Abdal Hakim Murad – Winter Reading List 2
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AI: Transcript ©
Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala Rasulillah, where early
he was happy woman well,
so this is, I believe the second in our winter reading list
sessions, where we look at publications recent and
occasionally not quite so recent that we might be curling up with
during the long winter evenings, some of which may actually be
appropriate as stocking fillers for our non Muslim friends. So
we're not really looking at detailed Fichte texts here. Nor
yet at masterworks of Islamic philosophy, but rather a books
that are a little bit more middlebrow, more general for an
ordinary reader that nonetheless draw on important issues, but also
on some of the more recent scholarship that's been happening.
So we've got quite a bouquet to offer you in this little session.
And I wanted to start first of all, with something that well is
100 years old, morbid you pick tools novel the early hours. So
why am I choosing this? Well, it has many virtues picked all we
know as probably the best known translated into English of the
Holy Quran. But in his day, he was a best selling and hugely revered
novelist. That was how he earned his living. But he was also a
campaigner for Indian independence. He was the editor of
the Bombay Chronicle, which was deemed to be anti Raj. And so he
was fired from that. Close friends with Ghandi, the Phil Avitus,
movement and so forth. Interesting. And the introduction
to the book has a potted history. If you're interested in Indian
Muslim heritage pictoral, there's actually quite a quite an
interesting figure, but a novelist. So he converted to Islam
about halfway through his novel writing in Korea. And it's
interesting to see how the Islamic preoccupations and deepening of
his sort of soul work unfold in this literary genre. So this is
generally regarded as his best novel, and also as his great
Islamic novel. In fact, I would say it's the great Islamic novel
in the English language, the early hours. And it's named after the
word Doha
the famous verse from the Quran, which indicates that there will
always be a new dawn, never despair. And what's it about?
Well, it's about the Balkan wars of 1912. And the years leading up
to that final collapse of Muslim power in Europe. So we think about
the Inquisition, the record is due in Spain, but that's five
centuries ago. There's something very similar is happening in the
east of Europe in the Balkan Peninsula, more or less within
living memory.
So Pictou Pandit publishes this novel in order to give people not
just a sense of what the politics were, he himself was sympathetic
to the Committee of Union and Progress and not very keen on
Abdulhamid autocratic rule quite unlike Abdullah Quilliam, and some
other British Muslims are active at the time, and he uses his novel
to present a sympathetic case to the Committee of Union and
Progress through the eyes of a simple ordinary Balkan, Turkish
Muslim soldier, camera Dean.
I won't summarize the novel nor yet provide any spoilers. But for
me, it's a very interesting indication of an earlier set of
crises which afflicted the OMA and certainly hurt the conscience of
British Muslims at the time. pictoral went on to create an
Anglo Ottoman society which campaigned for the integrity of
the Ottoman Empire when some Whitehall were thinking that it
should be broken up. And we can see what a catastrophe that has
led to with new states like Bosnia and Lebanon and Iraq, really not
working very well after the Ottoman colorful umbrella is
withdrawn. So he kind of prophetically anticipated the
disasters of the Middle East in the Balkans in the 20th century,
after the Pax automatica was withdrawn, but what's most
interesting for me in the book is the way in which he depicts very
ordinary life and interesting individual events against the
backdrop of late Turkish rule in the Balkans. So here is just an
example of that. And all of the book is well written em Forster
thought that he was one of the great novelists of the day. But
here's a passage camera Dean has fallen into
a espionage or counter espionage
ring in the Balkans and is sent on a secret mission on the train,
which the Ottomans have built up into the hinterland. So this is
from chapter 13. I'm readin in the intervals of conversation looked
out at the ever changing landscape.
As the train meandered up into the hills with his dark green of
forest, here the blue of some deep lake under a cloudless sky. It was
not the first time he had traveled by the iron road, but it was the
first time he had been sufficiently at ease in traveling
to look around him with such keen enjoyment. This compartment where
he lounged was vastly different from the trucks into which they
packed for soldier men. And this was but it Kinji second class,
there was built in Jim first class also on the train compartments,
like a casket need for holding jewels, and some compartments
closely curtains were reserved for women, the shrill voices the
inmates being herded every halt. Everything had been arranged with
nice convenience and propriety. The train possessed a cheery,
whistling voice, the guard watched over all like a proud father. The
spice of danger in the expedition was a source of energy to come
over a dean, making his mind alert to notice trifles and filling him
with a sense of joyous life. He felt quite sorry when the train
stopped at the station short of Monastir, at which he had been
ordered to alight that guards book for him to talk to a soldier who
was on the platform with the result that he passed out without
the slightest difficulty.
And then he walks on to his destination in this remote
Macedonian town. Out of the open country, he passed suddenly into a
labyrinth of narrow markets with scraps of awning hanging back like
overhead crowded with all sorts of people, men in turbans, high crown
fizzes, CALPADS, multifarious raiment, and women in stripe veils
of diverse us. Arriving at a mosque he had a mind to enter and
make up his areas of prayer before proceeding further. But as he was
on the point of doing so he saw a face well known to him within the
gateway and quickly turned away.
It was the spy Khalil last unit Salonika, the men who had so
nearly brought him to destruction on a lying charge. What was he
doing in this country turn far from the seat of government, the
source of pay for such as he praying that the rogue might not
have seen him come readin hastened to the barracks, the sight of his
old enemy had made him anxious to bear the letter to its destination
instantly. So it's a kind of thriller as well, but kind of John
McCurry in the Ottoman Balkans, it has a romantic interest.
Inevitably, it's set against the backdrop of the majesty of the
horrifying spectacle of the collapse of the old empire. I
think it's a really good read. It's only a little paperback,
perfect stocking filler. So we must move on to my pick, number
two, German MagMod, the leaf of the neem tree, the leaf of the
neem tree famous Indian tree used in various medicinal and tea
making activities. And this is by a member of the younger generation
of British Islam, a Londoner somebody whose literary gifts have
already made Him known on the BBC, and as a filmmaker, and as a poet,
somebody who insha Allah has much to look forward to. And here we
have a very different British Muslim voice, which is not the
voice of the British Muslim going out to try and sort things out in
the Islamic world. But the descendant of those who have
migrated under very difficult circumstances from the Islamic
world, to the imperial capital of London, dealing with its
materialism, the racism, the Islamophobia, the risks of
assimilation, and I think it's one of the most reliable and
accessible places to go to if you're interested in that
particular aspect of the British Muslim experience. So this is a
book which is mostly poetry, but also contains certain short
stories and prose, anecdotes.
So walking through mer 11 breeds a love of money. This is apparent.
The higher the ceiling, the sweeter the fruit. If you look too
long at this place, and it's brothers, you will wake in the
mornings with a mouthful of copper and steel, a lack of saliva and
ears shorn of hair. Free to hear all the nothings you need. behind
your eyes, you'll keep the names of horses and the floor plans of
strangers homes.
Back home, we say is it your dad's house, Baker Street doesn't live
under the feet of your aging mother, even if we build a mosque
them. The curvature of a lip or the long mile of an eye do not
need capital to burn, but it's difficult to see with an eyeful of
ashes.
And then another representative poem takes a village.
The only place I know like the back of my hand is the back of my
hand and sometimes he could be driving to in my head. They know
me in mirror poor and Gillingham. On some nights they mentioned my
name in Karachi.
and perhaps once a decade, it's uttered in Rajouri. But I doubt
many can put a face to it that
they still ask about me at the mosque at home, my only claim to
community, no other place smells like elders before they died. I
can visit home for a few hours every week to feel like a guest or
a friend of my father. How long you allowed to claim a place
before you were accused of lying
before they stopped listening, and the food you left out is no longer
edible, like spoiled fruit of a whole town's labor.
She wants to do a third of these thick, I receive a lot of poetry,
some good, some
disappointing, no, but this is certainly one of the best
specimens of that emerging discipline of British Muslim
poetry that I've received recently.
get worse or trouble goes the first line of the month manager.
I'm not as brave as Imam Ibn Natalie. But my therapist said not
to respond with fear. She uses the metaphor of a clock that I can't
take down that will be in the other room if I try to go that
tells me I have to drown it out that poetry is abstract, and I
need to target the senses.
I respond apprehensively listen to her medicine. I think of cooking
more being outside and touching the soft Life of Plants. Even
touching a pet she says it all sounds so simple.
I'm no messenger. But I think of the Arab Prophet asking his wife
to cover him. I think of trembling, of being a strange
father.
If my body temperature and neglecting responsibility, I think
of the skin on my hands prematurely turning to rubber. I
wonder what happens when you mix blood and obsession. If lineage
pulls from that well, or if that's water only I use over and over.
They're quite atmospheric, always short.
reminding me of certain other
British poets Danny absi, perhaps comes to mind. But here we are
published in the United Kingdom in 2021. By Hotjar press, no doubt
available on Amazon and at your local Islamic bookshop with any
luck. So moving on, we come to one of my all time favorites by the
Danish Muslim journalists Kanade holmboe Does it encounter does it
encounter which has subtitles and adventurous journey through
Italian Africa.
Again, this is old, like the Pick tool book came out in the 1930s.
But it's been reprinted. And I think again, it's an example of
people in the early 20th century pioneering arts that have
subsequently been explored by many others. This is one of the first
works of travel writing by a European Muslim hobo was from
Denmark, and had already published a book about the French
suppression of the reef rebellion in northern Morocco in the 1920s,
and worked quite regularly for some of the major newspapers in
Copenhagen.
One of the few Muslims in the whole country at the time, he
thought quite a pioneer are very dedicated. And this is his very
hair raising trip almost unbelievable at times, in a really
beat up old, falling to pieces Chevrolet with a very eccentric
American traveling companion. There is people that they pick up
here and there as they drive across the Sahara Desert, from
west to east from Morocco trying to go to Egypt. Again,
I don't want to offer any spoilers. But in each one of these
countries, you get not just vignettes of the traditional life
of the populations.
The poverty, superstition, unshakable faith, heroism, you
also get a sense of the absolute apartheid style distinction
between the rulers and the ruled the French racism in North Africa,
the Italian racism in siren Erica and in Tripolitania.
And the story becomes more and more kind of nerve wracking until
he gets to Mussolini's Libya.
Mussolini, Mussolini bared his teeth most effectively in his
African conquest in the invasion of Abyssinia which was one of the
low points of the whole European imperial story but also in the way
in which he occupied Tripolitania and particularly siren Erica,
which had been quite happy and loyal under the Ottoman Empire
until the same year 1912 When the Balkan provinces were amputated
from the Ottomans. The Sultan's God traditionally was made up of
of Libyans, they had been,
it'd been a very good relationship. So he
kind of commutes between the world of dandified, Italian military
officers, officers, and then at various points as you drive to
learn, almost dying of thirst in various places as this terrible
car breaks down again and again. He starts to get to know as he
moves into the heartland of the rebellion and siren, Erica is on
there and Mortara revolt, what exactly the Italians are doing the
genocide, the herding of half the population into concentration
camps, where they're basically left to
starve to death unless they convert to Catholicism, and they
get baptized, in which case, it's a different story. It's a very
kind of religionist tale.
So here's an example of one story that he encounters in siren airco
when he's talking to one of the dissidents who are struggling
against the Italians. So this is what this is. The story here is
a score of our men led by myself at attended a Greek Festival in a
neighboring oasis. It lasted three days, and we returned to our
oasis. It seemed quiet enough. But the first person I met was my
wife. She came running to me horror in her eyes, her hair
streaming down her back, her clothes torn off her body. Oh, do
not come home do not come home, she wailed. Allah forgive me for
having to tell you what has happened. She sobbed and wailed,
and I could not get another word out of her. I got off my camel and
then my brother appeared. He came up to me kiss my cheeks and said,
Brother, you know as well as I do that Allah alone beats out justice
to man. Muhammad is dead. Dead, I said, but he was not ill. No, he
replied, our brother was shot. The Italians have been here. They shot
every fifth man.
I was so shaken that I was speechless. But my brother
continued. You must place your trust in Allah, whatever happens.
Aisha is gone.
I chose my daughter and I could not control myself any longer.
Tell me I cried. Is she dead? He shook his head. No, he said, an
Italian Sergeant with some Eritrean troops arrived. They
drove the camels away and when they left with the animals, they
took Aisha with them too.
Oh, my brother, could you not have spared my house, that shame in my
heart that sorrow? You knew how I loved her. But you might rather
have killed her than that that disgrace should fall upon my name.
I knew nothing until it was too late. Eritrean soldiers kept guard
everywhere you were applied.
For a long time, I did not answer him. Then I said, You must take
care of my wife and son of man who is only nine years old stood
beside his mother. I'm going to look for Aisha
I left the oasis on my only remaining camel. I did not know
that I was never to see it again. I searched for many months in many
towns, and at last I found her. She had been put in a public
brothel in Derna house where everyone could commit literally
for payment. The chief clenched his hand around his rifle. She
knew me and I asked her to come with me. But she shook her head
and wept. Her father, she said, I believe that I am ill. And if I've
got that illness, I shall never be well again.
Aisha I forgiven you, as Allah will pardon us all. How did you
get here?
The Italian carried me away when they took the camels and
afterwards I was brought here to this house. She sobbed. Only Allah
the merciful knows what I suffered at that moment.
Kill me father, she asked, I shall never escape from this place, and
death will be a favor when it comes from your hands.
So I killed her, kissed her forehead and fled, fled to the
mountains.
Everyone was silent. I could not answer him. I was too deeply
moved.
That's just one of the stories that he hears. And he's got the
ear of a journalist. He's looking for these human interest stores,
stories that put a kind of flesh of reality on the bare bones of
what the historians record of what colonial rule in those places was
actually like colonialism plus Mussolini plus Catholicism plus
race theory.
A dreadful story. Moving on now to my pick, number four. This is
called Saracen chivalry, councils on valor, generosity and the
mystical quest by Pierre Xia, Inayat, Han,
this is a different kind of narrative. It's a sort of
historical novel, but taking the form of insight into the principle
of what Islam calls fatawa. That is to say the chivalry that
connects the need to act ethically, outwardly, even on the
field of battle, with the need to act correctly and heroically
against the demons and the enemies within
And these things have to be united as with the twin pointed sword of
Imam Ali, who was regarded as the great hero of the warriors of
fatawa. So, this book
designed in many ways for a non Muslim readership, I think in
order to present these, these virtues to them
is a kind of imagination of a book that spun off from the great
pacifier legend poster for the Knights of the Round Table. King
Arthur, the holy grail that kind of heart of European mythmaking,
sacred symbolism.
Some of you will know the story
that according to Volf, hyung von Eschenbach, who was the German
13th century author of The Great Parsifal story, one of the
monuments of medieval literature really
the king of Anjou Gomorrah that goes off as a night to offer his
services wherever chivalry is understood, and he enters the
service of the Khalifa of Baghdad,
for whom he performs many deeds of heroism. story says he's a
Christian, but the Khalifa is Muslim. And that world of chivalry
salad in Richard the Lionheart often brings together in a kind of
mutual respect in a strange way, the two rival civilizations.
He goes off to a mythical kingdom in Africa where he falls in love,
of course with Queen Bella cane.
He marries her, he is white and she is black as ebony, and leaves
her pregnant and then goes on to continue his night. arrogancy.
According to the story, she dies of grief. He marries again how to
Lloyd up in Europe and has another son.
So the first son is Farah fees, who emerges as a kind of mottled
half white half black strangeness. And the second son the half
brother is policy file becomes cost the hero of bargainous
greatest opera and a major figure in the Grail legends.
The Grail is not very big in this particular book, and the book
takes the form of Queen Bella canes.
Advice to her not yet born son, Pharaoh fees, urging him to uphold
the honor of the house of Andhra but also the honor of the
Shuttleworth tradition in Islam. So this is a kind of photo Vietnam
as medieval Muslims sort of calling it goes through the basic
practices of religion, and the basic virtue. So here's a couple
of examples.
This is Queen Bella Cain, writing to her unborn son fees to her
Gomorrah, it pains me more than I can say that I will not see you
grow to manhood. I will not see your form, hear your voice or feel
your touch. Even still, I will turn toward you that your face may
be veiled to me. I pray and trust that I will be given the sight to
see what is in your heart. With eyes of fire I will watch over you
delighting in your happiness and mourning your grief.
Before long you will be a young man. The lengthening of your limbs
needs only time. If a boy merely eats he will grow. But to become a
young man in the true meaning of the word to become a fetter a
chivalrous youth, something more is wanted. Your nourishment must
be virtue, generosity, courage, courtesy and wisdom must be your
constant practice. In garments. You must aspire to the knighthood
of purity and you must attain it.
For as long as men and women have risen towards the good in thought,
word and deed, so long has chivalry graced the Earth.
Whenever revelation has come down, the order of chivalry has rallied
to the prophets call, renewing its fealty to the ancient covenant
time and again with the sweat and blood of its worth is it has
redeemed its vow.
One of the earliest sections of the book goes through the five
pillars in which the queen is explaining to her unborn son, the
enormous importance of the five pillars and their spiritual value.
So this is the section on proud
fees to Volga muret prayer is ascension. When you bow down,
prayer lift you up. As your head descends to the earth, your heart
ascends to the sky.
A Chevelle yet needs a Shavon porphyries and camels are
commonplace. patter Lamont streets are overcrowded with them. A real
Ghazi requires a mound of Brock's noble breed. And what is that? The
Holy Breath of prayer the side that rises beyond time and space.
Spirit rides the wind.
I trust you will perform your prayer steadfastly. Prayer is both
a solemn duty and a delicate pleasure. We
When you step onto your prayer rug you step from the world of
becoming to the world of being. When you lift your arms in praise
the burden of the past and future falls from your back. And your
heart expands to greet the presence of the present, which is
another name for the eternal.
They you stand on Earth, you bow and rise in the temple of
eternity.
To pray five times each day with gesture, thought and feeling is to
put in motion the tides have a rhythm that will elevate your
soul. Deepen your peace, see you through danger and guide you
towards the fulfillment of your life's purpose. Hold on to this
rhythm. When all else crumbles around, you let dust return to
dust, but prayer is heavens portion.
And the sections on the cat and the Hajj and Ramadan are also
simple to understand. It's not an academic book, but there's
considerable depth here. And then the second portion of the book
goes through the traditional virtues of fatawa.
On wisdom, on courage, on temperance, on generosity, on
justice, on nobility, and so forth. So this is
definitely
worth giving to non Muslim friends, because it's about
fellowship, it's about that use chivalric things held in common,
but within it within the book is A Vindication of the basic spiritual
principles of Queen Bella cane, the mythical Muslim queen. So this
one is published by omega publications of New York.
Strongly recommend it. So we come to the last of my five picks for
this year. This is by Jeffrey iron Bowden, who is an academic in
America has already published a number of interesting things,
particularly on Islam and American literature, Islam and the
enlightenment.
This is his most recent offering Jefferson's Muslim fugitives, the
last story of enslaved Africans, the Arabic letters and an American
president.
Well, you can already see that this is a book by an academic
that's aiming for a larger public. And there's been a certain amount
of interest
in Jefferson and his relationship to Islam, ever since, of course,
the famous episode in 2007, I think it was when Congressman
Keith Ellison of Minnesota, when he took his vow of office to enter
the Congress did so. Not in the Bible, but on Thomas Jefferson's
own copy of the Koran, which I think was probably sales
translation. And in that era of war on terror, mad Islamophobia,
of course, that gave the journalists something to chew on.
And then Denise Spellman has written a book about Jefferson's
grant Jefferson's relationship to deism certain trends in the
enlightenment that were influenced by certain Islamic texts and
traditions, a certain sort of Unitarianism a certain sort of
insistence that the personality of Jesus is enormous ly impressive,
but only if you consider him to be really a human being rather than
divine. That's another story. But in in Jeffrey's book, what we have
is something that looks at some documents.
And these documents originate and he begins the book rather
dramatically, with a stormy evening at the White House in
1807. And Jefferson's already had a hard day traveling his horse
almost drowned, there were floods.
And so he's sitting in the White House when a mysterious person
sends a message saying, I have something a vast importance to
tell you
guys admitted, I guess it's a bit more difficult these days.
And it turns out that the man comes with two mysterious
documents, which nobody can read from two fugitives who had been
arrested in Kentucky.
What's the significance of this? Well, again, there's spoilers. The
book weaves in and out of larger questions of Jefferson's and early
America's relationship with
the Muslim world. But this is specifically about literature
generated by slaves. So here you have these two fugitives who are
sending letters it seems to the president in the White House, when
they are Muslims who've been enslaved and are in chains and it
seems to have escaped several times from various forms of
incarceration, including the famous Christian prison and in
Kentucky, make it over state lines into Tennessee that on its own
would make it a great movie. So they send letters complaining of
their treatment, but the letters were in Arabic,
in a kind of West African mother B type script.
And they say
in the who Allah Delica Shaheed god is their witness. They're
doing it partly to alert you
One who's at the top of the American pyramid, that massively
unequal society, to the reality of what's happening right at the
bottom and people who aren't even kind of Christianized Africans,
but Ishmaelites. So, from the bottom, unlettered to the top.
So, I'm burden goes through these documents, which is found, it
seems, I think it's the Massachusetts Historical
Institute, he actually discovered them and they're reproduced here
for the first time. And then he uses this as his cue to talk about
the neglected story of these people who are at the bottom that
Ishmaelites that the rejected ones of American society, who not only
have the wrong race, but also have the wrong religion. Because there
is Muslims and therefore, mores, Saracens, the parodic metric
others Ishmaelites.
So that weaving together of a Muslim identity with an African
American identity is something that has been significant for the
kind of Malcolm X Muhammad Ali phenomenon later on, for Keith
Ellison as well. But what has not been really brought to the surface
recently is the fact that these African slaves, they often were
highly literate, and could produce books when given a chance, in
Arabic, on flip on doctrine, and they could quote the Quran. The
first of these actually is not the documents that Jeffrey is
disinterred, but a document that goes back to 1750 or so. And there
are others.
Very moving tiny little fragments scribbled down sometimes in
prison, sometimes on plantation sometimes in extremely difficult
circumstances, that hardly anybody in America could read. Jefferson
certainly didn't know what these things said, it took a long time
before anybody could start to
start to decode these documents.
And so this is work in progress. There's so much sort of Black
Lives Matter, preoccupation, generally legitimate about the
American caste system. But the aspect of the enslaved that shows
that actually, many of them were princes, many of them were highly
literate, many of them were deeply devout and religious and saintly
men and women who could, right that's not part of the narrative,
because generally, the kind of Black Lives Matter world comes out
of a entirely European enlightenment, Marxist idea, and
doesn't really like to acknowledge other tributaries and other
cultures. It's certainly not multicultural, although sometimes
will claim to be so the liberation that they propose is based
entirely on European intellectual genealogy. So this other story,
this other America, this truly
exiled and Israelite
principle, maybe there's other documents to be found, maybe
movies to be made, may be an awareness of the Islamic identity
and the literate Islamic identity of many of those early African
Muslim slaves in really desperate circumstances. They describe how
horrific it was plantation slavery really was no joke
will come to the surface and we'll start to see the natural
connection that exists between sort of America white Protestant
Christian power gun lobby Christianity, on the one hand,
that's not the only way of being a Christian in America, but in the
kind of Bush era, the Trump era, it seemed to be dominant. And on
the other hand, the rejected eldest son, Ishmael Hotjar, the
ones who are cast out for being half African, that really the only
religion in the world.
That is the that is founded by somebody who has some African
blood because of course, the Israelite story is precisely that.
So there's a lot more to be done on this. Jeffrey has given a wider
story about Arabic literature in early American Republican culture
and much of that is interesting as well but certainly a something
that indicates how very ancient apparently obscure texts can
really break surface and become sensations nowadays and and shed
light on the actual meaning of injustices and headline issues
today. I think this is definitely a very interesting text and it's
Oxford University Press.
In New York, they're generally not too expensive. 2020 Yeah, so it is
new, the reviews have still not quite digested it but yep.
An excellent piece of scholarship that also contributes directly to
the culture wars in modern America, strongly recommended. So
that brings us to the end of my five winter texts for reading as
we go through the
is dark and soggy month, but it is encouraging to see how much is
being published now, often by kind of piratical small publishers
these voices very often from the margins, but then that tends to be
where truth is the story of religions is all about God being
with the margins being with the dispossessed being with the
discriminated against with the Worcester Dauphine with the monka
theoretical Lobo home so hopefully as we internalize this, and gain
what is really the message of all of these texts, which is Allah,
Allah cliche in Shaheed, he is the witness of everything. The elites
may not see it, but God sees it and sees the real shape of
history. And it is the most that I've seen, who will ultimately be
the worry theme as the Quran insists they're the ones who
inherit in the next world if not always in this. barnacle. Alfie
Kohn salam o aleikum wa rahmatullah Cambridge Muslim
College, training the next generation of Muslim thinkers