Abdal Hakim Murad – Travelling Home Interview
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Salam Alaikum. We are here today with Abdullah Kimora on to discuss
his latest book, traveling home essays on Islam in Europe. Check
this book has just come out. Can you tell us a bit about it? Well,
it was Rahmatullah. And thanks so much for taking the time for
having this conversation with me about my new book, which I suppose
Better late than never is the best way of looking at it, but reflects
some of my thinking about some quite hot topics
that I've been pondering over the years. And it really does, I
think, represent me stomping across a number of minefields to
do with the new body beliefs to do with gender, to do with
integration to do with racism to do with Muslim community
leadership, to do with Islamophobia. So I'm going to
consider this book, I kind of kept the time throwing amongst the
pigeons, it's dealing with some of the most controversial issues on
Earth. And I've decided that I'm going to speak quite frankly, this
time, but Inshallah, there will be light generated as well as heat.
And thanks again for doing this. So let's begin with the first
essay. You speak about liberalism, as well as traditional Islam. Do
you believe that traditional Islam can still flourish in Liberal
Europe?
Yeah, I think that the question of the overlap zone between
liberalism and Islam really can only start when we recognize that
those are two very diverse phenomena. There's different types
of liberalism, certain liberal beliefs that are going to be
difficult to square with traditional Islamic teaching. And
the Muslim family, of course, is diverse as well. But one of the
things that I'm reaching for in the book, I suppose, is the idea
that liberalism itself across Europe seems to be morphing in a
coercive way. And the paradox is not not far to seek. In other
words, it is no longer a question of the traditional rules in or or
lock in vision of liberalism, which is that the state takes no
view on the worldview of the citizens, and more towards a
coercive view, whereby the state increasingly expect compliance
with certain
social beliefs that are regarded as being paradigmatically.
Liberal, I think the worry here is not just for the prospects of
social cohesion as people are being forced to believe certain
things, but also that this has handed a stick to the xenophobic
movements across Europe, which they are using to beat immigrants,
conservatives, Jews, as well as Muslims. So that this coercive
liberalism becomes a kind of badge of European identity, which is
really feeding in to the mounting prejudice against people who don't
fit in people of conservative religious backgrounds,
conservative Christians, as well, who increasingly feel that they
are pushed out from the center of the consensus of European
liberalism, in the name of liberalism itself. So there's
clearly a paradox here, can liberalism tolerate anything other
than itself? And I think it's very important that Muslims get their
heads around this question, because increasingly, it is
central to the whole conversation about the future of thriving
Muslim communities, not just in UK, but across Europe. So of
course, when discussing the role of Islam in modern Europe, we have
to of course, comment on the role of the media has played recently.
You mentioned in your chapter about the Bosnian war, the
reluctancy of politicians and the media to acknowledge the role that
religion played in the war. Yeah, there's a whole chapter about
Bosnia because I think that
we exist in a post Holocaust world we exist in a post 911 world, but
we're also very much particularly as European Muslims inhabiting a
Post's ryburn. It's a world storybrand It's the largest
atrocity act of genocide and its perpetrators convicted at The
Hague of genocide and crimes against humanity that we've seen
since outfits. And this is clearly insofar as the Muslims were the
victims of enormous concern, not least because so many of the anti
Muslim zealots across the world really are looking to the radical
Bosnian Serbs as paradigms of Western white Christian Crusader
hood, so that for instance, Anders Breivik, while he was carrying out
his Otoya massacre in in Norway, wrote very much of his in
duration by the example of the example of courage in the Bosnian
Serbs. Similarly, the Christchurch mosque massacre was done by
somebody who was singing Chapnick radical Serbian religious songs as
he was shooting down worshippers and the two mosques in
Christchurch in New Zealand. So there is a sense in which we know
where that road leads. anti semitism start sauce starts us on
a road whose Terminus is outfits. Islamophobia, clearly is taking us
along a road whose Terminus is Srebrenica ethnic cleansing, mass
murder. And I think it's very important that we focus our minds
on this rather grim outcome, not as a possibility, but it's
something that is still there. And as an example, Serbian religious,
Orthodox Christian nationalism, a kind of strange, idolatrous
worship of the national self is something that is not confined
just to the Balkans, or to the Slavic or the Orthodox world. But
it's increasingly a paradigm that inspires a shockingly large number
of young, anti Muslims and it's really across the European
continent, and the role of the media has often been quite
invidious. In that in Bosnia, all of the stereotypes were inverted,
weren't they? The usual Western narrative is innocent Christians
being massacred by evil Muslims with daggers and teeth, coming to
ravage and ravish them. But in Bosnia, it was exactly the other
way round, peace loving, pluralistic Muslims being mass
murdered by their cross caring Christian neighbors, that the
media kind of went into a meltdown and didn't quite know how to deal
with this, the narrative was flipped. So absolutely. And we
need to remember that there is the same reluctance on the part of
mass media, not just tabloid media, when confronted with the
reality that most acts of communal violence in European countries now
are perpetrated against Muslims rather than by Muslims. And this
is something that the media is uncomfortable with. And clearly
the consumers of the media are incredulous about, but it's very
important for us to set the record straight. I like the fact that you
have an entire essay on environmental issues.
What exactly do you mean, though, by the term creation,
spirituality? Yeah, it's quite a punchy and argumentative chapter,
I think not everybody will like it. But essentially the emphasis
that is kind of
a form of worship in our time, on preserving creation is one of the
things that differentiates spiritual or religious discourse
from a purely secular materialistic one, the Green
Movement, the ecology part is to date tend to regard the natural
world as something worth protecting, because thereby we
protect our own future. It's utilitarian, functional,
defensive. I think that from a religious perspective, and
particularly the perspective of the Quran, which is nothing, if
not a great collocation of, of, of wonderful hymns to the glory of
the natural world, as a sign of creation moves along way further
than that, and gives a stronger heart to the Green Movement and
the Green parties, insofar as we wish to protect nature, not just
because it's the life support system for our own species, but
because nature represents the symphony of Gods science that are
yet and everything in creation, according to the Quran knows its
own form of prayer, and its own form of test via of glorification,
which means that the other Almas and the Quran does speak of our
species as being almost all members and fellow come nations
like yourselves have the right to be here, whether it be the
pangolins, or the mice or the horses or the Siberian tiger, they
have their hub that right indescretion And the traditional
Mies van or balance that obtained for 99% of human history whereby
human beings existed in a kind of balanced relationship with with
other ecosystems has been completely overthrown by
consumerism, secularism, materialism, a utilitarian view of
things as being there for us to make products out of. And I think
we really need to push back against materialism and secularity
because that's the basis of their instrumentalizing of the the
natural world which for us is is blasphemous. So yes, a creation
spirituality. That's the term that I'm using here, that we look at
the world not just as blobs of matter. That is something that is
attributed to a creator. And that therefore is redolent not just
with messages about how we might make money out of creation or how
we might in a utilitarian way want to protect and
reserve creation, but also is something that as we inhale, the
beauty and the aesthetic of the natural world, takes us closer to
God and reminds us of our point of origin, Eden and our point of
return in sha Allah which is Jana. So yes to see creation in a
spiritual way, I think is essential if we're going to move
forward and take the green movement out of the margins of our
political and discursive life and put them where they have to be
right at the center of the conversation about the human
future and human survival. So because of the outbreak of the
Coronavirus we all we're all in lockdown right now. No one really
knows what's going on. There's a bit of a panic people are
overbuying. No one knows what's happening. You do comment on the
Coronavirus in your book. What do you think people can take away
from the book during this time of crisis? Yeah, it's important isn't
it? We live in extraordinary times. And everything has been
upended the corona crisis in society and political life and and
medical apparatus, the corona crash in the markets, the new,
great depression, which seems to be upon us,
millions and millions of people out of work 10s of 1000s of people
dying in quite distressing ways. The world has changed enormously
in the last few months. And so I do talk in the book about what we
can make of this as Muslims and what are likely to be the
implications, not just for Muslims, I think. But for other
vulnerable minorities. Don't forget that one of the precursors
of the rise of Nazism in Germany was the Great Depression. And the
Great Depression had been preceded by certain demographic and psychic
turbulence is caused by the the influenza epidemic a few years
earlier, epidemics create a kind of earthquake in human society. So
I think we're already seeing conspiracy theories of various
kinds, they tend to be pretty anti Chinese a lot of the time. But
they're anti Muslim conspiracy theories as well, which of course,
are flourishing everywhere. And the result is likely to be as far
as we can see, we're still only at the beginning of this
alarming episode, that the rich will get richer, that the money
which is now filtering out of the bank accounts of the poor, is
going to end up somewhere, and it's likely to be with the global
1%. That minorities, refugees, asylum seekers,
other people who are right on the edge of European cultures already
have a lot on their plate in terms of their cultural, economic,
social political position, are now facing high mortality rates.
The problem of loss of social cohesion because of the social
distancing regulations that are now across Europe, except Belarus,
but basically, this is this is our new normal, and that as a result,
it's going to be easier for the far right in this unsettled,
unhappy, agitated Europe to find these minorities as a useful sort
of whipping boy or as a scapegoat for things that ultimately clearly
are not their fault. So I talked about COVID-19, and a coronal
crash in certain contexts in the book. And of course, it's a watch
this space situation, isn't it. But clearly, we are in new
territory. And I think that Muslim thinkers and writers really have
to be quite quick in responding because the world has the right to
expect some kind of guidance or reflection from us. Insha Allah.
So you cover the topic of identity a lot. Muslim European identity in
your book, being a Muslim and being Western can create a lot of
conflict when it comes to one's identity. But your book shows
actually that there is a surprising, surprisingly strong
Muslim history in Europe, that many of us are not aware of. How
do you think Muslims can draw from this when creating or trying to
understand and establish their personal identities as European
Muslims? Yes, identity, everybody is worried about their identity
and panicking about their sense of self. Sometimes this is egotism,
they just want to feel that everybody loves them and sees how
wonderful they are. And so they say I am this I am that and I
affirm my whatever it might be. And this is tiresome, because in a
religious context, I do talk about this in the book. We're not really
supposed to be terribly obsessive about ourselves, because we're
more interested in God and in helping neighbors and family and
so forth. We reach beyond the self and we find happiness not in
soliciting the approval of others, but rather in trying to serve
others and it's not
There's not unusual in the world's
rainbow of religions in this respect. But the question of who
we are in Europe, I talk about in several chapters in the book,
because Europe, of course, historically invented itself as
being that last bit of the ancient world, the Roman Imperium, that
didn't become Muslim. Everywhere else, all of the great cities of
the Roman Empire, they became part of the enormous suddenly appearing
unexpected armor of the shield EFA. And this little appendix to
the ancient world, which is European continent was the only
bit following the Battle of Pottier. That didn't enter Islam,
you have to remember that the Muslims went 92% of the distance
from Medina to Cambridge. One more push. And well, the University of
Cambridge his curriculum would, as Gibbon remarked, looked rather
different. But a little bit of Europe was left and from that
little bit, it started to expand again, with the Crusades, the
Reconquista, crossing the Atlantic, and now means the world
through itself or through
the ethnically cleansed America's. And as a result, Europeans as they
think about their identity, whether or not in the context of
defining this common European home, that Strasburg is always
hyperventilating about,
have to look back to well, what made us Europeans in the first
place, the Roman Empire was about the Mediterranean, really, it
wasn't about what we call Europe. And the first usages of the word
ELRA pensais is to mean Europeans actually come about in crusading
Shah suggest type poems. It was only when the Muslims appear that
Europe is created. This is the famous pirenne thesis that
historians talk about. So there's a problem then for European
integration with Muslims. If the peoples against whom Europe self
defined, are now minorities in Europe, 25, maybe 30 million of
them significant minorities, then what exactly is the narrative that
Europe has in order to regard them as just unproblematic part of
parts of the European family? So I talk about this, but of course,
the demography means they have to continue to import people from
neighboring countries, which happen to be mainly Muslim
countries.
So I talk about little the passes famous sculpture, which is outside
the European Council building in Brussels, which is Europa and the
ball.
It goes back to Homer, the beginning of European literature,
Europe begins with this nymph, Europa, who is carried off from
Lebanon, Arab world,
by Zeus to Europe, and gives birth as a result of that curious union
to the European seas, to the Europeans. And they have that
image outside the European Parliament, which to me, I guess
they didn't intend it seems to reflect their awareness that
Europe can be sleek and powerful like a ball, but it needs the
importation of an Arabic fertility, if it's going to
survive, they actually very good symbol for the European Union. So
we have to be part of that conversation. And what I'm trying
to do with the book really is not to look at it from some standard
ethnographic or sociological point of view, because there's so many
different theories, and they have very little predictive power.
Although it's useful to know how many Muslims are there in France
and
basic data like that, but to do it from an insider's Muslim
perspective, to look at Islam zone, indigenous resources for
migration, integration, respect for the religious other
neighborhood, the common cause, the common good, all of those
things, the public square, and to see how those resources which are
very considerable in our
tradition, as opposed to say, some of the fundamentalist movements,
which almost as Europe used to be exists precisely as a kind of
counter narrative to Western hegemony. They are based on a
negativity rather than a sense of what's important and indigenously
rich and valuable ethically about the tradition that Muslims need to
think theologically about what it is to be precarious minorities in
a continent where more and more people are voting for these anti
Muslim populist parties is an age of the growth of national populism
and we need to react not sociologically, or by going crying
to the European Union or to Strasbourg, saying please protect
us from this wicked Islamophobic Person A but instead to see how we
can eat fat bility here accent as the Quran says, react to an
aggression with something better, something more beautiful, instead
of just complete
meaning, let's see if we can come up with something more
therapeutic. That I think is the more authentic religious response.
So really the core of the book is a Muslim theological argument
about how we can change our discourse and flip it from being
moaning, and demanding rights and demanding protection, and turning
it into something more positive and proactive, and I think more
likely to be respected and certainly better for that work,
which is, what can we do to help this continent that's in the grip
of so many crises, and you mentioned the environmental one,
that's just one where we have a very strong discourse, but there
are many others. So really, the agenda of the book of the
manifesto, because it's very kind of argumentative, a lot of people
are not going to like it. It ruffles a lot of feathers. But
this is the most controversial, controversial issue in the world,
the West and Islam that I'm proposing, the less off smart the
return to the resources of that enormous, huge thing called
traditional Islam, those neglected dusty libraries, in order to show
how we can be therapists, not complainants in modern Europe, how
we can actually help to heal people, their spiritual crisis,
their moral confusion, their arguments about gender and
identity, and this worries about the body. All of this is something
that instead of despising and feeling superior about, we should
be reaching out to see what's wrong, and how we can help. And
the medicine chest revelation is full of some very powerful
remedies. So basically, that's that's what I'm looking for in
terms of this question of identity. And there's, of course,
individual questions of what is specifically French Muslim
identity, what would a Danish Muslim identity look like? And
this is something that theorists like me are not really going to be
able to shape because it's to do with human beings working out
their own solutions, and young people defining for themselves,
what they want to be in these hybrid situations and a bunch of
ivory tower, academics are not really going to lead that
conversation, but we can theorize it. And we can show where Islam
actually does recognize the possibility of cultural diversity
and inculturation and a positivity towards neighbors and 100 that we
have such rich resources for that and I've tried to explain that
Muslims need to have more respect for their own heritage in because
it really does provide an extraordinary set of solutions for
this, this darkening crisis that Muslim minorities across Europe
feel that they are entering. Thank you very much. I really appreciate
you taking the time. It's been very fascinating. Thank you.