a lot of time
talking all the time anthropologists a primordial
humanity always talking.
And there is something of that. In this the Hitomi of Islam the
ceiling Enos of it that were taken back not just to the Abrahamic
things with the carbon and hydrogen also to really ancient
times.
And that is part of the prophetic charism as a Nabil or me the unlit
To profit something off him of the seer,
the deliverer of Mantic utterances, the one who is covered
with a mantle, who doesn't do writing and those other things
which Plato saw as being a kind of sign of human decline.
Truly, the man of fitrah and Medina is a kind of reprise of
something really ancient Islam not coming from the Roman or Greek
world, but from something Paleolithic. So Messina was
interested in that as kind of characterizing what sort of
Abrahamic religion Islam is. But an aspect of this is, of course,
that the Quran also talks a lot about women, pregnancy, the fetus,
the embryo, children.
As far as I can see, that's really not very biblical, for whatever
reason, that I may be completely wrong. There may be some wonderful
psalm about the embryo, but can't recall it.
And of course, modern Muslims in their usual apologetic way, say,
Oh, look, this is a miraculous anticipation of 21st century
science, and therefore Islam is true, and they feel a bit less
worried. Not talking about that. We're talking about the fact that
Dr. N wishes to draw our attention to
the seed conception, the womb, a Rahim families, or ham, the wombs,
it doesn't even say family, and it says the womb, that's what
connects us. And to the miracle of birth, and in sort of Meriam the
the dignity and the agony of birth, it's always totally
respectful.
So we need to think about this. Why is this principle of life so
big in our scripture,
in this desert place in Arabia, where you knew we were lucky to
see your acacia tree in the distance every third day, is kind
of Mars like aridity
and particularly the emphasis on human life.
And the insistence that we contemplate it
is obviously quite a beautiful thing.
No pregnancy is in the kind of Olympic thing that would be really
uncool to have a pregnant woman, there are a lot of kind of middle
aged men who look kind of pregnant, but
that's what they said about COVID when they thought that would sort
the birth rate problems. By the end of the lockdown. Everybody
would either be pregnant or look pregnant.
Even that didn't get people
changing their lifestyles. So
yeah, the this the religion, which really respects and venerates and
asks us to respect and venerate, maternity.
And, of course, anybody who has been pregnant or seen it or
studied it knows what an incredible, extraordinary
summation of the human condition this is men don't have with a
relatively sort of comparatively primitive technology, anything
that is so overwhelming.
But there it is, in the Quran, the Jenine the life, the cycles, the
angel comes, brings in the breeds in the spirit SubhanAllah. And
that's a normal human sense of wonder.
That's what makes the little girl when she's two years old, realized
that she was a little girl and how amazing that is that she sees her
mother is pregnant, and then she, one day, I'm going to have a baby
in my tummy, and how that amazing realization kind of like alchemy
changes the way in which she understands herself. It's very
proud thing. And she gets the doll and becomes it gets the doll's
house. And that's just a fact in every human culture. That's her
initiation into the wonder of the prospect of modernity, of
maternity.
So,
this is kind of a little bit obvious. And if you go to
maternity hospitals, you kind of see it.
Generally, hospitals are kind of miserable places where people are
trying not to die, kind of. But maternity hospitals are the
opposite. Where you see the wonder of new life and inherent
unlikeliness of a human being emerging from a single cell from
nothing. It's the Quran that very early verse talks about the Aloka
the alloc
plot of blood, the first Revelation talks about this life
that is within her and then develops into
a human creature for tobacco.
La officinal holophane Let it be God, the aggressive best of
creators and however secular and jaded and cool they are, they can
see that something amazing is happening
on the blocks in the maternity hospital late at night.
I don't know going to get a new newspaper or something because my
wife was being slow and I wanted something to read.
So you can see the women who've just had babies in the middle of
the night, there was one woman who was kind of looking at the baby in
its little plastic crib. And you can see this is the most amazing
thing that had ever happened to her and she was touching it
couldn't believe it.
To BarakAllahu axon or call it pain, it's the most extraordinary
thing that it is a charism a privilege of the female state and
it's like that for
other orders of creation.
Everything that's living apart from plants that have more modest
procedures, but
and that is emphasized very much in the Quran as a signer. So we
need to think about that. In connection with how we deal with
this bio pause.
What we must not do is click on any of the videos of Mischief
Makers of the type of Andrew Tate
which is often a kind of addiction for young Muslim men and is just
poisonous because it's all ego. There he is with his boo Gatti and
all of these teenage girls skimpily clad and that's the
opposite of sunnah anything, certainly not as original modesty,
not the religion of bling. But still some Muslim men who feel
that culture is absolutely negative towards masculinity and
boys have problematized in the schools and their, their natural
buoyancy is crushed, they kind of retaliate by looking at that
stuff.
Which is anything ego is from Farah AL Not for masa, it's fairly
obvious.
So then the question is,
what is the practical implication for us and for human fertility and
for the proper functioning of the brain? Because there's all kinds
of indications that our lifestyle is so far from what we're designed
for that we're really getting sick. And even our children are
getting sick with new allergies, and who's CHD and all of these new
initials, which have gone up fivefold since 2019.
To get a referral in the NHS, for that diagnosis, on average, the
waiting list now is eight years. It's current, the system is
completely collapsing because of these new issues.
Something is really wrong, and we don't know how sustainable it is.
So
the basis here is to take seriously the Quran is insistence
that we are at ease, and peaceful and happy when we are in a state
of Eman. And a man doesn't really mean belief. Belief is a more
superficial thing. I believe that Putin is in the Kremlin. And it's
kind of propositional Eman comes from a very different route which
has the sense of security, a secure awareness of how things
are,
which is what you get if you're in virgin nature for a long time. And
of course, you realized that this stuff comes from somewhere and
that there is the sacred all around you. It's kind of
inescapable. And every primordial people that existed in virgin
niches had that awareness, although sometimes their rituals
their expression of that were not exactly Sharia compliant, but they
all had that awareness.
So how do we get back to that?
In other words, Eman, not as a belief generated by the fact that
there's scientific miracles in the Quran Hurray.
But an Eman generated by the hearts contemplation of the
miraculous and spiritually pregnant if you like, presence of
nature.
And we get back to that when we're living far from nature.
When we're living working in modern hospitals or law firms, and
the only sign of nature is some kind of
indoor plant that's imprisoned in a pot looking a bit oppressed and
sad in the corner. That's all the nature that you'll see.
Well, how do we get back to this world of shuffleboard of
contemplation?
Well, we can do so
Through the face,
through the contemplation of the human other, we are all part of
the natural world and you can walk to the departures at JFK. And
there's not much to inspire the spirit, to put it mildly. There's
other human beings.
If you have traveled with the elderly yet, you'll see that they
are pretty naturally scanning those crowds for spiritual
nourishment. Because it's part of the Divine decree that every human
being every genetic shuffle, if you like, every concatenation of
atoms, every arrangement of the divine qualities in a human being
is different and irreplaceable,
which is pretty amazing. So the wellI, when he sees a human being
believing or non believing, says what is the unique manifestation
of the divine to jelly in this particular form.
So they say led to Chlorophyta, jelly, gold self manifestation is
never repeated. Each one is telling you something.
So in that environment, the elderly are a kind of looking for
spiritual nourishment by seeing the beauty in other people. They
want to see the parents that are looking after their children, they
want to see somebody who's helping somebody with a wheelchair,
whatever, all of those ethical manifestations and just the beauty
and improbable fact of conscious human beings. And that can be a
spiritually healing phenomenon. So this is what we might call shorty
humanism.
Humanism, based not on the fact that oh, well, human beings,
unlike other creatures can build jets and go to the moon and stuff
and therefore we're special and should be respected.
But instead, a humanism based on the reverence for other human
life. Because we know that Allah has created human beings, we have
Sinitta coin, in the best of forms. And there is more to remind
us of and to reflect the divine creative power and the divine
nature in a human being, then in anything else, which is one reason
why in our tradition, we don't like pictures very much.
Because a picture is always an artist's underestimation of the
actual presence of a human being.
The real woman who Manet is painting must have been much more
amazing than just two dimensional image that is there in the Louvre,
or ever. It's a potentially blasphemous underestimation of the
message, the witnessing the sheer hoard that's supplied by the
actual presence of another human being.
So this is again, part of our primordial ality that we consider
the miracle of humanity rather than just rights and
responsibilities and equalities. And the only way in which
modernity can deal with these frail bodies that in or later are
going to be sent off to the, to the crematorium.
But
places for the locusts have an immortal spirit, which does
miraculous and strange things to the face and to behavior and is
endlessly fascinating.
This also seems to me relates to the way in which gender and what
nowadays is called, at least by some feminists, although some of
them don't like the word gender equality,
which very often seems to take the form of, if we change society, and
we change the way men think, can we crush the patriarchy, then 50%
of all parliamentarians will be women and 50% of all jet pilots
and soldiers, and then we'll have equality and there's no justice
without equality seems to be the way they think.
And then, of course, that comes up against and this is where the
Bioforce kicks in the fact that 100% of people who get pregnant
still are women. It's not quite fashionable to say that, but
that's reality.
And then the women might say, well, we want to do other things
as well. And the system does tend to say, well, yes, but the Work
comes first. You have to be equal earners, equal participants in the
rat race or the world of fulfilling job opportunities. And
it can be very oppressive for a lot of women who feel the body
clock and want to be fruitful, and it's deeply rooted. Again, the
life impulses, the most fundamental thing within us, and
they're set up to be they're told to be equal, you have to get your
PhD as soon as the man gets the PhD and blah, blah, and
everybody knows this is kind of a problem.
But it is one of the factors for the collapse in the birth rate.
Not just women, delaying it until they hit the wall and it's too
late because after the
Age of 30 have any got a 5050 chance of conceiving, and very
often they sell the PhD, and then the job, and then the fellowship,
and then and then perhaps I'll fit it in. A recent survey of French
teenagers indicated that motherhood was nowhere amongst the
top 10 things they wanted to do when they were adults. But
eventually they think about it. And it's a real trauma that
modernity, this Neo Liberalist version of feminism has inflicted
on a lot of women who end up being single or being confused or single
mothers or various erotic situations.
Within 15 years, 50% of American women will be living alone.
The birth rate continues to tank
and the Instagram, or social media Cool Culture, even the dating
culture is not really designed to that.
That male female gaze is ultimately about the miracle of
the child. That's what it's for. But if it's just in two dimensions
on Tinder, or whatever, it's just about hooking up the child as
well, that's going to 20 years of expensive uproar isn't hidden,
I'll postpone that. So this can be a very real trauma. And a lot of
Muslim women are caught up innocently in the same thing.
What is interesting is that the kind of manosphere blaming of
women doesn't seem to work very well in the Islamic context.
Because part of the divine wisdom in the Holy Prophet multiple
marriages, is that you can see that there's many ways of being a
Mother of the Believers.
If you'd had just one wife, every woman would have measured herself
against that ideal. And every man would have said, I want to marry
that ideal.
She has to be 27 and from whatever or she's working, she's not
working. She's divorced, not divorced. He has such a wide range
of wives. And if Andrew Tate or whoever comes along and says, or
Vance, America's future vice president possibly says that
Kamala Harris is what a frustrated childless cat lady would have he
called her is pretty horrible.
We don't know her circumstances. And then you look say at see that
now, Aisha, Radi Allahu anhu,
who never had children, and was the beloved of the chosen one. And
who is not going to bow his or her head when they think of Ayesha
Mother of the Believers. So there's blaming, shaming, blaming
of women for materialistic postponing things. Sometimes they
may have their own conversations with themselves. But you can't say
that childlessness diminishes your status as a sign of God and as a
Perfected Human Being, who is going to say, I should kind of
missed out or it's just not, not a possible thing for a believer to
say. So when we say that there is indicative ality in gender of the
Divine, which is true, and particularly in the female, if you
follow Ibn Arabi. He says, The greatest manifestation of the
divine qualities in this creative world is actually the beauty of
women, which is the meaning of the Holy Prophet saying, three things
are made beloved to me, one of them is women.
That means women, not just women who've biologically succeeded in
perpetuating their and their husband's genetic material. It it
is the female estate generally, because that's part of his hobby,
but made beloved to me. And that seems to be very important.
Often in some traditional Muslim cultures, where they blame women
who don't have children, or in the kind of modern manosphere, where
they blame women for not whatever it might be. Nonetheless, that
doesn't mean
that
there is not a particular charism that attaches to the miracle of
conception, the womb, pregnancy, motherhood, all of these unique
things that the Qur'an venerates that's a particular thing, but
isn't, that's an eminence, but not to be in that is not a sign of
inadequacy because you have the Mothers of the Believers who are
Mothers of the Believers as module or murder.
So that's a very interesting aspect of of Islam.
Similarly, the idea of the departure from the primal garden,
which in the Western tradition is overwhelmingly blamed on Eve and
concupiscent
If that's not there in the Quran
for as a Lahoma Ushaped, on the shaytaan calls them both to slip
doesn't say sin, but Accra, Jehovah, me, Mirko Nephi, and
cause them to depart from that in which they were
pretty important.
In the Jansenist movement, in French Catholicism, there was a
special prayer which a woman was supposed to say, while giving
birth, saying this is the curse that is rightly inflicted upon the
daughters of Eve, which is a kind of depressing thought when you're
in that state.
And our tradition really doesn't do that. There's so much about the
gender thing in Islam that is subtle, it's not feministic in the
contemporary sense, which seems to be at least partly complicit in
the Bible pause.
But it's,
it really is respectful of the mother of the female estate.
And so, yeah, as we as a kind of confused and divided Alma, look
upon this modern predicament and see the many aspects of this non
communicable disease, which flow from childlessness and from family
lessness. So that
there's a global loneliness epidemic now
15% of young people in England say they don't have any friends.
And that percentage keeps going up with all of the kind of Insell
strangeness that that seems to be triggering anxiety, depression.
In the case of women, body image, questions, cutting, and certain
things that people do to their bodies that seem to indicate a
kind of enmity towards them tattooing, a skin *, as they
call it. You go to the dentist, as I did recently, and there's the
hygienist.
And
she's young, but there's a kind of huge black spider on one arm, and
then there's a Death's Head on another and she's this blonde girl
from somewhere. What is this kind of demonic imagery white? What is
it in her psyche that makes it appropriate to do that, to her
skin, that something indicates a profound dissatisfaction with her
with her own being in her own body. All of these tragedies are
likely to get worse and many of you guys probably see their
manifestations among non Muslims and among Muslims, because we're
out of kilter with the way our species is designed to be.
So the take home is that we need to see Islam in its retrieval of
primordial ality, as a therapy in itself, not just as a lifestyle
option.
But as a therapy, that the prayer the fast all of these things are
profoundly wise ways of reconnecting with what human
beings have always done. A life determined by the sun and the
moon, a life determined by peaceful engagement with nature,
or life determined by family life, by parenthood by Grand parenthood,
for by the traditional functions of humanity, because these are the
achievable accomplishments which historically bring happiness to
human beings. None of that was on display in Paris.
Everything else, people with I think fake smiles, desperation in
the society that claims that we are only bodies, and then fails to
deliver on the most fundamental functionality of the body. So
where will this lead we don't know but probably to some very
fundamental global reductions and inequalities. We can't really
imagine it but Muslims just need to stay. Stay cool and not to
panic, the panic in the OMA which is the basis for extremism and
stupid
egotistic choices of whatever is narrow in every situation of the
real threat to the OMA, we just need to chill a little bit. Relax,
be forgiving.
Maybe CMC will have a bumper sticker for you next year. Make
Love Not jihad.
We don't really have the courage for that. But in short, a lot you
know things
will work themselves out because Allah subhanaw taala is with his
Alma. All we need to do is be normal human beings. Believe fast
prey, love our parents love our children do kind of obvious things
and Stop panicking and Insha Allah,
we can look forward to a brighter
future and will be at ease with with ourselves
BarakAllahu Li Gong will IFOAM income Salam aleikum wa
rahmatullah.