Abdal Hakim Murad – Winter Reading List

AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the beautiful Italian mountain landscape and small village of seven thousand people in Bosnia. They talk about the beautiful picture of the Dolomites and the Italian logo, and how the path is manageable and accredited. The path is a pleasant experience, but the dark months and springtime are pleasant experiences. The speakers also mention the beautiful Italian language and how people are happy.
AI: Summary ©
Bismillah, alhamdulillah, wa salatu wa salamu ala rasulillah,
wa ahlihi wa sahbihi wa man wa ala.
So it's that grey subterranean time of the
year again when we curl up with a
good book and wish for the springtime.
We've been doing this at CMC for some
years now and it seems to have a
certain traction.
It's also an opportunity for me, I suppose,
to think aloud about some of the things
that I've been reading and re-reading recently.
And there has been quite a lot of
interesting publication, the amounts of material and the
quality of material coming out about this film
in the English language now.
It's accelerating rapidly, which as English becomes, I
suppose, the principal language of the ummah, that
has to be a good thing.
So, I've got, as usual, five books that
I'd like to ponder.
The first of them is by somebody who's
quite a veteran, actually, of the Islamic authorial
and publishing scene in the UK now, Ruqayya
Waris Maqsood.
And this is one of her books about
Christianity.
She has one on the Pharisees and one
or two others.
And she's probably best known, I suppose, for
her book, The Muslim Marriage Guide, which is
a staple of that sort of side of
Muslim publishing, and actually quite good, I would
recommend The Muslim Marriage Guide.
But this one is The Mysteries of Jesus,
El Greco undercover, I think, A Muslim Study
of the Origins and Doctrines of the Christian
Church.
So, the title indicates that this is not
just a kind of Muslim biography of Sayyiduna
Isa, Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, but
is something a bit more ambitious.
She is surveying the origins and doctrines of
the Christian church.
So, as she goes through the gospel material
and the formation of the teachings of the
early church, she is reflecting on how things
came to be the way they finally fell
out, and also on what modern historians and
archaeologists make of the real Jesus, the quest
for the historical Jesus, might have to say
to augment or perhaps challenge the traditional Muslim
understanding of who the Messiah, Isa ibn Maryam,
peace be upon him, actually was.
And she's actually, unlike some Muslim authors, quite
well qualified to do this.
She was a trained Christian theologian, she knows
New Testament Greek, she understands the behind-the
-scenes aspect of the polemic, and before she
became Muslim she had, I think, six or
seven books about Christianity, written as a Christian
theologian and New Testament expert.
Does God Have a Body was one of
the popular ones, Jesus of Nazareth, The Way
of the Cross, still worth reading, an interesting
kind of text, and some other books published
in the mainstream and by SEM, Student Christian
Movement Press.
She was out there in the large world
of Christian publishing, and then Her Road to
Damascus took place, and she's become a very
widespread, widely read authoress of maybe 20 books,
not just an aspect of Islam, but she
has a guide, a tourist guide to Petra
and things like that.
She has a wide variety of interests and
she's still, alhamdulillah, doing well.
So this book may well be the best
place to look for a well-informed, a
serious, not conspiracy theory-laden or polemical account
of how we understand the origins of a
great world religion, and how the Islamic understanding
of what it was meant to be seems
to coalesce in many respects with the findings
of the latest academic scholarship, which she deploys
quite well.
So inevitably in a book like this there's
an element of autobiography, it's a theological insider's
account rather than just a dry-as-dust
account of the formation of the New Testament
canon, that kind of thing.
There's apparently a new book published about the
New Testament every ten minutes now, it's an
enormous world, nobody really knows what's going on
in it, but this is a serious Muslim
attempt to get into that space.
So just to give you a sense of
what she does, just so that we can
see the kind of fairly accessible prose that
she favours, for centuries Christians have characterized Muslims
as the enemy, the arch-rivals, the infidels,
the savage deniers of their God, and not
as deeply developed believers in the same God,
but also respect and accept the message of
Jesus.
Suddenly with the advent of fair-minded literature
about Islam in the West, and the increasing
number of translations of classical Muslim works, it
has become possible and permissible to study Islam
properly.
And it follows, as night follows day, that
as soon as devout lovers of God who
are baffled and bored with Trinitarianism make a
real study of Islam, many are led to
the same conclusions as myself.
It is the theology of the churches that
is wrong, not the love of Jesus or
the Christian way of life.
God has not gone away, and Jesus, the
moral guide, is still an inspirational presence.
It is just that for centuries church people
have never dared to admit that the Trinitarian
choice made by the fourth century church might
have been wrong, and that Jesus might not
have been the great blood sacrifice of propitiation,
but exactly what the Muslims have patiently said
he was, a sublime messenger of God, one
of a series of chosen prophets of whom
Muhammad was the seal and the last.
So this is an indication of really her
own sense of liberation from the difficult and
to many rather concerning aspects of classical Christian
teaching.
She finds this a kind of discovery of
Jesus rather than a turning away, and this
is the experience of very many people who
have come to Islam from a Christian direction.
The first step to this liberating knowledge is
the realization that the world extends far beyond
the confines of a chosen or an elite
church, and that God's love is widely bestowed.
It has no need to be limited, as
Islam believes there have been 124,000 perfect
prophets.
Just as today's principal versions of Christianity are
not the real truth, so too Christ was
not the only way to God.
God's plan was to send many, as befits
his generosity and love, and not just to
rely on the action in history of one
only begotten son.
And this is a characteristic of her approach,
that the discovery of the real historical Jesus,
the Jewish rabbi of first century Galilee, is
actually a rediscovery of the principle of the
love of God, the Mahabba, and the Rahma,
the all-encompassing loving compassion of God, who
would not blame human beings and send them
to * because of the original sin of
an ancestor, and who doesn't need a blood
sacrifice in order to forgive human beings, but
forgives them, as in the parable of the
prodigal son, which she says some interesting things
about, just forgives us just out of love.
In other words, it's not about justice and
a kind of cosmic law and a calculation,
it's about God's forgiveness and his love for
his creatures.
So she describes this as a liberation.
And she goes on in the same vein,
this is the last words of the book,
before she goes into a kind of put
-down of various Muslim forms of optimism about
the so-called gospel of Barnabas.
She doesn't believe in that story.
Essential to the concept of pure monotheism is
the insistence on the consistent stream of divine
revelation, the Qur'an being its most recent
manifestation.
Looking for the true meaning behind the words,
it is an easy matter for monotheist followers
of Jesus and his way to adjust their
minds so that the formula of witness that
brings entry to the kingdom of heaven is
no longer, in the name of God the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but
in the name of God the One, the
Compassionate and Merciful.
For that compassion and mercy promise a forgiveness
that is direct and total and overwhelming.
End of her book.
So it's interesting that she very much stresses,
as well as the kind of rigorous forensic
analysis of the synoptic Gospels and everything that
goes with that, the idea that Jesus would
not have believed in the church councils and
their conclusions.
But there's this very strong emphasis on the
move to Islam as being an ethicising of
the story, an opening up of real access
to and empathy with the fully human Jesus
of Nazareth, uncomplicated by infinity and divinity.
But also the overarching principle of love, mahabba,
which of course is overwhelmingly present in our
literature and in our poetry, and the Holy
Prophet is Habibullah, God's beloved.
It's the characteristic devotional method of approaching the
divine in the religion of Islam.
So it's interesting that it's that principle, that
emotive, effective one, that she's chosen to make
the kind of master signifier of this whole
story.
And it's really not polemical, it's not dismissive,
she doesn't call Christians idolaters, it's very respectful,
but as you would expect, a firm and
well-referenced account with thousands of pages of
footnotes, everything from the Babylonian Talmud to the
latest studies of the book of Jeremiah.
It's a commendable work.
So that's my first pick.
Number two, which kind of follows from it,
although these are not really in a particular
order, is by the well-known Jewish writer
and journalist Anthony Lerman, The Making and Unmaking
of a Zionist, a Personal and Political Journey.
So here's another serious book that's also kind
of autobiographical, this is actually more an autobiography,
by a British Jew who has a distinguished
career in journalism, particularly in Jewish journals, founded
a number of Jewish and Zionist organizations and
charities in this country and internationally, who documents
his, as it were, rather harrowing falling out
of love with the Zionist project, as he
understands it.
In 1970, he went from North London somewhere
to Zion with a build the land kind
of movement, that was the day of Zionist
socialism, reclaiming the land, and he documents how
the kind of indigenous population, the Palestinians, were
kind of blurred or not really spoken about
very much, but insofar as they were present,
they were regarded as a kind of simple
peasant people without a real national sensibility, whose
the responsibility for whose upliftment in civilization was
actually the responsibility of the Jewish settlers, who
therefore took themselves to be a kind of
benign presence in the land.
Of course, the tension of that taking the
land but uplifting its inhabitants is something that
grated in his soul, and he's quite detailed
in explaining how he, over a number of
years, it wasn't a sudden road to Damascus,
road from Damascus experience, but the ethical principles
of his Judaism, as he understands them, seemed
increasingly painfully and paradoxically to clash with the
reality of what was being done to the
land, and Israel's seemingly inexorable slide to ever
more vehement forms of right-wing nativism and
nationalism, until eventually he jumped ship and he
documents the quite fierce response to his post
-Zionism that he met with from some established
leaders and journalists in his community.
I think he suffered quite a bit, but
it's a very honest kind of book and
he doesn't pull any punches.
One of the things, for those who aren't
aware, they look at the headlines, they may
not be aware that here is actually a
very rich, moral, monotheistic, somewhat agonistic tradition born
of centuries of misfortune.
There was a lot that's very profound and
tender and humane there, and some Muslims don't
quite get that these days.
It's actually a very good remedy for that,
because he is very good at quoting the
Jewish sources that remind us that this is
all supposed to be an ethical exercise, rather
than just a kind of land grab.
So, nice quote from Abraham Heschel here, Judaism
is not a religion of space and does
not worship the soil.
So too, the state of Israel is not
the climax of Jewish history, but a test
of the integrity of the Jewish people and
the competence of Judaism.
That's exactly the kind of moral clarion call
that eventually knocked over the walls of his
Zionist citadel and made him walk away, rather
sorrowfully, to become a firm, though never furious,
critic of the whole project of reclaiming the
land and necessarily marginalising and driving out the
people who were there before.
He doesn't engage very much with the Palestinian
communities, it's written very much from the point
of view of internal agonies and polemics within
the Jewish community, about the extent to which
it's necessary to create this place where, supposedly,
Jewish people will be safer than they are
anywhere else, rather than exposed in new ways,
in a kind of zero-sum game against
the interests and the rights of the pre
-existing nation and population.
So, I found it, and he's obviously arguing
with himself, that gives the book quite a
bit of energy, but I would recommend it
to Muslims who need to be more aware
of the internal arguments, polemics, agonising dichotomies happening
within Jewish communities in this country, when they
consider what's now happening, perhaps the most egregious
example of this impossible tension, the zero-sum
game, between, on the one hand, the desire
to create this highly fortified, nationally specific bunker,
against the rights of millions of people who
are, by the terms of the exercise, not
really what the exercise is for, who are
unchosen.
So, yeah, I think I'd recommend it, certainly
for Muslim readers who need to know more
about these internal Jewish arguments.
I found it quite, quite moving, and a
useful document regarding the collapse of what used
to be socialist Zionism, which was a major
thing, the kibbutz movement was basically an idealistic,
left-of-centre movement, and he sees that
for demographic and cultural reasons, the march to
the far right in Israel has become so
overwhelming that it's not really going to be
possible to have a socialist Zionism any longer,
if socialism is inclusive and egalitarian and respectful
of difference.
He sees that that is now something that
was once quite idealistic, that he bought into
in his youth, but is now a dead
letter.
So, like just about every other book about
Israel-Palestine at the moment, a rather sombre
read, he doesn't really offer any kind of
utopian future for us.
Okay, so my third pick, rather different, Mikhail
Abdullatif, The Tao of War.
I like this, partly because it's kind of
idiosyncratic and doesn't fit into any familiar category,
unless there's a whole genre of martial arts
spirituality that I've never become acquainted with, but
he is a Muslim practitioner of various East
Asian martial arts, who is very concerned with
the possibility that the endlessly growing martial arts
industry, the Wushu traditions, Kung Fu, Karate and
so forth, which have become what just about
every teenager does for a bit nowadays, can
actually be a useful way, even though they
seem to be very bodily and quite aggressive,
can actually be a way for Westerners to
return in an unexpected way to the sacred,
because all of these traditional martial arts came
from great sacred civilizations that knew the symbolism
and knew the meaning, and critically had an
important ethos of combat behind them.
These are ethical as well as simply militaristic
traditions, something that in the West has been
lacking, perhaps because the Gospels are pacifist, but
the Christian states had to have armies, so
it wasn't really clear how they could scripturally
resource their Knights Templars and so forth, it
all became a bit paradoxical.
But in the Far Eastern traditions, and also
in certain Islamic traditions, the Janissaries of course
were like a religious order, the Mamluks of
Egypt in their heyday were kind of on
a spiritual path, the path of Futuwa, chivalry,
but also involved highly subtle symbolisms of what
the armour meant, inscriptions on the sword, how
you put on the armour before going into
battle, certain prayers that you said, it was
part of the view of a sacred civilization.
So what he's saying is one way of
yanking the profane and unhappy West back to
the sacred is through these martial arts, unexpectedly,
I found that quite an intriguing idea.
So this is how he starts, this book
is a training manual for the students of
applied philosophy.
It is an attempt to distill an historically
informed understanding of the martial arts into an
exploration of the philosophies which underpin them, and
then to utilize said understandings to inform us
of actionable advice and principles of being.
Navigating the world is a complex process, life
is thrown at you all at once, and
while there are many traditions available to act
as guides or collections of advice, few sets
of philosophies and practices prove as useful as
those found in the arts of war.
Combat is among the most real of human
endeavors, there is no room in it for
falsehood or posturing, the brute nature of survival
is brought to the surface and the most
serious realizations are made.
So this is the idea of the way
of the warrior being about attentiveness, self-awareness,
body-mind integration, an awareness of the uniqueness
and irreplaceability of the moment, a preternatural awareness
of time, which you'll get in some of
the great Kurosawa movies, the Seven Samurai is
basically a kind of spiritual parallel that the
villagers have to be defended by the ethos
of the Bushido, of the warrior's code, but
the great warriors are almost like monks, the
great scene in which one of the great
samurai goes out at night and kills some
of the bandits in order to take a
musket, and as soon as he gets back
after this really hair-raising exploit in the
middle of the night, he lies down and
falls asleep, and that's when we know that
he's fully in command of his impulses, his
emotions, he's in that state of detachment, which
is the necessary state of the true warrior.
So as he goes through this, he develops
a certain terminology.
The book is not just for Muslims, but
is I think an attempt to reach out
more generally to people who are thoughtfully practicing
martial arts in the East Asian traditions, in
order to remind them of certain principles that
sometimes seem specifically Confucian or Taoist, but actually
universal and have very obvious Islamic equivalents.
So instead of saying the religion of war,
he explains at the beginning his terminology.
He prefers the word Tao as being more
accessible to Westerners, and also is incorporating this
idea of a way.
Tao means a way, so it's a path
of spiritual transformation, it's Saluk, it's Futawa, and
he uses the language of the yin and
the yang quite frequently, where we would probably
say Jalal and Jamal, or perhaps Tashbih and
Tenzih.
He explains the Islamic equivalents to these, but
his particular choice of lexical field is in
the East Asian traditions, probably again because he's
trying to overcome certain reflexes that the Western
mind experiences when seeing Arabic terminology, but the
effect is I think a thoroughly Islamic way.
So sometimes he lapses into a kind of
verse or aphorisms in the kind of Dao
De Jing way.
So in some of the Binaries where he
talks about the yin and the yang, he
uses for instance distance and nearness.
So here's an example.
It's quite poetic.
Distance is the way of the yang.
The striker needs distance to generate power and
does not get too close.
The father is understood as far from the
children, as is Al-Aziz transcendent from mankind.
The soft punch requires some distance.
The hard punch needs more distance yet.
The kick requires more distance yet.
The distance measures the power.
The power measures the lethality of the warrior
of yang.
The potency of a man is his distance,
like the distance of the striker.
He must remain aloof and unaffected, able to
detach from mercy in the name of justice.
So that's Jalal, Tenzih, masculinity, yang.
Nearness is the way of the yin.
So the blow, he says, and this is
traditional Chinese Wushu wisdom, the blow is the
masculine, it's the yang, and you need to
be detached and far from the blow to
have the sufficient inertia.
Whereas grappling, which is kind of wrestling, judo
-type maneuvers, is feminine because it's enveloping and
nearness is required.
So nearness is the way of the yin.
The grappler needs nearness to apply leverage and
does not get too far.
The mother is understood as close to the
children, as a Rahman is close to mankind.
The first touch needs nearness.
The hold needs more nearness yet.
The squeeze of death needs more nearness yet.
The nearness measures the leverage.
The leverage measures the lethality of the warrior
of yin.
The potency of a woman is her nearness,
like the nearness of the grappler.
She must stay engaged and empathetic, able to
understand others in the name of compassion.
So immediately we see the book is actually,
it has a significant interest in the principle,
fundamental human binary of the masculine and the
feminine, which in the Chinese tradition kind of
determines the warp and woof of the universe.
Which also, if you look at Sachiko Murata's
book, The Tao of Islam, is closely paralleled
by Jalal, Jamal, masculine, feminine equivalences in the
sacred symbolism of Islam.
So I'd like to read more of that
because it's a very good way of explaining
the idea of the genders as complementary and
equal in difference, distance, closeness, the blow, the
embrace.
Okay, so towards the end, he moves into
what we would say the inward ethic of
war.
So the angry man, the vengeful man, is
the one who's going to fail spiritually as
well as on the field of battle.
That's like some of the modern Muslims, so
-called jihadis, who are just full of anger
and revenge and resentment and they want to
humiliate the enemy.
That's the opposite of this Tao of war.
So listen to this.
The sage Abu Madian says, when you see
a deficiency in another, know you can perceive
it only because it's already in you.
I wish we'd remember that.
So do not look down on others but
have humility and be grateful the ground of
all being manifests it in others and not
in yourself.
The martial artist protects the inward state by
avoiding fools.
When apes enter the library, they seldom learn
to read and often make the library a
zoo.
Why argue with a fool who has practiced
in being foolish?
Are you too practiced in dealing with fools?
If so, you wasted your time.
If not, do not waste your time further.
So there are these very nice kind of
moralizing but not pedantic aphorisms.
It's not so easy if you're in the
West to access the Islamic traditions of Chinese
martial arts, but many of the great practitioners
of Wushu were always Muslim masters.
Yang Ping, for instance, who died 50 years
ago now, was one of the great Wushu
practitioners and he had thousands of students and
he was famous for when he was exercising,
which he did by moving certain rocks, he
would always recite the Quran.
It's integrated into the Islamic modality of Chinese
spirituality and there are specifically Islamic forms of
Chinese martial arts which you won't get at
your local community center on a Saturday evening,
I'm afraid.
They've not really been imported into the West
and of course the Cultural Revolution in China
has put paid to a lot of those
the places where those things were taught.
But if you can, find a spiritual master
who is also a practitioner of Wushu martial
arts, so that as well as doing the
exercises and learning the throws and the grapplings,
you're actually grappling with yourself at the same
time, which is part of the integrated spirituality,
the way of war and the way of
Futuwa, which is axiomatic in the prophetic way.
So I enjoyed that, but we must move
on.
Pick number four for this year.
This is Ron Reeves and Yahya Burt's nice
edition of the collected poems of Abdullah Quilliam.
Versatile man, we think of him as the
mosque builder, the one who established the first
proper Muslim mosque in the UK and Liverpool,
whenever it was, 1889, Brown Terrace, and the
one who is really a kind of activist,
a publisher of the first Muslim newspapers in
England, the Islamic world and the present, and
very active in Dawa in his community, which
numbered several hundred by the time it abruptly
really had to shut up in 1908.
Also his closeness to the Ottoman ruler, Sultan
Abdul Hamid, he was really a polymath.
If you go through the pages of his
newspaper, you'll find that in true Victorian style,
there's poetry all over the place.
Not much poetry in modern newspapers, which is
interesting.
They still have poetry in newspapers in the
Arab world, I've noticed almost every day, but
not really in the Times or the Telegraph.
It's just not mainstream culture any longer.
But he's Victorian as well as Islamic.
And one of the things that I found
interesting about Quilliam's poetry, and this does really
seem to be a very good attempt really
to put all of his poetry together, even
though it was scattered to the winds, particularly
after his disappearance in 1908, and his reinvention
as the mysterious Dr. Marcel-Henri Léon, in
kind of disguise, returned to England, became an
expert on influenza, and very idiosyncratic personality in
many ways, although it's certainly the same soul
at work.
But the way in which he puts together
the sometimes a little bit moralizing and insistent
rhyming of the kind of Browning or Tennyson
generation, and subsequently, it's definitely not the kind
of Swinburne cynicism.
It's very kind of almost empire building, and
it's sort of stiff upper lip.
So it's quite Victorian in its kind of
rather moralizing lessons about hard work, and pulling
your socks up, and not being downcast by
the tribulations of life.
And that doesn't really coincide particularly well with
modern rather more chill sensibilities, I suppose.
Sometimes it falls rather in a rather difficult
way on contemporary ears.
But a number of things come out.
One is that this founder of British Islam,
Sheikh al-Islam Abdullah Quilliam Bay, the representative
of the Khalifa in Britain, in a rather
diminutive British Ummah in the 1890s and beginning
of the 20th century, was really quite sort
of patriotic, and very involved with the conservation
of the antiquities, and the heritage, and the
landscape, and the flora and fauna of the
British Isles.
It's a very kind of nature loving poetry
in the Victorian sense, but he's clearly sees
it as fitting in with his Islamic loyalty.
The song for Deir Morna, that's the Isle
of Man, a jubilant song, huzzah for the
little Manx nation.
So cheer loud and long, full hearted and
strong, ye Manx men of every station.
For land of the Glen, of Cushag and
Wren, of mountain of Vale, and of Heather.
Health to the women, good luck to the
men, of the Island of Morna forever.
So this is a kind of pushback against
the kind of right-wing, pharaogist narrative that
Muslimness and Britishness can't really go together.
He's absolutely kind of patriotic, and even patriotic
for the Isle of Man, which is one
of the more kind of diminutive and out
of the way oddball corners of the British
Isles.
He's very located in his local loyalties and
patriotism, but he's also the head of the
Muslim religion in England.
It's interesting that the story of the British
Ummah should have got underway in that way.
Another thing I liked is that one of
the many enigmas has been the publication, apparently
through his auspices, quite late in his life,
of the poetry of a certain Sheikh Abdullah
Harun, or Sheikh Harun Abdullah, who he presents,
and this is really the only volume of
poetry that Quilliam brought about, whose publication Quilliam
brought about in his lifetime, presents itself as
the poetry of a Turkish Sufi Sheikh, of
the Mevlevi tradition, lamenting a woman called Habiba,
who seems to be a kind of euphemism
for the lost divine beloved in places.
But it's pretty clear in the introduction to
this volume, I think it's persuasive, that actually
there never was a Sheikh Harun Abdullah, and
that it was Quilliam all along, just using
a mahlas, or a kind of pen name,
but writing this time in a much more
recognisably Ottoman vein.
He'd spent more time in the Ottoman Empire,
his Turkish had become better.
So here we find not the kind of
Omar Khayyam playing with Victorian romantic sensibilities and
distorting the Sufi message of love in the
process, turning everything into a kind of hedonistic
pre-Raphaelite day by the river.
Instead this feels a little bit like what
an actual Mevlevi Sheikh might have used the
English language for.
So here's just an example.
This poem begins with the Qur'anic passage
in Surah Yusuf, God invites you to the
dwelling of peace.
Grant thou, O Allah, this my prayer upon
the earth, that everywhere mankind may with each
other bear and lead a peaceful life.
That they may truly Islam know, more like
thy prophet daily grow, and live together here
below in love and not in strife.
That's kind of moralising and a bit like
a hymn.
Then elsewhere, even though Quilliam wasn't really a
profound thinker or a metaphysician, you get stuff
like this.
Come, man, and contemplate upon thyself and one
who was and ever is, whose day will
ne'er be done.
Steadfast for truth seek thou, and seek till
it appear, and know ye that the truth
no rival hath nor peer.
Seek thou within, seek thou without, seek thou
all way, till in thy very soul doth
come its burning ray.
How foolish be the man who on a
darksome night doth seek to find the sun
by aid of candlelight, but greater fool be
he who in the light of day seeks
for the midday sun by aid of torch's
ray, etc.
So what he's trying to do in his
characteristically fearless way is to use the English
language as a native vehicle for the conveying
of a kind of deeper, not just moralising,
but Islamic metaphysical sense of the world as
the veil of reality and light casting shadows,
characteristically late Navlavi sense.
And probably this is the first time when
the English language was the subject of a
serious attempt to convey deeper Islamic meanings, and
even though it's not great poetry, it shows
the capacity, I think, of the English language
to carry Islamic meanings.
It's more successful than recent Islamic poetry has
been.
Anyway, time is short, so my final pick
for this year is a hiking manual, not
literature at all, Via Dinarica by Tim Clancy,
and it's a BRAT trekking guide.
Hiking the White Trail in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This is the first kind of detailed trekking
guide that has maps and pictures and information
on where to stay and where to get
a meal, that I've seen that actually deals
with Muslim Europe.
And hiking is one of the things I
enjoy, and I've actually done bits of this
long-distance footpath in Bosnia.
Usually it would take two weeks, I guess,
to do the whole thing end-to-end.
327 kilometres across Bosnia from left to right.
There are hiking trails in other Muslim parts
of Europe, in Albania, apparently there's some in
Circassia, the Caucasus.
There's plenty in southern Spain, but of course
there you're seeing villages with ladies curing ham
and churches that happen to face the Qibla,
and it's all a bit kind of post
-ethnic cleansing and rather depressive.
But Bosnia of course still has a living,
surviving Muslim community, despite everything that they've been
through.
So it's a kind of hike that enables
you to cross the boundary between firstly the
Catholic world, the Croat world, into the Islamic
world, central Bosnia, and then towards the end,
in Republika Srpska, along the Serbian border, to
experience the Orthodox world.
Bosnia is this unique meeting place of the
three great religious traditions of Europe.
So you start off in the Central Park,
Vidinje, in the Croat, far west of the
country, where the landscape's very Mediterranean.
Throughout the route it's basically limestone hills.
This is the Dinaric Alps.
If you've been to the Dolomites, you'll more
or less have a sense of what to
expect.
Although it's not as high as the Dolomites,
it goes up to about two and a
half thousand metres.
The path doesn't go right up to the
high summits.
It's kind of not really very difficult, I
would say.
It's not kind of hanging, suspended over a
precipice.
It's manageable.
But two and a half thousand metres is
quite respectable.
And as you move from the karst limestone
pavements of western Herzegovina, and then towards central
Bosnia, the landscape changes.
You know that you're in central Europe.
This is an Alpine landscape.
And of course, partly because the population of
Bosnia has gone down by about a million
since the war.
A lot of the young people have left.
People died in the war, of course.
But still, the villages are populated.
Unlike a lot of places in Spain, Italy,
Russia now, where there's just nobody in the
countryside any longer.
Everybody's gone or died.
Bosnia, the countryside is still populated.
Partly because they can't afford automation.
Partly because it's just a very out-of
-the-way place.
And it's perhaps the last place in Europe
where you can still find villages that are
really unspoilt.
Whether it's the traditional hospitality, where they have
the tradition of in the summertime in the
village that's too poor to afford to build
a mosque, they have a square area of
lawn that they keep very short.
And people just pray their Jumu'ah on
that lawn.
There's a fence around it to stop animals
straying into it.
And that's their mosque.
And I've been to some of these villages
and they genuinely give you a sense of
the integrity and the warmth and the kinship
of traditional village communities.
And it goes through some important places like
Umuljani, which is perhaps the most beautiful valley
in Bosnia.
There's a dragon there.
I've seen the dragon.
It's been turned to stone, but it still
looks like a dragon.
And people will tell you the story of
how the Imam turned it into stone.
And Umuljani also has Bosnia's oldest mosque.
They say it's the oldest mosque.
It doesn't have a pencil type of Ottoman
minaret.
It has something that's a bit more like
a kind of, how would you describe it?
More like a steeple, but with a rounded
top.
Very, very ancient, very ancient flagstone.
Been messed around with a little bit, but
you still get a sense that this is
really out of the way.
And of course, wildlife.
The wolf is still there.
The bear, the lynx, a lot more lynx
than there are left in Spain because it's
just out of the way.
Eagles, one of the last places in Europe
where you'll see a lot of eagles.
And you can stray off the path in
different directions to see various Muslim sites like
Ayvatovica.
If you go at the season for Ayvatovica,
which is one of Bosnia's big religious festivals,
the mufti goes, people on the horses and
banging drums, wonderful thing.
That's not so far from this footpath.
Bosnia is not an enormous country anyway.
And then you come out after moving through
the high mountains to the south of Sarajevo
into Republika Srpska and it stops more or
less at the Serbian border and the river
Drina.
So yeah, which is another national park, Sutileska
National Park, which is in the Republic of
Srpska.
So for those who are of a strenuous
disposition and wish to contemplate God's signs in
nature, Bosnia is really very beautiful.
You have to take certain precautions.
There's still five million landmines lying around, but
they're in certain known areas and there aren't
any mine fields near this path.
They've been quite careful.
It's a properly accredited long-distance footpath, so
it's properly signposted, there's flashes everywhere, there's a
GPS system so you can't really get lost
even in the high mountains.
Obviously, if you're up above 2,000 metres
or so, the possibility is that the weather
will change rapidly, so you have to know
what you're doing with proper boots and equipment
and thermal blankets and so forth to deal
with sudden changes in temperature.
It does get really high, but one of
the most beautiful places in Europe is going
to the little Kafana, the Bosnian cafe, up
above Umuljani, this huge beautiful green valley with
the pine trees all around it.
In the Kafana, they serve sweet tea, of
course, and the famous Bosnian kajmak, which is
a kind of rich cream which you eat
with bread.
It's not something that a dietician necessarily would
recommend every day, but it's a wonderful experience
of the food of the land.
This is, I would say, a very good
example of the hiking trail guide, because it's
got very good large-scale maps.
It talks about where you can swim, where
you shouldn't swim, what to look out for,
what to see, lots of information on flora
and fauna, tree types, rare endangered species, tour
operators, how to deal with...
well, it's worthwhile, even if you don't go
on the trail, just reading the book is
a breath of fresh air.
So alhamdulillah, that brings us to the end
of my meandering through the rather disparate reading
that I've been doing of late.
I hope there's been some benefit in it,
and insha'Allah, we ask Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala to guide us through these dark
months and not make them dark months of
the soul, and insha'Allah bring us to
the springtime of hearts in his good time,
with his wisdom and compassion, insha'Allah.
Barakallahu feekum, wa al'afu minkum, wa salamu
alaikum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh.