Abdal Hakim Murad – Winter Reading List 1
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The transcript describes a range of books and pieces of art made by Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor for women's haircutting. The collections include a series of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of collections of art from the early 90s, including a series of
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Cambridge Muslim college training the next generation of Muslim
thinkers Smilla hamdu lillah wa salatu salam, ala Rasulillah. Were
early he was happy women were alert. So what we're going to do
is just give a brief overview of these five books that not quite at
random we've picked for winter reading. These are not necessarily
endorsements, but at least the opportunity to reflect on some of
the stuff that is being published at the moment. And that is out
there. There's a lot about Islam and the interests of Islam in the
wider intellectual conversation of our culture, and we need to have a
window onto that. So what I want to start with, perhaps, going in
at the soft end is the poetic anthology of Paul Abriola. Dude
Sutherland.
Sutherland is very mature, established Canadian poet with
about 10 collections of poems already, to his credit, many of
them dating from before his conversion. But recently during
Ramadan, he wrote a poem on every day of the fasting month plus
another 10, from the month following. So you have here poems
on the life of the prophet Muhammad.
Each of the poems considers one aspect of the Holy Prophet in
terms of his
human reality in seventh century Arabia. So it's a kind of poetic
Sierra, but looking more at Shama issues and what kind of person he
was. So, here is something that he imagines say that art is just
saying,
when the love of my life died, I was 17 had founded an Islamic
nation shattered, the weapons of the aggressive tribes made the
high palms bow to kiss the sandals of Wayfarer, transformed thieves
into scholars given us the right manners for every action, had
conquered Mecca, and made it possible for us to visit our
families there, and so on. It's a very good way of getting into some
of the depths of the Sierra, very often we focus on battles and
marriages and events. And this gives you more of a sense of the
spiritual story. So that I think is definitely a recommendation.
And then from the sublime does something Well, not quite
ridiculous. I thought that we could dip our toes into the choppy
waters of that essay writing of Theodore Dalrymple, and this is
one of his recent collections, anything goes the death of
honesty. Now, he's not somebody who is immediately directed by any
religious worldview, but nonetheless, has contributed for
years to the times Times Literary Supplement spectator and so forth,
in a kind of not quite blimp ish curmudgeonly way decrying the
times. So an enemy of political correctness, an opponent of many
of the Wilder views associated with say, some of the transgender
rhetoric or some of the feminist rhetoric. And he does this not
from an elite perspective, but as somebody who has really worked at
the frontline of the Northern cultural wars, but the the
inequality wars of our culture, even though he's right of center.
As a doctor, he basically spends his life as a GP, in this country
and abroad, he's dealt with some of the rougher edges of the human
experience. He's been an expert witness in murder trials, he deals
with drug deaths, he deals with battered wives and so forth, and
has this
series of collections of essays in which he politicizes about the way
in which the country is going and in many cases, our own concerns as
Muslim believers are quite startlingly mirrored in this
collection. And it's interesting to reflect as we move through this
the extent to which
Muslim concerns are often reflected to the right rather than
the left of the political spectrum. Somebody like Jonathan
Bowden, for instance, who died recently who was with a British
National Party, which certainly will not normally touch with a
bargepole had some interesting things to say about Islam as a
counterweight to the the negative spirit of consumer modernity. So
that's Theodore Dalrymple, anything goes rather than what
academic but actually quite accessible is a book by young
scholar called Raymond Farrin structure and Quranic
interpretation. Quranic studies going through a kind of golden age
at the moment, and here it's some of it looks rather terrifying with
lots of numbers and structures and graphs of how the sewers
interlock, but his basic point which I think you can benefit from
without knowing the Arcana of Quranic studies, is a support for
the claim that ring composition gives us the key to understanding
the structure of the Quranic text he shows with detailed example
is how serious begins say with topic a move on to topic B,
perhaps topic C, and then back to topic B and back to a again. And
he also even more ambitiously proposes that you can see groups
of sewers in the Quran, in which this structure is observable. So
it's a little bit left field and it's as it were throwing the cat
among the orientalist pigeons. But it's a bold work. And I think for
those who are trying to understand the depths, and the compositional
beauty of the Quran, definitely something worth having on one
shelf. And there's also Jeff Iein. Bowden, and his book on Islam and
romanticism which is,
again, ostensibly an academic text, but in fact very interesting
to us because when we speak about Islamic Europe, Islam of the west
so often our adversaries think in terms of opposition's it's them in
us like light and dark, the Semitic in the area in the
European and the Asian it's, it's dichotomizing What he's pointing
out through his quite forensic literary trawl through mainly
German literature of the 17th and 18th century enlightenment
literature, and romanticism but also looking at the English
experience. So Lord Byron, who says he almost became a Muslim,
and of course his child Harold is full of Islamic references, and
then Byron through Shelley with his book the revolt of Islam, and
then shall his wife Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and we
recall how Frankenstein first learns to speak because of a
Muslim girl called Sofia who is reciting certain things and
there's resonance is there very much Islam as part of that pre
modern European world rather than something that as it were, fell
off about
50 or 60 years ago and reminding us of this interlocking narrative.
At the last of the five is Henrik Ibsen, Emperor and Galilean which
is an important monument because Epson probably Europe's best ever
playwright.
The Doll's House, Rasmus home, and so many other monuments of 19th
century second rising
sensibility. Ibsen himself considered this to be his best
play. And yet, it's really difficult to stage. The first time
it was ever staged in the UK was in 2011, at the National Theatre.
And unfortunately, what they did was to shorten it and to modernize
it. So here we have the one you shouldn't buy in the new version
by Ben power, who was a Cambridge trained kind of theater person,
who I think didn't really believe that a national theater audience
would understand the references of the 19th century, agonizing over
faith. What should we do with the body and its cravings?
Christianity no longer speaks to us? We can't be pagans any longer
the Wagnerian thing is, obviously, an absurdity. And out of the
question, where do we go? This is where Ibsen our greatest
playwright explores this. And at the end is the Emperor.
And input comes to grief, having invaded Iraq. Sounds familiar,
didn't work too. Well, that was the end of the Roman attempt to
expand empirically to to the east. As he dies, he predicts, in a
veiled but unmistakable way, the arrival later on of what he calls
the third Empire, which is the one that we will unite body and flesh,
which is obviously a reference to the imminence of Islam that comes
out of this book, because, of course, that's too, too strong.
Meet for modern liberal audiences at the National Theatre, but get
older ones and you can see how Epson himself like many of those
18th century romantics that I'm speaking about, clearly sees a
resolution to be found in the third Empire and the harmonizing
body spirit dialectic of the final revelation. So those are my
choices, not endorsing anything that's in them particularly, but I
think it helps to remind us of the liveliness of the current public
conversation and insha Allah will benefit from at least dipping into
the pages of these amazing writings. Cambridge Muslim
College, training the next generation of Muslim thinkers