Abdal Hakim Murad – Riding the Tiger of Modernity
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AI: Transcript ©
Smilla hamdulillah salat wa salam ala Rasulillah he was Safi woman
while
some of you will recognize the lack of originality in the title.
Riding the tiger is a fairly hackneyed expression, used quite
often by those whose policy of responding to the perhaps
unheralded challenges of the modern world consists not in the
perhaps requisite eschaton eschatological Sherry If
expectation or directive to head for the hills, with the proverbial
flock of sheep, but to jump on the back of this threatening Tiger,
and to see if one can attempt to tame it. One might say that much
of the quote unquote, Islamist agenda of the past 50 years,
perhaps more, has been based on the idea that one can for
instance, rather than retreat from the banking system, attempt to
carve out a niche within it, or even to tame it in some sense, so
that it can once again be directed towards adjust and legitimate
Sharia and the idea of the nation state. Another bugbear of many of
our brethren is in the eyes of many something that can be
appropriated and turned into something called an Islamic state.
We can even have an Islamic Republic. interesting irony, when
you consider that republicanism, particularly in its enlightenment
guys emerged specifically as an antidote to a perceived clarity or
theocracy. Republicanism was the child of carbonare, Freemasons of
various kinds, French revolutionaries, people whose
principal aim in life was to push religion back where they thought
it belonged into a box, leaving the public square to the
Republican and essentially Lake mentality, but we have following
the Communist Revolution, the idea of an Islamic Republic, very
strange
bedfellows, but this is the discourse that some of our
brethren perhaps with commendable courage, have sought. Instead of
the traditional modality of taking a step back in times of
turbulence. One takes a step forward, the presumption that
Islam is a proactive rather than reactive religion, and one should
seek to appropriate the technologies, the modalities, the
structures, the infrastructures of modernity, in order to turn them
to benign and humanitarian ends. So riding the tiger is a fairly
hackneyed expression. Some of you may recall that it goes back in
certain circles to the by now classic work of Julius Everleigh
Chevelle Sheila T car, ride the tiger he generally implied it in
the sense of a of an imperative. full title is a survival manual
for the aristocratic of the soul. Is emerges from an intellectual
world, generally unfamiliar to most Muslims, who have difficulty
strolling into a bookshop, and even picking up books to enable
them to understand the mainstream principles of modernity, let alone
Dissident Voices within it. But some will be aware that within the
story of Western modernity, and the agonistic progress towards a
still undefined, unimaginable, utopian end game, there have been
many dissidents of sometimes a Christian disposition, sometimes
of class war disposition, sometimes have a racist
disposition, who have sought to jump ship. Because of their
radical interrogation of the value of the modern project, that is
process of acceleration seems to them more likely to be a presage
of downward than an upward movement, modernity, as in the
grip of the law of gravity, its acceleration itself, grounds for
suspiciousness, and dissent, Julius Everleigh, himself a tragic
figure, a prophetic figure, but one whose vocabulary did not
extend to an embracing of the second Semitism of Islam. Others
of his generation, such as the fabled Naagin, all of the work I
do here did in their very selective and possibly
idiosyncratic sense, move in the direction of Islam, which they
took to be Europe's third neglected heritage and last
repository of tradition with a capital T, thereby excusing one
the duty of moving further east, as many of the German romantics
have done to seek la SolSmart spiritual values in the heritage
of the putatively Aryan subcontinent. But this second
Semitism has been a minority Aryan option for most Europeans who have
not bought the ideology of progress, and are concerned with
the atomism of on the human soul. The human subject human
in society, which they take the enlightenment, inescapably to
produce. So Everleigh, a very strange person, somebody who is in
many ways inimical to an Islamic perspective, someone who bought
into certain aspects of the race theory of his day and indeed spent
some time during the war and lecturing at an SS college, not a
natural bedfellow. For Muslim thinkers one might think, but
nonetheless, somebody who has had a very significant role in
triggering the counterculture, it's not a left wing
counterculture. It's not a right wing counterculture, but it is a
counterculture, which has continued to this day and which,
unfortunately, is moving in the direction following the decline of
the old Marxian alternative, the significant alternative to the
progresses utopian discourse of liberal capitalism has moved in
the direction of forms of xenophobia. So if you Google
Julius Avila now, you will, within a couple of clips, find yourself
in very clicks, find yourself in very unfamiliar territory in
various anti immigrant websites, Ukrainian supremacist movements,
and the like places where normally we don't, we don't populate.
But nonetheless, his discourse and the discourse of that cloud of
thinkers around him who are not really content with the pseudo
science of the racial alternatives to the modernistic secularizing
process of the mid 20th century,
represents a vision that can offer Muslims at least pause for
thought, when we consider what our due response to modernity should
be. Should it be just ad hoc, we like certain things, and we don't
like others, as if the modern world is a kind of buffet, from
which we might safely graze while avoiding the alcohol dishes and
the pork dishes with everything else we can consume. Is that
really our big philosophy when we confront the menu of modernity? Or
is there a deeper reservation of heart? Are we as evil as subtitle
suggests, aristocratic of the soul? Now here you have some kind
of egotistic claim that there is a Vanguard, an elite, a small number
of human beings who have not been subjected to the conditioning of
the mass media, and state directed educational processes have not
been brainwashed, but retain the right to a deep sense of dissent
and lack of asset to the premises of modernity, which raises what is
perhaps one of the largest questions confronting modern
Europe in particular, which is to say, if the dominant ideology is
to be liberalism, to what extent can liberalism ostensibly a
doctrine of tolerance, actually tolerate anything other than
itself? Liberalism, in some way seems to becoming increasingly
coercive, you must have such and such a curriculum, you must have
certain views about alternative sexualities, you must have certain
views about gender, you must have certain views, etc, etc, and
increasingly proliferating list of boxes which one is expected to
tick, which seems to sit ill with the basic premise of liberalism,
which is to open the horizons to people for people to think and
behave as they will, as long as they don't constitute a threat to
public audit, and the current strange liberal Inquisition into
schools, thou shalt be a liberal institution by Ofsted, and other
quasi state institutions. Just an example of the inherent paradox of
this late liberal or you might say coercive, liberal project.
Europe's xenophobia, in a rather curious way, is being triggered by
that liberalism whose roots lie in a campaign to open the horizons
for human plurality and difference as process stretching back at
least as far as the 18th century now being used as an implicitly
persecutory discourse and Slava Dziedzic and others have remarked
on the inherent violence of a certain type of liberal
capitalistic discourse, particularly in the way in which
marginalizes those whose dissent is outside the canon of forms of
life, which officially approved by the dominant culture and the
increasing strictures of the mass media. So Everleigh is a point of
reference for people who are seeking an alternative, but
unfortunately, because of his possibly a xenophobic, blind spot
when it came to Europe's third heritage, as what he called he
called it the heritage of Islam. God his move was definitely in the
direction of the underestimated Israelite Semitism. Much of his
analysis is alien and difficult, but still, there is much that we
can find to be a value, not least because he did find an almost
cosmological environment for his discourse.
He believed, drawing on what he called, along with, again unions
tradition, with a capital T, that we inhabit some sort of cosmic end
game, that the signs of the hour are upon us that the current
breakdown of tradition of monarchy of order of natural hierarchy of a
sense of the sacred is an inevitable and indeed predicted
presaging of the last days, the torba Magna. He certainly saw
himself as being an aristocratic hero, crying in the wilderness of
modern consumer blandness. So he has another book revolt against
the modern world, politics, religion and the social order in
the Kali Yuga. Here, like a lot of thinkers who thought that Europe's
spiritual they saw smart had to be in some putative Aryan substrate
is happy to mine the Brahmanical concept of the four ages, the Kali
Yuga, the age of iron, the Dark Age, being at the end of the great
circle of samsara, when things really start to break up, when
human beings are so dark in their perception of the inherent
radiance of matter and nature, that all they see is matter and
nature, and they lack the ability to see its inherent translucence,
the loss of the most fundamental, defining human attribute, which is
the capacity to perceive the sacred, so dull have we become
that we take that at face value, and are no longer able to see
beyond its surface. So this is the dark age, the age of iron, the age
of dissolution of hierarchy, a family, of priesthood, of the
secret of pilgrimage of all of the things that historically shaped
and defined the guiding priorities of normative humanity, we are
forever now inhabiting that age of darkness. So this is part of his
vocabulary and gain, and those whose persuasion followed him have
made Hurley he is another American writer who has written
specifically for Muslims on this idea of, of the the age of
darkness, and everless idea being that we can somehow ride the
tiger, that is to say, we can master it within limits, we can
inhabit it, not as passive subjects and victims, but in some
sense as active agents of change. And here, he adverts to what he
takes to be one of the neglected aspects of tradition, which is
unique its unique capacity to tap forms of human energy. Access to
the secret gives human beings access to a form of nuclear energy
that has no half life that continues indefinitely. The great
driving force of humanity is either an authentic or a spurious
simulacrum form of the religious energy. Everything else dissipates
in pleasures, self serving pursuits of the seven deadly sins,
and ultimately is inebriated and inert the energies of the secret,
however, the unique human capacity to strive to sacrifice to reach
beyond the demands of the senses, which is the gift of a belief in
eternal life, and the gift of a belief that beyond the doll, black
material carry piece of things, there lies a world of glowing
beauty, that energy he believes is sufficient to enable us to ride
the tiger, even amidst the dark shadows of an ignorant, modern
world.
So we have everless legacy as usual, we Muslims rarely stray
into the bookshops, and we don't really know what this critique of
modernity might signify, but it's picked up in the European far
right, which represents yet another missed opportunity. One
would say, European far right, is partly xenophobic, anti immigrant,
quite often, explicitly or implicitly racist. But it is also
often based on a certain anxiety about the loss of meaning, the
confiscation of identity, by modernity, for which it uses often
the immigrant, the strange looking guy with a corner shop as the
scapegoat. But it also represents a form of dissidents, that has as
its root, a genuine unease about what and who we become, when all
of the traditional constituents of identity, monarchy, district,
pilgrimage, the sacred priesthood, going to church, everything has
been taken away, even the significance of the flag, and the
old regiments and all of those old sort of biscuits, 10 Victorian
illuminations that sort of constituted the corny definition
of what it meant to be Victorian or Edwardian. All of those things
have been taken away to be replaced by this bland consumer
void with its endless capacity and its its its two dimensional
brilliance to appeal to everything that is lazy and low and lustful,
about our lower selves. Recently, just I think it was last week, I
happened to be going to an interfaith meeting at Windsor
Castle or other awkward place to get into actually when the queen
is in residence you have to pass through various
levels of people in different sorts of uniforms carrying
different forms of weaponry.
But I was actually prevented not by the boys in blue, but by the
fact that my talk had coincided with the weekly changing of the
guards. And so between me and the point where I had to go in order
to give my lecture, there was sort of the band of the Coldstream
Guards, and a lot of guardsmen marching up and down with Bennett
drawn. And of course, there was no way in which I could sort of slip
across the courtyard, well, that was in progress, it would have
been trampled underfoot. So I just waited there fiddling with my
phone, hoping that this would be an adequate excuse for giving my
lecture late. But actually, it turned out to be an interesting
experience. Normally, that is not my natural habitat at all. But
observing the guards and then observing the spectators almost
all teenagers, school children, visitors from various places, but
essentially, young England really was an interesting lesson. Here
you have in Windsor Castle, the epitome of a traditional, dusty,
patriotic English faded identity, the changing of the guard, there
are the cold streams with our battle honors. Nobody knows what
they're looking at any longer, but asked charge, Waterloo, and
Salamanca and CO Deus rial and Montecasino battle honors as long
as your arm marching up and down. But they are so aware that this is
no longer understood that when the band struck up, and the teenagers
looked cynical, the first tune that they played was the theme
tune from the new Star Wars movie.
I was expecting the British grenadiers or some Sousa classics
from the early 20th century, something retro but no, it was
selected highlights from Hollywood blockbusters. And of course, they
assembled teenagers, when they looked up from fiddling with their
phones and pinching each other and giggling, they just started to
dance.
That is how British identity has now has now become. And that is
where we now stand. And that is a strange ending for the National
alternative to the former religious narrative, which used to
define what we're about it was St. George's Chapel, which was the
heart of Windsor Castle, and then it became the Queen's private
apartments. And now what is it, even the National Secular
narratives completely voided so that you just have the teenagers
kind of rocking and rolling and fighting and laughing and
applauding at the end, because they've got no idea what else to
do. And that's the end, even of that alternative narrative to the
old Christian narrative. And this is precisely why a lot of people
in Europe are deeply uneasy, because they don't necessarily
want to have only that. This is what Charles Taylor in his
brilliant recent book, a secular age calls the felt flatness of
modernity.
Not only is it flat compared to the depths and the vertiginous
sense of the sacred, and the overwhelming and eternity and
beauty and grace and Heaven and * and God and the magnificence
of the traditional view that human beings were surrounded by, but the
flatness, but we also feel it has a certain sense of loss. We know
that we've lost something. And we have this awkward, anxious sense
that perhaps what we've lost is what actually is the most
important thing, and that everything else is just a papering
over of that increasingly vast crack. So the question that has
been asked by present day, advocates of the Everland attempt
to ride the tiger to try and fall find forms, whereby the world can
be reset re re sacralized is something that underpins this new
unease, this growing earthquake that was recently represented, for
instance, into the German provincial elections with a
frightening Return of the far right and very many even West
German lender. It is there and it is on the march but it is only in
part because they don't want to have more Syrians in the country.
It is because they're deeply unease, uneasy about what they
are, where they're going, the political elite that's leading
them to more and more blandness away from tradition. So the blurb
of a recent book in this in this world markets, villagers book
generation identity, which is about our current attempt to live,
rich and pleasurable and prosperous lives in the absence of
meaning and identity. Just looking at the blurb it talks about
Europe, her native population consists mostly of atomistic
individuals lacking any semblance of purpose or direction,
increasingly victimized by a political system with no interest
in the people it governs.
The oft lamented growth in the gulf between rich and poor is just
one sign of that. But the fact that the politicians are not
trusted, that their discourse seems to be increasingly
platitudinous that they know that nobody really believes they'll
deliver
on their electoral promises, a certain Sundering an absence of
trust between governed and governors is one of the increasing
sources of unease.
But what we have, therefore is the apotheosis or be at unlooked for
of the original hope of the Enlightenment, which is that in
the absence of the sacred, which for them represented the kind of
dark shadows of the Church and its strictures which had to be pushed
away as much as possible, in favor of the Lumia, the enlightenment,
where the human subject is the measure of all things. So we have
Rousseau and Voltaire and Kant, the kind of holy trinity of
thinkers of the modern world, the individual, the miracle of the
human conscience as that which can determine what is right without
reference to holy books, or to a putative natural theology, but
just man, the measure of all things, has been increasingly
decomposing as a result of scientific, neurological,
philosophical, psychological, historic interrogations of the
idea of the coherence of the human subject itself. So modernity
lapses and
limps into post modernity. So that the very sovereign human subject
which the Enlightenment thought that it could put in the space
vacated by the Christian God is itself in a state of increasing
crisis and anxiety, thereby producing these relatively minor
epiphenomena whether it's the pig either in Germany, or Donald
Trump, in America, or some of the Putin supporters, etc. And there
are, of course, clones and replicas, simulacra of this
phenomena, in India, in China, in the Muslim world, everywhere, that
this is something that represents a sense of crisis that modernity
has come to an end, post modernity is precisely constituted in the
deconstruction of that human subject, which was supposed to be
the fountainhead of meaning and beauty and philosophy and values
that the Enlightenment was heralding. So what we find now as
Muslims emerging into this rather broken and damaged landscape is a
conversation radically unlike any that we have had with another
civilization at any time in our history, and our own ways of
responding Islamically to this smuggle in, albeit, amidst furious
denials, much of the same crisis, so much Muslim talk is about
boundary issues is about identity is about being something more than
it is about believing something, ethics tends to be subsumed under
a kind of furious legalism, that is largely a matter of defending
one's threatened sense of self at all costs, rather than being
connected to a genuine sense of what is right, and what is wrong.
Recently, one of my students carried out a set of experiments,
he's got a PhD in neurology, in which he wired up various
religious, young British Muslims. And it's interesting to see them
moving their head gear, and see if they got any hair or not. And some
of them quite easy to attach the probes to their head and just
measuring them as their brains responded to certain propositions.
And very often he found, to his embarrassment, the Muslim himself,
that what the Muslim brains are actually doing was very different
to what the Muslim males were actually saying, Yes, we believe
in this about the family and gender and the hood punishment,
actually, the brain is doing something else. And this cognitive
dissonance is something that is very painful for a lot of people
and generate forms of, as it were fundamentalism that seek to
inhabit that that critical space that dissonance and to try and
close that gap. In other words, the denial of reality, in favor of
the Furious defense of increasingly extreme and often a
historical readings of the Sharia. These tendencies are a
psychological reflex, they are not based in any way on an objective
or responsible authentic reading of the soul of Islamic
jurisprudence, but nonetheless powerful and destructive for all
of that. So it is about the self, the crisis of the self, not just
on the streets of Dresden, but also in the Muslim self, a sense
of anxiety, the confiscation of identity, fact that the old
signposts are being worn away by these winds of consumerism and
Hollywood, and an anxiety to replace them with ultra sharp,
repressed donated versions of their original self. And hence the
strange reactiveness of so much of the Muslim community in Europe to
see German convert in Berlin wearing what the Germans called
Desert clothes, cotton
and Arabian stuff, very strange, particularly since I was there in
February. And it's pretty obvious that if you're saying, I'm going
to wear desert clothes in Brandenburg in February that you
got some kind of dissonance going on, because your interpretation of
religion really doesn't fit the fact that it's really cold and
wet. But that's just a sign an outward sign of the incapacity of
the Muslim genuinely and an irresponsible and authentic way to
look at the console to see what is authentic here, rather than just
panicking about making concessions to the fall.
So we have this, the anxiety of the self, but also at the same
time, the idea of the sovereignty of the self. One of the things
that the neffs does, when it feels anxious and threatened when it's
old landmarks, or being confiscated, is to retreat into a
sense of its own power, and sovereignty. And this is the self
that that is commanding that wants to be an authority. And this is
one of the things that Europe has discovered, the self becomes not
just a measure of all things, but the instructor and the determiner
of values. And this is one of the paradoxes of Western modernity.
100 years ago, it was assumed women, of course, couldn't vote.
Now, if anybody says that they shouldn't be voting, you suddenly
don't get a job with the BBC. And you're really strange. It's a
constant process of adaptation and change, because not only is the
self detecting value in the world, as cops thought it could do, but
it is actually making values and it is doing through. So through
various forms of consensual movement, whose ultimate shape and
shapers may not be discernible to anybody. So if anything is certain
about the current value set of the global elite, it is that in 50
years time, it will be something very different. And this is again,
something that makes it difficult for us to ride that tiger, because
the tiger itself doesn't really have a destination. But it's
constantly experiencing new interstates that push it in a
different direction. Remember, when the word the first university
was created in Egypt, first secular, Western styled University
and the Arab world didn't have female students. Why? Because it
wanted to be modern. Traditional mother says good often, especially
in the Mamluk period have women and they were mothers for women
and Cairo and Damascus. If you want to be modern, before the
First World War has to be for men, of course, and in Cambridge, maybe
they could attend lectures, but they would be then parked in in
Girton and nuneham. And certainly not allowed to take take degrees,
ticket on Matondkar products. That's a mindset, a cognitive
frame that is now very hard for people to imagine. But back then
our reality would have been unimaginable level. The only thing
that certain about the current boxes that were required to tick
is that 50 years down the line, certainly 100 years down the line,
the current social orthodoxies will be outrageous and
unthinkable, Harris's and the West will be doing something new. This
again, makes it difficult for us to engage in the conversation on a
deep level, rather than a kind of firefighting and an immediate
utilitarian level, because they don't seem to be any or soul. And
instead, things are just endlessly mobile, the extraordinary mobility
of modernity, which generates such incredible power, artistic power,
and Hollywood and the economic thing at the stock exchange is a
good example of the kind of brilliant randomness of the
culture that because of this, everything is in flux. And slab,
obviously Jack also has an interesting lecture, you can see
it on YouTube, I think, where he says that the majority of people
who work in the investment banking system, apologist, one or two
friends present, but the majority of them, he said, they don't go to
church, they're doing some form of spirituality that relates to
Buddhism, whether it be mindfulness or meditation or some
other thing. Why is that? He says, Because Buddhism also believes
that the ultimate cannot be grasped. And that the world is
constantly in a state of flux. And the self is not actually their
self is not real destruction, not new self. You begin with a kind of
useful fiction that you do have a self that you end up realizing
that it's not there. And he says, that's exactly what the stock
stock market is, all of these numbers flitting around, and
people inventing money, and creating money on the basis of
money that they say somebody else is going to create. And this
enormous, extraordinary, randomized world is the perfect
image for our modernity and the modern soul. And that's why
Buddhism kind of fits into that world, even though what Gautama
Buddha himself would have thought of Riggs bank or JP Morgan is
another question but that seems to be where they are spiritually at
home.
So flux and the void, endless motion, a kind of celebration of
randomness is something that
It is the nature of the modern process, which again makes it
difficult for us to have a conversation with it because
they're not actually keytab any longer. There's something very
strange, something without precedent. And I think that we
have been wrong footed here. And often our response is, just as
they on their fringes are looking for some kind of residual token of
selfhood. So usually, unfortunately, they don't go to
even song any longer, they go on some kind of anti immigrant, bmp
March, that is the kind of degraded way in which they
reconnect with the indigenous, the sense of Britishness or European
or American is a kind of David Duke.
Ridiculous, crude reification of the worst aspects of the culture
that tends to be where that fringe moves to. But in the Islamic
context, the similar ambience, the atmosphere which we breathe, which
flatters us by saying that the self is sovereign.
And that says, We need to be skeptical if the self is to defend
itself, a sovereign of inherited hierarchy and authority and
institutions is producing an allergist movements in the OMA of
Islam.
Why is it that so many people find their spiritual home saved with
the works of Ibn Taymiyyah, rather than Al Ghazali Ibn Taymiyyah
really an outlier in Islamic history, not even his, his famous
followers didn't really follow him and a lot of things, and the armor
generally passed by his his thought in silence. He believed
that beyond the claimed contemporary consensus of the all
on that, and the established wisdom of the format hubs and the
Usher era and establish Sufi tariqas, there could be some
sovereign principle within the soul of the believer himself,
namely the fitrah which could enable one ultimately to have a
good intuitive belief a sense of what actually is right or wrong.
So if even Tamia chose the Sunnah, as intuited correctly by the sound
fitrah of the human being, there's something very humanistic about
this. Some people like Laos, some of the orientalist quite like even
Tamia, because of his high opinion of the human capacity to know what
to write. But of course, from the point of view of the stability of
the tradition, it's a subversive message. If you're saying the
format hubs require me to pray like this, but my fitrah reading
the Quran and the Sunnah say that actually, I should pray like that,
you have something that might claim to be a unifying principle,
but which in practice tends to shatter the mother habit of Islam,
into as many with our head as there are human beings who think
they're in touch with their fitrah. It's impossible to avert
to the fitrah, without also opening the door to human
subjectivity, and to a raft of anxieties about what people
actually want to do. So you have people looking into the sword and
saying that they can find things like targeting civilians in
Belgium.
Whereas in fact, something like that is clearly ruled out by the
format hubs. And this is the risk, this is the danger. And anybody
who reads the Syrah can see how far this is. And this is a kind of
parenthesis, but it is important, what would be the Syrah equivalent
of what happened in Paris in Belgium?
Well, the equivalent I guess, would be for somebody from Medina
to go to Makkah. And to go to the marketplace, pull out a knife and
start stabbing people at random. That's the equivalent thing.
That's essentially what they did in Belgium and in Paris, and an
increasing number of other places just to events, one's anger and
one's rejection just by killing people from the other side at
random, irrespective of how they voted or what their view is on
foreign policy just just killed them. And this is the way of the
Jackie Lea. The J Helia. is precisely predicated on the
sovereign human self, the Hermia. Tilda Helia, the feverish pneus of
the chair Helia is about us versus them, my tribe, right or wrong
with no real aversion to higher ethics, or a sense that cuando
neffs in Vienna, Casa de la Hina, every soul is a hostage for what
it has has acquired Nope, it's back to the tribal age of us
versus them. And this aversion is precisely what happens when the
NATs becomes sovereign, and is so pleased with itself that it thinks
that it can sit on some high throne and look down on the armor
of the mothership, and all of the all of the soul and all of the
automat of Cannan and say, Look, I may just be a dentistry student in
Antwerp, but I know better than elfers Ali and Duany and even
humble and all of those that's very gratifying for the self. And
there is something in that fundamentalist impulse, the
trusting of the fitrah which really is a euphemism for doing
your own thing you
There is a certain convergence between that and the Enlightenment
belief in the sovereignty of the individual human subject, which is
one reason why this type of movement tends to prosper. On
neither side, do people really like to accept the wisdom
accumulated wisdom with all of its crankiness and the decrepitude of
its institution, the accumulated wisdom of tradition. So, we are
not immune to these aversions, even though the language that is
used is religious rather than secular, but the the fundamental
shift from collective wisdom and inherited wisdom to the
sovereignty of the angry and threatened human subject and human
identity is something that happens amongst Muslims, as it does
elsewhere. Now, I mentioned as I started, the figure of Louis
Messenia, who's been a subject of some interest recently, and a lot
of conferences and books published about him, perhaps of all Western
writers on the religion of Islam, the one who really sought to go
deepest, and who has had quite a quite an influence in Muslim
circles and whose disciples, some of them did become Muslim, like
his most famous disciples, that's on that day, who was Professor of
Arabic at the Sorbonne, and was the French translator have been
held on and that'd be Iranian, a major figure. In late 20th
century, Arabic studies in France took the nine months or died only
about 10 years ago, I used to know him, I learned a hammer, mess in
your star pupil went into the Islamic Alma, but from a position
of real erudition and from a position of looking at what's
essential, and what is deepest, rather than the incrustation to
the surface, and seen from the perspective of the turbulences of
the ego. These will profoundly erudite, historically alert people
aware of ambiguity and nuance, and happy to deal with ambiguity and
nuance in a way that say, Ofsted is not an in a way that even TV as
follows often are not a celebration of the fact that part
of the gift of traditional religion is to give you
the key to an Aladdin's cave, which is full of golden treasures,
which seem to be piled up maybe somewhat chaotically, but which is
really full of Marvels. Now, the fundamentalist in that case, as
well, this doesn't look right, who made this stuff, we removed it all
down, we'll just have the gold, Islam will be just gold. And we
won't have all of this stuff and that stuff, and we that's all
confusing, and that's culture and it's just had the gold.
Well, you end up reshaping it, because you can't have the thing
on itself that has to be interpreted by somebody's country,
it's going to be your culture, and your reading of the message of the
early Muslims, there's no neutral way of doing it, it's always
mediated through yourself or somebody else's. So what they do
is to melt down those treasures, and to take the gold of the Quran
and the Sunnah, and to create new and often horrifying forms, called
suicide bombing, or whatever it might be, to replace those old and
beautiful forms. But that's not allowed. Hamas was very aware of
the beauty of those forms, and was sophisticated enough and had
enough experience to know that even though they seem to be kind
of dusty, and jumbled, and in many ways, not very well maintained,
they are what has come down to us from the past. They are our unique
link to the sacred past. And that if you get rid of them, and create
your own shapes out of those goals, then you will be radically
disconnected from that past. One of the tragedies of the radical
mind is that in seeking to bracket out 14th centuries of the illness
story and get back to the pristine early story. In fact, they end up
being cut off in a radical way from that early story. And they
end up becoming a human form, that the early Muslims simply wouldn't
have recognized at all. And that is, as we've said, closer to the
feverish anger of the Jackie Leah. This is one of the tragedies and
one of the subversive aspects of their approach because because of
the loudness of their claim to have the Islamic State or the
Islamic whatever, the world, apart from the scholarly world, and
apart from the world of traditional believers, actually
believes that and therefore, the beauty and the goodness of the
self themselves are dragged down to the level of these latter day
gorillas. So we have this, this insight, that somebody like monta
who read Ebola and was aware of this, this alternative possibility
that Massino himself charted and aware of the fact that for that
The educated person, the less educated person is just really
looking for ways of feeling good about himself and picking and
choosing bits of tradition, whether it be in a fundamentalist
or Liberal way. But for the educated person who is aware of
the complexity and the brilliance and the depth of the cave and
Russia or go into any Islamic library, and bigger than any of
the Hindu libraries of a Christian like just goes on forever.
Hundreds of 1000s of great thinkers, only 2% of which has
even been printed. That's another thing we need to think about when
we consider the brilliance of our heritage. You go to the Egyptian
national library, what a shame What a scandal, even if the book
you ask for hasn't been sort of stolen by somebody and sold in
some dealers office in New York, even if the book is still there.
The Faraj that guy brings you the book plunked it down in front of
you, then he brings you your tea, and puts it on the pages of the
manuscript. And it leaves a little circle, Molly shabby. Nevermind,
what this book, do you have any idea maybe I've heard it's worth a
lot of money in our show. No, that's, that's the estimation.
This is the degeneracy of the custodians of that cave of
treasures.
And the windows broken, and the pigeons flying in and out. And oh,
my God, and then you go to the casino at the Ramses hotel. And
that's where the energy is in those places. Now, unfortunately,
what people care about, but still those treasures are there. And
further person who doesn't just want to listen to the theme tune
of Star Wars is the most important thing in his life, but actually
want to dig deeply and have a richer life. He's going to find
those treasures and those wonders in those manuscript libraries,
it's important that we conserve them a look after them, and
digitize them and copy them so that even if they're stolen,
we still have copies of those treasures. But it's it's hard
work.
So we still have that. And we have an again Vanson was very clear
about this. And this was one of the reasons for his, his Islam. We
have the fact of a unifying religious legacy, really unifying,
nothing's more unifying than Tawheed. In its simple and
absolute Islamic form monotheism, the most powerful idea in history.
Islam has it in a really simple, straightforward, powerful, sacred,
uncompromising, beautiful way. That's pretty powerful. And
despite the clunkiness of the Ummah everywhere, the mosques are
full everywhere, just because of the power of that idea. But this,
but along with that, let you know how in the law, the other
insistence on the the only reality is unity. The only ontological
fact, is the divine, and everything else ends up being just
really a point of view. Despite that radical insistence on unity,
the OMA has been this peacocks tail of diversity, of
interpretations and cultures. And so he wrote his book, or sanctuary
left Islam, the five colours of Islam, which is his very scholarly
exposition of how that has worked in history. So the five colors of
Islam, for him really meant the Arab bit of Islam, the Persian bit
of Islam, which we've included the subcontinent, the Turkish bit of
Islam, including Central Asia, the black African bit of Islam,
because he was a great scholar of Islam in Senegal, in new wall off
and he was one of the great experts on that, and the
Nusantara, the islands of this of Southeast Asia, and Indonesia,
Malaysia that world, five colors. And because he was a scholarly
master on all of these things, he could show how that beautiful
principle of the rainbow reducing to the pure white light of Tawheed
was an actuality. Despite the diversity of those cultures, and
the fact they all face the table, or from different points of the
compass, they all face the same peddler. This was for him, the way
forward for Muslims in Europe.
But for many of the young Moroccans who used to come to him
and sort of talk about these things, he had a very beautiful
flat in Paris and constantly, even in his retirement, people were
coming.
They were more interested in feeling better about themselves,
and healing their ethnic traumas, and dealing with that worries than
with exploring the beauty of the shining gold in in the Cave of
Wonders, disarms Cave of Wonders, and they were kind of proud of it.
But really, they didn't want to get into fuck readin Ross's
arguments for the existence of God from contingent being they wanted
really to
know what they should go on the next demo about what was happening
in Algeria and that was something that he had to work with
constantly with them identity, taking the place of the things
that really should be the deep things in religion and the the
unhappiness that resulted from that because identity issues,
political issues, economic worries, relationship issues. They
tend to be part of the turbulence of human existence anyway.
fitna is something that is kind of promised to be part of the history
of the ummah.
Holy Prophet alayhi salat wa salam says that, or that of the ALMA is
filled dunya Alphington was a reservoir of cattle. The OMA is
subject to Allah's mercy. Lisa Ali, her other one, Phil Afra has
no punishment in the next world is punishment is in this world,
fitness and earthquakes and killing. Well, we can see that.
And this is just in a sense, particularly in an age in which
religion is in the grip of the mentality of the age which is
about the me the subject them and us the return to Jay Hillier. It's
kind of part of the package. But what he constantly tried to do is
to bring them down to a deeper level to connect with what really
is important. Faith, Hope, beauty, a sense of pride in the
incomparable aesthetic, cultural, architectural, spiritual,
intellectual, theological, historical, sociological 30,
achievements of the OMA and to connect with that, because that's
what is real in religion, and that's what's going on. So one can
be Muslim, for Islam, but Allah and His Messenger, or one can be
Muslim for the Muslims. And the latter is really not a very good
option, if you want to be on a kind of spiritual even keel
nowadays, if the main thing that your Muslim ness is connecting
with is the latest headlines on the BBC, that's, that's really not
a very good place in which to place your principal religious
concerns. This is just the kind of storm on the surface of the sea,
and you need to be deep down with the interesting treasures and the
sea creatures, because that's really what religion is about. And
there's always a different storm, and last year storm will be
forgotten, there'll be another one. That's the only predictable
thing. So this is what he tried to do. And with his book, The five
colors of Islam, where he showed the depth and the beauty of each
of those bands in the Muslim rainbow. He insisted really, that
the way to be at those depths, as a Muslim is to
deal lightly with the boundary issues. And the anxieties that
particularly recent migrant communities tend to inhabit on the
surface.
Further, European Muslim, is not a racial category of anybody who's
really been brought up here and has the European cognitive frame,
whether they like it or not,
things are easier, because you're dealing with the current reality
with its culture and with Islam. For the first generation, you're
dealing with the current reality, and with Islam, and with an
ancestral set of honor codes and beautiful things and ugly things
and those things, and that's a much more difficult stage. So for
him, we need to move from the triangular sort of identity to a
world where just a dialectic between the timeless beautiful
truths and inhabiting that golden cave. And on the other hand,
seeing how we can still inhabit and maybe even ride the back of
the Tiger of this strange, post enlightenment,
post religious, modern capitalist, inescapable reality. So if you
look at his writings, and if you look, for instance, at his
treatment of an area that he knew very well,
he really was a kind of old fashioned scholar and that he
didn't sort of dig one hole very deeply, but he dug a lot of holes
actually quite deeply in a whole range of places in the armor. This
is part of the Macedonian tradition in western Orientalism
that you learn all of the languages, mess in your new
Turkish really well, Farsi really well. And reshimo was another
example of him just being Arabist or Persian nest, which tends to be
the style nowadays, but really to have a broad sense of Islamic
civilization, which a lot of Muslims tend not to do. They tend
to think of Muslim ness is focused on the Middle East, which is
really not the case, because most Muslims are not in the Middle
East. And the Middle East has not really produced major cultural
intellectual achievements. For five or 600 years, the energy has
been on the fringes and historians, the fact of the output
of the libraries is evidence for that. So if you look at for
instance,
well, we're probably in France or England at one end, one extreme
one edge of the big Eurasian landmass, which is really kind of
important bit of the world
Hold for religious history and look at the very other edge, which
is the fifth of his five colors, which is the North Sunterra, the
20,000 inhabited islands of Southeast Asia. And you look at
their engagement with Islam, he finds there a style of Islam, that
has been really focused on the depths of the religion and on the
gold in those treasures, and less concerned with identity and
boundary issues starting to change now, but certainly when he was
studying it in the 40s and 50s, that that that was what that place
was about. So look at the the willie sambal we should know about
the willie Sangha. They are the nine holier than nine great
scholars and saints, who are traditionally credited with the
conversion of the island of Java to Islam. Java, really a place
whose identity is complicated, really complicated, because deep
substrate is shamanistic. And then it became Buddhist, we don't know
how, and then they became Hindu, which is strange when you think
Buddhists then Hindu, but we don't know how that happened. And then
they became Muslim. And now they're kind of everything. And
that unique, extraordinary process, for him provides an
interesting context for investigating the capacity of
Islam to
to deal with massive multiplicity and inculturation itself.
Now, inculturation, is not the same thing as assimilation, just
kind of going native and losing ourselves. For him. The great
genius of Islam is that it retains its structures of doctrine, and of
practice, absolutely, and miraculously intact, in the midst
of outward cultural forms that can be more diverse than those
cultural forms, generated by any other civilization.
And that's a balance that is characteristic of Islam and makes
our cave of treasures, so much busier, and deeper and richer than
anybody else is, the capacity of Islam, to foster a plurality while
remaining absolutely uncompromising about the deep,
important tell, heed religious things. And we often tend to
confuse that listen to an average mosque conversation in modern
Britain just you sometimes it's not good to eavesdrop. Sometimes
people are speaking with such passion that you can't help but
hear what's what's going on. Nine times out of 10, what they're
talking about the boundary issues of various kinds of resistance,
hijab is not quite right. And look at what's happening in Turkey. And
why is the Imams stoled, not linen rather than cotton or some other
strange thing or somebody came to me recently with this really
scatty idea saying that you can't recite the Quran, according to the
McCombs, everybody who's always recited the Quran, according to
you can't do that because of McCombs, or from some non Muslim
culture. So that's another boundary issue, has nothing to do
ever at all in any way, conceivably, with the soul doesn't
affect the validity of Tajweed. If you use knock on the house and
knock on the server, totally irrelevant, but we're so anxious
about boundary identity issues, that's dominated our conversation.
So we're on the stormy surface. And the depth is kind of not many
Muslims diving down there any longer because we're kind of
fighting on the surface. And we've kind of forgotten that religion is
really not primarily about the surface. So
in the Nusantara, particularly in those areas, really, Java is the
center of everything. There's a few other places where they're
interesting culture, Southern Sumatra, and others. But
basically, it's Java really complicated, deep, outrageous, in
many ways. It's forms of syncretism that you can't justify
in Sharia. But if you look at the way in which Islam came to those
places, it came to the Wali Songo, the nine saints.
And their strategy was to say, take people
to what is deepest in religion, and don't waste their time with
the surface things that will come later. And it's not the most
important thing, what they believe is actually more important than
what they're wearing.
Is that really a difficult concept for some Muslims nowadays? It does
seem to be though if he's not wearing a hijab
What if her Eman is better than your Eman? What then knows. This
is because that's that's what Islam is. It's just a kind of
badge of identity for so many of us. But look at look at the depth.
So the willie Sangha, and they're kind of mysterious, almost
mythological figures. We don't even know if there were nine. If
you actually count up the Welly song goal. You come to somewhere
between 40 and 50.
by my reckoning, but that's just part of it.
The mystique of it very Javanese. So, the inculturation about which
now start Monty used to write. If you go to the second city of
Indonesia, which is Surabaya, it's kind of its spiritual hub is the
mosque and the Mazhar and the College of sauna and unpin.
He was,
again, not quite sure where he was on probably, of Chinese and ozbek
heritage
from some OPCON anyway, so maybe Persian speaking rod in Ramat and
his great pupils on unborn in the region, originally Rodden Molana
Matome. Ibrahim seems to have been, again, a Chinese mother, the
influence of Chinese Assam and Chinese convert very significant
in that part of the world. Sonam bond is significant because he,
first of all, you'll notice how they, the first thing they do is
to change their names. He doesn't want to be Molana Makhdoom Abraham
any longer he knows that'll get in the way of taking his people down
to the depths when they lived 90% of people are Hindus or
syncretistic of animists or whatever. A big task for the Dawa,
a long way from the heartland of the Ummah, not an easy place to
get into a very deep, traditional place, very static place. And in
order to get into the depths, don't mess around to the surface.
don't alienate them because you've got some freaky Arab name, that
wander around in desert clothes in the streets of Seoul about a get
might be more comfortable than wearing desert clothes and in, in
Berlin, but still, it's going to kind of be a veil is going to get
in people's way. And the dollar is going to be of the surface where
all the storms are. And he won't get down to those depths. And
these people knew that actually, the Javanese are people who
naturally inhabit the depths, some sort of dark and freaky depths as
well as sort of the luminous depths of some very odd, odd odd
world of superstitions and beliefs that but they are sort of
spiritual static Indyk deep people in their deepest instinct. So
going down to the depths, don't freak them out by giving yourself
or having some Arabic name, you can keep it. But for purposes of
Dawa, you will soon unborn and you are rather than whatever, you use
the indigenous Javanese and don't march around in Yemeni or Moroccan
clothes. What could that mean? Were the Javanese clothes. So
these these
are the songs or were famous for magnificently dressing and
magnificent sort of Indic dress of the Java need. And that overcame
the surface barriers and enable them to take the people of Java by
the hand and to dive with them into the depths. So Sonnen born
ENGs great legacy, in many ways was his
mastery of the Javanese language, and his creation of songs and
poems that use the forms of the traditional Indic devotional
literature of Java, but with an Islamic content. And to this day,
everybody in Java, if they're Muslim, they know and love these
songs, it goes so deep into people's hearts. So in some song
competitions, and if you ever go to the again, it's kind of rather
eye popping sometimes. But if you go to say the Indonesian
equivalent of the voice, for instance, how often these songs
will be there. There's some ditzy little girl maybe in a miniskirt
singing away, but it's one of the songs of son unborn because it's
absolutely axiomatic in our culture, and even the most secular
people will still love that. And it keeps gives them some kind of,
of a thread that attaches them to to Islam. In many of the
pesantren. The Quranic schools, these songs are known.
The best known of them
is this one. This is just an English translation of one of his
kind of very simple nasheeds. Know that there are five cures to your
heart. First, read the Quran with an understanding of its meaning.
Secondly, do not forget to 100 prayer. Third, keep the company of
the people whose hearts luminous. Fourthly, keep your stomach hungry
regularly. Fifthly Do not forget to remember God at night. Anyone
who can do even one of these, may Allah bless him forever. Nothing
could be simpler. You could kind of get the five year old to
understand that completely. But everybody in Indonesia knows that
and it's on the song competitions and other peasant trends. They all
done such an amazing impact. How did you do it you can get them to
sing in Arabic even though they didn't know Arabic which is what
we tend to do here which is kind of nice and sentimental but not
the
way of Dawa. Instead, he goes into the essence of the culture
affirming the beauty of their language, and their traditional
tonalities. And he brings them up. So thanks to these people, these
worldly Sangha, the 80 million strong population of Java, he's
actually mostly Muslim now, which is pretty impressive. If you
compare that to some of the strategies used elsewhere, so in
India, where often the Allah mat kind of maintained quite a
distance, and didn't use indigenous forms, and wouldn't it
be amazing if Indian hours 80 90% Muslim, but no, the Allamah tended
to say we are a shut off and we use Persian and we're kind of a
cut above everybody else. And it's only some of them like minored in
Chishti who said, nevermind the surface stuff, nevermind writing
stuff in Persian, use the local languages dive deep, and take the
people to what really matters in religion and then the surface will
will follow. But this was the approach of the wily Sangha. So
someone born and has great disciple was one of the best known
of the Molson and Kelly Jaga. Again, not a very Arabic name,
Southern Cali Jaga, who was the queasy legendary inventor of the
way and call it, which is the famous Javanese shadow puppets.
And this is, again, a great way of reaching the masses, you go to any
traditional village in Java to this day, and when they're not
watching The Force Awakens, because unfortunately, that's
there as well. They are looking at the shadow puppets, which is
really amazing, beautiful, ancient, very simple, traditional
art that doesn't require money or technology, just this amazing guy
called the Delhomme who's sitting behind the screen with the light
shining, so you can only see the shadows and he works all night.
It's an amazing skill telling these stories. And
the villagers are kind of really, really into this. And many of the
stories that son and Kelly Jagger used were actually not Islamic
stories at all, but come from the Ramayana and the Hindu legends.
And he used to confer with his his his Sheikh, son unborn and
frequently about what are the boundaries? Because he was a man
of Sharia? What can we do so that's why they use the shadow
puppets, because it's just forms, it's not really pictures of people
and the fetters that was permissible. And his shape also
told him to make the forms really not look like human beings or
living beings, but kind of distorted and strange. If you see
the images of the Javanese shadow puppets, they've got kind of long
nose and freaky foreheads, and kind of weird, but beautiful in a
certain folkloric way. And so he did this in order to spread the
message of Islam through teachings that he found in the indigenous
tradition that was still about that too, and about heroism and
about dhikr, about the secret. And within a few generations, the
population of rural Java had come to Islam through these methods.
That's an amazing story. And thus a multi was very fascinated by
this. But the question then arises is how you you pull the same stunt
in the context of modernity, how he wrote that Javanese Targa Tiger
successfully and Indonesia is now the world's most populous Muslim
country. And in Java alone, there's more Islamic universities,
then in the whole of the Middle East, it's not insignificant.
And how do you do that today? Well, the obvious response to that
is that it's going to be easier and harder, easier, because you're
not dealing with deeply entrenched, traditional people who
really can't imagine doing anything different to what their
great grandmother's would have approved of. Modern world is not
like that people are much more mobile, people will become
Buddhists without thinking. People will convert to religions without
thinking in order to marry people. Everybody is mobile in flux,
because it's all of the surface. It's all about identity. And hey,
this year, I'm going to be a biker and I bought my leathers and next
year, I think I'll do a bit of Kabbalah. And then the year after
that, maybe I'll support Everton and this is just how people work.
On the surface, everything's kind of leveled out and becomes just
different ways of being.
But for
our purposes, taking people down is going to be harder. So on the
one hand, people are more mobile, they seem to convert sometimes. I
was talking to somebody.
A few days ago, we wanted to marry this Muslim girl. So we're talking
about Islam, and I explained it to him. So do you have any questions?
No, it's fine.
You know, you're gonna pray five times a day for the rest of your
life. Yeah, that's fine. You what you're, you know, brought up who's
brought up the Christian? Yeah, that's all right. That's kind of
really worrying because he just wanted to marry this girl. And
that's kind of that's hard to deal with.
So people mobile and convert and unconverted at the drop of the
hat. This is predicted prophetically in the Hadith that
says, used to be gradual, a few min and williamsii Kaviraj. At the
end time somebody will wake up a Muslim, and get a bed as a non
Muslim. And then they will wake up as a non Muslim and go to bed as a
Muslim. It's the kind of time of religious Brownian motion people
moving in all conceivable random directions, we have somehow to get
used to that.
But on the other hand, difficult because you're telling people
actually religion isn't just the surface and headlines and wearing
desert clothes and eating biryani and being freaky about
it's about going deep. It's about how he'd about let alone a lot of
that stillness to that connection to the sacred. It's about really
loving humanity and all of those things. This is such a new
language for people, that they need to be taken further back in
order to learn the basis of what religion is supposed to be in what
human beings have traditionally aspired to.
They may not have any sense of what a pilgrimage is really meant
to be.
Traditional Catholic who converted to Islam could work out the Hajj
pretty quickly.
An atheist, an atheist background, for him, the HUD really needs to
be explained in painful detail before it makes any sense at all.
What is this this toe off and going round and going this way?
And that way? And throwings? What is that? Because there's no,
there's no background, there's no context, that makes things more
difficult. And it makes the process of writing this particular
Tiger, which is a kind of, it's a sort of not really organic, it's a
kind of sort of robotic Tiger, in a certain sense, it's the machine
of modernity, where technique has increasingly occupied what's
happening on the surface of the planet, and the human organic bit
gets smaller and smaller, and more and more things are done by
robots. And even my bank seems to be entirely populated by robots, I
can never get through to human being and buying a ticket. And
it's that's the modern reality. So
actually getting through to the, the humanity becomes harder,
because people's experience is not enriched from an early age, by
complex and rich human engagements with extended families and with
neighbors but largely through engagement with with these things.
handheld devices and other devices and the teenager who's got the
laptop, and the mobile phone. And that is something really new,
which we have not dealt with before. And taking people from
that level into the depths is going to be harder. And writing
that particular Tiger is going to be really hard. And this is
possibly quite possibly the stage at which we do have to disengage
and say, well, we're not going to be defined by these this
increasingly overwhelming and dictatorial technological culture,
which has gotten us what effects on on the beat the fundamental
functioning of the human species. So here's a fun fact for you, the
average American males testosterone levels declined by 1%
every year.
And this is one people are worrying about this and saying,
Well, is this why relationships are failing and why men are
wimping out and the women are doing best in careers and 65% of
undergraduates are women and what's going on?
Well, one explanation for that, apparently, is the use of laptops.
Think about that. So we don't know the extent to which our reality is
surrounded by really powerful machines. There's a certain
vulnerability about the human metabolism that has its limits and
will eventually start to break down. And what it doesn't do the
spirit and the psyche is another thing that doesn't bear thinking
about the stillness, the focused centeredness, that is essential
for beginning the plunge into the center, the depth is the center is
going to be difficult if we have never really been a state in a
state of collected integral centeredness, because there's
always another text and another thing going on. And that is
really, really hard. And the extent to which the species itself
and the brain is being rewired. Because teenagers and are
increasingly dominated by this form, is going to create
historically unprecedented challenges for religion. Easy to
get them to be crazy fundamentalists, because it's all
on the surface and it's all storms and that's what they used to get
them into a time of stillness where they think it's fine to be
doing nothing.
Or you can have a long, focused conversation with another human
being and experience the divine
Mystery of the soul in communication with another soul,
or a real relationship of love with another human being, or a
relationship with an animal, which is another thing that human beings
have lost. Because part of the richness of the human experience
always was with engaging with animal mind, you didn't have to be
looking after goats in your backyard, although a lot of people
did. But the relationship with a horse when you are traveling
somewhere, or the camel, or that's another aspect of
intersubjectivity that's been lost. And where we're impoverished
by the increasing sort of metallic context of our lives. How you ride
that Tiger is a big question. And I'm not sure that all on that
really have begun to deal with that. And very often you find
Muslims saying we must embrace technology.
Doesn't we think about that metaphor is kind of
I can imagine people things. Cats, I wouldn't mind embracing that
technology is kind of cold and Angular and doesn't really not
going to respond in a very satisfying way. There's a certain
way in which the technology dominates us because it's got a
better memory. And
it's, it looks better, the phone always looked good was the human
metabolism tends to crumble after a while. It's kind of
increasingly, as the human subject maintains its historic mammalian
self, and the technology gets better and better at the stuff it
does we necessarily shrink. So to embrace this, this enormous
monster is something that's a bit worrying. But still, the question
is, we have to coexist with this tiger. Maybe it's not possible to
ride it. But though, it's necessary for us to coexist,
because even the summoner Council, you should call and your corner
Pharaoh melee and Muslim Vanaman yet Tabby, OBE, shareability bail
on my work LK three federal Rubini human will fitten sound Hadith in
Sahih Muslim there's lots like it. It's almost the time the Holy
Prophet is telling us it's almost the time when the best thing a
Muslim can own will be a flock of sheep with which he goes to the
mountain passes and the places where the rain falls, fleeing with
his religion from fitna. Well, first of all, you have to get the
the somebody to
get to the sheep and to certify the sheep, and maybe they need
their ears clipped. And then you need to, you have to slaughter
them in a way that the government will approve of. And then where's
Where's where's the valley that somebody hasn't already built a
Burger King or an airport or seriously
that the real meaning of that is that there has to be a certain
inner withdrawal,
that the surface is going to be so turbulent increasing, that the
believer has to be more of a diver than he was in the past. And that
shouldn't be a good thing, because that's where the reality of
religion is. So that whereas other Muslims are saying, nevermind the
spirituality, business, and this art and depth, and vicar, let's
stay on the surface, because it's kind of interesting seeing all of
the fighting that's going on, we can actually change the world by
being on the surface instead of that, Let's withdraw. If you can't
find a sheep and a mountain.
Perfect, then that's a literal obedience to the, to the Hadith.
And very often, we find that our brothers who say we want to
literally follow the Quran and the Hadith, they tend not to look at
that hadith much they want to be on the surface fighting with some
other group that has a different view of the Hadith.
You won't find too many of them then the Scottish Borders with a
nice flock of Merino sheep, a lot, a lot. That's not what they were.
They are the frontline of fitna wars.
But we need to find ways of recalibrating ourselves so that
naturally the things we think about, and the things that we talk
about are the things of the depths, rather than the things of
the surface. Otherwise, we're really going to suffer
psychically, psychically because the surface is so
almost uninhabitable. Now. The surface of the world with its
focus on matter and on self and the human subject and mee, mee,
mee, and money, and the whole thing of it is really not not
human, not humane.
So we need to be withdrawing but still with others, and this is
where the Naqshbandi speak of the Hollywood dot Angelman solitude in
the crowd,
which is a tricky one, really, because our nature is osmotic, to
take on the disposition, the values, the lifestyle choices of
the people that we hang out with. Not just the young people who feel
the peer pressure, but we all do.
And often the temptation is if you really feel different to feel kind
of superior about that or develop certain psychic complexes which
are not healthy either
but to be distinct and different, but not to have a superiority
complex, whatever that calls to be an aristocratic, an aristocratic
the soul. That's not a healthy thing either. So to maintain a do
humility,
well, in the ground, can only take place when you retain the most
fundamental of all religious ethical impulses, which is to be
looking out for the needs of others, and to find things in
other human beings that are lovable. This is what my sheiks
always insisted on, that the sound believer, when looking at others,
will always buy his fitrah. Look at whatever is most lovable in
that person.
And the sign of the sickness of the soul, is to see whatever is
the floor in others. And this is an inflexible rule, that should be
applied in every situation.
Whether the person you're engaging with as a Muslim, or non Muslim,
or you don't know, always look to your soul to see if your soul is
reaching for and attracted by and impressed by whatever is most
beautiful and good in that person.
And this is an important skill, because it does give us a
detachment whilst still being engaged. If you're taking from
others, or you're looking to see what you can take from others,
then you are as it were dependent upon them and you are part of that
osmotic process of being sucked into the vortex. But if you're a
person who is giving that gives you this, if you like, kind of
Noblesse this noblesse oblige of the aristocratic the soul, and
means that you're not dependent on them. And that requires a
reinforcement, we saw small,
seeking provisions, which can never be done on the surface, but
the fish and nourishing stuff is down underneath the sea. And
that's where you need to be. And this is what one sees
consistently, you see that the true scholar is the one who, when
a gathering is at an end, and people are talking about what
people were saying and what they liked, and what they didn't like,
the true scholar is the one who will always talk about and will
encourage the conversation about the good things that happened in
the session, and the good things that they learned about people and
the inadequate Jalili environment, even if everybody has beard as
long as their knees, knees and mismatched Miss wax going and
whatever else the surface might be. If they're saying, well, he
has this point in Aikido, which is problematic, and he looks really
weird, whatever. That is the sign of the sickness, which is
unfortunately, often the dominant mode of the Ummah, because of our
insecurity, and our seasickness, as it were from being on the
surface all the time, the ego predominates. And the judgmental
Ness Amara comes to the surface. So this is one counsel that my
teachers always had, which is to look at people with a selective
eye to see what is best in them. And to have a kind of blind spot
to their weaknesses, but not to the extent that you get taken in
or fooled by people, because the believer is not bitten twice from
the same hole, but still sort of not to prefer not to notice other
people's faults, and to always find a good interpretation for
that. And that is not just a moral platitude, but a way of finding
this engaged detachment which is which is important.
This is also linked to another principle, which is that there has
to be justice in the world. But the sheiks and Abdulghani
nebulosity and others make this explicit, justice is necessary
where love fails. In other words, if that sort of natural fit three,
desire of human beings to get on with each other, and to celebrate
the mystery of being and to be friends, if that fails, because
the ego, it's always the ego gets in the way of that, that's when
justice is necessary. Justice is not necessarily everybody's
looking out for each other. And there's a state of mutual love.
That's the highest state. And this is where we find the Holy Prophet
Allah slopeside, speaking about the to have the mutual love of the
believers as being something that's beautiful to see.
But still, there must be justice. So looking out for justice issues
in the world is significant. But usually the healthiest way
spiritually of engaging with that is to look to local things.
Because it's better for the soul, to engage with people directly
than to press a button on a screen that sends $100 to Burma or
wherever, which is a kind of cold engagement really through this
huge technological mega structure, which is in between you and the
recipient and instead to deal with what that really meant at all. So
Holy Prophet says ally, so to begin with your dependents,
family, neighbors, and others, that is really where sadaqa
begins, some charity does begin at home. And that also puts you in a
state of not needing but being needed, which is
is a necessary prerequisite for being in society without being
overly swept away by by its currents. So be in a strong
position, and don't be dependent. And the easiest way of ensuring
that is to ensure that in your own environment in your own context,
otherwise people, other people's rights over you are being
satisfied. So these are some kind of rather random, obvious
reflections on the let's face it difficult challenge which we have,
we tend to say, why is the OMA such a mess? Well, the fact is,
the world is in a mess. And the ALMA is trying that very nearly
but not quite impossible task of retaining a fully sacred
worldview, in the context of a planet that's kind of drunk with
the excitement of, of, of matter and stuff. And the seven deadly
sins, and whatever is going on the world is really in a bad state.
And the armor of course,
it's colliding with that. And the collision is producing casualties,
and there are sparks flying and incomprehension on on the on both
sides. So it's not too surprising that the armor is in its
ramshackle state, but the key is,
under the core is intact. If you're into the depths, Islam is
really intact. metalhead is there, the doctrines are still there, the
theology is still there. The practices are still there.
Nobody's ever dare to tamper with the way you pray or the way you
fast. You can have a million arguments over who saw the moon
last night. But it doesn't really affect the reality of Ramadan,
human ego gets as close as it can to interfering with people's
sexuality. But Allah always protects those practices. And
nobody's been able to subvert the basic and beautiful practices of
religion, which are what we are hopefully, in Islam for anyway. So
if we inhabit those depths, and we put the core of the religion where
it belongs at the core of our lives, and repeat the surface of
the things as being something two dimensional and passing part of
the ebb and flow of the flux of space and time and separation
distance from Allah, then we will in shall not be in a healthier
state. And then our intuition will guide us to the nature of our
engagement, the extent of our relationality to the enormous, an
intimidating and quite cold and inhuman mega structures of today's
world. There's no simple argument to Should I join the military?
Should I become a politician? Should I get into local
government? Should I run a hotel? Should I be in etc. There's
questions everywhere, because you're going to deal with a whole
range of often inflict terms unprecedented new questions and
complex social situation. There's no simple single factor on any of
those issues. But you do need to have this basic disposition of the
soul, which is the soul is oriented towards that pillar,
which means the depths the ancient, dark mystery, the
Abrahamic beauty of God's
unchanging ability. If that's the center of your life, that pillar
is the center of your life, then you will be able to engage with
those spaces insha Allah with some degree of protection with some
sort of HEFCE from the craziness and polluted gases, which humanity
unfortunately has generated for itself as a result of our
excessive greed and our forgetfulness. So that's the end
of the homily. Haven't occupied the whole two hours but and I
think my blood sugar level is running down a bit. Get some of
those nice biscuits, so came late as usual.