Abdal Hakim Murad – Ivan Aguli Paradigms of Leadership
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AI: Transcript ©
Bismillahi Rahmani Raheem. So welcome to what I think is the
21st episode in our ongoing series entitled paradigms of leadership,
in which we look at various strategies by which Muslim men and
women across the continents and down the Muslim centuries have
been exemplary.
And you may have noticed that I've also been focusing quite a bit on
our European and British Muslim stories which are in the nature of
things compared to the larger history of the OMA might seem a
little bit on the edge. So last time, we were looking at truth
Bullock, I do think they're important, actual lessons for our
reality to deal with some up to date people who are part of the
Islam known as groundwater Islam. You can divide Muslims in Europe
into groundwater, Muslims and rainwater, Muslims, rainwater,
Muslims are those who like to pure rain come from overseas, which is
the majority in Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Most Muslims have
been there for 1000 years, effects along came to Russia before
Christianity did. The rhetoric that is quite different. And then
the groundwater Muslims are the Muslims who are simply brought out
of the earth simply by the beauty of Islam and the attractions of
Tawheed. And these two different stories in our communities in
Western Europe, and now, as would be expected, interacting into
marrying, becoming a single Western Muslim reality. So, if we
look at the story of British Islam, we find if we look at
groundwater Islam,
it goes way back, and it's an important thing to tell our
children. Certainly British schools are not going to teach the
history of Islam in Britain, when they do history. You're lucky if
you get the Holocaust and the causes of the First World War. And
that's it. But it's a very interesting history. And it's
important to ground ourselves here in that history going back, at
least as far as Robert of St. Albans,
who died in 1187, who was the famous English Crusader Knight, he
was one of the Knights Templars, who converted to Islam, and
critically played a role as a squadron leader, during Salah had
Dean's battle of has been one of the most important battles in
Islamic history and also in world history. It's nice to think that
British Muslim history begins with that act of heroism, that amazing
battle when the Muslims set fire to the dry grass around the
Crusaders already thirsty. And behind the smoke and the flames
the thirsty crusaders could hear the vicar of the Muslim armies.
And then the extraordinary battle that was such a blow to crusaders
that when the Pope Urban the third heard the news, he actually died
of shock, and a heart attack or something he was put open. The
third was a keen advocate of the crusading principle. So I history
goes back at least as far as that.
But we also think of people like Jack Ward dies in 1622, one of
many Muslims who ended up with the Ottomans or sort of with Muslim
principalities in North Africa. known in Europe as a pirate, he
became use of race. And a lot of Muslims or non Muslims especially
quite surprised when BBC history did a documentary at the time of
the Pirates of the Caribbean craves and discover that actually,
the original Jack Sparrow was actually Jack Ward, and was a
Muslim.
So it's important we know these things, tell our kids so that they
have a sense of ownership of the Muslim history and Western Muslim
identity. And then another of my famous characters and really I
could do a paradigm lecture about all of these they will have
extraordinary stories. It is such a great history.
Thomas Keith
dies in 1815. He is from Scotland, after various adventures ends up
converting to Islam and becoming a member of the Ottoman military.
And under Tosin Pasha. This is the battle between the Ottoman
philosopher and the first we're happy rebellion.
And Thomas Keith converted to Islam and actually becomes the
governor of the Whaley of Medina is of course a great honor.
Possibly the only British person ever to be a governor of either of
the holy cities and plays a significant role in in dealing
with the Wahhabi rebellion, and eventually unfortunately, he is
caught in an ambush and what habits kill him and so I guess he
becomes a shahid so it's such an amazing history, the history of
groundwater Islam, and I don't think we need to make any
apologies for dealing with some of those
Just an England Of course, Abdullah Quilliam, whom we take to
be the founder of British Islam as it is today, founded with the
first active mosque in the UK, etc, born 1856 and shot and I will
do an episode about him. His story, again is another
extraordinary story. Almost
by definition, these are unusual, strong, nonconformist
personalities. But that the personality I want to focus on
today as an example of a sort of leadership, which you might say is
cultural, and spiritual are kind of SAP essential or wisdom based
leadership.
Although he was never in charge of anything, and had no books
published in his lifetime,
is somebody called Yvonne or gwili.
1869 to 1917.
Even gwili
Until recently wasn't known very much.
At least outside Sweden, in Sweden, his famous as an artist.
The Swedish post office puts his face or his paintings, on postage
stamps. And there's an ugly Museum in Salah, which is the town where
he was born in central Sweden, so known as one of 19th century,
early 20th century, Sweden's four or five major artists, post
impressionist artists. And there's been a dim recollection of the
fact that he was also an active Muslim, but that side of his
personality has always been a little bit marginalized.
But really a very interesting individual and one, whom I wish to
spend some time on today, not least, because the 100 and 50th
anniversary of his birth, recently triggered a revival of academic
interest in a gwili. So this seems to be a good time to kind of try
and make him a little bit better known and a little bit
less in the shadows. So
those who have written to try and flag up the Muslim list of the man
and to dig is often quite obscure story. Letters, stuck in the
bibliotech Nasional in Paris and the Swedish National Library and
not really touched for 100 years.
And that was really the way he wanted it because he was very much
somebody who hated the limelight.
But
in 1981, a novel was written about him, which kind of made him a
little bit more of a real life character, rather than than just a
name attached to some, some nice pictures. And this is a novel by
somebody called Turabian sufferer, who is quite a well known Swedish
cultural figure. He was head of the Swedish National Film school
for a while, has written a number of books about boxing,
studied philosophy, and so forth. And during the course of writing
this book, and the book is entitled even a gwili a novel
about freedom. And that's going to be an important principle that I
do a freedom.
sufferer, who had the long been involved with the anarchist
movement in Sweden, actually converted to Islam.
And since then, has been one of the recognized figures in Swedish
Islam. Using the name Ali Toba, he writes in minaret, which is the
journal of the Swedish Islamic Academy in in Stockholm and is
author of some some reputable books, but coming into Islam from
this
rather startling anarchist direction. So that
triggers an interest, even though it's a kind of romanticized and
novel type version of his life. And then, as I say, following the
anniversary in 2019, some academic can conventions and publications,
the one in the middle here, edited by Mark Sedgwick, who is the
expert really on
the lineages of certain European assaulter isms in the early 20th
century in particular,
many of which claim or tacitly acknowledged that Gwalia stands as
one of the founding figures
held a conference in which a number of scholars have written
and it's been published under the title anarchist artists, Sufi the
politics, painting and esotericism of events actually edited by Mark
Sedgwick, and Alas, it's one of those tiresome, academic tomes
which cost about 70 pounds. So even though it's a really
Amazing story.
Not many people are going to learn about it. Great example of
something being buried.
Academic Publishers tend not to know good thing when they see it.
And the third thing which is much more accessible
is this book, even our gwili sensation of eternity selected
writings, translated and edited by Oliver fatos
is one of two books that he's written in order to try and
disinter ugly legacy for people in Europe.
And essentially what he has done has been to look up old letters,
articles, and now really very hard to find obscure, esoteric,
modernist Freemason journals and odd things as we'll see as we go
through today's journey in order to produce what ughelli In his
lifetime never produced, which is a book and this is actually
inexpensive and I would recommend
that,
that people buy this book because even though he's writing so long
ago, there's like 130 years ago when European Islam was kind of
unimaginable is what really one of the pioneers that there are some
things that he really gets right that are immediately relevant to
our situation and haven't really aged at all. And as we'll see, he
is the first to come to some of the terms and the concepts which
are now our bread and butter so
yep, sensation of eternity worth investing in. So the bio data
he was born in this little town Sala central Sweden 24th of May
18 69.
And his father is a vet, Johan, and his mother Anna is from a
farming family.
The father is super strict, kind of Tiger father, highly
aspirational for his son, who seemed very disappointing, he
didn't really do very well at school.
Also, the kind of father who wants his son to do well economically
disapproves of the young
Argolis interest in art, that donate money out of art. This is
something that that continues today. So he sent his son to a
technical college in Stockholm, okay, he can't get his exams,
right, but at least he can study something and make something of
himself.
In Stockholm, he reads very, very, very extensively, including some
other sort of fashionable thinkers of the late 19th century,
particularly those who express a disillusion. With the progress of
post enlightenment and industrial Western society. It's anime, it's
urban blight. It's industrialism. its distance from nature's
distance from the Spirit and His nature. Ibsen Strindberg is in
that kind of world. But his key inspiration in the early period
that really important to understand this is Swedenborg.
One of the strangest and in many ways crankiest inspired
Protestants of the 18th century, dies in 1772. Known in some
circles today, primarily as a scientist, it seems that he was
the first one to come up with the concept of the neuron, he was
interested in the brain at its functions did some serious work,
but mainly experienced various, what he took to the inspirational
moments in his life. That led him on from a kind of Lutheranism,
Lutheranism into sort of Reformed Lutheranism, following a series of
dreams and strange visitations. Part of which was that there is a
complex set of symbiotic correspondences between the form
of things and the meaning of things. In other words, between
the material and the spiritual worlds. This is a common theme
amongst some of the late Protestant mystics that they don't
like the
the Cartesian separation between mind and stuff, and they don't
like similarly, the idea that the world is somehow fallen and
dreadful. And you can only see vague sparks of the divine in it,
whereas God to some kind of transcendent being in another in
another environment. He rejects the orthodox doctrine of the
Trinity,
which he points out isn't there amongst the earliest Christians.
It's not in the Apostles Creed, but it is present in the Nicene
Creed. So he believes in what we're called to her if
Christianity represents a distortion of its original
teachings. He denies the atonement because he doesn't think
that a perfect God is incapable of forgiving human beings without a
price being paid.
So really very marginal. This is kind of the radical wing of
Protestantism is influenced by some people who were involved in
complex ways. And it's hard to trace this by some sub Islamic
currents in the radical English reformation. John Toland spoke
Christianity not mysterious. And he was also in London during the
trial of somebody called William Whiston, who was Professor
Lucasian professor of mathematics in Cambridge was Isaac, Newton's
successor. Newton himself had been convinced of the falsity of the
Trinity. and Western similarly denied it, but made the mistake of
actually talking about it. So he was sacked from his professorship
in Cambridge and face to heresy trial. And Swedenborg was in
London during that period. And there is an interesting question
that probably can't be answered as to the extent to which this kind
of strongly Unitarian spiritualization of Christianity,
that happens in these late reformation circles, oh, some kind
of triggering to Sufi influences. We know that Western Red hive and
Jaco Zan which have been translated here in Cambridge, and
there is something going on that Quakers as well.
But in any case, this kind of unity of view of existence, and
this benign idea of a creator who couldn't possibly want a blood
atonement,
a God of compassion and mercy, who transcended any triune or any
other differentiation
has attracted the attention of quite a number of people in
Islamic studies have pointed to convergences between Swedenborg
and even Arabic
or they call them suddenly noted that so did Annemarie Schimmel. In
any case.
This is
Swedenborg is from Sweden and buried in Uppsala cathedral. And
this is the kind of spiritual nourishment which the Iguala is
receiving. And indeed, his mother is very distantly related to
Swedenborg. So when he goes to Stockholm to do this dreary
technical college thing, actually goes to the house of a Lutheran
pastor friend who has become a Swedenborg. In there is even
today, a separate church, the Swedenborg in church was quite
small. But mainly what he wants to do is to paint.
Now, the painting world in Stockholm at the time as an
England is divided between traditional academicians with a
formal Tableau on the set piece, allegorical statements of
mythological or Christian scenes, and avant garde painters. And
even when he's still a teenager, there's a number of senior artists
and stock on who really think that he has talent, and they like his
work. So finally, when his father sees that he's just intoxicated by
this painting thing, his father gives him permission to stop his
technical training and to go to Paris, the center of this modern
movement, in order to study painting. So in 1890, he goes to
Paris and this is going to be one of the key events of his life. And
in Paris, he studies not at the kind of official Academy with its
traditional, rather pompous, posed type of art, but another place
called The Academy Giulia.
Interestingly, that's the place where 20 years earlier at end
neighborhood studied that Yandina further as Muslims were interested
in those things, also converted to Islam becomes Nasiriyah. Dina did
some famous paintings of the Hajj, which are interesting
documentaries of of that time, he moved to Algeria lived in Posada,
but quite quite different.
So the Academy's Giulia is more modern, they accept female
students did it have exams or prizes, it's more creative, more
organic, more of a commune really. Now at this stage at night is
painting has already moved beyond sort of Impressionist stage. This
is the age of the post impressionist at the age of Goga.
And interestingly, quite a lot of the painters are really interested
in matters of the spirit. It's important to understand this
because there's a certain certain secular bias in modernity as
history of itself. That assumes that all of these great artists
like Matisse and Suzanne, all kinds of happy atheists,
deconstructing everything is not the case at all. Most of them were
actively involved in some kind of spiritual search, but not for
church Christianity, but for something which they took to be
more spiritual, sometimes near platonic. And much of the art of
the Impressionist and post impressionist can be understood as
an attempt to bring to the surface certain patterns of form, color,
light which in
impinge directly upon the soul without the distraction of tous,
we're, as we will put it, that attempt almost photographically to
make an image of the surface of what is there, they're trying to
look at the bottom of what is there. So,
we find in a gwili.
Saying things like this, you must cultivate more exalted aspects of
the soul
is necessarily going to become a mystic learning that love is the
origin of all understanding. This the kind of thing that most of the
post Impressionists would have regarded as normal.
So here's Cezanne, who was actually his friend, when I judge
art, I take my painting and set it beside a god made object like a
tree or a flower, if there was a clash, it is not art. And again,
he's not trying to produce a photographic replica of the
surface of things. He's talking about what God intends by those
things, the button that is a Tarik of those things. So this is to do
with a certain reaction in France, certainly against the sternness of
Catholicism, the rededication of the country to the Sacred Heart
following the defeat at the hands of the Prussians, the trauma of
the commune, a kind of really conservative monarchical,
revanchist to Catholicism, that is hard on the body. If you're going
to be part of the serious spiritual elite, you have to be
celibate. And that also regards Nietzsche in an almost Jansenist
way as a kind of fallen thing that one has to transcend. And these
artists, were reacting very strongly against that.
And we're looking for the Socratic putty that was in things rather
than the circularity that is on the other side of things.
So
many people at the same time thought, in order to find this, we
have to avoid the cold, industrialized, de spiritualized
environment of the north and go to brighter, warmer, more colorful
places, where body, mind and spirit are still in harmony. This
is why Matisse goes to Morocco does some of his most luminous and
amazing paintings, including some of the mosques and Islamic scenes,
in Morocco, which he really loved.
Gorgon Of course, goes to Tahiti, even further, looking for this
kind of almost Neolithic Eden, where body mind and spirit are
still not alienated from each other. And there is the tradition
of Orientalist art but that is, for the most part, even though the
spirit quite classicizing and not really part of this, this new
movement. So it really is, it knows Gogan and he knows Cezanne
and these people but his particular friend is somebody
called Emil Bev now,
who is one of the leading post Impressionists is also based
mainly at the Academy Julian, and they'll not made a visit to Egypt,
which really changed him. In Egypt, he saw a land of spirit, a
land of sensual spirituality, a land of bright light, a land of
limitless horizons and also a land which compared to the highly
legislated societies of Europe seem to be an act of freedom. And
he invents the famous class on a technique which is using some
paintings of that period, color blobs are separated by black lines
that essentially is from from him, and he seeks his primordial
simplicity, actually in France and with the Brit on peasantry
that becomes his major focus. This is where we can seek some kind of
reintegration of spirit and nature and, and matter and mortality.
Now, though, definitely a Christian while a believer in God,
sort of a Christian, but like a lot of these people really
interested in eastern wisdom and used to go to a theosophical
launch school, the Anantha which was in Paris, theosophy had
already been popular amongst the Swedish intelligencia actually
certainly knew about it. Strindberg had been interested in
it members of the Swedish Royal Family,
often seen though as a kind of middle class, upper middle class
aristocratic sort of elitist club for either Tarik, dabblers, but
suddenly influential on modern art. So people like Malevich,
Mondrian, Kandinsky, explicitly or implicitly influenced by theosophy
not really good to dislodge but the main subject of his interest
in the conversations, which go on there seem to be Swedenborg but
also Islam. How to figure out when the interest in Islam begins
Since but you have to remember in those times, the colonial times
though racist times they're strongly social Darwinian times,
but there isn't sort of 911 Taliban and the popular idea of
Islam as necessarily a barbarian. Other it's Islamophobic
environment but somewhat different particularly in in mocks these
avant garde slightly hippie ish people drinking Absinthe and
looking for alternatives to official discourse, discourses. So
Goga is part of the same circle.
And it was actually Boughner, who introduces a Gwalia to Google.
Google quite characteristic and in some ways, they're Kindred,
kindred spirits, even though Golgo made various odd claims about
himself. He thought that he was originally from South America and
was actually an inker savage. He had nothing to do with the
flatness of modernity.
And, of course, a dissolute person who ends up dying of the
consequences of tertiary syphilis, strongly anti clerical, he hates
the priests.
And his great painting, which she finished, just before his sort of
death sort of suicide. Has the words in it, where do we come
from? What are we, where are we going?
And going, and what's the kind of blue Idol or statue in it, which
he thought signifies the beyond?
Well, doesn't actually tell us an awful lot.
He seems to have been interested like many by Indic imagery, but
for him, and for those who are interested in Indic Traditions,
there isn't a final resolution of the questions, because everything
is about rebirth. The decisive is indefinitely deferred.
So
that's one of Google's images of
time Tahiti.
Suppose it Polynesian paradise. So I gladly says, Go Go went to
Tahiti mainly to re immerse himself in the primitive world of
simple feelings.
There is in critics failed to understand that his journey was
more shift in time than in space. In other words, what he was
looking for, was not
a far place where there was still Eden, but was a kind of journey
and time looking for a togetherness and intactness of
human life, which had been torn asunder by the enlightenment by
Catholicism and by,
by modernity by industrialization, so who's kind of a time traveler,
looking for some prelapsarian utopia.
And as we'll see, as well, this movement is really quite
different. actually goes back to Sweden. And he has his first
productive season of painting the summers of 1891 and 1892. When his
in Gotland, which is this big island off the coast of Sweden,
very picturesque, borrows books from the Swedish National Library,
we have some indication of what he was reading.
He borrowed the Quran
but also borrowed the Philip du mal the famous poems of Buddha,
LAO,
which are, I suppose,
a lyrical, slightly pessimistic declaration of the idea that body
and soul cannot be separated and that spirituality comes through
the body, rather than throwing to try to transcend it. And of
course, may or may, monogamy is part of that world, monogamy also
seems to have converted to Islam very much in the same, same vein.
Now
if you want some kind of generalization as to what his
paintings are saying about his spiritual journey at this time,
you can always read too much into a painting, I think, and it's best
not to over analyze them. But if you look at these fairly typical
images from Cezanne.
Critics often point out that says Dan likes to have something in the
foreground that indicates our apartness from the nature that he
is quite sumptuously, but with these quite earthy colors
depicting so here you can see that, of course, the human
instinct is to want to walk into a landscape but you can't easily in
these cases, because there's something in the way.
So this isn't here is saying that we are somehow detached from the
world from nature. There's a sky above it was some fluffy province
of clouds, but it's clearly not what the subject is about.
The big contrast between Suzanne
And he's contemporary, actually, if we start to look at well, his
pictures now is
really quite different. This is from his first productive period
in Scotland.
What's going on here? Well, you notice immediately that the human
instinct when confronted with the landscape to see how one could get
into it is facilitated by the fact that well, it's deliberately
painted to show that yes, you could walk well into it, there's
nothing to obstruct, you're reaching really the far horizon,
the world nature is inviting you to come into it.
Now, normally, in Scandinavian painting, it's the the Nordic
Light, the famous, rather
pagan, perhaps luminosity of a sky where the light is made, diffuse,
but also quite enchanted by the nature of the sky, the horizon,
the mist, the frequent darkness, often that Nordic Light makes us
want to look at what is close to us, but actually very often gives
us blue skies and a far horizon. And this is what he comes to
describe as a monotheist landscape.
I mean by that monotheist art, really, it is the sky that
determines things, there'll be a symbol of transcendence.
And where you see the sky, you see something that unlike the living
Earth is not in a state of cycles that will come and go, but you see
something that is of the eternal.
And this, again, is the kind of perspective that makes people like
oh my god about want to draw parallels between Swedenborg and
Ibn Araby, that there is in our contemplation of the world, an
intuition of a transcendence that is unitary and unchanging.
The colors often do seem to come from from Swedenborg, gold,
yellow, white, signifying God virtue and so forth.
But these layers, guys are important. Because if you look at
that picture,
and you look at the sky, and you're not quite sure whether it's
the landscape, or the sky that is really being depicted, that big
yellow thing doesn't actually look like anything you might see in the
real world. It's a huge yellow blob, what is it couldn't really
be a cloud, it couldn't be a mountain. It's an oddity, that
there's a strong principle of abstraction here, which is about
the divine eternity, I think, and the divine imminence, and where
the layers are no longer as with Suzanne, kind of on the earth, but
the layers are, as the Sufis would say, Marathi degrees of being the
idea of the heavens as being stratified.
There's also something in these pictures that is, we might call it
an eternal seduction, there is an invitation to enter the world that
the beauty of the world is there to be. It's a kind of Edenic idea,
you can imagine fruits on those trees. Again, Buddha, Lao seems to
come into it. So
here are some more cases.
This is
another landscape in Sweden, and again, really, it's called
landscape. But it's the sky that is really significant here. And
you can see these layers that somehow parallel layers on earth.
You can see there's a horizon and presumably some trees in the
backdrop, but everything is is Marathi. And then this famous
image
of I think this is in the
Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, and one of his most famous
paintings on postage stamps and so forth view of Stockholm at 92.
Seems quite advanced, you think almost of the surrealists. It's a
kind of one of those dark to Curico urban landscapes.
No human beings though, and hardly any windows, but it invites you
into it. There's the pavement, it has come. Maybe over the horizon,
there'll be something a little less depressing, waiting for you.
So it's a kind of Strindberg, Gibson urban annual me something
is wrong. But then look at the sky again. What on earth are those
blobs? Like great big whales in the sky?
Is that mountains Well, not if you're in Stockholm, clouds, but
very strangely colored and shaped clouds. So again, the idea is
there is a mystery whose emblem is the Physical Sky
I'm
here again, you can see these
extraordinarily unlikely
images of
landscapes here made sort of much more abstracted, slightly, while
very, very active, there's a lot of movement in them, you could
imagine there's a storm going on, perhaps, but above you have these,
again, very unrealistic and improbable, strange gradations of
the gold with the blue above that, and when you probably expect
something a bit different.
Here again, another painting from this period 1892. Again, you can
see how easy it would be just to wander into that landscape. But
then what is that weird golden thing behind it couldn't possibly
be painted from nature, it's some other thing.
So
here is how ugly later described his inspiration from Cezanne.
And he became quite a prolific writer on artistic criticism. One
cannot copy says, only follow his path. This involves firstly
telling the truth and the truth alone.
In other words, don't paint just the boring mechanical image that
is the surface of things but the reality of things the truth,
secondly, disciplining oneself so that one cannot tell a single lie.
This discipline is simpler than namely, the desire to express the
subtlest emotions, with the most unprocessed and compact material.
And one can see how this can converge with Islamic conceptions
of art, which are about nature,
but are about what lies behind the surface of nature, not simple
pictures of men and women doing stuff. That's what children do at
school, but something more profound, which is in the case of
Islam, which is largely a geographic do a largely
geometrical art, to see the structures, the symmetries, the
mathematics, the geometry that underlies the apparent chaos of
the rough surface of things.
Now
a goalie in Paris, continued an interest that had been triggered
already in radical circles in Stockholm, which is that he's
associating quite consistently with people who want political
change. So he becomes an out and out. anarchist is one of the most
famous paintings of a gwili by his friend of saga. Nelson, I think
this is also the Swedish National Gallery, and probably the best
known picture of him.
time you look at this picture, well, that what is being said
about his personality by his friend at this period, quite a
lot. You can see there's an odd arch in the backdrop, which
suggests almost that it's part of the trip Tich, suggesting that
here we're looking at a saint, perhaps pre wrap lights might have
done something like that. You have the post impressionist parallel
brushstrokes, everything leading really to that face, which looks
really gaunt and obsessively thoughtful. But the center of the
painting really is the hand, isn't it?
It's a painting about the hand, indicating presumably that Gwalia
is here being presented as a man of action, not just a thinker, but
a man of action. And in his hand, you have that very extraordinary
thing, a kind of orange rectangle, which probably represents his tie,
but looks more like a kind of dagger that is drawing or some
fiery thing with which is proposing to change the world. And
it becomes quite prominent in anarchist circles. He did go to
London, it seems and he met Kropotkin, who was the famous
Russian prince who escaped dramatically
becomes after the Kooning, the leader of anarchism worldwide.
And we can easily deconstruct this, I suppose, as an urge for
freedom caused by his strict upbringing. That would be the
first place to go if we want to understand this, plus the strongly
anti clerical dimension of Swedenborg, who really rather like
the Quakers believed in personal inspiration, and hated religious
hierarchies or the imposition of a centralized control on people
particularly in in their spiritual life. So he does hobnob with all
the leading anarchists in Paris, including Shel Chatel, who's the
editor of the leading anarchist journal. He even shares a flat
with shelves.
Chatel,
they seem to have been close friends and Paris at this time was
really quite unstable and had been since the time of the Paris
Commune.
The catastrophe of the 1870s
really a hotbed of radicals, and so actually looking at this
increasingly regulated and statist world with its religion that was
intensely hierarchical, leading to it's infallible, but obviously
human Pope calls anarchism the most beautiful thing in our feted
age.
So what kind of anarchist is he? Well, he obviously recognizes the
need for some boundaries and structures, so you might call him
an anarcho syndicalist. If you want to become technical. In other
words, there can be free associations of workers as Sunday
cat is a trade union. Workers should freely organize and
supplant the state wherever possible, there should be a
subsidiarity. People's loyalties and affiliation and acceptance of
a communal duty should be based on family on local neighborhoods, on
trade unions on groups that are local, rather than depending on a
probably corrupt a state that doesn't know the individual.
At the same time, we find that unlike some of the other
anarchists, or gwili, is always quite strongly determinist. Much
of a believer in the sort of attractive, but philosophically
and scientifically very problematic idea of freewill. And
this again, seems to be something that leads him towards Islam in
the
longer term. And this has always been a problem for anarchist and
socialist thinkers. And George Soros tried very hard to reconcile
the science which seemed to suggest there's no free will.
Everything is just physical natural processes. With the human
capacity to act, Marx had tried to do something similar, but it was
always a problem for these radicals. We know that science
says that there's no free will. But on the other hand, we want to
change the world, it becomes one of the kind of agonistic moments
in in radical thought, at the time and still is to some extent, so
anarchism and Islam.
Sound like strange bedfellows, but there have been some
depending on one's definition, so here are four
taken from an interesting assortment
that one could cite mostly from groundwater Muslims to use that
term.
Isabelle Eberhardt? Well, many of these people it should be added,
like
bow now like a girly like Gaga saw out places outside Europe as being
places of spontaneity and authenticity, that there was a
possibility of freedom there, which meant also North Africa,
Egypt, the Middle East, it's a semi romantic idea. Byron also
seems to have taken the same view the East was a place where you
could be free, where the state wouldn't be breathing down your
neck. So Eberhardt, best known example, one of the best writers
really at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of you might
remember about 30 years ago, there was a film about her life with
Peter O'Toole. She is a recognized figure
died tragically young. And then the enigmatic shall we say figure
of Hakeem Bay, Peter lamb born Wilson, a scholar of Iranian
Sufism, who suddenly self identifies as an anarchist and is
regarded as one of America's leading anarchist gurus.
Although I'm sure he'd be the last person in the world to consider
himself Sharia compliant.
But he produces interesting book pirate utopias.
Moorish core says and European Renner Gordo's second edition,
which is about the converts of the type of Ward, who populated and
prevailed in many Atlantic and North African course our towns in
the 16th and 17th century.
Sometimes like Algiers, maybe the majority of the population at
certain periods might have been converted to Islam. And according
to landlord Wilson, these are the first some of them looked like
being the first kind of anarchist communes, no aristocracy, no
clerical hierarchy, local groups.
You can take it or leave it but here's a figure who has some
bridging capacity because anarchists very often tend to be
against religion and against spirituality, Linda Rafanelli, who
I've spoken about before
came out of not just anarchism,
she converted to Islam in Egypt, having met various Italian
anarchists,
and became sort of best selling novelist, also said to have been
Mussolini's mistress for a while, one of the key figures of Islam in
Milan until the 1970s. Again, somebody who saw Islam as being a
place where you go in not not to be constrained. And then I'm not
proud of
who is writing today, there's others.
Just to get a sense of how on earth this works, how can you
combine anarchism with something coming from the religion of the
Sharia, the religion of Khilafah, which emphasizes that there is an
authority
that what that is read in the name of the Halifa? How do you fit Alec
ism into that? Does this work at all? Well,
we don't need to come to a judgement ourselves necessarily,
except to reflect on the fact that these 19th century people did
experience Europe as
very, very deeply just the state increasingly legislated and
controlled people. You needed a passport in order to travel, the
state had a file on everybody. The state was interested in your
health and your education, doing a lot of things that the traditional
state never did. And it's one of the paradoxes of modernity, in the
enlightenment that on the one hand, there's this discourse of
liberty, freedom, equality. On the other hand, there is more and more
regulation of our lives.
And for many of these people, the Islamic world looked like an
alternative. Nowadays, it doesn't look like an alternative because
of as well as one that was pointed out, you have the attempt to turn
the Sharia into statutory law, something that the state imposes,
which is not something that classical Islamic law recognizes
at all. God legislates the body interprets and applies. And it's
done locally.
But just to see that this is indeed
an inference that in the pre modern Islamic World, which didn't
have a Pope on infallible hierarchy,
and which didn't have a state that legislated in many ways, the
classical Islamic vision seems to look a little bit like what the
anarcho syndicalists are saying.
And it's socially conservative, for sure. That's not to be imposed
centrally. So here's Abdullah, Noor paradores. book, published in
2010. Islam as mystical anarchism,
then in Spanish at moment, unfortunately, but it's a mature
book and worth, worth serious consideration.
So here's some quotes from him.
Just to give you a taste of what modern Muslim,
he's not, he says quite explicitly, he's not saying that
Islam is an article. He's saying, What if you look at Islam as a
mystical anarchism, what happens? So, this is what he says we are
saying that Islamic anarchism is different from anarchism as a
characteristic ideology of the European political tradition. We
are saying that it has a dimension of openness to the origin, capital
Oh, which anarchism often denies. Islam is not an ideology does not
have its final goal in the terrain of human relations. It is an
integrated mode of life which orient us towards Allah the next
life.
Another quote, mysticism contains within itself the idea of a
spirituality liberated from forms, from the tyranny of institutions,
not an individualistic or egotistic spirituality, the kind
of new age thing I'm liberating myself I'm discovering myself not
something which would be a contradiction in terms. But as
spirituality is centered in experience, as such, it is
corporeal material and earthly spirituality. So for proud of this
also links to things like animal rights, eco theologies, and the
like, side by side with the Vagabond dervish who despise his
political power and recognizes no earthly authority, we encounter
the totalitarian shake, dressed in pompous robes and sublime titles.
Sufism is a complex phenomenon and cannot be reduced into being
presented as Islamic mysticism. So he's saying he's not meaning
Sufism in the straightforward way by Miss
stoicism is talking about those aspects of religion that to do
with a direct experience of the Divine, which are often subsumed
under the large category of Sufism. But he doesn't like the
very authoritarian types of Sufism, which he sometimes
encounters.
At the present time, in the early 21st century, when the great
corporations and media agencies possess almost unlimited power and
a capacity for control, the forms of resistance cannot take the form
of great ideals or projects of a totalizing nature. So saying, what
does it mean to be an anarchist? To have this insistence on freedom
from hierarchies?
In today's world where everything is so intensely hyper regulated,
he says realistically, you can't
engage in what he has great ideals or projects of a totalizing
nature, but must instead be small, individual and communitarian acts
of resistance. To live as an anarchist amidst the Society of
Control and spectacle is to live side by side with other free men
and women who repudiate tyranny and turn their backs on all the
neon garbage by which they hypnotize us, and to create
liberated spaces in the middle of the society which has been swept
away.
Okay, so modernity, with its doctrine of freedom actually
alienates us because that freedom is secured to massive endless
legislation and restrictions.
And by the limitation of human choices, by the predetermination
of our preferences and choices, by the increasingly pervasive
messages of mass consumerism, and mass entertainment, we are not
free, even though we're told that we're free. So he's talking about
small groups, more sort of communities, rather than some kind
of state exercise. So anyway, it's it's an interesting Latter Day
example of this
genre, Islamic anarchism. And it should be said that this has
repercussions in today's world.
These people are attracted to the traditional Islamic model of non
hierarchical religion,
or Gwalia, notes that Sufism can entail the direction of authority
from the shape to the pupil. But it's a voluntary thing to join the
Tharaka. It's not
an inevitable package within the religion, you can move to another
Tarak, there's no authority above you have an ecclesial nature to
tell you otherwise. So it's still a free decision to choose your
preceptor.
But in terms of the exoteric authority of the authority of
fatwah in Islam, there is no binding authority. There really
isn't. The most that you could find is the Khalifa when he
declares jihad to protect the abode of Islam.
But otherwise, there is no institutional authority. The
mosques are not parishes. They're not answerable to a bishop who is
answerable to an archbishop to a cardinal to that model. It's more
like the free churches, individual chapels that are governed
congregationally rather than Ecclesia. Really.
This again, pushes us into kind of libertarian Swedenborg. Again,
direction that spirituality is best secured when individual
inspired communities do their own thing, rather than submit to
a hierarchy or a bureaucracy. But nowadays, in the Islamic world, we
find increasingly Islam is nationalized, doing not just that
in his RV, and others have written about this, that each Arab country
has its grand mufti, who is appointed by the state, by the
general or by the king, or by the emir, or whoever.
And he's the one who determines right religion and wrong religion.
So that's much more like a traditional Christian model or a
Caesar a Papist model. The Byzantines used to do that.
Certainly the Russian Cyrus from the time of Ivan the Terrible did
that.
And in England, the English reformation, Henry the Eighth,
appointed himself as the supreme governor of the Church of England,
and to this day, all of those British politicians who moralize
Muslims and say you ought to separate religion from politics.
need to remember that the Supreme governor of the Church of England
is also the head of state in England, under the prayer book is
changed by act of parliament in English law, that there are
bishops in the House of Lords.
It's a
Caesar a Papist set up.
And this is the model that's being adopted in a lot of Muslim
countries where the state wants to control religion for reasons of
security, usually, but fortunately, us in the West, we're
not subject to the authority of any of those national churches.
And if they create an Islamic Cultural Center in Berlin, or
somewhere supported by Muslim emphasis, has no authority over
us.
We can just say no. So this is part of the argument for an enough
anarchist interpretation of Islam that it it doesn't recognize
centralized religious or clerical authority.
Anyway, so back to our gwili. He's in Paris, his hobnobbing with
these dangerous anarchists. He's living with one of their leaders.
And in 1894, he is arrested. The police have swept Paris in order
to arrest the leading anarchist troublemakers. And he hasn't done
anything directly. But he's certainly been associating with
Chateau Ireland, some of these other people. So one of the famous
trials in France in the 19th century was the so called posse,
they talk to the lawsuit of the 3030 leading anarchist radicals
are tried, with the possibility of the guillotine for some of them.
And many of them are sentenced to very long sentences. So during the
trial, he is sent off to Missouri's prison, which is a
nasty prison in Paris, and this is the kind of Pepe your environment.
If you've seen that film, Steve McQueen, not a pleasant
environment, the conditions are harsh.
But he does say,
at least it's not as boring as Sweden. He said that after he was
released, anyway, he puts the time in prison to good use, learning
languages,
including Hebrew and Arabic, and we know which books he asked his
friends outside to supply. Sweden by Swedenborg, texts, the Quran,
works of grammar. And it seems that his way of learning Arabic
was that he asked for St. John's Gospel in Arabic, because he knew
the gospel so well, that if you read it in Arabic, he could kind
of fit, figure out what the language was saying. Very unusual
way of learning Arabic 12th of August, his case comes to trial,
the jury can't agree and he's actually acquitted.
He gets off.
So his mother then sends him some money goes off to Egypt to join
his friend back now. And it's in Egypt that he encounters Islam.
Look at these things that he is saying.
Belief in a Supreme Being which is above all others, Allah is not
Muslim at this stage. monotheism is the essence of Christ's
teachings. So important that the faithful Muslim is more Christian
than most Christians, no Trinity.
This is how I can see the modern monotheist in terms of outward
morality, fanatical towards himself, tolerant towards others,
and intense thirst for the infinite.
So he's in Egypt. There's plenty of anarchist activity in Egypt, as
we saw in 1900. Later, Rafanelli converts to Islam and Alexandria,
Alexandria is full of Italian anarchist.
The anarchists have even organized the university in Alexandria, but
it's not clear that actually had anything to do with that
particular group. But of course, what he wants to do is some art.
So
I'm including this, if you can see it. This is actually one of the
sketches I did when I was in Egypt, before I became Muslim. Not
very good. This is the Mosque of Babel of Russia and Cuba, which is
near Babel, Sharia. So I just wanted to include that just for
reasons of ego really, but this is
a grilling.
In Egypt, he calls this painting Egyptian cupula.
Again, there is a girl is road into the image. Even if a choice
of roads, you can take that road to the right, or you can go up
that slope and maybe go into one of those doors. It's a very
accessible place, even though that all seems to be blind. And then
you have the cupola
really interested in the idea of squares cubes representing the
earthly instantiation of a heavenly symmetry. This is why
with a poly now he becomes interested in cubism later on. And
then right at the top you can see a few blobs of white indicating
the usual weird thing he does with his skies. There's not mountains
Not in Cairo. This is probably somewhere in the southern
cemetery. Darby athma, maybe.
But he's doing this arrangement, this gradation of the sky. And he
finds the desert light more monotheistic ly interesting as an
artist and the Nordic Light. And he does a lot of very bright
Tableau during this period. And of course,
the light of the South had inspired Cezanne and Pcell and
Van Gogh.
And because Matisse goes to Morocco, it's really interesting.
And
here he feels there's a kind of holism
does these images, doesn't do many buildings when he's in Paris, but
he does in Cairo. But not many figures in the buildings, but it's
about the totality of everything coming together under the desert
sky. So he says, in Paris, you can usefully study analysis. But in
Cairo, you study synthesis.
But really about theorizing things out, it's about seeing that
everything forms part of a single totality.
At that, I take it as the Gooshie Mosque, which is on the more
cotton hills
which is still there, near the ticket of cargoes Abdol.
Again, look at those strange clouds in the backdrop and how
they seem to somehow reflect or even blend with lines in the
foreground. As if the horizon isn't the decisive boundary
between here and there, imminent transcendence down and up, but is
just another grade in the grades have been
a bit more peaceful, like perhaps and the cloud is not doing its
usual thing. Not quite sure where that is. But I suspect that is in
the Citadel, one of the mosques in the Citadel and they'd be wrong,
and so on.
That is the Karratha, the southern cemetery. Now of course, it's full
of people, but I guess back then, it was like this. And again, you
get the sense of earth and sky mirroring each other through
gradations that clearly interact. You can see how the foreground
blends into a lighter colored sand. And then above this horizon,
you get a lighter colored sky and then a darker colored sky as if
there's a kind of strip across it anyway, as I said, we shouldn't
over theorize these things, but his ideas about heaven being made
of degrees of being which is in Swedenborg, but certainly in
Sufism, as well are becoming quite
concrete here. So
everything is shimmering into a unity not through the kind of
Scandinavian mists, but through the intensity of the light.
So he writes this a landscape can reflect a state of mind the
monotheistic landscape is sunlit, illuminated by penetrating
sunshine and light powerful enough to let the aerial perspective
supersede the Linear Light is master of matter.
He leaves Egypt and goes back to France where he stops painting and
starts a career as an art critic, where he writes rather well about
art and continues his studies. He really wants to study oriental
languages more systematically. So he goes to the best school in
France, the best university which is the Ecole Partick desert etude,
where he does Arabic and Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics. But he also reads for himself quite extensively on
Islam is early interest has definitely been intensified by his
experience of Egypt, and by the fact that it's a country where
religion is not centrally regulated, unlike in France.
In 1898, he takes the plunge and he converts to Islam, in Paris,
not an Egypt.
slow process. Of course, there's various elements of his life, some
of which we have already seen.
And evident in his art, the unity of things to a kind of
transcendent light, integration of body and soul, the value of Eros,
the intactness of his arms practices, something primordial
about the prayer, which nobody has interfered with. It seems that he
had some kind of literary contact with Evan Araby even in this early
period, but we didn't really know how or where.
So in a sense, he is looking to reroute himself. He is into
rooted this spiritual reality behind the landscapes of Sweden
and Cairo, and he wants to know, a theology, a kind of explanation in
words of what's going on. And Islam provides this more
explicitly clearly than Swedenborg. And it's also
represented in living societies. He can actually see it when he
goes to Cairo. And that's perhaps why he does incorporate human
structures into his Egyptian landscape, something which as we
saw, he doesn't, doesn't really do when his painting in Sweden.
So convert in France, and then the next year goes back to Egypt and
then on to India and Sri Lanka
is Muslim Now, his sleeping rough in madrasahs. He just sleeps on
the floor. He's never been a man of dunya, as we will see, and this
is where he starts writing his most significant articles on Islam
under his new Muslim name Abdulhadi.
So even ugly, becomes Abdulhadi archy Li.
It's real Anka, he associates with an entourage of admin Robbie,
who's the famous Egyptian nationalist hero, that Azeri who,
the English of imprisoned and then deported to Sri Lanka with other
pro independence, Europeans, obviously as an anarchist and left
wing person, or galeas always completely against imperialism.
There is also of course, a sort of love interest.
But as you would expect by now from a gwili, it's a bit strange.
This is mathy Otto, who was his muse and the woman in his life.
She was 20 years older than him.
He met her at Simpson in 1893 on this this trip to Paris, and she
is married to one of agrilus publishers, Anatole wall, who
edits a left wing publication called the unsecure PD content
behind us play. And she's very active, smart woman. She has her
own literary salon,
and also another keen spiritualist and theosophist.
It's kind of her spiritual home and theosophy
was about 20 years older than him, hitting 4619 30. And it seems
pretty unlikely that the relationship hadn't ever had an
intimate dimension, as we would say nowadays, there's still very
deep she's a kind of muse, that kindred spirits then immediately
kind of recognize something in each other. And she dedicates one
of her poetry anthologies to him incidentally, she is not same as
the Navi or who is a modern French poet who is also good but but
quite different. So she is an anarchist, of course, a symbolist.
Radical avant garde ahead of her time, particularly an animal
rights activist.
So she was known for having encountered a vivisection earnest
and physically attacking him.
She went to a lecture by a pastor of the famous biologist
and interrupted him heckled him during his lecture because he had
conducted experiments on dogs and gwili. Courses, the son of a vet
had also been very committed to animal rights. She has some other
radical ideas, she advocates now gave de volunter, the belly
strike, she thought that women should refuse to have children
because the human race brings so much suffering to other humans and
to the world. Technology is going to kill us, as well as killing the
animals. So abortion and birth control, she thought she'd be
free. So she writes a rather dark book or the Melda vivo
which advocates the voluntary extinction of the human race.
You can get some very radical green activists nowadays
advocating this but this is really quite quite hardcore.
Ugly, is it a Kropotkin also seems to have discussed animal rights
with with ag Wally, but actually has that orientation. Anyway, it's
quite common in anarchist circles.
And so I really
write things like this is more perfect and pure to donate to
someone who seems weak or inferior than to donate to an equal or to
someone more powerful. Kindness to an animal takes us even closer to
God, because our ego is less involved.
The animal doesn't care who you are, is really good to express
gratitude and therefore, kindness done to animals is somehow
spiritually and morally superior than kindness done to human beings
where there might be a more ambiguous
This
reaction and the possibility of a quid pro quo. So this is a
greatest painting of one of the street cats he adopted when he was
in Sri Lanka. He called her mother Orca, and she was blind and
pregnant. So of course, he took her in.
So he had that kind of romantic dimension. Mother also really
interested in Islam and Sufism, and she even thought that she had
some Arab blood in her ancestry and therefore was naturally
inclined towards nature towards the Earth towards love towards the
warmth of the South.
So he's back in the anarchist world. He joins protests and even
riots in Paris.
And then that takes place an event in which he actually hits the
headlines.
Near 1900 Spanish style bullfighting is introduced in
France.
They've always had a kind of bullfighting in the south of
France, and they still have it but the animal isn't killed. Not like
the Spanish thing where the spears and sword
and the animal actually usually dies.
And oh, and her boyfriend or friend or gwili, are outraged by
this.
So actually goes to one of the first bullfights near Paris,
putting on kind of extravagant fancy dress and takes a pistol
with him, the revolver
and when the thing starts, he jumps into the ring and opens fire
at the matador misses him, but wounds one of the matadors
assistants, one of the pika doors or whatever they are. So of
course, the John Dom, immediately take him into custody. He's in
prison again.
This is more serious, attempted murder.
It's outrageous. It's in the newspapers,
as it was intended to be, you could have faced the guilty in
quite quite easily.
And that you have his police mugshot on his arrest.
So this is what he says and he makes a number of impassioned
speeches in front of the judge.
Defending what he'd done. If I permitted this evil act to take
place before my eyes and had done nothing, I would have to answer
before God as the accomplice to a criminal. But the success or
failure of Act is in the hands of God alone. I've confirmed
humanity's nobility and royalty by defending those lower than me from
my equals.
So the cases heard public opinion throughout France is more or less
entirely in favor of him. Particularly since there seems to
be a woman involved. And this is France and it looks like some
great quixotic romantic gesture, and the judge comes to sentence
him finds him guilty. But it's not the guillotine. He just gives him
a tiny little fine to pay. And his let off.
So now he the woman is I know really impressed and says one
thing alone have you done for love of me and of religion, the gunshot
that actually seems to have been the end of serious bullfighting in
France after that, because public opinion has been so inflamed by
this. It dies away.
And is now of course confined to some parts of Spain. And even
there, it's under considerable pressure. But
he goes back to Cairo.
And here he wants to continue his studies. There's a picture of him
in Egypt, not really looking very Swedish at all now.
And he studies at alohar and he takes bay in the Tariqa of Saudi
to share the LEA with somebody called Abdurrahman, Eilish.
And this is his great period of learning and spiritual progress
1902 to 1909.
And he's very close to a leash, as you can see, from this quote,
which he pens just in a letter, I think to war, most of the
information we have about his life really comes from the letters that
thankfully have often been preserved. You know, the great
affection shift Alicia has for me. Now Sherif Ali, she was an
intimate friend of the Emir Abdulkadir of Algiers. The Sheikh
himself washed his body and buried him by the side of him and RRB in
Damascus. The chef called me Mohiuddin, which is one of the
urban Arabic names even for he knew that I was his disciple
actually is confiding with war about these sort of inner
transformations and affiliate
Asians that he is going through. Alicia is a very senior member of
the Maliki madhhab in Egypt.
And he'd been
imprisoned by for by the British for supporting the Oribi
rebellion.
And,
and Robbie himself had been a student of Alicia's father
Mohammed, Alicia was the chef of the Molokhia in Egypt, who's also
with Cheveley. And the elder Elisha actually died in prison.
And the son went to Damascus and associated with Amir aplicado LTSR
airy, who is one of the really great figures of Islamic
resistance to colonialism in the 19th century, the great hero of
the jihad against the French, cheated by the French so many
times, members of his family killed and eventually ends up in
Ottoman Damascus, where he famously intercedes to save the
Christians of Damascus from a right by the Druze.
So very much a person who is not a person of revenge, but a person of
over Udell and compassion.
And this, Amira, aplicado saw as being part of even Aerobus
tradition, that everything in creation is precious and
inviolable, because it represents a particular pointer towards the
divine. There's nothing in the world that isn't a particular
manifestation of the Divine Names. Joelle and Jamal. God is
absolutely transcendent. We say Allahu Akbar. But everything in
the world is
directly not indirectly related to him. The being of the world is
from God.
So
this kind of interpretation of urban r&b
has often been quite attractive to groundwater Muslims in Europe, I
would say because it makes sense of your being in a largely
Christian or non Muslim environment gives you a basis for
toleration and compassion.
So there seems to be in a close inter shared married relationship
with agony during these seven years and he went on a halwa
seclusion or a retreat, but as this quote seems to indicate it
had a kind of connection with urban Araby since 1893, he thought
when he seems to have seen urban r&b In a dream, creating a kind of
way see affiliation of the kind that we referred to briefly in the
lecture on Achmed, Bullock. So in Cairo, he becomes good at Arabic,
and writes in Arabic, and translates some of if an Arabic is
shorter, or a sale or epistles into French.
He lives in a single room near the Citadel, Allah. And resumes work
as a journalist columnist, in a publication that is in Italian and
in Arabic, called a nerdy or econ veto, which becomes his main
platform for his writing at the time, where his main theme is the
disaster of the westernizing of Arab culture. So there's an issue
of a nerdy from the time. And that editor or the CO editor was
strange Italian by the name of Enrico in sabato who was also an
anarchist.
Now in the battle, was probably an Italian spy of some kind,
freelance or official, who produced this magazine to try and
encourage the Arabs into a pro Italian stance, and thereby to
undermine British and French imperialism and also Ottoman
imperialism, because some of the articles were also written in, in
Turkish. But whatever in some battles intentions might have
been, this is a platform for a Gwalia. And some of his key
writings appear in this periodical. And maybe we'll also
send some pieces from thoughts which are published in Cairo. So
this is where he makes his debut in some ways, as a Muslim writer
as Abdulhadi.
And it really is a debut in some quite notable ways. So for
instance, in 1904, he writes an article on Western feminism, which
seems to be the first analysis ever by a Muslim of Western
feminism, explaining what it is, where it comes from, and giving an
Islamic perspective on it specifically from
Nottingham utilitarian discourse, but from the perspective of an
Arab is very exalted view of the meaning and the symbolism of
gender. So that's important here.
He is the first ever Muslim to write on this major modern Muslim
movement from a Islamic perspective.
Note and therefore, also, he is the first person in the world to
use the word Islamophobia.
Seems he invents it.
And he identifies its forms because he writes a lot about anti
Muslim prejudice and how it's different in Germany, in France,
and Russia, and amongst religious Christian Christians. And he
attacks Muslim governments for not fighting Islamophobia. Why did
they complain about this prejudice around the world? Well, why don't
they do something about it?
So if we actually allow him to speak.
Just to give you an example of the kinds of things that he's writing
at the time, you can see his he doesn't pull any punches. Remember
his this anarchist activist has been writing in Paris. Latin
thought is directed by a priesthood that has relapsed into
paganism, and does not wish to understand the East Germanic
thought cannot do so being too obtuse. The German thinker like
certain patients, absorbs a great deal but digests nothing. Aryan
packs and also he thinks only with an inferior part of his being,
which is not amongst the superior human faculties, Protestant and
vivisection Ernest, unless you convert to some form of Semitism,
you will always be a man of the winter sun with eyes of chilling
frost.
It is by the anti mystical priest and is too reckless auxiliaries,
the missionary of the Levantine that Germanic materialism impedes
the union of East and West.
On the other hand, the East is not without fault. It is neglected the
greater holy effort as you had to Akbar and has done nothing to
spread the teachings of Islam amongst the Europeans, who in turn
have been allowed to penetrate deep into the East for lucrative
reasons. But this is only a semblance. In reality, they are
unconsciously drawn by an invisible force towards a Semitic
conversion.
This is something that many groundwater Muslims have noted
that there's always a deep level of so many European minds that
attraction to the east, the attraction to Islam, that kind of
Byronic idea, that's more than just romanticism, but the Muslims
in the east are doing nothing to support this.
You write a lot in this econ veto
on Sufism as the essential key to maintaining Muslim authenticity,
because it is the discipline of self knowledge, which is vital.
So he attacks what he calls the Calvinist of Islam, by which he
means mainly Rasheed rid off and his followers, because they
obstruct the cultivation of beauty, and they find it difficult
to tolerate diversity.
So he says, If Sufism declines, Islam will collapse into crisis.
That's a thought. Let's voice it again. If Sufism declines, Islam
will collapse into crisis.
The br the initiation, he says puts one in touch with one's naked
self illusion stripped away is last Nia softap hollows through
the bath with the initiation.
Now part of his agenda is very much because he's writing in
European languages as well as writing in Arabic by the stage he
writes nice Arabic. He wants to de culture alized Islam. One of the
veils that has kept Europeans from Islam is the sense that it's this
exotic thing with camels and shishas.
So he presents Islam as the universal religion.
And he says Islam's promise is not to alienate Europe, but to return
it to its authenticity. This is really important for even for CMC,
his idea of Islamization meaning, the resuscitation of what's
indigenously authentic, which to a lot of kind of UKIP type seems, a
contradiction in terms but this is what he says.
On this
the most striking feature of Islam is its vital intensity seen above
all in its homogeneity. All Muslims recognize themselves
according to a special trait. All Muslim works of art or literature
about an original imprint, yet each does her according to his own
land. Thus the Arabs, Turks, Persians, Indians, Malays, Berber,
Sudanese, etc, all still differ from each other. Each one
masterfully synthesizes his sky, or the plot of earth on which he
lives with the Arabic formula.
No one is expatriated by the religion of the Arabs, yet they
still set stand united.
I shall take it even further. I maintained that the Persian became
more open
Ocean after his Islam than ever before, under the Indian came to
grasp Indian nature far better than the Hindu. The Muslim out of
India, despite its rigorous formula reflects the country far
more faithfully than Hindu art,
thereby manifesting the great power of spirit of a matter, an
equilibrium of well established consciousness, a greater cosmic
charity and redemptive force.
Thus, Islam is a discipline that emancipates at once both regional
and universal, it places the homeland within the heart of man,
enabling him to feel at home everywhere.
It's the only creed on earth that is stronger than any atavism, or
heredity. I've seen Hindus and Buddhists transfigured after only
a few years of practicing Islam, one could have said they had come
to change their race.
So it's a very kind of up to date stuff. When we talk about Islam in
the West and Islam in Europe. What he's saying is that Islam is a
repatriation that the groundwater Muslim has become more of his land
and his place than the one who is not Muslim.
These are
important thoughts, I think. He also writes about the types of
spirituality which work for him. He says that the highest human
type is the Malema Tia. This is the traditional term of somebody
who does not attract attention to himself through being
spectacularly good or religious. Ordinary people have basic outward
compliance, they say their prayers, but in whom God has
hidden the light of Wilaya of sainthood and of course,
he says Islam is the religion of poly centrism and diversity is
again fits in very well with his decentralizing anarchist
instincts. So he points in his writing to the very many 30
Because in the different math hubs, all he says God, the macaw
said, a Sharia,
Holy Prophet is the exemplar of the middle way. He combines the
spiritual and the temporal unity and diversity, the different
social classes. So he says, Sufism, without which he says,
Islam will collapse into crisis offers the West away back to a
balance between spirit and body, this world in the next, a pure
monotheism that will also reconnect them in an authentic way
to Jesus, the monotheistic
So, in this magazine, he gets some chefs to write like his own chef,
Elisha. Muhammad for Farid waggy, who's quite a well known author of
a Tafseer at the time also writes, he translates the resultant mela
Mattia of salami,
the Marathi Bill Woodroof ideas, rooted Of course, the ayat nor God
is the light of the heavens and the earth. He commends him in
Arabic also because he sees him as being the kind of author who is
sober. He doesn't think that the ecstatic type of spirituality with
shutter hat and strange mysterious utterances the tearing of clothes
is appropriate, but it's still a love based type of religion.
He translates our deen Bellinis result Allah Hadiya
which has also been done more recently into French by the French
Muslims colony, Shan Shan KOVITCH.
So, when he's painting, what he's trying to do is to paint not
existence, but being
to put it in a barrier in terms not the moldboard but Woodroof
itself that which is found, in other words, the World Indigenous,
the world as it truly is, and truly indicates, so the presence
of the Divine again, this is very different from the kind of
Augustinian idea of a gulf. But there is the divine presence in
the world through an Ashley context, occasional ism. The world
is renewed in every instant. God is not the kind of domestic figure
that starts it off and then watches it go wrong God is that in
every instance, and in an Arabic system, as ugly notes, this is the
10th detail Hulk Bill infests the world is renewed may completely
new again in each divine exhalation.
So the end of dualism, God is Zaha and Barton.
So he's really an urban r&b fan. He says if an r&b is a Leonardo in
the form of philosophy.
He's also and this is interesting, not the kind of stereotypical anti
Western convert, although he can be quite anti Christian, but he's
trying to build some kind of harmony between East
and West a symbiosis. So he thinks that the Templars once had tried
to do that with the incorporation of certain forms of Eastern wisdom
and that they were destroyed by the church. And that wet the West
hasn't really been able to integrate the highest spirituality
of Islam into itself since that time. So he doesn't like it when
Muslims in France, right, fiercely anti Western polemic and condemn
or Westerners and this again seems to be a very kind of up to date
perspective. So
here
he says,
we have read in love a view the Open Letter of Sheikh Abdullah
Huck to Europe in the name of Pan Islamism.
Okay, which is a kind of anti Western screed, the Honorable chef
is wrong to direct his hatred against all Europeans. In the
three nations of Italy, France and England, true Democrats are doing
their utmost to at first hinder the policies of colonial
expansion. And then they always, in the name of justice take the
side of the indigenous victims of their own compatriots. There are
those who for the sake of this course not only risk their careers
and their fortunes, but also their lives.
And then to those who say, Well, why don't they convert to Islam?
The European How do you want him to pray? He who has never heard
the call of them who has in in his cold country sad and cursed by the
abandonment of God, he has lost his hieratic sense. Therefore,
ritual and prayer remain close to him. The absence of sacred
architecture, decor and color make profound and religious emotions
difficult, as well as perceptions of the eternal and fixed world. In
spite of this, it's rather rare to find a European who is hostile to
the Muslims for any other reason than ignorance. He wants to learn
from elsewhere. But a sound education is difficult to obtain,
when it comes to the east.
know then that there are highly powerful parties in whose vital
interest it is that east and west should hate each other. The only
exists to do to this loathing, and the day that east and west truly
get to know each other, the powers of darkness shall be vanquished.
Many Europeans have converted to Islam. The educated independent
European almost always loves the east, not only by fashion but by
taste. If Muslims had been familiar with the spirit of the
Europeans, they would have been conversions in droves. I've known
Europeans who have been moved by the recitation of the sublime
Quran by the contemplation of beautiful and ancient mosques and
by processions and religious gatherings. A new convert was
insidiously asked why he'd become a Muslim replied, I love minarets,
more than factory chimneys, and I prefer the turban to the black
hat.
The Literary beauty of the Quran is a proof of its celestial
origin. The beauty in architecture, decor and life is
not only the work of a faith that is intense and pure, but it is
also the foremost weapon and safeguard of that very faith.
So this is his great period in Cairo when he's developing his
ideas. 1909 He returns to Europe seem to have had a break with
money, but there, the friendship is renewed the following year, and
he starts publishing again in Murphy's husband's kind of journal
that sequel PD writing is Abdulhadi. But he also writes in
another periodical, a new one, log nos, which is edited by then again
oh,
there it is, and you can see lots of languages at the top, I'll
extract is there somewhere which is supposed to be something
analogous to the idea of good Gnosis and then on the right is a
later
sort of epitome of some of his writings for Latinos in French
published more recently, and his most important essays on art are
from this period, so he writes on the Italian futurists
interestingly futurist, through marionettes have also been the
ones who trigger the conversions of leather a finale, then Altintas
on point at a number of other creative features that people
quite influential, but this time as a critic, pointing to
what he saw as the key tension in artistic and literary modernism,
which is that there is a discord pre modernism's love of movement
and technology, with Marinetti and it's awareness that we are
alienated from the primordial How do you sort that? So he writes on
cubism, which he likes as a geometry of enclosure and presence
which points to transcendence and seems to have some sort of it's an
attempt to do what Islamic geometrical art does much better.
So he becomes friendly with a pony now, who is poet an advocate of
Cubism?
Polly now I think it's the man who invented the word Cubism. So
they're all
So looking for something transcendent for the order behind
the chaos of things. And that's one reason why he likes the square
of Islamic architecture, the cube the domed mausoleum.
So on the left, there is a poly now the crazy poet and on the
right, his other friend at this time, his publisher, then again of
releasing this journal likeness. And there is a really Titanic
meeting of an association that our Gailey tries to establish in Paris
called an aquaria, in which is trying to bring his Egyptian if an
Arabic wisdom, and his shadowy initiation to these spiritual
seekers, in this very busy, complex experimental world of
Paris.
And one evening,
the opening ceremony for this new Acharya takes place and a lot of
intellectuals are there, including rain again, or, and after
expounding the teachings of the chef Akbar. And the beauty of
Islam, then again, or takes his shahada, some others, including
somebody called Neil sharpener, who is also significant in
esoteric circles also become Muslim. But this is quite Titanic
ly important because Ghana becomes at all of these people, by far the
most widely read. And he takes the name Abdullah head yeah here.
And it's from that time that Ghana situate himself solidly in as he
put it a form of tradition. So to convert genau is a pretty
important thing, because he knows influences all over the place,
sometimes,
through various misunderstandings, Julius Evo and various fascist
toyed mid 20th century thinkers, like his critique of the modern
world, but really is advocate advocacy of religion, Steve
Bannon, and other troublemakers.
Alexander Duggan, who was Putin's Rasputin for a while, people who
will not accept usually for ego, Eurocentric reasons, I think,
again on option for Islam, but really like his criticism of the
modern world. He's one of the significant thinkers of the 20th
century, I would think, but he doesn't go to Egypt cannot doesn't
go to each until 1930. Much, much later. So Ghana is converted to
Islam and receives a beta into the shed, Ilya because again, he seems
to have been appointed to be the MacArthur chandelier by by his
Sheikh in Cairo.
But they're always different,
or girly is really not what is sometimes colloquially described
as a perennial list. He doesn't believe that all of the religions
in their pre modern form are perfect instantiations and paths
up a different Mountain. As we can see from his writing, he doesn't
think that as take human sacrifice and so forth, could possibly be
right. So,
if you look at some of Aquarius, writings, you can see this quite
clearly.
You can be quite polemical, Islam is the only religion in the world
that can do without clergy or sacramental institutions of any
form, as it firmly rests upon the basis of tradition. The clerical
concept is evidently anti Islamic, which is why priests of all robes
and sects harbor a fierce loathing of Muslims, that these in fact
respect Christian priests in accordance with the strict command
of the Quran is of no consequence to them. Thus, imagine a belief
that renders the entire anthropomorphic enterprise
superfluous, or even noxious to things necessitate the priests the
idol and the conventionalism of sentiments referred to as
sentimentalism,
etc. Idol priest and sentimentalism are three aspects
of all anthropomorphic religions. Islam is not such a religion. So
this is
clearly not an idea of the equal soteriological value of all
traditional religions. But to deal with that will take us I think, in
a direction that we don't have time to explore.
1911 goes back to Sweden, a small painting there.
1912 back to Paris. Upali. Now, has invited him to write a book
about art. Unfortunately, he never gets around to writing it. His
paintings now seem to be a little bit different. There's a more
obvious mysticism, perhaps slightly didactic in his paintings
of this period, clearly depicting the sovereignty of light painting
with if the heart sees the divine in everything.
He sees art as being akin to worship exists to demonstrate
existence. It's an enactment of an ontological insight
it
1313
Can't resist it goes back to Egypt
paints some more
lives in very considerable poverty his only real source of income
apart from a few pennies for his art criticism has been occasional
small, some sent by his mother from Sweden.
Now, this is 1913 between the Balkan Wars when the Ottoman
Empire lost its European provinces and the First World War. It's very
political. Egypt is strategic. That's the Suez Canal.
Gaza, just the other side really of Sinai is in Ottoman Herms and
the British suspect actually of being some kind of Ottoman spy.
He's a traditionalist Muslim, so he must be. And the choice that
faced Muslims in the Middle East at the time was pretty stark,
either the Khalifa, or British and Trent's promises of prosperity and
some kind of autonomy,
unspecified.
The evidence now suggests that the majority of people in the Middle
East supported the Khalifa, despite the kind of Lawrence of
Arabia myth of the Arab somehow being liberated from their own
people and, and kissing the hands of their British and French
liberators. That's a kind of post post hoc reconstruction of what
actually happened. So he's being followed. Cairo is the center of
the Arab Bureau and all kinds of spy machinations, as it was during
the Second World War. Second World War there was a famous, I guess it
was mi five or military intelligence headquarters in
Garden City, a big apartment building
wasn't terribly well disguised because it was called Secret house
in Egypt. And even when I went to Egypt and lived there, you know,
you even the taxi drivers knew where secret house was
ayob or or even secret house, they would say?
Not very well disguised.
But, yeah, the First World War this is the center of all kinds of
machinations after for Ottoman centuries, the Europeans, the
Christians are pushing in, and they want to bring as many Arabs
as they can. So the Swedish Embassy offered to pay him to go
back to Sweden, neutral Sweden, but he can't afford to take his
painting. So he declines that he doesn't want to leave them in
Cairo. Eventually, the British kick him out, they deport him to
Barcelona, in neutral Spain, where he's completely destitute, he's
unable to rent even the simplest accommodation. And even though
it's a hotbed of anarcho, syndicalism, he is regarded as an
outsider, a weird Muslim, probably a spy of some kind of the
anarchist movement that reject him. So he's literally a tramp is
living on the streets. And his hearing has really deteriorated.
So
on the first of October 1970, in wandering around, somewhere near
Barcelona, is hit by train and he dies.
So, a sad end, but a kind of, maybe a sort of appropriate,
obscure, surprising end to somebody who has a dervish, wasty
molarity kind of person.
So we should wind up pretty soon. The theme of fucker of holy
poverty in his life is pretty salient.
One winter when he went to Stockholm, he would wear a kind of
sheet thing and a blanket with newspapers tied front and back. He
really looked like a complete, complete tramp or really,
Bohemian. Somebody said with his eccentric appearance. Combining
Socrates and Zola he attracted attention wherever he went.
Sometimes he would have to copy out books in libraries because he
couldn't afford to buy them in Egypt. He lived on bread and figs
used to sleep on a pile of old books because he didn't have a bed
early Zahid
sick often. So this is his own sense of that type of
spirituality, the spirituality the outcast.
straightened conditions poverty and the hostility of enemies are
nothing but a lesson and they lead to more boldness externally, and a
better closeness to God internally, praises for Allah
forever. After difficulty comes ease. As the Quran says, in
actuality, constraint and liberation bring the same results
to he who is blessed, and also to he who is cursed.
So he sees this as faithfulness to the prophetic example Holy
Prophet, lived in a state of poverty, the nobility of giving
charity
I'm
not blaming others. This is all part for him of the molarity.
Ethos.
We could quote more from his amazing writings about that. And
he says that the decline of this molarity ethos,
caring for others caring for animals, loving God seeing God in
others, the decline of that signals the decline of the Muslim
world.
But again, one of the points we've been trying to make is that it was
a rooted journey. Remember, his conversion was in Paris, he became
convinced of Islam.
Ultimately, for Western reasons. It's because of this particular
journey
that many dissident Europeans had taken.
anarchist, post impressionist, rather bohemian types, sipping
Absinthe in dubious bars in Walmart. It was that world that
led on to the discovery of, of Islam.
So one of the contributors to Cedric's volume,
puts it this way, from the perspective he described of the
Malama tear, he succeeded phenomenally in living without
ever selling his soul, without celebration of his merits, and
dying as humbly as those whose lives he defended.
So that's all I wanted to say about the extraordinary perhaps
tragic, but in many ways, very energetic and sincere life of Chef
I've heard ERP Lee,
who it can be said is a kind of founder of groundwater Islam in
Europe, and his particular reception of the way of Amir
Abdulkadir with its traditional
tolerance, respect for difference. Respect for others, respect for
the diversity of religions, respect for the diversity of the
Muslims, is probably the best way that Muslims will find to go as
they try to find a space for them that is more than just a survival
strategy as beleaguered and misunderstood communities in the
Europe of late modernity. So may Allah Insha Allah, grant his Rama
to his soul and give us benefit from remembering his story. Baraka
lofi was salam o aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato.
Cambridge Muslim College, training the next generation of Muslim
thinkers