Abdal Hakim Murad – Winter Reading List 4
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Smilla hamdu lillah wa salatu salam ala Rasulillah. Early he was
off be woman well.
So, once again, we have the opportunity to share thoughts
about some of the things that I've been reading recently. This is our
winter reading lists that perhaps will enable us to wile away those
long hours in these dark winter evenings. And it's our custom to
look at five books,
which hopefully will enable us not just to learn more about our
heritage in the world, but will enable us to inhabit the modern
reality in a more informed way. So my first pick this year, is a book
by the American Jewish author, Daniel Boyarin,
which he calls the no state solution, and his professor of
Jewish Studies, Talmudic culture
at the University of California, at Berkeley, and one of the most
distinguished Jewish intellectuals writing in the academic world,
nowadays. His book, carnal Israel is a really interesting and
Islamically actually quite suggestive account of the way in
which Jewish knowledge is always embodied in forms of engagement
with the body with water with ablution, circumcision and so
forth. But the book that I'm looking at, which is his latest
book, is about the current
unfolding catastrophe in the Middle East whose ripples are now
spreading far and wide, including creating thick, most recently, the
largest ever demonstration in Cape Town larger even then the anti
apartheid demonstrations 30 years ago, a global crisis focused on
Jerusalem ultimately. So the no stick solution, a Jewish
manifesto, by Daniel Boyer in
we always hear about the two state solution, which is where the
forlornly the dream of the Foreign Office and various dialog pundits.
But of course, it's clear that so much land has been taken on the
west bank now, and Gaza is kind of a pile of rubble, that the idea of
a Palestinian state is a kind of pipe dream, frankly, in the
current scenario, Netanyahu has said is against a two state
solution, one state solution maybe
I was talking once to a settler rabbi in Jerusalem, who was saying
there'll be a one state solution, everybody will be able to move and
live wherever they like in Greater Israel, but the vote will be only
for Jews. So it'll be a democratic state, but a Jewish state, and
Christians and Muslims will be allowed to live and enjoy
citizens, right, but they won't be able to vote. And that's how we'll
maintain our identity. Something like that may well be a
possibility. But Boiron is proposing this cheeky title, the
no state solution.
He begins with a kind of statement of his own agonizing, as somebody
who spent his life with the Jewish texts, Jewish communities, Jewish
tradition, a religious man, and who really loves his, his identity
is at Al Kitab identity, but is completely alienated by the
reality of Jewish nationalism in the Middle East. So he loves the
people and the idea of the people as a nation, but not the idea of
the people as a nation state. So let me just read to you in his
explanation right at the beginning, so you can see what
he's doing when he says no to a national energy or enterprise for
the Jewish people. After literally decades of obsessive thought about
the Jewish question. I seem to have gotten myself into an aporia,
a dead end of thinking with no way out. One way of describing this
and pass would be the two of my most ardent political commitment
to full justice for Palestinians, and to a vibrant creative Jewish
national culture seemed directly to contradict each other. It would
seem as if the only way to fulfill the latter dream is to support the
existence of the State of Israel. But clearly the existence of the
State of Israel next to the first dream impossible to fulfill. The
forms, moreover, that this Jewish national culture takes in the
Jewish state have always been problematical, inevitably. So I
would argue, given the premises of such a state, even when pursued
with the best will, this best will furthermore, turns more and more
sour almost by the day, it seems almost inevitably so the nation
state is well on the way to being a racist, fascist state. Given the
choice between justice and my culture, my nation, I have no
choice but to choose justice, but the loss would be insupportable.
So as explaining this trauma is actually shared by very many
Jewish people that on the one hand, they need to express their
fourth their fullness as a nation with a law, but on the other hand,
they can't rest easy in their homes when they know that their
homes have been
Taken from another ethnic group and they have to find ways of
shutting out that ethical paradox. So here he
in the book reflects on Jewish authenticity is something that
following the destruction of the temple has always existed and
flourished and as found its identity in diaspora, as
minorities, that is where Jewishness is most authentically
to be found. And that's the moral paradox of existing as a
triumphant state while sitting on the head of a captive population
is not Jewish, and cannot be allowed to continue. So it's quite
a good read. There's plenty of other books by anti Zionist Jews.
Of course, Shlomo sand is very interesting with this, the
invention of the Jewish people is a Tel Aviv historian, who's
written this very meticulous book, they've tried to pull it apart,
but the reviews have generally been favorable, even in the
Israeli press, where he says that the Palestinians, by and large, as
far as we can tell, are the descendants of the ancient
Israelites with lots of admixture from everywhere. But the Jews who
returned following the suppose at exile, the Romans expelled them,
he says, that never happened
from around the world, are largely the descendants of converts. So
the Eastern European Jews, the Arab Jews, local populations, that
then were religiously assimilated into the Jewish people. So that's
a very interesting read. And he's also very alienated by the whole
Zionist culture which diseases inevitably given differential
birth rates in Israel slanting towards more and more Zion
religious Ultra nationalist electorates. So he's written a
book called Why I am no longer a Jew, which raises interesting
questions about whether you can stop being Jewish, but that's also
interesting. But Muslims who see the current conflict as a kind of
zero, sum game between different religions need to be aware of this
very vibrant Jewish minority dissident opinion that is about
looking for an authentic Jewish identity and diaspora. So Boiron,
definitely on my list, kind of relatedly I've been reading a bit
about and this is my second pick this year,
about the catastrophe, the Holocaust, if you like of the
Native American populations, you might have noticed that dozens of
churches have been burnt down in America recently by Native
Americans, as an expression of their outrage at the way in which
using Christian ideology, quite often using biblical terminology.
The countries were were taken apart, they were ethnically
cleansed, destroyed by alcohol destroyed by venereal disease
destroyed by militant Christianity and a series of, of massacres. And
actually, of all the American races. The demography that's most
supportive of the Palestinians in the US at the moment is actually
the Native Americans. So this is one of the most kind of heart
rending books by Theodore Kroeber, Ishee into worlds the best known
book by and about Native American culture. And spirituality is of
course, Black Elk Speaks, which is also really moving. And anything
about the Native American Experience tends to be sobering
and depressing. But in the context of Muslims living in America, who
need to know what is indigenous, and the fitrah of their people who
are looking for instance of ways of decorating mosques, and
identifying with not the settler cultures, but with what is
indigenous, because that's what is normally used as important to
understand these people. So this is a book
about this guy issue. It's not even his name, because in his
tribe, you could you could ever pronounce your own name,
had to be named by somebody else. And he was the last survivor of
his tribe. There were hundreds, maybe South 1000s of them. Then
the white man came is from California, from the rocky tribe.
And they were massacred, murdered, poisoned with alcohol. And he was
the very last survivor, the last speaker of his language. So he
wasn't even able to tell the people who finally found him what
his name was, but he was kind of adopted by the California and
academic establishment.
When he was finally found having been alone, everybody else was
killed from his nation and brought into civilization. And
he learned English and he became a mine of information about what
California was like. And it's very interesting because the usual
stereotypes of the Red Indian, being shot down by John Wayne as
he kind of screams and hollers and scalps the white man does the
usual kind of things that the other will do. America's
Palestinians
is
what a kind of refined
To person who was, here's somebody who, before the age of 50 had been
living a kind of Paleolithic lifestyle. These are hunter
gatherers. They didn't even have villages, they wandered up in the
hills of California.
And then the age of 50 is brought in, they're given a suit. He sees
railway trains for the first time, he sees skyscrapers. And what
they're amazed by is his extreme courtesy. He's not the wild man,
kind of a Fred Flintstone Stone Age man. He's extremely polite. So
they take him to dinner parties and California. And he is
unfailingly courteous to the women, he always looks down when
he's speaking to them, always polite to them. The idea of the
savage even the noble savage is is not present. His quite bewildered
by the obsessiveness that the white man has for building high
for achieving things for subduing the landscape, he doesn't see the
point of that at all. When you see photographs of him you see the
kind of hieratic tribal dignity of his face, next to these smirking
anthropologists who have the kind of disturbed anxious Western
faiths, and the difference between them was quite, quite amazing. So
just to read a little bit, this is kind of the summary of who these
people were. It's quite a good spiritual as well as an
ethnographic account. Because these I call primordial peoples
were people who worship the Great Spirit, who saw the divine in the
divine signs in nature, who were very hygienic every morning at
dawn who get up to pray, but would wash before he prayed
a Fitri human being so
the California Indian was, in other words, a true provincial.
He was also an introvert, reserved, contemplative and
philosophical. He lived at ease with the supernatural and the
mystical, which were pervasive in all aspects of life. He felt no
need to differentiate mystical truths from directly evidential or
material truth, or the supernatural from the natural one
was as manifest as the other within his system of values and
perceptions and beliefs. The promoter, the booster, the
aggressor, the ego as the innovator, would have been looked
at a Scots. The ideal was the man of restraint, dignity, rectitude,
he of the middle way, this is often that Native American way of
saying what we would call a stood out on the stocking balance in
Norway, sometimes called the Red Road.
So
it's if you read it, it's uncannily similar to some of the
most foundational aspects of Quranic religion.
The idea of the elements the idea of the Indicative unity of nature,
the idea of restraint, the idea of, well, polygamy is the, but a
kind of strict separation of the genders in terms of function. And
in terms of presence, they didn't do free mixing very much, not not
no California, red people,
the idea of different times of day being suitable for different forms
of worship, the idea of a lunar calendar.
It is kind of North America's true Sharia, if you like and when I was
last year in
Arizona, I was interested to find that Muslim communities there have
a good relationship with the Apaches who are on the
reservation. And of course, the white man's tools, particularly
alcohol, are continuing to
oppress those people. A very great tragedy. One thing that is really
it's haven't been able to do, of course, is to poison the
Palestinians with alcohol because they didn't drink. It's part of
the problem. One reason why the reservations are Gaza sized,
rather than little American reservations, you just can't
poison them with, or at least the ties in with alcohol. So I found
this book very moving. It's not too technical, anthropological,
but it's a very good portrait of this guy who was treated in a
university as a kind of curiosity. All this is an exhibit people have
come to the University Museum enough to see the the red man. And
then after he died, even though he had certain requests for how he
would be buried, they didn't respect that, of course, and even
took his brain out and sent it to the Smithsonian, in Washington to
be analyzed along with millions of other Indian relics that they
have. Apparently, they lost his brain for a while. But finally,
when they started to change in their attitude to the red man, it
was sent back to a related tribe, and it was buried in a secret
place so the white man can never change his mind but a traumatic
story but also a reminder that the fitrah is universal and human
beings, when they live in a primordial way with nature,
respecting the seasons, the sun and the moon, the presence of the
Great Spirit, become people have to
Mendes, restraint and dignity and not savages. Pick number three
this year is this books. It's a very humble production love
secret, a journey to the Beyond no author
which is unusual in these egotistic times particularly not
academics are on the catwalk all the time seeing my stuff.
But not for this lady. And it's fairly clear that this is female,
spirituality.
It's that thing that we used to do a lot as an ummah, which is what
used to be called shutter heart or theater Pathik locutions, or
interest phrase that is to say, inspired words that try to capture
the perfume of a particular moment of lived experiential proximity to
the divine.
So the it's not poetry, but it's as you can see set out so there is
not very much on each page. And the anonymous author s
is using a spare but quite evocative language in order to try
and document a spiritual state which is clearly inspired by Rumi
and Sufi tradition.
I want to be taken into meditation drawn into the depths. I don't
want to sit with the straight back or force this relationship with
the beyond.
I want my eyes to close slowly, because they need to because I'm
carried. I want this to be a feminine experience of beauty or
soul. One day, I may be ready to go completely. But for now, please
just continue to be patient and kind.
I used to think this light was mine. No, I see. It was never
anything to be owned, and never something to keep. Simply a gift
you gave which I can offer back to you with the sincerity of my heart
and the purity of my intentions.
I found the more I have taken, the less I have.
I've been given time to take the responsibility of this life
seriously. What more could I ask for? I've been given space to
pray. I've been given a heart that cries What more could I ask for?
I've been given sunrise after sunrise. I've been given the black
of night. Really what more is there to ask for? Now I will take
each step forward. Honestly, respectfully, compassionately.
It is you who sees for my eyes and loves for my heart. Birds sing. I
hear them for you.
I come to you in need, wanting nothing and everything
simultaneously. My prayer is a prayer of rest and of silence.
Knowing I can never be enough except to the kindness of your
merci so many times you make it possible for me to breathe again.
And so many times I forget to in need and remember you in love.
So as you work through these simple expressions of what is
traditionally called Mona jet, like the Mona jet of Hydra,
Abdullah Ansari, and an author in Al Eskandari, who has the hicken
but also his famous one object is intimate conversations with the
divine. You get a sense cumulatively as you read through
these meditations and these little prayers of the particular
fragrance of the of the
writer's experience the Neff heart, the exhalation of the
Divine and in our age where it's known as become quite
externalized. People write too much about God and their
experiences, but they will have a million views on that absent
Sharia and politics. I think it's important to get back to this
particular voice and to remember that the essence of religion is
the personal experience of proximity to el Caribe, the near.
Quite a nice gift as well, I would say because it's the kind of basic
hardback but it's a nice looking thing. So it's a kind of present
for people and weddings, aid, presents and so forth. i i dish
them out whenever I can. So we move on to my fourth pick for this
year. Jack miles. God in the Quran
is not a Muslim is a Episcopalian American, who's written a book
called God, a biography which got the Pulitzer Prize a few years
ago, he writes in the New York Times, and it's kind of well known
voice on the interpretation of religion. And he's written a book
about the god of the Quran, coming to it as a ton of open minded,
open hearted, curious American of the best sort, worried about the
growth of sort of Trumpian Islamophobia in his country.
and looking at the Koran and its portrayal of the Divine, with a
fresh objective and it's not an academic book.
It's not packed with with footnotes, but he's done a lot of
reading, reading in Islamic literature as well as with Quran.
And his conclusions are very interesting.
The American Evangelical kind of
warmongering stereotype is of Islam as this religion of the
sword, not a religion of peace and Christianity as being the religion
of Jesus meek and mild on the other cheek and therefore better.
And his comparison actually, even though he's not quite at ease with
it, and isn't quite sure where to go with it theologically. He
leaves it really as a question is that it's kind of the other way
around, which is not what he expected when he began his quite
meticulous study of the Quran. So he begins by talking about how the
Bible ends with the violence of Jesus at the end of time. And the
violence of the language, which is very important for American
evangelicals was used a lot in the war on Iraq, when it was thought
that Iraq was Babylon, Babylon will be overthrown. God would give
victory to Israel, the mosque would be destroyed, the temple
would be rebuilt, there'll be lots of trumpets sounding and Christ
would come again, which is a few many millions of evangelicals in
America and in kind of prosperity, gospel environments in places like
Africa, believe it, which is
Armageddon type, language, but this idea of the violent Christ,
with his eyes of fire and feet of brass, who comes to hurl the
unbelievers into eternal fire, I saw an angel standing in the sun,
and he shouted aloud to all the birds sort of flying high overhead
in the sky. Come here gather together at God's great feast, you
will eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of great generals and
heroes, the flesh of horses and their riders and of all kinds of
people's citizens and slaves, small and great alike. And it's
important for Muslims who are trying to understand American
violence that's often supported by the, the evangelical right. And
American support for Israeli maximalism that they're reading
all of the Bible, and particularly this consternation of the Bible,
as many understand it, and it's foretelling of the end times and
the violence that Christ will be unleashing. So he begins by
talking about, well, this binary, peaceful Jesus, and the war
mongering idea of the Sierra, maybe it's not like that. So he
then goes and looks at the specific stories, particularly of
the prophets as recounted in the Bible, and goes through them one
by one, job and Jacob and casting out of Ishmael, the fate of Hadar,
Joseph all of those stories, Moses, and particularly looks at
what Bible specialists called the text of terror, which is the
extreme acts of ethnic cleansing and aberrant violence that are
endlessly attributed to the prophets. And that adherence in
the Hebrew Bible, the head of the sacred extermination.
God says to Moses, Write this down in a book this is the biblical
book of Exodus, to commemorate it and repeat it over to Joshua for I
shall blot out all memory of a Malik under heaven. Now go and
crush a Malik put him under the curse of destruction with all that
he possesses. Do not spare him but kill man and woman, even suckling
oxen, sheep, camel and donkey. So if God in the Bible is ordering
his prophet to massacre, not just competence, but also the women and
the babies and even their animals, this ban of extermination is kind
of regarded as
absolute. Now, can you imagine if a verse like that would appeared
in the Quran, wipe out their babies and kill their animals? Fox
News would be reciting it several times a day. It'd be their
favorite Quranic quote, but it's kind of biblical. And this is the
kind of text that Netanyahu has been citing in order to give
religious explanation and context for his campaign in in Gaza. So
what he does as he moves to the Bible and looks at the Quranic
stories, is to conclude that all of these horrifying things, modern
Christians find them kind of horrifying. A lot of Jews find
them kind of not Jewish. They're taken out from the
you don't get these massacres the psalm that's that says, Blessed is
he who takes the babies of the of the Babylonians and
Dasha is out their brains on a rock that doesn't appear in the
Quran.
The story of
the dubious stories about the prophets, so lots sleeping with
his daughters and Solomon hankering after foreign deities,
and
all of the very dubious tales in the story of Abraham, the binding
of his son in the bible. what he sees as a rather nasty touch is
that Abraham doesn't tell his son that he's about to kill him. It's
going to be a kind of paternal surprise in the Quran. Of course,
the first thing that Abraham does Alayhis Salam, when he sees the
dream is to go to his son and to say this has happened. Funds
automatic, what do you think? He consults with him, so he knows
exactly, and the son consents. So miles his view is that the Quran
consistently emphasizes these chaotic stories about the biblical
god and actually ends up
giving us a greatly improved view of Jewish history that it becomes
ethical. It's the opposite of anti semitic because it's taking out
and reforming and saying, These stories are not true. Your
Prophets your story is actually really ethical and really
beautiful. So he ends there was some interesting
reflections what, what, what to do with it. So he says things like
this is quite smart. I recognize a brilliant symmetry in how Islam
combined Judaism's criticism of Christianity with Christianity's
criticism of Judaism.
Christianity insisted against Jewish tradition, on
universalizing God's covenant with Israel to include in potential all
of mankind, dissolving Israel's privileged in the process. Islam
accepted this critique, the Muslim ummah, is as universal in
aspiration as the Christian church. Judaism insisted against
emergent Christianity, that is, God alone was divine, there could
be no two powers in heaven. Jesus was not the Lord. Only the Lord
hath Oddish Barrow, who was the Lord, Islam accepted this
critique. There is no room in its theology for a divine Christ, or
any other power associated with the one and only God.
For image by a kind of radical simplification, Islam took was
most precious and most defining it at the same time, eliminated from
each what was most problematic. From Christianity, it stripped off
the doctrine that had produced by the time of Mohammed, endless
controversy and multiplying sectarian division. Well, from
Judaism, or from the Jews as a people, it stripped off the sense
of privilege as the one and only chosen people of the one and only
God.
So by the time he's got through all of the stories, and done this
work is kind of really transformed, that the Quran
represents exactly the solution to these ethical difficulties and
these theological problematics and kind of gets the best as he sees
it of the two religions and creates a new religion with it,
that emphasizes the whole story of monotheism. So I can recommend
this God in the Quran by Jack miles, wholeheartedly, I think, as
a good refutation of Bible bashes, who say that Islam is violent.
They need to get to have their noses rubbed on the pages of the
Old and the New Testament and asked to read this, to see what
the comparison really looks like when a kind of open hearted
American Christian is prepared honestly to do to do the work. So
my final book this year, political again, it's been a very political,
disruptive. 12 months. John Gray who is professor just retired, I
think, London School of Economics is a philosopher, the new
leviathans, thoughts after liberalism.
Everybody left and right, spectator readers, New Statesman
readers.
Take a deep breath. What do you mean, after liberalism? Aren't
things getting more liberal, more work more tolerant, more
inclusive, more diverse? What does he mean after liberalism? Are we
sliding back into Nazism or some kind of divine right of kings
world? Well, he's looking first of all, at the philosopher Hobbes,
Thomas Hobbes, author of The Leviathan, the perpetual whipping
boy for many historians, and philosophers and political
scientists, but the opposite view is that in the state of nature,
man is a wolf to man, and that we need the state the Leviathan in
order to restrain things from collapsing. It's the Islamic idea
of the wears out, there must be a religio, cultural, political
entity that stop for the weak being devoured by by the strong
I'm Hobbes quite an Islamic thinker in many ways. So gray is
thinking it's not not a Christian is not religious. Following the
decline of the Christian order or the theistic order, generally in
the West, which underpins values, we have this slide towards massive
inequality, towards
more authoritarianism, in many parts of the world, that the 1989
to 1991 euphoria, the kind of Fukuyama, end of history, bliss,
at last history has reached its consummation, and it's over,
because the Soviet Empire has fallen. And the future is with
democracy, human rights, liberal capitalism, etc. The final
solution, Darwin has been proved right in the Human Sphere, has
been disproved by the fact that history is certainly back with us.
We have a major war in Europe, once again, we have a multipolar
world in a way that we haven't seen really since the 19th
century, America diminishing, defeated even in Afghanistan.
We have the rise of China, we have the rise of India, we have the
rise of Russia, which is generally fielding sanctions, pretty well
look set to when its current war with NATO, which is essentially
what it is NATO doing everything in Ukraine except pulling the
trigger.
And in this very unstable world, liberalism is very much on the
defensive, even in the western world itself. So he points to the
new authoritarianism, particularly in campuses and those who work in
a Western University know how strict the speech codes are, what
you can say about Israel, what you can say about sexualities, what
you can say about the list of issues on which there is quite
rigorous censorship continues to grow in the name of a certain type
of work, orthodoxy, so he says this, for instance, in schools and
universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling
progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve
approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on
race, gender, and Empire, find their careers terminated in their
public lives erased. This repression is not the work of
governments, the ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by
civil society. Libraries, galleries and museums exclude
viewpoints that are condemned as reactionary powers of censorship
or exercised by big high tech corporations. illiberal
institutions are policing society and themselves.
A global pandemic, accelerating climate change, and war in Europe
have hastened these transformations. But they began as
many historical reversals do, with the apparent triumph of an
opposite trend greeted in the West as an augury that liberal values
was spreading worldwide, the Soviet collapse was the beginning
of the end for liberalism, as it had previously been understood.
So he doesn't really talk much about the Islamic dimensions of
this, but it is important, given the kind of preachy nature, so
much Western discourse about other cultures and about Muslims and
Muslim migrants and why wouldn't they be like us and World Bank
loans to countries in the Muslim world that are conditional on
progress on women's rights and alternative sexualities and the
fuss that they made during Qatar, that the Qatar is we're not going
to change their laws and their values and their structure of the
family, in order to please Western work. Orthodoxy is the idea of the
West as
the exporter of a kind of coercive liberalism, which is actually the
opposite of traditional liberalism as, as understood so the regrowth
of empire, the regrowth of a multipolar world, and the collapse
of the dream that the West has triumphed, something that Muslims
as they're searching for their own place in an increasingly
multipolar world need to reflect on that we're in a very strange
transitional time in which Western triumphalism really, as great
amply documents no longer works with the collapse of the religious
basis for Western civilization. New orthodoxies are being imposed.
And the future direction of the West is unclear demography as
well. Of course, the birth rate across the industrialized world is
collapsing. And there's no sign that that will that will be
reversed. So immigration,
demographic transformations.
All of this is going to make the future look
unstable, certainly. But it's not the West as the end of the summit
and the conservation of history, the way that Fukuyama and
Huntington and many other sort of evangelicals, for Westerners were
thinking 30 years ago, so quite a useful reflection coming from us.
secular perspective on the sort of spangled Aryan thesis of the
decline of the West that now unquestionably seems to be
happening. So that's the end of my reflections on what I have been
reading in recent times. And I think all of these things from
their very disparate perspectives are going to be useful to us. And
insha Allah will always remember that empires come and go
ideologies come and go peoples come and go Zion isms come and go
nationalisms come and go, Islam remains.
General Huck, was I have called Battle in about Allah kanessa
hookah falsehood is just a kind of froth and it passes away. And what
is the only thing that certain about the future is that Islam
will continue to be there, and its basic forms will continue to be
maintained. 100 Allah, Allahu hollyburn Allah Emery inshallah
we'll be enjoying the rest of the winter and May Allah bring us
safely to Ramadan, as wiser humbler, more reflective, more
optimistic Muslims in sha Allah, Baraka long fecal coliform income,
was salam aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato.