Abdal Hakim Murad – Winter Reading List 1

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