Abdal Hakim Murad – Travelling Home Tea Over Books
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
So as long as I come and check out the Heike Murad, it is a real
pleasure and honor to have you here with us today to discuss your
latest book traveling home, which comprises of a collection of
essays on Islam and Europe, many of which were actually lectures
that you gave at various locations. Throughout the years, I
believe one was as early as 2003. So really spanning some time. And
by tapping into the rich and broad framework of traditional Islam,
you take us through a journey of as Muslims in the West, how we
should navigate a society which on the one hand, is becoming
increasingly hostile towards Muslims, Islam, ethnic minorities,
and immigrants in general. And on the other is a society which has
moved away from monotheistic religion from perennial truths,
and has really embraced quite an atheistic culture.
And in the midst of all of this, we are given some insight and
perspectives into a plethora of subjects from the mythical origins
of Europe, to what Islam has to say about retaliation to the war
in Bosnia and the tragic massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica,
and why it is so important for us to reflect on that recent period
of history. It also seems particularly poignant that we are
having this event today, on the 20th anniversary of 911.
There is a lot here to unpack, so brace ourselves for a bit of a
ride. Just as a bit of a warm up show had Hakeem, why did you
choose this image as the cover of your book? So there is a young
boy, for the benefit of the audience staring out at what
appears to be a deliberately smashed window, peering at a copy
of the Quran that is illuminated? Why did he settle on this image?
Well, as you see, the
essays that comprise this book are on a range of disparate subjects.
And it was difficult to pick an icon that somehow encapsulated
everything. So I think the designer went ultimately for an
image that raised rather general thoughts about boundaries, about
transgression about religion, about youth about ethnicity, but
without trying to make too explicit to kind of iconic point.
So it just raises a general air of unease, which hopefully makes
purchasers anxious and have to click by an edit to the, to the
basket.
And indeed, like by delving into all these different subjects,
it really feels like you're flipping the narrative a lot in
this book. And, for example, you say that Muslims belong in Europe,
even more than the atheists than the Austrian right wing politician
than the liberal. I mean, these are not concepts that we see in
mainstream media. And I think a lot of Muslims don't see ourselves
in that way. One other thing you encourage us to do is to rethink
our terminology rewire our brains a little bit. We might talk about
some of these words a bit later. But one word word that really
piqued my interest is Ishmael. You talk about developing an Israelite
theology, and you often use the words Muslim and Ishmael
interchangeably. Why is it so important to evoke the legacy of a
smile with this great Abrahamic figure?
Well, everything in those ancient scriptural modifications has an
ongoing relevance and interest. And in this case, it's one that is
differently signified in the biblical Jewish and Christian
tradition, and the Islamic tradition. Ishmael is constructed
by the authors of the book of Genesis as a sign of unchosen,
this is the firstborn, and seems to be evidently the heir to the
promise, the land, multiplicity of children, prosperity and so forth.
But then in one of those remarkable Genesis twist,
Sarah who is in her 80s becomes pregnant and another child is
born, that is then taken to be the heir to this promise. So right at
the beginning of the Abrahamic religions, you have this difficult
sense of parting of the ways, which is already present, I
suppose, even in the Cain and Abel story. And there are ancient
resonances of city dweller against Nomad against in groups against
outgroups. But this, I think, is the most significant of the
bifurcation of the binaries that the gospel also that the Bible
authors wanted to work with. And suddenly, it's always been taken
up very energetically as a sign of the chosen against the unchosen
isn't Paul uses it quite a bit, I think in Galatians and St.
Augustine in the Christian tradition generally regard that
firstborn who turns out not to be the favorite
One is the sign of God being a god of distinctions. So
but the interesting thing, if you look at the passage in Genesis is
that there is a lot of implicit sympathy for Ishmael and his
mother. Because Sarah gets jealous. This is a kind of
surrogate motherhood or second wife scenario. And Hadar and the
child are expelled or driven out or asked to leave. In any case,
they leave into the wilderness, which really was kind of a death
sentence in that context. And then you have the first prayer which
the Bible attributes to a woman, and the appearance of an angel to
the woman, and a number of other signs of favor, which you wouldn't
really expect had the initial intention of the text been to
present this as the dark other the outcast, one that is perpetually
to be the adversary of God's people. And that ambiguity
actually has been picked up by a number of feminist theologians in
particular, who find Haider as a kind of symbol of the abused wife,
the ethnically impure, other,
etc. The single mother, all of these images, particularly
American womanist, African American theologies, she's become
a kind of patron saint of that, even though the Jewish and the
Christian traditions often take her to be the great icon of the
other page, our harga it means the other because she's from Egypt,
and therefore not from the people in Egypt, by implication, Africa
is the sign of uncertainness. Egypt is the place where you're
persecuted and you want to escape from but she is from Egypt. So for
those interested in racialized theologies, there's interested in
gender issues, women's rights, and so forth, HR has become a kind of
heroine more than the Virgin Mary, for instance, you will find this
more interesting and appreciative identifications of HR as an ideal
type amongst feminist theologians and the Virgin Mary, who doesn't
seem to do much in the biblical narrative. It's very passive, be
it done unto me according to Thy will. Whereas Hagar is this kind
of agent, she's active, she looks after her son she prays. So it
there's an irony there in that the figure who Islam claims as the
ancestress, of the final prophetic Meccan intervention, which for us
is a sign that
God tends to work with the outcast and not with the privileged,
is also being recognized by quite a few Westerners who are also
concerned about some of the ethnic engendered and confessional
binaries that have traditionally attributed to the text of the
Bible, who found this really very interesting. So there's an
interesting convergence between Islamic sensibilities and perhaps
that point of view in the western even work spectrum where one
wouldn't expect to see the validation of something that's
iconically Islamic. So I find that interesting, but from the Muslim
point of view, as disadvantaged, as outcast, as ethnically
problematic as refugees, asylum seekers, all of these things that,
hey, Ishmael story seems to be invoking, I think that is very
interesting kind of proto narrative for us, particularly in
in diaspora situations in the modern West. Ishmael is the one
who goes out his the kind of refugee and he doesn't return
the way Abraham seems to,
or the way Odysseus starts at the beginning of European literature,
the Iliad and the Odyssey, the end is when he returns home. But in
the Islamic tradition, Ishmael doesn't return home but find a new
place, which turns out to be a neglected sanctuary.
And so from that time, Islam has been the religion of migrants of
Moorhead urien of the extraordinary globalization of the
Islamic message, which before the modern world, and the growth of
the great European empires made Islam the religion of global trade
and migration and pilgrimages and we were the first internationalist
or globalists, really, and so how dare Ishmael as kind of primitive
founders of the religion seem to be a very interesting sign of the
mobility of Islam, and therefore an interesting theological,
scriptural point of departure where we, when we reflect on what
it means to be Israelites here in the heartland of the civilization
that historically fought us most bitterly, where we are always
typecast as the Israelites other. The Spanish Inquisition taught
took itself to be following the biblical instruction to expel
Ishmael and hijab, which they saw as being the Semitic other, the
Jewish as well as the Islamic. So it's a very interesting
predicament for us, to be from that narrative to
which is historically the other of Europe, but to be here and somehow
trying to find, not just a modus vivendi, but also some kind of
theological imperative. So I'm using that theme and I do find it
to be an interesting one. And so much more can be said about these
rich, biblical and Quranic archetypes about what does it
mean? What is Isaac mean? What's the etymology of it? What is male
mean?
So I throw it in as a kind of theological trope without trying
to make a big theta point out of it. But I think that politically,
if you like the idea of Islam, emerging as a migratory asylum
seeking, refugee, outcast, style and style of religion, is quite a
good basis for the creation of some sort of liberation theology
in our precarity in the modern west.
So instead of this cover, invoking done a sense of unease, shouldn't
we in a way embrace that roll down of being the outcast of the
outsider? Well,
the Quran also says, When redo, redo and Amana, Allah Medina's to
die, fulfill all we want to
bless those who have rendered weak in the earth, and make them Imams
and make them the inheritors. It's not necessarily right for one
always to be existing in a kind of outcast and miserable agonistic
situation that happens to be the way of the world which is very
unequal and unfair and tearing this place. But it's not
necessarily the case that it is a situation to be celebrated, but
rather one which one acknowledges as a certain inevitability that
the people of God necessarily, especially in our kind of Uber
materialistic, very ironic worlds such as that of modern turbo
capitalism, it's appropriate that God's people should be in a
position of marginality and weakness. That where you find the
divine and sincerity and God's people in this age, is not in the
sort of smart crystal cathedrals of American evangelicalism, where
everybody is driving an SUV, and you have a Dunkin Donuts in the
lobby, and it's all the American dream. That's not where you expect
to find the divine favor. In an age such as ours, you expect to
find it in the little Bangladeshi mosque or the Kurdish taxi driver
or the guy who's just swung the channel. That's just part of the
nature of the Divine that the divine favors the outcast.
But it's not necessarily the case that we make a cult of that in a
sort of monastic or poverty vowing way, I think instead, we need to
be thinking about how inevitably,
the people of God in an age such as this tend to be disadvantaged,
mostly Athena, but what can we do, not only to protect ourselves, but
to try and remedy the dire circumstances and the structural
and the spiritual inequalities which are brought about the
current endlessly increasing inequalities in our world. And
building on that, indeed, the Prophet peace of peace be upon him
said that the whole earth has made a mosque for Muslims. Reading from
this passage from a chapter that deals specifically with atheism, a
theology of the key verb which I presume is a play on the phrase as
a key term. You say here, Israelites are not an exile in a
strange land. As believers they are never abroad. For the man of
praise. The Prophet peace be upon him indicates that one of the
Hassan is the unique traits of his community, is that the whole earth
has been made a mosque for me, in this prophetic optic, the land of
Europe, however, secular is already a masjid. It is the
Ishmaelites Brown, not the atheists, which touches the
European earth that that's a very visceral image. Why do you think
that the Muslim belongs in Europe more than our French or German or
Spanish atheist counterparts? The Muslim belongs everywhere, partly
because of the Hitomi the universality of Islam, which is
encapsulated in this hadith, which says not just Muslim belongs
everywhere, but everywhere is a mosque.
And the fact that there is no continuation of ancient teachings
have chosen this about a people or a land, Muslims aren't sacrilege
obliged to go back to some uniquely special place. And the
history really manifests this, the Holy Prophet doesn't return to
live in Makkah, he lives in his city of Medina, thereby
prefiguring the enormous Muslim story of going out and settling in
new places and intermarrying in so many diverse ways. And I think it
would be helpful to see the new Islamic diaspora if that's still
the right word in the West as an extension of that, but also as a
challenge to see if as long as historic patterns of
indigenisation can still operate. And that's why I like one of the
chapters
and even a Qualys book, which I was talking about in a recent CMC
lecture, where he is writing for certain skeptics about his Islam,
who say Islam is just a foreign thing. It's classified as an Asian
religion and you study it in the Faculty of Oriental Studies. It
can't belong, although it can be tolerated by saying that Islam is
actually experienced as a repatriation, that one's
belongingness, to a local narrative, broadly understood, but
deeply understood is actually accentuated by the conversion to
Islam. So he says that the most Indian people he knows are
actually the Muslim people in India. And he traveled quite
extensively in Sri Lanka and in India. And he got the sense that
what really belongs, though, is actually what is Islamic. And it's
a very aesthetic and abstract judgment. He points out that the
Persians really found themselves and found their verse after Islam
arrived.
And so he says that, to be Muslim in Europe is to become, in some
strange sense more European in ways that may be very difficult to
explain. And certainly, if you travel in convert communities, you
find that very many of the human types that you encounter tend to
be very explicitly of that place, as if Islam has somehow held up a
magnifying glass to whatever is best about their relationship to
their place, and to their tradition, and made them more of
that. And I think that's a good observation, because I have found
that quite extensively. And I think it's always been
a feature of British Islam, if you look at its beginnings, say with,
at least in recent times, with Abdullah Quilliam, that is he half
of his poems are about Holy Prophet are about Ottoman wars
against the Greeks or something. But the other half are all about
the hills and the mountains of the Isle of Man and folk songs and the
gorse bushes. And it's very, very rooted and very British. And I
think that's one of that's the sign of the genius of Islam, the
fact that it look at ISIS itself. So then the related point is, how
much do we belong?
Obviously, with people who've come here from abroad, there is a
generation or two of understandable reconfiguration and
reorientation,
but we're already seeing the success of that, insofar as most
of the new generation of British Muslims know how to operate here
and have a sense of belongingness more than if they went back to
their grandparents place in Bangladesh or Iraq or wherever.
But more deeply than that, as you look around, you see the
alienation that modernity is inflicted upon European cities and
villages.
And how people are detached from the sensibilities that originally
shaped the cultural style of those places. And one can make the place
to claim that the Muslim actually kind of belongs more.
So for instance, once I was in Madrid,
with immigrant person,
and we visited the Church of the the Spanish armed forces. Here we
have the guards chapel, and that it's a church which is quite close
to the royal palace in Madrid.
And kind of at the center of the church, there is the big image of
St. James, Santiago Mata Morris. He's on his horse, and he has a
very white face, he's kind of smiling, and being trampled
underneath the hooves of his horse. There is a black guy
looking a bit sad. That is the national emblem of Spain, and is
there as part of the imagination of the Spanish armed forces,
because Spanish identity historically is shaped by the
millennial conflict with expelling the Moors. Now, this ethnic
minority person I was with, wasn't particularly overwhelmed by this.
Because it's a very strongly racial thing as well as anti
Muslim, the two are often very difficult to separate. In fact,
modern racism was probably invented by the Spanish
Inquisition who had this idea of limpia 30 sang going to purity of
blood. Even if you are descended from a Jew or Muslim, you are
disabled, you couldn't cross the Atlantic, for instance, you
couldn't go to the New World, you couldn't join the aristocracy it
was quite racist and explicit.
So
the paradox that European Muslims are facing is we are in countries
which have historically figured themselves in opposition to a non
white and a non Christian other, but they now no longer respond to
this image of St. James Santiago Matamoros. St. James the Muslim
killer is the patron saint of Spain is called St. James the
Muslim killer images everywhere and their big pilgrimage to
Santiago.
which is the biggest pilgrimage in Northern Europe is to St. James,
the Muslim Akela. So you get to the cathedral in Santiago, and
those are the big image of some James the Muslim killer. But
nowadays, some of those images are a little bit kind of
uncomfortable. So you can see that the church or authorities have
strategically placed vases, and sort of sprays of flower. So you
can't actually see the sad, decapitated blackheads, which St.
James has neatly sliced off with his nice Christian sword, it's all
a bit kind of difficult to relate to now.
And the
newer generation, which is alienated from that, through
modernity and globalization,
therefore, finds it increasingly difficult to relate to any local
narrative. And the styles are the styles of global modernity, the
eat burgers rather than paleo, modern, atomized consumers. So the
question is, if that process has been accelerated by the religious
collapse of what was once the kind of mad, hyper Catholicism of, of
Spain, and that's gone and been discredited. Franco tried to keep
it going. But that's discredited as well.
Is it the case that the Muslims who you see in those places now
are sort of Moroccan guys who are running restaurants and their
wives in hijab, that actually, they are, in some sense closer to
the better aspects of the Christian sensibility or the
Jewish sensibility that was shaped the country? So
in Europe? Could it be said that substantively, it's the Muslims
who are more in continuity with what was deeply important to the
religious aspect of that culture than most secular people are.
Because they can see God in the world, and they kind of understand
the aesthetic of traditional buildings and traditional forms of
life, they have a sense of what a pilgrimage ought to be about,
whereas for an atheist, it's just
talk from a different planet. So that's one of the things I'm
speculating with that Muslims actually coming to Europe are
traveling home insofar as all Earth has been made a mosque for
me, but also, because we couldn't be more at home, in what the far
right would consider to be the place we don't belong, then most
secularized people, because we maintain belief in God and certain
family and other values that the mainstream have now lost sight of.
So we have become more indigenous than the indigenous.
It's not easier, though, for you, as a white, European Muslim, to
show that you can be both European analysts, and what about ethnic
minorities in a certain kind of way. But I don't think it really
matters because I engage with so many of the new generation who
email me constantly saying they can't relate to the footballers in
their mosque, and they are being taught by their parents to marry
in a particular way. And they don't relate to that any longer.
And they have a kind of liking for aspects of what this country is
about. They quite like freedom of speech, and all kinds of
possibilities that they might not otherwise have. And that
generation, I think, is looking for a way of feeling that they
belong, rather than just feeling that they're tolerated or that
they're economically beneficial.
So 40 years ago, I found that there was a big difference between
convert and migrant Muslims, but I think that's been very
substantially eroded now, because 97% of British Muslims go to non
Islamic schools, and inevitably, they're shaped whether they quite
admit it or not, by certain British habits of thought and
certain recognitions of certain cultural forms, I find that yeah,
if if they can overcome the initial sense that oh, this is
what those people do, and actually see, the way in which the land was
traditionally used and cultivated. Now houses were built in certain
humility and traditional forms of life that they can have a sense of
ownership of that even though of course, it won't be complete,
because the parts can never completely belong to anybody.
And one of the ways you think for us to feel this ownership and for
Muslims to demonstrate the universalism of Islam is to what
you say in corporate local customary norms again to read a
passage from page 209. Here theology, a Hickie verb. While
rejecting Blairite demands for conversion to extreme social
beliefs. We must revive the ancient Islamic practice of
incorporating all of our local customary norms into our lives
Muslim experience, wherever and whenever this does not challenge
the revealed revealed requirements and you are quite critical in the
way certain Muslim leaders are practicing Islam.
In the Western and specifically Sufi, some Sufi communities as
well.
Some of the problems that you see in the way that some Muslims are
practicing Islam Well, the sense in which they confuse or or local,
cultural, you know, cultural norms with a Muslim identity.
The
mosques in Germany that have Turkish mosque written over the
door, and everything is a perfect replica of the way it's done back
in Turkey, even though the Moroccans who can't may not relate
to it, the local converts may not relate to it and it becomes an
obstacle to doubt or, because here are really means to Earth, the
customary way of the local place, it doesn't mean something from
somebody else's off. That adding adds to a lot of the cultural and
cognitive dissonance, or the way in which today occurs, which
historically always enculturated themselves. So vicar and Kurdistan
is Kurdish under the current China is full of Chinese stuff. When
they establish themselves in Western Europe, they often are
quite keen to provide exact facsimiles of a circle of liquor
in Morocco or something or in Turkey, and they all dress up in
Turkish clothes or Moroccan clothes or whatever it might be in
everything. Sweet Moroccan tea, and it's all like a bit of
muchness, even if everybody there is a Jamaican convert or
something, they import somebody else's art, which is not the
traditional norm of Sufism, which has always been a way of
inculturation mosque design is another example. It's interesting
to reflect that when the Muslims moved into Spain, everybody knows
that they like to use those famous horseshoe arches, the Moorish
arches, but actually those are Visigothic arches, because the
churches and other public buildings in pre Muslim Spain use
that form. So instead of saying, Oh, we want to do everything, the
Middle Eastern way. They said, Oh, look, they've got this local
tradition, let's do something new and even more amazing with it. So
they built the mosque in Cordoba and Alhambra. And it's one of the
miracles of global architecture, but it's specifically Spanish. So
I think mosque architecture in this country, if the mosque elders
are determined to make it look like something in Egypt, or Sudan,
or Bangladesh or somewhere, that's not what Islamic civilization has
historically done. There's no Sharia requirement to have a
pointy dome and the other features of that admittedly Great Eastern
forms of building and it may well be that a lot of money is being
spent simply proclaiming Islamic foreignness in a way that will
benefit the far right, the anti immigration people who say, look,
these people just, they just didn't belong. And I think that's
that's one of the problems with mosque architecture in in Western
Europe, the French mosques that look like Moroccan mosques, and
the Swedish mosques that look like Iraqi mosques. That is an
inappropriate understanding of the idea of off, we need to indigenize
localize, use whatever is religiously neutral of local
themes.
Not just an architecture, but in, in shared in poetry and literature
in all of the cultural forms that go with that enshrined and present
religion. And we're not really there yet, it's starting to
happen. Some very interesting new mosques in Holland, for instance,
that use a lot of Dutch themes and colors and shapes, which are very
successful and make an enormously reassuring point to neighbors,
that Muslims also respectful of the torture of others.
But there's still a mindset amongst the elders that Islam is
not just a religion, but is also the culture of a land of origin.
That has to be defended as zealously as we defend to hate
itself, which is a misunderstanding.
And indeed, traditionally, Islam spread in many lands because
Muslims traveled to non Muslim areas, and they mastered the local
culture and language. And they were able to, say, compose a poem
in the local language that reflected Islamic principles that
was so astoundingly beautiful, that it brought a lot of people to
the faith. Yet we live in a day and age now where we're constantly
distracted. We're far more interested in Instagram and the
next Netflix drama than a beautiful novel or poetry. Do you
think that us Muslims, writing some literature that's really
profound, will have the same impact as it used to? And do you
not think that building on that there is merit in us being adept
at more image based mediums like filmmaking or comic book writing?
Sure. I think that's the case and they're already gestures in that
direction.
Even though older generations and many traditional Alanna may not
know what the boundaries are.
Somebody wrote to me just last week, wanting to know whether he
can do a comic book
About a
Scottish
drug dealer who converts to Islam and can he use rude words. And
these are kind of difficult, difficult issues, to what extent
to use some of the less ethical dimensions of that inner city
world in order to present a message.
But there are so many genres such as the novel, where one could
imagine, and one can see a completely secret message being
put across through the considerable subtlety and
psychological insight that
religious novels can generate Dostoyevsky, for instance, one
could see how that kind of genre could fit very well in, in a
Muslim context. So yep, and there are Muslims who are getting into
those spaces in Islamic languages and in the West as well. Even
though there was really a kind of cultural or an automat
infrastructures to support them, it has to be people operating on
the basis of their own conscience.
And who may not have particularly strong Islamic backgrounds. But
inevitably, this will happen. So even though the young are glued to
their phones, a lot of people still do read novels. They get art
galleries, that interesting exhibitions, they like new
buildings. So the world is decadent, but the classical genres
of artistic production, they are still active, they're not on sort
of life support, thanks to Arts Council grants, they're still
living with us, and we need to get into those spaces. So really, this
is a form of doubt, to our non Muslim neighbors. But when you
look at our own community, from economic problems, to social
issues, like rising prison rates to great internal division, both
ethnic and religious, how can we, as you say in one of your chapters
seek to heal and build the society around us what it sometimes feel
like feels like we're the ones most in need of healing.
Because healing others is one of the best ways of healing yourself.
Service, Hitman is one of the basic principles of Islam
of the unsolved, the Quran says they prefer others to themselves,
even though their need was greater.
And so taking in refugees, asylum seekers dealing with community
issues, helping out people who are suffering from this loneliness,
epidemic, etc, etc. Even if we have endless problems ourselves,
we should be in those spaces. Because there's a certain
cleansing of the soul that comes about through service. And in many
of our traditions, particularly service to animals, as we've seen
with this text that we've been looking at, because
kindness to animals, and again, a gwili Weisberg on recently was
interested in this what is an important aspect of the Sunnah, is
particularly spiritually beneficial because the animal
can't thank you or pay you or do anything, it's disinterested. And
that was how Hyderabadi Knox van started his spiritual journey, his
teacher told him to look after the street dogs of Bahara for seven
years.
So all of those spaces are spaces that we need to get into even we
ourselves like that I did not commander in rags.
So yeah, as as a community of service. And very often our
mosques tend to be rather insular, and they're not really interested
in the local social problems. And little old lady who lives opposite
who hasn't been visited by anybody for five years and
disaffected youth, in Muslim communities and out of Muslim
communities were in our little fortresses. And I don't think
that's good for the soul. Because despite the outward proficiency of
modern Western consumer society, there is a lot of inward pain.
The fact that in this country, we now have history's first minister
of loneliness indicates the extent to which those disintegration
going on in society 11 million people are believed to have
diagnosable levels of loneliness, which is now a recognized medical
condition with NHS. It's a society in which there's enormous amount
of suffering. So yet, we should be out there, even if it's only a
little bit, but we should see ourselves as people who are giving
and helping and looking after people even in a very simple way,
just sort of smiling at somebody in the street that the Hadith says
that that's a sadaqa. So yep, I think we have problems in our
community. But that doesn't excuse us from helping others, whose
problems in many ways are actually worse, whatever we might be being
told.
Muslim community in many ways does kind of hold together. People
still sort of have a marriage structure sense that marriage is
normal normative. The extended family for many people is still a
kind of reality neighbor
hoods in many, largely Muslim areas are still sort of
functioning of neighborhood as neighborhoods in the way that
perhaps for non Muslims 100 years ago was the way everybody lived,
but now isn't. So there's basically the Muslim community,
even though on the surface, it's a mess, has a lot of intact stuff
within it. But with secular communities on the surface,
everything is very slick. But within there's a lot of deep
spiritual dysfunction.
That's why we should be reaching out
once we hit the sound of the wind, because directly relates to the
question about to ask you talk about nature and the importance of
connecting with it and how it heals us, which in turn, inshallah
means we can heal those around us. In fact, the penultimate chapter
here is called Creation spirituality. It's one of my
favorite chapters. A lot of us Muslims were familiar with a
hadith is about treating animals with compassion. But what this
chapter shows is that our relationship with nature is so
much more than just a set of do's and don'ts about animals and trees
and so forth. Even certain acts of worship are intrinsically tied to
the cycles of nature. So there is a passage here that is really
illuminating. In Islam, the sacral act is guided by the cosmos, by
the motions of Sun and moon, and the simplicity of the prayer by
which man begins upright and heaven falls to earth, and then
ends in the balanced position of Jelsa. Between the two, which is
the colorful posture is fully integrated into the motions of the
solar system, Muslim worshippers cosmological affirming enchantment
of the cannulated narrative. In its cyclical movements, we move
from air to the clay from which we are made, and to which the
symbolically defiant forelock is necessarily pressed. After which
thanks to the act of prayer itself, and the peaceable
surrender, which in enacts, we find that balance is restored. Do
you think that we've lost a lot of that symbiotic relationship with
nature that we're meant to have? And especially now that we're all
living in these urban communities? How do we retrieve it and we've
lost it? Yeah, I was talking about this a little bit this morning
that we're experiencing, what some are calling a Nature Deficit
syndrome. And it has to do with, still, I think, scientifically,
poorly understood,
you know, neurological issues. We know that homosapiens has been
around for 10s of 1000s of years. And our current form of life may
be 50 years. And it's extremely abnormal. It's not normal to our
physical or psychological makeup, the way in which we exist
nowadays. And the extent to which the brain's plasticity can adapt
indefinitely to increasingly weird forms of social existence and
technological interfacing is not really known. But the fact that
there are so many epidemics of allergies and mental health
problems, anxiety, and so forth, particularly amongst the young
indicates that we're kind of getting near our limits. Because
what we're designed for is a fairly primordial hunter gatherer
lifestyle,
in which we are engaging with nature 24 hours a day. And we
still have a sense when we are surrounded by Virgin nature when
we encounter animals, and children suddenly have this because it's
part of the fitter, it's what we're designed to appreciate that
there is a certain ease that comes from being in a natural
environment and the genius of Islamic art and architecture has
always been that it brings that into the domestic and the sacred
environment. With geometrical and stylize tessellated vegetal
motifs, it indicates for us it bodies forth the intrinsic
symmetry and beauty of the natural world. And that is what we are
used to. And we are certainly not flourishing in our modern high
tech, aluminium high speed train, Rhian our environment, that's not
what we are for. And, again, as I say, the neurologists are not sure
what the long term implications for the quite delicate balances of
the brain might be of all of this. But it's certainly the case that
there's the species is malfunctioning in various ways.
The outward malfunction of our ecosystem is just one example of
that. It's the outward manifestation of something that's
happening inwardly, to our symbiotic. So
the forms of Islam because they are unchanged since the time of
their formulation, which in terms of the emergence in space and time
was in an oasis city in seventh century Arabia, where nature was
primordially present and existence, and really, presumably
not really changed since prehistory.
work times, although they had iron, but otherwise, it's a very
ancient kind of environment puts us back in a ancient space, where
we are
aware of the rising and the setting of the sun, when we are
aware of the seasons, the moon, which seems, has some kind of
strange influence on us, just as it has on the tides, but it's very
controversial and poorly understood,
has an impact on us. And therefore reconnects us to a kind of Fitri
normal environment. And I think a lot of Muslims have that
experience, say when they go to the mosque, for Fudger. And when
they go in, it's dark. And when they come out, there's a bit of
light and they feel I have participated in this amazing fact
of the beginning of a new day, in some way that may be very
difficult to articulate. But there's a certain peace and
serenity that is voiced in the seventh or eighth commandment or
not the end of the prayer, which indicates that through the prayer,
which is our fundamental act, we are reintegrated into the
fundamental cycles of life in the cosmos, which shaped the cultic as
well as the practical lives of our ancestors. And I think this is one
of the meanings of Islam as the religion of fitrah. That even
though we may be holding down a high pressure job,
we ask, we can't get away from those things which are most
important to our ancestors.
The seasons rising as the sun and the moon, we're all linked to
that. The way in which we engage with animals ritually, through the
halal institution, the way in which we have sacred places, non
sacred places, patterns of pilgrimage, ways of expressing
ourselves sacrilege. There's a dot app for going up a hill and a dot
for going down a hill. And if you've ever driven at speed with
the Tablighi Jamaat, you'll notice them all quickly saying the DA is
up the hill and the down the hill. So the Jamaats in America wants
and it was fine when we were in Michigan, then we got into West
Virginia or somewhere and they couldn't really
mashallah they were following the Sunnah up the hills upon Allah
Allahu Akbar.
That is what human beings always did.
And I think that that must be a profoundly healing thing for us.
And so many people are looking for something like that, that they end
up hugging trees or something or going to Stonehenge at the
solstice and playing a flute or meditating or doing yoga. And
they're not really connected in the way that we are through the
Senate. And it's now back to the Holy Prophet
who represents this kind of Iraqi law figure in the virginal beauty
of the Medina and Oasis. So that's one of the things that I'm trying
to fumble my way towards in that chapter.
And there are a number of enlightenment European
philosophers such as Schleiermacher and herder, who,
having had for the first time in European history, relatively
accurate information about Islam, thanks to the early orientalist,
then said, well, Islam comes later. So why isn't it better than
our Christianity was Judaism and we know Christianity is better
than that. Islam comes later, so becomes a kind of crisis for them.
So what they say is, are that Islam is a kind of shaman ism.
It's really primitive. And it takes people back to those ancient
times when they really connected to nature and
the lives was shaped by sunrise and sunset. And so that's too
primitive for us, and we people of the Enlightenment, we want to move
forward. So Christianity is actually better because it
disconnects us from those natural roots Schleiermacher in
particular, and is interesting on that. So yeah, they said they
describe Islam as a form of shamanism, which is not perhaps
what the average Mawlana wants to say. Because after all, the Sierra
is a battle against animism and a certain type of
image worshipping shamanism. But in the context of a green
theology, I think that these very primordial aspects of the religion
do make are unnecessarily centrality to the environmental
movement, something that that we need to be establishing, and under
the plenty of Muslim countries and organizations, which have strong
green initiatives. For instance, do you know which country in the
world has the highest percentage of renewable energy? It's not
gonna be the one that I'm thinking of. So it's actually Morocco.
Yeah. You think, oh, it's probably Finland or somewhere, but it's
actually the Moroccans. It's the world's biggest wind farm. They
are doing something Indonesians also very good with the annual
1000 new green mosque initiative. So they're almost not completely
asleep. But we need to see why that is mandated by our theology
with 100 that we should be
The custodians of, of the green world is the materialists, not the
religionists if messed up the environment.
Modernity should be penitent. Religion is not implicated. And of
course, climate change is one of the existential crises of our
world today.
What do you think Muslims then can contribute offer to the climate
change movement or to discourse around sort of global warming and
so forth? Well, there are individual initiatives that one
can take by choosing what kinds of things you buy, and what you do
with packaging, what you drive, how often do you fly, there's, I
think, morally significant decisions for all of us. And I was
recently interviewed by a guy in New York, because championing the
sustainable lifestyle thing. And he's very happy that his annual
electricity bill is less than $1.
Because he's just shifted his life around, that's fine. And that he
feels like one trash bag every year. There's a lot of people who
are doing that kind of
sort of green athleticism. But it also has to be a collective thing.
Governments ultimately have to carry the main responsibility, I
think, because the problem is so big and global, but also religious
communities and mosque communities.
Because the technologies are becoming cheaper, it can actually
save your mosque money, if you introduce green technologies,
photovoltaic cells, maybe a wind turbine or so forth, and switch to
a green tariff. So I think that our mosque congregations and
mosque elders should be pushed in this direction, because it's a
matter of matter of survival, and if of any Adam, and because we
have this beautiful doctrine of hate,
Muslims should be leading the charge rather than tagging along
sort of sheepishly behind everybody else, which is often the
way it looks.
Going back to what you said earlier about alienation and
Europeans being disconnected from the sort of heritage or indigenous
culture. You say that populism is a secular evolution, and one that
reflects the sort of very chronic spiritual recession, a sort of
moral vacuum. Do you think there's a direct correlation between this,
this rising national populism, and it's really one that we've not
quite experienced before? It's not quite left wing or right wing
because you have right wing politicians that are adopting what
traditionally would have been quite liberal left wing values. So
it's an odd one, it's quite radical and new. But do you think
there's a relationship between this phenomenon and the spiritual
recession? This alienation? Yeah, I think one reason why a lot of
liberals are confused and wrong footed by the rise of these
xenophobic populism is that they incorporate a lot of socially
progressive language. It's not particularly obvious that
something like Marine Le Pen's National Alliance or whatever she
calls it now is straightforwardly of the traditional right, because
she's very pro feminist, gay marriage, a lot of work issues,
which you wouldn't identify with the right historically.
But it's also the case that populism throughout the 20th
century in Europe was often
successfully advocated by people who said that they weren't of the
left or the right. So the Nazis, the most obvious example, to call
themselves National Socialists, because they bought a lot of
statist big government things, which the traditional right which
like swore government wouldn't have envisaged at all.
So but it is a movement across Europe, and each European country
has its own dynamic
based on quite often historic narratives of conflicts with
Muslims. So in Spain again,
in the 18th century, they had this debate that was under the
Bourbons, I guess, is our patron saint England hasn't fjord,
France or St. Louis, who is going to be the real patron saint of the
New Spain. Would it be Teresa of Avila, or would it be St. James
the Muslim killer? And they said, Oh, St. James, the Muslim Akela,
obviously, because that's part of their national story. It is their
national story.
And that can be very easily repressed, donated as part of a
narrative of anti Muslim anti immigration ism.
Because if our national identity is defined as non Muslim, this,
those people cannot belong. Those are the people against whom the
Inquisition was fought. Those are the people who, against whom we've
always defined ourselves there, the black masks the dark other the
Saracens
To the horse.
So on Europe's edges, that is the dominant narrative of the new
populist.
In southern Italy, for instance,
certainly in the Balkans with Serbian nationalism, they go right
back to their struggles with the Ottoman Empire and which they
present in a very mythologized way, because the Serbs are
generally pro Ottoman during the Ottoman years and fought some of
their major battles and became senior Ottoman officials. Or you
go further east to Russia, which a little bit like Spain has always
considered itself to expand at the expense of Muslims. That's how the
Cossacks originated. And
yeah, I was reading Vasily Grossman, recently into the mid
20th century, Russian Jewish chronicler of the Second World
War. But he also wrote about the gulags.
And he has a character who's in one of these camps, who remembers
how as a boy, he'd been playing in the mountains of Adygea, which is
historically Cassia. And it found this ruined village. And there
were still apples on the trees and cherries, but everything was
ruined the forest have taken over. So he went back and he said that
what happened to those people there? They're not our people.
There's the Muslims with the Circassians and they went off to
Turkey, where they belong.
But that why couldn't they come back? Because they didn't believe
in progress. They're not ours. They're not of us. So this the
Catholic mass massacre is the biggest single act of ethnic
cleansing in Europe in the 19th century. But because it was so
complete, hardly anybody remembers. People know that Boris
Johnson's Great grandfather was a seer Cassia and half is apparently
most of the journalists don't even know what a seer kacian is because
90% of them were killed.
It was a higher proportion of Circassians died in Europe then
100 years later Jews died during the Holocaust. It was kind of a
complete, complete annihilation.
So when the Russian Federation had the Winter Olympics, I think it
was at Sochi 10 years ago. The surviving Circassian organization
said don't put the stadium there. That's where our martyrs are
buried.
It got into the English press and people thought martyrs Circassians
Are they like the Taliban or something? And this is a very
weird thing. But for them, it's it's their life. That's their
story. And it's a shocking tragedy, a shocking story. They
were just deliberately exterminated in the 1860s, I
guess. And most of them still aren't allowed to go back. So the
point is that wherever you have the borders of Europe,
you have a sense of national belonging that is historically
shaped by non Muslim ness and via often genocidal conflict with
Muslims. What happened to the Carnegie's of Siberia?
None of them survived. Nobody knows that there will must have
been places that what happens when you go east of cousin, Ivan the
Terrible.
Europe is defined by Pedro, the cruel in the West, and Ivan the
Terrible in the east, kind of symbolic boundaries of this
horrible genocide, genocidal process, whereby Islam, which is
the third replenishment of the Abrahamic story is forcibly and
viciously driven out.
Which, of course, is a huge paradox, given that it's also
supposed to be Christian. Turn the other cheek. Well, they certainly
didn't do that. You have the Knights Templars and the Knights
Hospitallers and the Knights of Calatrava,
monks, dedicated to war against Muslims. Very strange
civilization.
There was a case I was reading about in Germany in the 16th
century, when Turkey was expanding. And he was a Protestant
part of the radical reformation. And he said, the Bible says, You
must love your enemies, and you mustn't fight. So we should let
the Turks come, and we'll be treated the way the Greeks are
treated, and also have our churches but you mustn't fight.
And for that, of course, the church had him tortured to death.
Because you're not supposed to say that, but historically, had they
adhered to the gospel teaching.
We've seen minarets all around us here we wouldn't see spires
because the early Muslims were 93% of the distance from Medina to
Cambridge. They were stopped in central France. There's only a
little bit left. But they became these sort of super warriors. So
it's hard Europe is the continent that is historically defined
itself as the harbinger of a battle to the death death against
the Sarah cynic other the Israelite, the impure. And so
these populists can quite readily reach for those stories. A little
bit harder in
England, Scandinavia and places that geographically we're not
coterminous with the Islamic world. But still the stories of
the Crusades and King Arthur and there's it's there somehow in the
national narrative, but it's not as central as it did in Spain, for
instance.
So, yeah, the populace often reach for that. But it's complexified. I
think, fortunately, by the fact that the churches have moved on.
The churches are just embarrassed by St. James, the Muslim killer is
too outrageous. Russian, Orthodox churches are still a bit,
unreconstructed. But generally, the churches in Western Europe
tend to be supportive of refugees, asylum seekers, they make
initiatives to support them. So that religious dimension of
European populism has largely drained away in the West.
Which is, we have allies now with other religious communities, which
was not the case in the past.
Similarly, it's harder for them to use the straightforward language
of scientific racism because of where that led the 20th century so
they find it hard to find an ideology can't be religious any
longer. You can't really be racial any longer. So it has to be about
the intrinsic unsuitability of Muslims for life in civilized
Europe. So it becomes Islamophobic. Otherwise, it can't
really exist. And most of the arguments are extremely crude
based on typecasting of extremist movements here and there. So I
don't I don't see them as an intrinsic threat. But given that
there's no other ideology around, people don't have anything to
believe in or fight for any longer. So they end up losing in
Afghanistan, to a bunch of hillbillies with Kalashnikovs
data, because they don't, what are they therefore? not really quite
sure, but they want to build women's rights or something. But
it's not really a world view or an ideal. It's just holding the space
to some liberal thing, and so they fail.
And that, I think the loss of the European narrative, the loss of
overarching grants, philosophical and religious schemes, is going to
make it really difficult for these populist movements to sustainably
gain power. If you look at the fluctuations of the fortunes of
the BNP in this country, that sort of getting 15 20% of the vote in
places like Rochdale and Nelson 10 years ago, hardly anything though.
The Austrian,
far right party of York high there is now imploding thanks to various
scandals, there isn't really a strong idea there. As there wasn't
a time of Communism and Nazism and Christianity, it's kind of empty,
it's it's defining Europe, and belongingness, only in terms of
what it isn't, rather than terms of something that that it really
is. So I think I see it as something inherently unstable, and
probably not destined to go much further. But the Muslims need to
contribute much more manfully and pushing it over, I think
otherwise, their lies about what our religion says, are going to be
accepted by default. And, you know, today is the 20th
anniversary of 911. So we've seen a lot of reflections on the good
and the bad of the relationship between the Western world and
Muslim minorities and the growth of Islamophobia, but also the
growth of Muslim communities. mosques have more than doubled,
since 911. The increasing into permeation of Muslims with other
communities, which often tends to be the best way of overcoming
prejudice. People read something online that says that Muslims like
to kill Jewish babies or something, and then they talk to
their Muslim friend and they sell never heard that.
There's there's no substitute for actual human friendship and
engagement,
which is another reason why we shouldn't be afraid of broadening
the circle of acquaintances, and that's always religiously,
religiously a valid thing to do. And that's how that work is
progressing. So, yeah, it's it's the 20th anniversary of that sort
of Great Exhibition of Middle East and stupidity.
That
sort of primal scream
that brought nothing but disaster upon the Muslim world. But it's
also sort of soured the atmosphere for so many people and in the
West, and probably worse in America than here because the
surveillance thing and paranoia about Muslims is, in many ways
worse. But then it was talking to this New York blogger guy, and
even though Muslims are only 8%, of the population of New York
City, and they had this spectacular, horrible outrage. The
city of New York now recognizes Adel feta and Adel as public
holiday.
This.
So despite everything they can do that we don't do that in this
country at any European country, so there's still a certain decency
there that is pushing back against the demonization, which does give
me hope for the longer term. You paint quite a hopeful picture and
a positive one to some degree but the reality is that there are many
Muslim groups individuals out there who are behaving in a way
that is anti Dawa, going back to your earlier point that you are
encouraging us to use different terminology. One that is often in
the book is the word turn fear. Yeah, which you define as
repelling people against religion as opposed to attracting them.
Again a passage here, but generally Arabs were under the
authority of ego and fearfulness. Thus their way of existence and
their personal presence were ugly and disturbing the amount of
praise and showed beauty and hearts melted. This is why 10 Fear
is so absolutely condemned in the Sunnah. The sound Hadith instructs
us to bring ease and not hardship, good tidings and repulsion. As a
commentator observes, the Hadith commands us to give people the
good news of God's grace and wide mercy and forbids us to repel
them. One who drives human souls away from to hate as a Confiserie.
And as a cursed since he or she is directly undoing the work of the
prophets and this is in the chapter the venomous spit out of
10 fear. What actions exactly for under the category of Titan fear
and why exactly are they so venomously an innovation? Well?
It's a hadith based term. The hadith says by Shiro Allah tuna
funeral. Yes, ru Allah to ask zero. It's a sound Hadith. give
people good news and do not repel them make things easier and don't
make them difficult.
It's commandment. So this two Nephi rule gives us the noun 10
fear which means driving people away, which is the polar opposite
of Dawa, that were the work of the prophets, bringing people to the
truth by showing them
the beauty and the ease that comes through following the Sunnah and
the prophetic way. driving people away is therefore what the devil
does. And that's exactly what 911 was a sort of Middle Eastern
temper tantrum. That was the worst possible way of publicizing world
religion. You couldn't imagine anything uglier, cool, random mass
murder of office workers, irrespective of their religious
persuasion, no discernment, just
a dark outrage. And that single event I think was probably the
worst event in Islamic history in terms of making the world take a
step back from Tawheed. Because every everybody in the world
probably knows that that happens. And everybody has seen those
iconic images. And if it's connected in any way with Islam,
then we'll go oops, don't want to go anywhere near that. So that is
the great example of 10 fear in our time, but anything like that,
with the Manchester arena bombings at a clan massacre in Paris, all
of that is young people whose moral circuits have been fused by
the power of their rage and anger and vengefulness about real things
that are happening
in a way that I see as being part of the vengeful culture of the
Jackie Lea, the HMI or to JD, and that is ruled out by Islam that
says the innocent innocent, the guilty or guilty. So
that I think is the principal obstacle to the spread of Islam,
which is intrinsically this easy and beautiful thing, obviously the
third replenishment of the great Abrahamic story story of Abrahamic
monotheism looks pretty messy if it's not what it says it is. And
central mosque in London registers about 600 Shahad as a year in
Cambridge about 50 Shahad as the people are still coming into
Islam.
Maybe 100,000, according to the 2011 census,
converts in this country, this year census may reveal a larger
figure. So despite the 10 fear, the ugliness of 911 and the arena
bombing under stabbings, and all of these very extreme
manifestations of human moral failure. And inhumanity, people
are still saying, well, that's interesting, what you've got, and
they kind of look around the edges of these horrible, dark scarecrows
that are driving people away and saying, Well, yeah, what have you
got?
You know, I see that. We're like, little birds wanting to eat from
the crops, and these people are the scarecrows that are scaring
everybody away. But it doesn't always work. People still come to
Islam. But yeah, so there's a whole chapter on 10 Fear, which I
define as a bid is perhaps the preeminent leader because what
greater innovation that misrepresents God's religion can
they be then
To do things that are so repulsive, that people run away
from Huck.
It's the greatest bit by definition.
It has an aspect of an idolatry of the self about it. I think. So
yeah, that's a chapter.
What did you find in it specifically that you film sort of
held your attention? Because that's one of the things that I
didn't actually give us a talk anywhere. I think it's an
original. Ask me a question.
I think it's interesting because you have a chapter that deals
specifically with anger. So anger, that is the god versus anger that
is from the song people listening to the whims of their ego. But I
feel that Muslims rightfully, in many situations, have a reason to
be angry and you feel vengeful. Yet you say that we ought to be
transcending our sense of anger, we ought to be considering that
the Islamic vision of justice is way beyond retaliation, and I feel
and I but it seems easier said than done. There's so much hurt
and trauma from colonial history, and modern day colonialism, if you
will. Isn't it a bit sort of blase to just say, we want to transcend
anger and well, and it's the Holy Prophet, I'll let you select his
firm can the other day well, we're kind of under bahala you're
collegial and you're hoc, he sometimes get angry. But his anger
did not cause him to depart from what was right.
And if you look at these kinds of suicide attacks, and stabbings
that we get today, Makkah, under the idolaters, was in a life or
death struggle with Medina under the Muslims. Did the remaining
Muslims in Makkah, go to the marketplace, go to the Kaaba start
stabbing people at random. There's no incident recorded of that at
all, anywhere in Islamic history. After the Mongols kill half the
Muslims in the world, kill the Khalifa fill the tigress with the
great books of Islam.
Build mountains of skulls. What did the surviving Muslims do in
the face of that outrage? Well, the smiley group so called engaged
in some form of terrorism, assassinations, Sunnis No.
Instead, the son is put their heads together and said, How can
we bring these people to Islam? And that's one of the great
stories of our history, that even though Genji is cornered, his
people had forbidden Halal slaughter on pain of death. And
that forbidden the Avant, in Bukhara, Samarkand everywhere.
There's great centers, no alarm on pain of death. They came to Islam,
through people like Seaford in your Harbor, how to see through so
many of the great Sufis, Najmuddin kumara who stood their ground and
refused to
compromise the thing that I think is a safer Dania harbor. How does
he who was dragged before the the
robbery Buddhist, and they are in Bahara
who wanted to test his anger, as I said, Show me how you you Persians
pray.
So he does to rock us. And then the Sultan gets one of his guards
to grab him by the head and bang his head on the floor is is making
scheduled to make me angry just going to produce an amusing
situation. And then the chef's finishes his prayer.
And then the Emir says you Persians are worse than dogs. And
he just says, bad for Islam. Yes, we will be worse than dogs.
Do you just kind of would not allow his anger to get in the way
of talking about truth. And one, one, there's a lot of interesting
books about how the Golden Horde converted. And those were quite
horrible. People what was worse in history than the Mongol massacres
in India in Hungary everywhere.
And yet, they ended up converting to Islam. So they become the
moguls, they become the ultimate orator. They become a central
Asian incarnates they become the Yuan Dynasty in China, and we
build those places better than they weren't.
The most beautiful book in the world probably is the 28th Juice
of the Quran of Sultan or J tall, which is an Egyptian national
library. And they're huge things. They're like a meter wide and gold
leaf commissioned by the Salton
and I was there with a conservator who was working on I think he
actually works on the US Declaration of Independence is one
of these. This is the most beautiful book in the world.
Because the thing is kind of a miracle.
That was commissioned by Sultan all J tall, who had originally
been Nicholas, because his mother was a Christian, but the family
will share
Minister and Buddhists that he converted to Islam and Gaza unfund
converted to Islam and they produce the most beautiful book in
the world, having been grandchildren of the people who
cut off the heads of the Allah mat and forbidden the Quran. That's an
extraordinary episode. And that was achieved by the Muslims not
losing it. May not saying let's go and stab some Mamba looking guy in
the bizarre because we're, we're, we're out of it. Because they had
great shakes, and they had the Tawakkol and the trust in God and
the confidence that the beauty of the truth can melt hearts. So if a
lot of Iraqis had done that, when the Americans invaded, and Paul
Bremer or some of the SHS generals converted to Islam, that would be
a real victory that will be decisive, and would have sort of
historical ramifications, but instead and it stabbed somebody,
let's blow ourselves up. Let's attack a church, really based
stuff that is not not yielded anything for them except misery
and humiliation. So yeah, anger is real, and some things we should be
angry about. But the believer is able to see things in the context
of eternity, and to know that God will, in the end bring about
justice. And that
wrongdoers will face the latter day, and that believers are
required to show restraint and patience, and find ways of
conveying the truth even in these apparently impossible situations.
That one of my favorite movements in Islamic history again, in Spain
is the NHS.
In Spain, you have the horror of Inquisition. And on Friday,
everybody in Spain had to keep that front door open. So the
familiars of the Inquisition could see if anybody was praying. When
he went into any town in Spain, there was a checkpoint, so you had
to eat a little sliver of bacon to make sure you weren't Jewish or
Muslim. It was totalitarian. And despite that, there were people
who continue to convert to Islam, even under the Inquisition, like
all the edges, an inquisition was really panicked about them and
really punished him very severely. So that's how authentic monotheism
operates not through detonations of anger and despair, but by
working for truth, even under impossible and provocative
circumstances.
We also have the king we've traveled to many places today that
I've been commanded now that we have to bring this to an end. I
have a few questions in my hands. But I thought I'd take the
opportunity to open it up to the floor first. So the Where does
it's my use stories, and does it end inside of Europe or outside of
Europe? Is it voluntary or involuntary? Well, one could push
beyond the limits, I think of these ancient stories and the
extent to which they are created to give us some kind of steer as
to how we should behave in a very strange times.
The point of the agile and Ishmael story is that even though they
seem to be refugees, asylum seekers sent off into nowhere,
that they come to this valley without cultivation. That then
turns out to be the beginning point of what in the fullness of
God's time turns out to be this extraordinary and unique new
chapter in the unfolding of Abrahamic religion. So, that is
their place of dwelling. Abraham says as Kanto I have caused my
descendants my progeny to find this to be their home their
mascot.
But of course, part of the sort of punting on the title of traveling
home is that ultimately we're all traveling home to home isn't that
is not of this world.
All wayfarers
when they're heard the heat don't either be dirty, incompetent, or
in here, either Qatari or be ill a lot on this world is not a place
where you will remain. It's just a road to your home. So Ishmael
ended his days and is buried at the Kaaba. But that's not the end
of his traveling his traveling is to the piano and to the radar of
Allah subhanaw taala we hope that that's the home to which we're all
traveling.
Linked to that question, there's a question here. How can Muslims be
heirs to a fleeting sense of Britishness as we are traveling
home,
because the tradition of order which is very strongly stressed in
Islam, the fuqaha as one of their accepted glide, of principles of
law say a model for orphan Kalama shadow a shadow that which is
known to accustom is like that which is legislated to Revelation
and other Mahakam as
It's a principle that the jurist really,
really insist on that because of the universality of Islam because
of it being fit everywhere. One is required to inhabit a particular
place, which is not just part of a globalized, universal ecumenical,
on unrooted, OMA, but it's specific. And the different parts
of the Muslim world have always been very culturally distinct.
Indonesia, and Islam has a different fragrance that was big
Islam, which is different to African Islam and so forth. And
they're all facing the same Qibla. So what we're seeing now, and we
will continue to see, irrespective of my sort of abstract theorizing,
is that in routing, if that's a word of European Muslims, who
increasingly feel confident with their identity, not as a diaspora,
but as Rotterdam Muslims, as Oslo, Muslims, as Scottish Muslims, and
we see those identities are really bearing fruit. And of course, they
have to be selective. We're not going to integrate into the pub
culture. For instance, there's lots of things that are ruled out
by Sharia, but in terms of the subtler and deeper aspects of the
way in which human communities have, in a constructive way,
interacted with the land, and the nature that is in the land. I
think we're going to see more and more Muslims feeling at home and
also registering the Socratic use of the land.
Sheikh Abdullah and Jamal,
Elia Hamel, who was very active in the Naqshbandi World in London in
the 1980s. He had a Xiao Wei in Bolton
used to take his marrieds in every conceivable ethnicity was very
diverse to some of the places which you felt were wholly in
England.
Sort of Glastonbury type places or places where maybe ley lines were
converging, the validity of that it's not not possible to establish
altar and establish it. But he felt that it was very important
for Muslims living in a place to be alert to the Socrates, that
have always been there in that place, which is why you have
Muslim community in Glastonbury, for instance, because they're
specifically interested in the particular religious quality,
spiritual quality of that place. And Muslims have always done that
many Muslims sacred places, and wherever you go, we want sacred
places that belong to somebody else, and belong to somebody else
before that. So that's just an inevitable part of the Ishmaelites
expansion into new places, and the purification and the inclusion in
the Dar Al Islam.
So to change the subject a little in the book, you talked about how
the Internet played a crucial role in exacerbating this idea of 10
fear. And there's a question here, should we then stay away from
online cuts platforms, especially with young people, particularly
for the sake of education?
Well, I mean, the problem with the internet is that it is mindless,
and amoral.
And as we saw last week, one of the sad things that it has shown
about human nature is what people actually want to hear and look at.
So it's an age of burgeoning conspiracy theories, something
like Cuba non or the great replacement theory, would have
been hard to imagine before the age of Facebook and siloing.
And the creation of algorithms that just keep sending you the
kind of stuff that you're already looking at.
And I think a lot of young Muslims can very unsuspectingly get drawn
into that kind of stuff, especially in a sort of vicious
fundamentalist dichotomizing and the essentialism centralizing of
the other.
So
yeah, books are generally safer.
Because books can be more easily attributed.
But I think all of humanity is now struggling with this new medium,
it's having a very profound effect on human culture. In Canada, now,
most terrorist attacks are by members of Insell movements,
nothing to do with Islam. And the Insell movement is entirely in
existence on subreddits and 4chan, on
unregulated uncurated platforms where anything and anything can be
said.
And we don't really know whether the extent to which sort of
completely uncivilized and misanthropic views of human
predicament can actually be controlled. If the algorithm
itself is soulless, and the internet is not being directed by
any principle, religious or otherwise, we simply don't know
but most of those movements seem to be getting worse, as far as one
can tell. I mean, the Internet can be used for positive purposes,
obviously, we all have to use it, but still that
enormous amount of material that can inflame and misguide
particularly vulnerable or unhappy people is, I think something that
is likely to get worse.
I mean, the great replacement theory
30% have talked about this in the book 30% of Brexit voters
explicitly adhere to the great replacement theory, which holds
that
Muslim immigration to Europe is being orchestrated by a conspiracy
of plutocrats, because Muslims can be paid less than
30% of Brexit voters, very high. It originates in France with this
an even higher number of believers. So and again, this
seems to be directed by the sort of madness of the self referring
algorithms that people have just reinforced and increasingly
aberrant beliefs.
And a mistrust for traditional sources of authority. mistrustful,
politicians were established narratives, established churches
morphed is
people are quite fearful and paranoid mistrustful of classical
authority.
So how does the Muslim leader deal with this? Should they go online?
One is online, whether one likes it or not.
The question is, how its regulated and how in proper statements are
dealt with.
I don't really like the idea of a kind of self promoting brand of a
particular Muslim leader, because that immediately drags it down to
the kind of celebrity culture that one finds nowadays, which is
certainly the opposite of Emmanuel Fidel is vision of humble
religious scholar who the last thing he wants to do is promote
himself.
But then, if everybody is like that, it's all the self promoters
who end up representing religion.
And the Vatican knows this. So they've turned Pope Francis into a
kind of internet meme. He washes the feet of asylum seekers, and he
does certain photogenic things. And it's all carefully
orchestrated, not necessarily for cynical reasons, but because they
know that unless that isn't the space, then everybody will be
looking at aliens or some other interesting thing.
So in a sense, you have to lower things in order to compete
otherwise, you're not in the screen at all.
How do we deal with the secular narratives of Afghanistan? So
Right? In the context of traveling home?
Well, the Taliban, unlike say, ISIS,
are not really a thing in the Western world.
The religious nationalists who just want to get foreigners out of
Afghanistan,
I would say that a lot of the secular, commenting quite recently
has been quite mature. And abashed. There's a certain Anglo
Saxon hubris that has been broken.
Because of the extraordinary unexpected circumstance of high
tech, NATO, drone led robot arm is being defeated by these hairy guys
with in flip flops. Nobody thought that could, you know, they can
press a button and zap you from the other side of the world and
the robot. Artificial Intelligence determines whether you're a valid
target or not. Somebody in the RAF told me that a lot of drone
strikes are completely automated now, by something called
artificial ethics, synthetic ethics. So the drone is flying
around looking for targets for days, and it sees a truck and it
sees a piece of metal in the back of the truck. And it sees two
adults driving the truck. And so it decides that's a target and it
launches the hellfire missile without consulting any human
operator.
This is somebody from RAF who told me this. And he said actually,
they find they have fewer
innocent collateral casualties, if they let the robots do the
deciding than if it's some guy who's dressed as a pilot, in a
cellar in Virginia are somewhere deciding when to press the kill
button. So I think it has been a chastening moment for the big
empires of the world. But
from an Islamic perspective, of course, what kind of Muslim
movement finances itself almost entirely on the proceeds of heroin
trafficking.
Where is that in the Sierra or in any conceivable interpretation of
Islamic ethics? It's obviously a non starter, and their
interpretation of Islam seems to be a particular dry type of
Deobandi Islam that again is transcendentalist use the category
I was trying to reach for earlier.
that if God is only transcendent, the world is a kind of
emptied de sacralized space where evil has a real presence and you
can demonize people much more easily than if you have the
correct spiritual balance between tansy and Ashby.
And
the great fighters against colonialism in the 19th century
with people like abracadabra to that eerie. Imam Shamil, and
others, who were profoundly influenced by Ibn Aerobus school,
and who were not capable of demonizing people. So Abdulkadir,
which is that even though the French broke all of their treaties
with him and cut down the trees and massacred huge numbers of
people, and demolished the Great Mosque of oran to build a railway
station and horrible
they captured him by trickery, imprisoned him in France, and many
of his family members died because of the conditions. And finally, he
was allowed to go to the Ottoman Empire, and he settled in
Damascus. And then there was a riot by the Druze against the
Christians. And he was the one who interceded to save the Christians,
even though it was the Christian French, who had done what they've
done to his country, and explanation for that, as he sets
out in a book that he writes called Letter to the French is in
his Aquarian metaphysic. Everything participates in some
way visible or obscure in the divine way in the divine life, and
that, therefore to completely other another human being is
simply bad theology. And you always look to see where the
Divine Light is in someone, and Imam Shamil was certainly the
same. And the whole Muslim world, I would say, until about 50 years
ago, believed in imminence as well as transcendence. So the Taliban
are not selfies, but they do follow a kind of metaphysical
system, or they don't talk much theology really.
Which is liable to the demonizing of human beings and a human
difference, which I think is dangerous. And another reason why
from a classical traditional Assam perspective, you couldn't really
acknowledge them as a valid expression of the tradition. So
how can we talk about vicious lamb or French Islam, for example, when
we are facing such a globalized world where we're just creating
such a cultural sort of hegemony?
Yeah. How do we integrate into societies that are disintegrating
in a sense? How do we follow the local order? If the local people
no longer care about it, if they're not building in a local
style, if the houses not decorated in a local style, they don't know
local songs, they're there, nothing's really there is part of
the global consumer culture. Yeah, that's a good question. And I
think that
there might be a way and I do explore this in a kind of
rather loose way in the book, in which the doctrine of Whorf and
the fact that we continue the Abrahamic religious story makes us
better equipped to engage with aspects of local culture that
everybody else has kind of walked away from because it's not as cool
as watching the internet or driving a car that no longer looks
like a British car or a French car, but is just subject to the
whims of international design.
So it may well be possible that the best argument that we can
present against the Populists is that Islam can show itself to be a
better instantiation of aspects of what is local than secularity ever
could.
That's the kind of thought rather than a theory. But it seems to me
that if there are
chapters in the books of Uppsala correctly read them that that is a
real possibility.
Because once they've taken away what was once their master
signifier, which is God, the churches are empty. Everything
kind of comes unraveled, because everything used to be centered on
that.
So if you joined the Royal Marines, for instance,
the first thing you do is to swear an oath, which begins I swear by
Almighty God.
And then you've got 40 weeks of *, but you sworn the oath, so
you're stuck with it.
Now Muslims can take that oath, I guess it's not a Trinitarian oath.
I swear by Almighty God, what does it really mean? If you're a bog
standard British atheist from Newcastle on time? What are you
saying?
So there is a sense in which obviously there are
particularities of the Christian thing that we can't get into and
we leave respectfully intact as they are. But there's also a
larger set of Abrahamic assumptions that had to do more
with the givens of monotheism. God, the day of judgment and
prophesy that you family which is shared Abrahamic land by a lot of
other traditions as well, which is a space we definitely can get
into. So we can't Christianize Islam and we, we mustn't sort of
bring in things that are specifically churchy, even though
those have often been at the core of local identities. But there is
something that is deeper than that core, which is the basic belief in
the monotheistic gods. And in the virtues, which even many
churchgoers
on this focused on anyway, the number of people that even song in
an English parish church, who really can put their hands on
their hearts and say, I believe in the Trinity. But I believe in the
39 articles that the Church of England is probably pretty small.
But they do believe in God and the general outlines of what Abrahamic
religion is about. So yeah, I would say that, that would be a
very interesting place to go. And something that should be seriously
considered if we want to stay here because Europe is historically
very dangerous. Muslims have coexisted with classical India
with classical Africa, China, it was always difficult, but it could
be done. Europe was the place that produced the ethnic cleansing, the
killing of the Circassians, the Inquisition, it came from Europe,
not from those other civilizations. And the 20th
century was even worse, in many ways. So we need to think about
ways in which we can be completely Sharia compliant but also fit in
rather than just kind of grumblers in our ghettos, who think that if
we grumble enough, they're going to concede and make life nicer for
us, which may happen or may not. That isn't a very good strategy
for communities that want to stay in the long term.
What does it mean to be Sharia compliant in the West? Can we ever
implement Sharia? What would that look like? Well, if you're only 4%
of the population, then any consideration of Islamic Public
Law is obviously not a consideration. But there are
aspects of personal status law, things to do with marriage,
divorce, inheritance, and so forth dispute resolution through
the arbitration process. There's quite a bit that can be done.
That Public Law obviously not
what is the best way to ward off atheism in the next generation?
Humility, I think
atheism in my supposition comes not so much from logic, chopping,
or the reading of science in a particular way. But by considering
deep questions on the basis of a soul that has been disturbed, is
full of doubts and agitation, and doesn't have a place for
contemplation. So connection to nature, a genuine close concern
for other people and awareness of the inherent unlikeliness and
wonder of creation. These things are normal to us settle the heart
and make the atheistic idea which is that this comes from nowhere,
and nothing means anything. And the physical constants of the
world just pop up out of the primal void just by themselves, a
kind of absurd idea. But that that sense of it being absurd comes
from the fitrah. And people are a long way from the fitrah nowadays,
and they can believe in just about anything. GK Chesterton said, if
people stopped believing in God, they don't believe in nothing,
they believe in anything.
So, flying saucers and 50 different genders, and whatever it
is that's going on now is enabled by the fact that the master
signifier is missing. That master signifier is really there by
divine gift. But it's generously given to those people who are
contrite enough and have a contemplative dimension. And then
that light will shine in their hearts and they'll know what are
the correct answers to those big questions.
I'm sorry, but I think that was a very beautiful note to end the q&a
session on. Thank you ever so much Shahadat Kean for doing this, and
thank you all for attending. Inshallah, we'll have more
opportunities to discuss this book on future occasions. Please buy
it. It's right outside for you to purchase. Thank you very much,
Simon. Thank you.