Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad on Blogging Theology (2021-07-15) #

0:00:02 Good afternoon and welcome to Blogging Theology and today we have a very special 0:00:08 and honored guest Abdul Hakeem Murad, sheikh,  who is also an Englishman, a convert to islam 0:00:18 professor Tim Winters so you are most welcome thank you very much it's it's 0:00:23 an honor to be here on the show thank you um for any uh viewers who are not familiar 0:00:30 uh with his biography i've just mentioned a few a few of his um accreditations he's the the founder 0:00:36 and dean of the cambridge muslim college uh also the aziz foundation professor of islamic 0:00:42 studies at both the cambridge muslim college and ibrahim college which is in east london 0:00:48 he's also director of studies in theology and religious studies at wolfson college 0:00:53 in cambridge cambridge university where he is also sheikh zayed lecturer of islamic studies 0:01:00 in the faculty of divinity at that university um as i mentioned he is a a convert or river to 0:01:08 islam and is the author of numerous books uh original work plus translations of texts uh from 0:01:16 arabic uh and also from i think from turkish um possibly from persian i don't know into english 0:01:23 and uh he joins us today as i say and i want to focus on themes arising from his most recent work 0:01:31 uh which has proved to be quite a a sensation uh called traveling home essays on islam in europe 0:01:39 published by quillian press last year and the uh what one reviewer um on i think was on amazon uh 0:01:49 described the prose style as complex but well thought through and i think i agree with that the 0:01:56 the the language is uh challenging it's demanding but in a good way making you think and ponder 0:02:02 over the meaning of the thoughts that are conveyed therein and it's certainly well thought through um 0:02:09 and i just wanted to introduce the book by reading a paragraph from the book to give you a flavor 0:02:15 of the style and the theme uh from which uh many of the uh insights come from and he um he writes 0:02:25 that um muslims now this is obviously muslims in europe primarily but muslims find themselves 0:02:31 at home everywhere meaning everywhere in the world and what is this muslim sense of belonging 0:02:38 that believers feel more at home in a place than any atheist could since to lose contact with god 0:02:46 is immediately to forfeit one sense of connection to a place of his god making it is to feel one's 0:02:54 roots and identity shrivel there can be no truly english german or russian atheist from this kind 0:03:02 of muslim perspective lenin was not russian douglas murray he's not british and sam harris 0:03:09 is not american they seem to wait in a for law foreign encampment even when officially at home 0:03:17 by contrast to become muslim or to arrive from an islamically abrahamic place is to maintain 0:03:23 that traditional sensibility which perceives god's signs super abundantly everywhere is immediately 0:03:32 to see the land with understanding and hence to begin to grow roots and to adorn and engage the 0:03:38 earth such very roughly is the islamic theory of abrahamic mobility unlike israel wanderings 0:03:46 in exile which await the messianic intervention which would take the people to a home greater 0:03:52 than all homes muslims travel from one home to an equal other and do not cherish a return to the 0:04:00 mother of cities except as visitors they migrate abrahamically but every country for them is a 0:04:10 promised land there's almost rising to the level of poetry in my view it's beautifully written 0:04:16 clothes uh and uh makes its point with uh supreme eloquence um but enough flattery sincerely meant 0:04:24 um would you like just to expand a bit on that perhaps in simpler language language form as i'd 0:04:31 shut up now yes i sometimes forget what i myself intended when i write those long sentences but i 0:04:38 think what i'm reaching for is the idea that there is something rather startlingly miraculous about 0:04:45 the seerah story which of course is pivots around a migration insofar as it clearly continues and 0:04:52 uplifts and affirms and repairs certain aspects of the pre-existing jewish story in particular 0:05:01 but doesn't include the idea of a unique people or a uniquely appropriate land in which they belong 0:05:10 so even though sort of western arabia was this dusty remote place that few people in the 0:05:15 larger ecumenical hellenistic world had ever thought about nonetheless it becomes the 0:05:20 crucible for something that turns out to be very successfully universal and you do find that in 0:05:26 the the anti-tribalism of the holy prophet's migration the fact that he establishes in medina 0:05:32 this mosque this place of worship which is to be the first non-tribal non-racial non-national space 0:05:39 that arabia has ever seen so that you have bilal the abyssinian you have sohaib the 0:05:46 syrian byzantine you have salman the persian and they can go and be and pray anywhere in the mosque 0:05:54 and that's a kind of sign of islam's universal aspiration that this is a migration it's a kind 0:06:01 of exodus but it's not an exodus that kind of is to a place where everybody has to be and from 0:06:08 which they've been exiled but it's an exodus into god's god's wide earth and so the uh the hadith 0:06:16 the whole earth has been made a mosque for me which is one of the hussites the unique 0:06:20 qualities of the holy prophet's religion turns out to be the case that despite the details 0:06:27 of the sunnah the sun that works and helps us in 21st century britain and in australia and malaysia 0:06:36 and turns out to be remarkably sort of portable that's one of the miracles i think of islam that 0:06:42 despite the particularity of its origin it has served as a religion that uplifts transforms 0:06:48 invigorates so so many peoples so the corollary of that is that 0:06:55 if the quran is pointing us towards god's signs in nature and saying that the whole world is 0:07:02 god's and so migration is just migrating from one part of god's manifestation to another part 0:07:09 that wherever you go if you have a sound heart and you're reading the scripture 0:07:14 you will see the sacred in the place where you are there's no place where god is absent 0:07:21 uh and therefore muslims in europe now looking around traveling in the earth considering the 0:07:29 ayats the signs of god the local securities the theophanies the wonders of nature beauty etc 0:07:36 actually have more right to consider themselves to be belonging to those places than those who 0:07:43 are atheists and therefore have migrated away from the deep narrative of those places a 0:07:50 couple of days ago i find myself driving on the a3 whatever it is from which you can see stonehenge 0:07:56 all right and stonehenge is from the stone age it's even before iron age bronze age it's 0:08:02 really ancient enigmatic we don't really know what it was uh but it's a reminder of the fact 0:08:08 that uh people in this island have until a generation ago always focused their life on the 0:08:17 sacred in a sense of the secularity the mystery of the earth no doubt in often aberrant ways but 0:08:23 that's normative to what it is to belong to this to this island and so muslims superficially judge 0:08:30 to be the people who most obviously don't belong particularly by the kind of anti-immigrant right 0:08:36 uh turn out to be the people who most belong to the broad outlines if not the details 0:08:44 of the the sacred story of what used to be called the matter of britain if you look at even william 0:08:49 blake and english sort of platonic speculators about the meaning of of the country they'll 0:08:55 say well it's about god it's about a particular way of reflecting and and affirming the divine 0:09:00 nature so muslims do that despite the superficial exoticism uh whereas the atheists certainly don't 0:09:08 so i think from a deeper historical perspective not even necessarily a religious perspective 0:09:13 one can see the muslims as having a deep right to belong and as being authentically indigenous 0:09:19 whatever their dna might be as from our point of view irrelevant uh whereas these new uh sort 0:09:28 of secular and atheistic utilitarian scientific interpretations uh have to be seen as uh denying 0:09:38 people really the right to feel that they are rooted and belong to this country so i'm trying to 0:09:43 invert the usual narrative that perceives muslims as kind of wandering outsiders i think on a deeper 0:09:50 level um given the logic of what this country has always been what europe has always been it's 0:09:55 the muslims who very evidently belong yeah but i just um perhaps challenge you on that slightly uh 0:10:02 say douglas murray i've read several of his recent books and he's a very eloquent man 0:10:06 and you he talks quite openly i think one of his books like the suicide of europe about the 0:10:11 loss of faith that characterizes modernity and he doesn't rejoice in this he's not like a dawkins 0:10:18 uh who is a militant atheist he grieves over the law of a spiritual heart and i 0:10:25 notice he appeared a day or two ago on um i think it's premieres as a christian channel 0:10:30 in london uh talking with um uh professor tom wright the former bishop of durham the christian 0:10:36 theologian he's now oxford a very distinguished uh christian churchman in his own right 0:10:42 and i i sense it could be wrong that douglas may is looking for a way home the christian tradition 0:10:48 because he realizes the vacuum the nihilism at the heart of of contemporary nationalism 0:10:55 contemporary populism contemporary anti-muslim polemic is not drawing on those noble christian 0:11:02 european traditions of faith or spirituality of transcendence uh going back at least as far as the 0:11:08 stonehenge so maybe you know he's not i know he is anti-muslim don't get me wrong douglas murray 0:11:14 is but i think underneath that um that rhetoric there is nevertheless a heart that is seeking 0:11:19 faith again and that's human nature isn't it because it's what we've always been there 0:11:24 may even be a god gene some people i think the daily telegraph recently published a speculative 0:11:30 slightly cheeky piece indicating that uh belief is so fundamental uh a part of the human metabolism 0:11:37 that perhaps atheism should be classified as a mental illness you can imagine the chatter 0:11:42 that resulted as a result of that but you know objectively uh there is a case to be made so 0:11:48 of course these people recognize that they're missing something but the problem often is that 0:11:53 uh for psychic or nationalistic or tribal sometimes racial reasons they can't see where 0:11:59 the truth actually is and one of the things i'm trying to reach for in the book is that
0:12:05 god's truth thanks to another of those 0:12:09 great historic ironies is placed in our age precisely where the elites least expected to be 0:12:18 it's like i gave a talk recently about the holy grail and europeans for centuries have 0:12:22 been kind of scratching around probably not far from where you are at the moment in france 0:12:27 uh the nazis were were digging away in those caves in southern france trying to find the grail 0:12:32 and just last week in glastonbury somebody tried to dig up the tomb of king arthur to see if the 0:12:36 was that kind of permanent obsession but according to the historians the roots of the grail legend 0:12:43 are most likely to be found in islam because it's the black stone in the kaaba and many 0:12:48 historians say this is what it is and the medieval european legends recognize this even wagner in his 0:12:55 letters says well isn't it to shame that our great german legends actually turn out to be of 0:12:59 saracenic origin that when he was writing his great passive files so 0:13:03 but the grail is available this thing that the europeans have always been looking for most it's 0:13:09 the black stone so it's kind of hidden in plain sight if you like you can see it you don't need 0:13:15 to dig around in provence you can see it if you go on the national geographic channel and there it is 0:13:21 but it's in the wrong place for the european ego because the point of the grail search and for any 0:13:28 traditional pilgrimage when the hajj days of course now is that it is about 0:13:32 the outward enactment of the inward journey which is about overcoming ego 0:13:37 superbly a pride is the worst of the deadly sins and it is generally europe's pride that says well 0:13:43 i can go through any of these ordeals and i'm happy to scale mount doom and fight with black 0:13:47 dragons and deal with the green knight like sir gawain and i'm a real uh real warrior but 0:13:54 when you say well you just you can get to the grail temple you can kiss the grail if you like 0:14:00 uh but you have to say seven words in arabic in order to be allowed in they say oh well 0:14:05 i don't fancy that ordeal thank you very much i'd rather fight with a black dragon in mount 0:14:10 doom or something that's that's my kind of ordeal so uh this is a divine irony that the 0:14:15 grail is there and it is understood and it is the traditional yearning for the european soul 0:14:23 uh which is not really a christian legend it's kind of it is it is from islam it's certainly 0:14:28 not biblical but it's the pride of europe it makes it so difficult for them really to consider that 0:14:35 actually god may be placing his secret in our age in the place that they are most habituated to 0:14:41 despise with all of those bangladeshis and saudis they can't imagine it could be there of all places 0:14:47 well indeed one of the great ironies of all this is that the traditional 0:14:52 christian faith which is uh precipitously declining at least a 0:14:57 you were looking at church attendance in the church of england it's in free fall 0:15:01 you know these people follow a jew from palestine from 2000 years ago who wasn't white who didn't 0:15:08 speak english probably um and um and who who culturally and linguistically semantically uh uh 0:15:16 aramaic is cognate with uh arabic and hebrew uh he had much more in common with a certain seventh 0:15:24 century arabian prophet than the archbishop of canterbury or tom wright or uh and and yet 0:15:31 that they see him jesus as part of their history and somehow have a problem with a very similar 0:15:37 character who taught basically the same thing just down the road in arabia i find that ironic 0:15:43 well it's again rooted in prejudice and you have to remember how fiercely europe always 0:15:47 self-defined as being that which is not islamic islam by this miraculous historically unique pro 0:15:54 process came out of those arabian valleys and within 100 years it was in southern france and 0:16:00 the gates of china and this is the great trauma of traditional europe i was reading recently a 0:16:06 story of a 16th century protestant in north germany who said well clearly the turks are the 0:16:13 most powerful country in the world we know that they treat the christians well and allow different 0:16:17 sex to coins coexist unlike us in germany so i think it's wrong biblically to fight against 0:16:23 them because we're supposed to be pacifists we should let the turks invade and christianity will 0:16:29 do better here than it does under these warring catholic and protestant princes and for that of 0:16:34 course he was horribly tortured and put to death and they danced on his grave because by the way 0:16:39 uh do you recall i i can find it or you feel like i don't recall the poor guys would like 0:16:44 to look that's extraordinary this is the great unthought of europe um because you know the great 0:16:50 the great pilgrimage center of western europe is santiago de compostela isn't it and or not quite 0:16:57 in lourdes actually as about an hour and a half yeah but santiago is much bigger and medieval 0:17:03 english people go there and the kaimino is a big thing when you get there to a rather in my view 0:17:09 over baroque and elaborate bling church at the center of it there's the big statue of saint james 0:17:16 and his title is saint james matamoros the muslim killer so the destination of western europe's 0:17:24 big sacred pilgrimage is this big statue and he has a white face he's on his horse and with his 0:17:29 sword he's cutting their heads off these rather sad looking dark-skinned muslims who are being 0:17:34 trampled underfoot and nowadays the church finds it a bit unecumenical and embarrassing 0:17:39 so you can see that they arrange flowers to kind of disguise these sad-looking muslims
0:17:50 and that's so deeply rooted in the dna even of quite secular people i think like douglas 0:17:54 murray and so forth that it's just very very hard but there are people even from the far right in 0:18:00 europe who have made the leap into islam publicly or privately i'm in conversation with some you 0:18:06 know really nationalistic people in europe quite well-known people who have wikipedia pages and a 0:18:12 kind of twitter storm whenever they say something who have discreetly 0:18:16 come to islam or at least recognize that islam is the truth so one should never despair of 0:18:21 those people and um i believe will be a very good mahmood when he finally overcomes this 0:18:29 this matamoros dna and and humbles himself before the lord of of abraham that would be 0:18:36 a a day to rejoice so uh um you you quite do review the coin this term submarines
0:18:44 what are submarines submarines are those people of we don't know how many they are 0:18:50 who convert to islam and do it but without announcing it to anybody i even knew a guy 0:18:58 jewish guy who whose wife was very puzzled that kind of four o'clock in the morning he would 0:19:04 mysteriously get up out of bed and come back 10 minutes later a little bit damp and she couldn't 0:19:09 figure out what this was about it went on for years um but yes i know a full professor here in 0:19:15 cambridge who's been a muslim occasionally you see him discreetly in the mosque but he's certainly 0:19:21 not known to be muslim and there's you know there's i know a guy who is the senior adviser to 0:19:28 uh a cabinet minister in the current government who is an active convert to 0:19:32 islam but i think nobody in boris's team suspects this there's quite a lot of them 0:19:40 um and the idea is that they want the beauty of islam and they love the form 0:19:43 of prayer and the purity of the monotheism and what's not to like but all of the kind of
0:19:51 crisis talk about muslim communities and palestine and afghanistan and so forth they don't feel that 0:19:57 they want to take on the psycho babble that goes with it so they they they keep quiet about it so 0:20:04 yeah there's certainly a lot of people like that i find it interesting that 0:20:08 and in europe prominent as you say far-right populist um non-muslim leaders 0:20:16 privately contact you and just and discreetly uh send out feelers in a very positive way 0:20:24 or in faith and i think that's uh extraordinary ministry to use christian language that you 0:20:29 have to the world well it's a very passive one because i don't go out you know i've i've not 0:20:35 emailed somebody like milo yano pulos and drawn the merits of the qurante's attention uh sometimes 0:20:42 what do you mean who's now got religion and repented
0:20:52 is a kind of ultra traditionalist catholic of the sort of 0:20:56 if you watch uh church militant and those uh catholic websites you can
0:21:06 the fact is that muslims do dichotomize and assume that those people are kind of soulless androids 0:21:13 who we just have to insult and push away but everybody has a soul 0:21:17 everybody was there at the day of the primordial covenant when we all said 0:21:20 yes we bear witness everybody therefore is thirsty for god and we shouldn't despair of 0:21:26 anyone and that's part of the beauty of the seerah even when the holy prophet was being persecuted 0:21:32 and his companions tortured and killed he would pray in what seemed like the most unlikely way 0:21:40 or strengthen islam by abu hakem or omar the two great islamophobes of of the age and omar came to 0:21:48 islam by god's decree and i think that's a more healthy place for us to be in double terms than 0:21:55 just twitter storming people and responding to their abuse with more abuse i think that the quran 0:22:01 says call to the way of your lord with wisdom and goodly exhortation and that's a commandment that 0:22:07 i think is binding on us yes well come on perhaps uh to the dower scene in the uk shortly but just 0:22:14 perhaps moving on the conversation to um something that is summarized in this dance with wopism 0:22:20 um what is him i don't know it's kind of a new form of political correctness but 0:22:25 it seems to have become a cultural revolution now um and focusing on issues of gender of sexualities 0:22:34 particularly doing away in my understanding with traditional definitions of gender and people now 0:22:40 who uh well acceptable for people to define uh their own personal agenda by their beliefs about 0:22:48 their agenda so if i think i'm a woman then i really am a woman and and uh people should 0:22:53 uh accept that and doctors and powers that be will all say yeah this person is a woman 0:22:59 um and this kind of redefinition of reality um i mentioned this because it obviously affects 0:23:05 all of us but particularly regarding muslims in the west in britain uh france uh america 0:23:11 and so on who are coming under pressure of course because muslims are quite traditional
0:23:18 sexuality the place of uh intercourse uh within uh heterosexual marriage uh and gender roles 0:23:25 are quite clearly defined and celebrated and accentuated rather than i don't know 0:23:30 moved over in an egalitarian kind of mishmash of everyone is universally the same um but 0:23:39 am i right i'm thinking this is becoming a serious issue for muslims particularly those with children 0:23:44 who are whose children have been who might say brainwashed by their teachers well yeah i don't 0:23:50 see it as a specifically muslim issue but i think it's something um that people who want to maintain 0:23:57 the traditional idea of gender dimorphism which seems to be implicit in all the world's 0:24:02 scriptures you know taoism and hindu religion they all assume that reality is dyadic and 0:24:08 that the mysterium tremendous the mysterium fascinans are part of the nature of existence 0:24:13 and it is through the interaction that the miracle of life comes about as you can see in 0:24:18 most of the species around us and that's kind of always assumed to be the case so but it is 0:24:26 and there are a lot of christians if you look at the organization christian concern they often 0:24:29 champion individuals who who've been persecuted really that's the word because of what is now 0:24:35 called heteronormativity so uh i mean i could mention a friend of mine somebody i consider 0:24:41 a friend bernard randall who used to be chaplain of one of the colleges here in cambridge christ's 0:24:46 college um very decent guy mildly conservative evangelical perhaps but very open and courteous 0:24:55 he got a job as re teacher at a school with an evangelical heritage and was overheard to indicate 0:25:07 that according to the church of england marriage is between one man and one woman which is the 0:25:14 true isn't it that is the official teacher it is it's on their website so not only do they fire him 0:25:20 but they also refer him to prevent can you imagine as if saying that the church of england says this 0:25:27 which is just a fact means that you're potentially a terrorist suspect well of course prevent they 0:25:33 throw it out because they can see this is really didn't meet their threshold as it were but then 0:25:39 and the kids in the school the conservative christians are saying is this a compulsory 0:25:43 belief that heteronormativity is wrong and that we have to be against is it obligatory now and it's a 0:25:53 source of distress evidently for some of them and for that for their parents and and then bernard 0:26:00 contacts to his supporters lambeth palace to find out what the archbishop of canterbury has to say 0:26:08 about what is on the anglican church's website uh and um the archbishop of canterbury declines to 0:26:17 intervene and says well it's terribly complicated you know you have to understand all sides and 0:26:22 the usual prevarication so he won't defend his own priest and effectively throws him to the lions 0:26:30 just for saying what the teaching of the church historically is and continues to be so that's 0:26:35 the you know christians are facing this as well but interestingly the same archbishop
0:26:42 you may recall at the the battley cartoons scandal a few months ago 0:26:47 when those outrageous cartoons were being brandished to muslim pupils in a in a school 0:26:52 the archbishop said no i believe in freedom of speech
0:26:58 look at this is the priority that lambeth palace seems to have now that muslim 0:27:02 pupils can be offended but students who uh believe in heteronormativity just have to be smacked and 0:27:09 silenced that seems to be their view what why a particular point uh wellbeing the current article 0:27:15 of the canterbury is that you know having to know that he comes from an evangelical background 0:27:19 associated with htv holiday brompton in uh london which is a powerhouse of evangelical 0:27:27 uh theology hugely popular with the middle classes in kensington and he comes from 0:27:32 that very constituency and yet when he catches canterbury uh lo and behold he uh the uh my view 0:27:39 the zeitgeist uh becomes his touchstone rather than his um his faith and um you know i don't 0:27:47 want to be rude about the man but i'm pretty uh madly i'm extremely disappointed and you 0:27:52 know if an evangelical archbishop of canterbury fails to stand up for his own church's preaching 0:27:58 what hope is there for anyone and the thing is declines and declines and declines and you've said 0:28:03 this before in other words that the only real uh monotheistic presence in europe that is standing 0:28:09 on its own legs is islam which is uh mostly i say mostly because of the fringes there are modernists 0:28:18 who are um you know praising or you know all these lgbt whatever things but 0:28:23 most muslims are remaining steadfast it seems is that is that correct assessment uh it is the 0:28:31 case at least in western europe eastern europe has a very different more conservative logic 0:28:37 that if you go into a church you can't be quite sure what you're going to see or what you're 0:28:44 going to hear yes and if you're in a parish you have to like it or lump it really um the 0:28:55 but it's also objectively the case that if you go into any mosque really any mosque 0:28:59 in western europe you can be pretty sure that you'll see the liturgy that you expect to see 0:29:05 and the sermon will be within some kind of bandwidth that is recognizably part of some 0:29:10 sort of classical islamic broad consensus so i don't see it really as being about these sexuality 0:29:17 issues but more about uh more about tradition and the courage to defend tradition because the 0:29:26 lgbt thing in islam has been dealt with in such a different way historically then it was dealt with 0:29:32 in christianity that you can't really apply the same kind of is it phobic is it not phobic it's 0:29:38 it's more complex and nuanced than that and we don't really fit on that that spectrum at all 0:29:43 um and obviously everybody has to be dealt with with compassion and and understanding 0:29:49 but uh yeah the liturgy is is actually more central uh you can yeah any anywhere you go in 0:29:56 the world really there's 10 million mosques in the world 10 million mosques in the world yeah 0:30:04 in how many will you see something that really is a clear violation of something that's in the 0:30:11 scriptures when you go for more prayers how many now there may be horrible fundamentalist 0:30:16 extremist sermons there may be sermons dictated by regimes that people have to read out but still 0:30:26 it will be canonically valid and that's the point so i've just looked through quite an 0:30:31 interesting book it might be up your street or maybe you've seen it stephen bullivant 0:30:35 mass exodus uh i've heard of it yes i i've had a review of it yeah yeah uh which is 0:30:41 basically it says catholic disaffiliation in britain and america since vatican ii 0:30:47 uh it's about why it is that the catholic churches are emptying and nobody wants to be a priest any 0:30:52 longer and the churches are all being closed and turned into condominiums or mosques or whatever 0:31:01 and his conclusion is that it is partly because of vatican ii and partly because the church 0:31:06 doesn't really seem to clearly maintain its traditional values he seems to suggest that young 0:31:12 people will respect a religion more if it stays clear about its teachings even if they don't agree 0:31:19 with those teachings then if it's kind of squishy and follows the zeitgeist in an anxious attempt to 0:31:25 hold on to young people's attention at all at all there is a problem here i i won't mention 0:31:31 his name and i won't mention with mosque there is a um an imam of a very prominent london mosque 0:31:37 um who gives the cutback on fridays obviously uh who told me uh in in confidence i'm not portraying 0:31:43 the comment i'm not saying who he is or where he's from but the that he will not preach on friday on 0:31:50 sexuality issues particularly on homosexuality for fear that the mosque will be invaded he'll be put 0:31:57 on the register police will get interested now he is not if he is a he was born in this in england i 0:32:04 should say a highly intelligent man um he's a good good guy actually uh and that he knows that he was 0:32:12 thinking um that he will come under suspicion of the authorities and suffer consequences 0:32:19 either from the state or from activists you know the old outrage mob will come in and destroy as 0:32:23 they have done and i've witnessed this in churches so people self-censor and don't preach on subjects 0:32:30 yeah and and the issue of whether anti-zionism is anti-semitism is another one that a lot of muslims 0:32:37 who are in exposed positions have to negotiate and we just have to recognize that 0:32:41 there isn't freedom of expression and let's be honest there isn't freedom of expression in 0:32:46 any muslim country either there's other ways other ways of tiptoeing through different minefields 0:32:51 that happen if you're in egypt or saudi arabia it's not just the west that is censors by any 0:32:56 means but if you're a minority you have to respect the local sanctities and these nowadays are quite 0:33:03 different to those which christianity historically acknowledged but um we're still you know allowed 0:33:08 to preach on 99 of what is significant so uh i see it just as a matter of courtesy really right all 0:33:16 right interesting so in terms of the question of hydra which is on some people's mind so i 0:33:21 brought this up with a uh professor uh uh from zaytuna a week or two ago professor abdullah ali 0:33:28 he was american and and he'd and asked him about hidra and he given the pressure it's an increasing 0:33:33 hostile environment that many muslims feel they're in in the west and and many of these people have 0:33:38 children you know who are being educated in these um woke values which are inimicable to traditional 0:33:44 faith be it christian or muslim or i mean fascinatingly never occurred to me that you know 0:33:50 if you're in california you're not a muslim yeah you can do hitra within america it's a federal 0:33:55 you know huge vast continent with many different nation states so move to a republican area where 0:34:02 traditional values are respected and many of these traditional christian republicans are actually not 0:34:07 islamophobic as the media would uh have you believe and i didn't know that so uh his answer 0:34:14 was you don't have to literally leave the west you can move within the west to a more safe and 0:34:20 welcoming would you agree with that or would you see hidra as a serious consideration for muslims 0:34:25 well um america is certainly not britain it's not obvious that there's a place in britain to 0:34:30 which you could migrate if you don't want your children to be indoctrinated with the 0:34:35 latest state beliefs but there are problems in the us of course do you really want to
0:34:44 go past a lot of trump banners and posters every time you go to work um that is also a problematic 0:34:54 view but it is it is the case that even though many muslims think that the evangelicals 0:34:59 are kind of hell-bent on zionism and the destruction of muslims everywhere that once 0:35:05 you get to know those people you find that most of them are actually very reasonable and once 0:35:09 they learn what muslims actually are and they visit the mosque they can be good neighbors so 0:35:15 uh it is an option and california of course has always been kind of at the edge of the earth you 0:35:19 know you feel like you've got to fall off if you go any further uh it's a kind of extreme 0:35:25 that there's there's other places um where people can move to in north america and i think there's a 0:35:31 very strong case nowadays for inter-religious alliances on these issues of conscience 0:35:37 that people do feel persecuted that they feel that their freedom of speech is being impugned that 0:35:42 their children are being indoctrinated against their will and uh there's there's plenty of 0:35:50 opportunities for forging alliances with conservative jewish uh traditions as well as 0:35:55 with uh traditional questions also for places like africa for instance where this is also 0:36:01 beginning to be an issue so you know but of course we can't do that in europe 0:36:06 unless of course you want to go and live in victor oregon's hungary which is perhaps a 0:36:11 mixed blessing um because very often conservatism in europe tends really does go hand in hand with a 0:36:18 furious kind of matamoros islamophobia um and that kind of partly because it tends to be less 0:36:25 religious i think in a certain interesting way it's easier for us to persuade and engage with 0:36:31 kitab than to deal with people who are just secular atheists nationalist races to believe in 0:36:38 a darwinian kind of natural selection that has made the white man the top of of of a billion 0:36:44 years of evolution it's hard to engage with them but with people who are significantly part of 0:36:49 kitab there's always grounds for discussion but what about the home school i mean i'm not 0:36:54 a parent myself so this is kind of outside of my particular area but what about homeschooling for 0:36:58 muslim parents is this a serious uh possibility in terms of avoiding the the worst excesses of 0:37:04 yeah a lot of people do this it may well be the case that the various inquisitors who inspect 0:37:11 homeschooling groups and programs will insist also on the inculcation of these new beliefs in 0:37:18 very young children because it's become such a passionate orthodoxy 0:37:22 for a culture that i think has been starved of certainties for so long that has become a kind of 0:37:28 secular religion somehow that delighted that they found truths after all and everything was 0:37:32 relativistic this is absolutely true they think and of course they proselytize with 0:37:37 all the zeal of the fundamentalist converts so uh and in countries like france homeschooling 0:37:43 has been shut down that may well be the pattern for many other european countries 0:37:49 liberalism is increasingly becoming intolerant uh which might seem like a contradiction in 0:37:54 terms but it's what we're seeing now a coercive liberalism is becoming imposed i know christians 0:38:00 are talking about muscular christianity and they they really mean is to dominate muslims and and 0:38:05 force them into submission but so you don't see hydra in terms of the physical leaving of the 0:38:11 muslim majority countries as a particularly obvious option well where is there a place that 0:38:18 is a particularly appetizing destination right now i don't know however you tell me where we've been 0:38:25 i would i mean indonesia is one of my favorite countries i certainly wouldn't mind living in 0:38:31 a little traditional village there eating mangoes and paddling in the sea and just being being happy 0:38:38 going to the mosque i like indonesia a lot but then in my case what on what use would i be though 0:38:48 my skills are rather specialized uh so uh yeah i i hang on here uh in the hope that 0:38:56 you know really the only justification for muslims living in the west is the dawah justification 0:39:00 everything else is very dodgy and the first hadith of islam beginning of bukhari is the 0:39:06 hadith of hijrah which is also the hadith of niya now that's a big thing if you make hijra for dunya 0:39:14 dunya will eat you alive basically and you can see the effect on your children and grandchildren 0:39:22 yeah both muslims come to the whites historically they're not for uh hindu purposes not for a 0:39:27 sincere desire to spread islam but for economic reasons yeah and that is not haram in islam 0:39:34 uh but it's i think it's time now for a near reset for muslims in europe why are we here 0:39:42 because nia intention is enormously important in terms of divine acceptance and the 0:39:47 our inner spiritual health what on earth am i doing here in this 0:39:51 weird place uh well i'm here to help people you know to be rahmatum and says a mercy under healing 0:40:00 not so that i can save up for a big new car allah may still help me if that's my main object in life 0:40:08 but may not but if my intention actually is to help my neighbors and to spread truth and to 0:40:14 try and bring people to mercy respect for family neighborhood looking out for wild animals in the 0:40:21 animal shelter or whatever just helping to to show mercy then that's a legitimate nia and i think 0:40:27 if that is strongly our near then there isn't really a a duty of of emigration in our time 0:40:34 right okay finally then if we may come to um our scene in the united kingdom um which i 0:40:43 have observed to small extent close up um how would you character is it a healthy state uh 0:40:49 i mean and what have you observed in terms of dow activity in in britain well you probably have been 0:40:56 more at the front line than i have i tend to hide behind the stacks in the university library and 0:41:02 speak from a distance i mean there's two sides to it there is the natural human 0:41:10 thirst for truth and for beauty and for god and for hope and that is still there 0:41:17 despite the fact that everybody is so rushed off their feet and checking their texts and doing 0:41:22 things too fast that it's hard really for their souls to experience that contemplative faculty 0:41:28 as it's as it's supposed to once people calm down a little bit or perhaps after they've had some big 0:41:34 misfortune in their lives they do recognize that they need meaning and truth and islamic 0:41:41 monotheism is has all the virtues of monotheism which is certainly history's most powerful idea 0:41:48 but without many of the complexities that are identified with historically evolved christianity
0:41:56 there has been a shift in the churches as you've noticed away from some of the classical 0:42:01 formulations and towards something that is more kind of generically unitarian i was invited by a 0:42:08 a friend of mine dr fraser watts a admirable person to uh preach at his church when he was 0:42:15 vicar of saint edwards in cambridge yes to his congregation it's a nice hospitable invitation 0:42:22 and i preached from ridley's pulpit the pulpit that launched the english reformation if you 0:42:26 think certainly it was it wasn't mistake or something or sorry wasn't he burned at the 0:42:32 stake or something yeah he ended up um getting into uh getting into trouble with the marion 0:42:38 yeah you have spared that but still there i was i mean i wasn't likely to start a kind of 0:42:44 new reformation with a sort of couple of dozen silvery headed parishioners that were trying to 0:42:50 hear me in the church but afterwards we sat down and we talked about one of the real differences 0:42:55 between islam and christianity and i said well we do respect jesus and we respect his sainted mother 0:43:01 but we don't believe that he was god and they said well we don't either we believe he was a 0:43:08 wonderful human being but we don't understand how he could have been god at the same time 0:43:12 so without douwer in a sense that that journey towards what makes sense is already well underway 0:43:19 yes yes um and one doesn't have to get too angry and polemical and if you are that people tend 0:43:25 to get angry and polemical back it's kind of aggression is usually counterproductive again
0:43:34 say to people what is most beautiful and that doesn't mean using four letter words and 0:43:39 youtube chat boxes that's not the way to melt hearts really um that that just exacerbates the 0:43:45 ego which is what we're trying to get beyond so you know people are joining islam quietly we get 0:43:53 about one conversion a week registered at our main mosque in cambridge which i used to think 0:43:59 was amazing but last week i met somebody else who said at his mosque in london they get a similar 0:44:03 number so we'll have to look at what the census return looks like when they've crunched the data 0:44:10 that they got a couple of months ago but for the previous census they reckon there's about 0:44:14 a hundred thousand converts to islam in britain a hundred thousand yep and that you can correlate 0:44:19 by looking at the number of people who click the box muslim but also click the box that says 0:44:27 white anglo-saxon irish or whatever you put those together that's the number you get to 0:44:33 and i expect it'll be a larger number this time but that happens really without da'wah it happens 0:44:40 just because people are looking for what is they find something in islam something about 0:44:48 its timelessness they like the form of worship they like the uncluttered simplicity of the mosque 0:44:53 they love the fact that muslims united in their ibadah and that it's uncompromising ramadan is 0:45:01 difficult but impressive five daily prayers difficult but impressive there's a seriousness 0:45:07 about it that makes them think well this is this is a real religion this looks like 0:45:10 god's religion because it's not constantly being sweetened and diluted by anxious synods
0:45:23 the reception of the eucharist the the central part of the church on a sunday usually one has to 0:45:29 fast yeah from for a whole hour whole 60 minutes um um from food yeah and uh i i know i'm not let 0:45:40 me say that to mock but i'm just juxtaposing that with um the realities of ramadan and the uh yeah 0:45:47 and you know anyway it's just how different things are yeah i think that uh those things 0:45:54 which make people shake their heads why don't we get with it and become modern and like everybody 0:46:00 else are those things that are quite irresistibly attractive to a lot of seriously minded people 0:46:09 which is why you know the mosques are full everybody's talking about the crisis of 0:46:13 islam well we do have a lot of crises but if the church where my ancestors used to worship 0:46:20 in norwich is now a mosque is it well which religion is in crisis yeah there's one thing 0:46:28 i've always known is the most the problem with the most is they're always twofold
0:46:33 there's always two and the age of the average age of the attendant is very young the average age of 0:46:39 your average church of england or roman catholic church is the opposite um we're talking about as 0:46:44 you say lots of gray hairs yeah that's the typical um story tonight yeah it's very uh you know jummah 0:46:54 prayer is crowded and it's a dynamic event and leila in a mosque is overcrowded in an even more 0:47:01 sensational event and people people take that seriously so it's kind of self-perpetuating and 0:47:07 i see no sign of that really flagging anywhere in europe right there's places in albania that were 0:47:14 subject to communist forced secularization for so many decades that people have forgotten what a 0:47:21 mosque is for where things are flagging a bit but really you have to adopt the inquisition approach 0:47:28 islam prevailed in spain after the muslim conquest within a hundred years most people 0:47:33 had converted after the christian reconquest of spain it took them hundreds of years to winkle 0:47:40 out the last pockets of muslimness and they had to use the inquisition with all of its horror 0:47:46 and you know they were still discovering muslims in spain in the 18th century um 0:47:53 so a friend of mine who lives in granada recently had his house uh rebuilt and the builders found 0:48:00 on the ground floor a couple of skeletons that were facing the qibla 0:48:06 they were thought to be 18th century so that family had kept up the traditions in secret 0:48:11 risking being burnt at the stake for for many generations so that's the kind of resilience of 0:48:16 islam it doesn't die away quickly because it it's it's the religion of fitra people 0:48:22 love the idea of monotheism they love the idea of a timeless beautiful simple quite short form 0:48:28 of worship um what's not to like of course on the surface you have the taliban and isis and crisis 0:48:35 after crisis which is what the media tend to report but um it's it's a kind of mirror image of 0:48:41 the west in the west on the surface everything is nice but underneath you have a demographic crisis 0:48:49 you have the environmental crisis you have uh the crisis of loneliness we now have the world's first 0:48:57 minister of loneliness in the uk really i didn't know yeah because society is fraying so fast so 0:49:04 that's the society into which muslims are being invited to integrate yeah so 0:49:11 there's certain things that are still rough and ready but still more or less functional 0:49:16 the muslim family the muslim neighborhood the place of worship the idea of gender these things 0:49:21 are still maintained despite everything but the surface of course which the media reports this is 0:49:27 uproar constant uproar but beneath the surface there's stillness 0:49:31 but what about i mean i don't need to go on this is a separate subject i don't want to go into it 0:49:35 or now but but what about the second generation the third generation of muslim immigrants 0:49:40 uh uh the the the offspring of them are they retaining the faith or are they hemorrhaging 0:49:45 all over the place and will disappear you know water in the sand or will they will they will 0:49:50 they retain there well in the book i do talk a little bit about retention and there's been some 0:49:56 sociological work done on it so uh 26 percent of christian parents statistically can expect their 0:50:05 children to be church goers if they are church goers 26 in the case of muslims it's 71 percent 0:50:13 which is not not a hundred percent but still a rate of survival plus the converts plus 0:50:20 big families means that the mosques are likely to be well used for some time to come so 0:50:27 yeah retention rates but of course there's part of the problem is that the culture of many mosques 0:50:33 in england reflects the cultural needs and focus of first generation migrant communities who came 0:50:40 not so much with islam but with their culture yeah and that's fine for the first generation 0:50:46 but the second generation which has been to british schools and has a kind of british soul 0:50:50 effectively uh may not feel particularly at home in those spaces and the khutbas may not be very 0:50:57 relevant and that's the danger really that in islam we have this idea of local custom which is 0:51:04 a valid and respected thing as long as it doesn't violate something in the quran of the sunnah 0:51:10 but if you have the orf of somewhere else 0:51:14 and you're expecting young people with their own local orf to relate harmoniously to that then 0:51:19 you have a cognitive dissonance that can result in disaffiliation and i think that's the main problem 0:51:25 that people find the mosques exotic kind of spaces where an overseas beauty is maintained rather than 0:51:33 something that speaks to the kind of questions that they're having to ask here's written 0:51:38 on that point about earth probably mispronouncing culture am i right thinking that that concept uh 0:51:45 is an important element to sharia itself that it recognizes the legitimacy uh and uh 0:51:52 and value of a culture and it might not be an arabic culture or a paganism it could be a british 0:51:58 an english culture is actually explicitly uh as long as it can you know it doesn't violate sure 0:52:05 alcohol abuse or pornography or loneliness we're talking about those positive aspects of culture 0:52:11 are recognized by the sharia is that right yeah and this is part of the universalism and you know 0:52:16 part of the the beautiful wisdom of islam is just as even though it makes strong prophetic 0:52:24 points against the ahlul kitab because that's what prophecy does it still is very generous it still 0:52:33 says lace or they're not all the same amongst them is a community that is upright it tells us 0:52:38 to be respectful to them that's part of you know the unique brilliance of the quran amongst other 0:52:44 prophetic documents and that it's respectful even though it comes as a kind of repair 0:52:51 similarly where islam has traveled historically if you look at what it's done to the literatures 0:52:57 of the peoples that it has touched uh it doesn't replace them with a kind of uniform 0:53:03 arabiness but actually triggers or galvanizes a new flourishing in those literatures 0:53:09 if you look at persian literature yes before islam while it's a few afterstand prayers and 0:53:15 incantations to various kings it's not much then islam comes and you have hafiz and rumi and saudi 0:53:23 and it's uh but in farsi so it tends to feckin date the local uh and it's the same with 0:53:31 turkish literature which before islam was really nothing at all um many of the literatures of the 0:53:36 subcontinent of west africa and so forth so it's a principle that while uncompromising about tawheed 0:53:45 and about the inviolability of the basic sacred forms you don't introduce local customs into your 0:53:51 federal prayer for instance and nobody would would have the temerity to do that that's universal 0:53:58 that at the same time uh in terms of the more informal aspects of people's lives 0:54:03 how they dress what they eat the language they use and also in their literature and 0:54:08 perhaps some of their extra economical rituals in say the context of sufism you'll find that 0:54:14 local socialities and local languages tend to be uplifted and this is why orpheus none 0:54:21 of this is controversial it's there in all of the classical texts of sharia a maxim of the sharia is
0:54:32 which is to say that which is known through local custom is like that which is legislated 0:54:38 by revelation wow which some people nowadays with the kind of rather limited view that they 0:54:44 have of islam find startling but uh that and that's particularly effective in terms of what 0:54:51 he does in a law court he'll look at the books of sharia but he'll also look at what the local 0:54:56 custom is and if that customer is not violating something that's known in revelation in which case 0:55:02 it has to shut up and die if he's not violating that then that becomes islam for those people 0:55:10 and so the challenge for us in the west is to see whether we are going to use the orf of 0:55:18 indonesia in holland or kurdistan in sweden and that's how we have to be as muslims or whether 0:55:26 the traditional enculturation that the ummah has always been pretty good at is going to be possible 0:55:33 for us in modern europe so what should a mosque in sweden look like for instance well should it 0:55:39 look like a turkish mosque or a moroccan mosque or a kurdish mosque most of them do that and that 0:55:44 can be quite divisive because it cements ethnic divisions in the community which are weakening 0:55:50 but what about what would a swedish mosque look like and how would a swedish imam dress 0:55:57 and what kind of poetry islamic poetry would you want to write using the 0:56:02 particular genius and strengths of the swedish language and that's something that is starting now
0:56:09 it has to be uh convert-led presumably it can't be well not necessarily if you look at some of the 0:56:16 sort of rather dutch looking mosques in holland now in rotterdam for instance a very interesting 0:56:21 big mosque in rotterdam which draws a lot on dutch styles of architecture that's not primarily 0:56:28 convert lead that's led by so i think that the the differentiation that one saw between the 0:56:35 converts and the cradle muslims if you like in the 80s and 90s is starting to die away 0:56:40 right um i think it may be that the age of the convert is coming to an end really and 0:56:45 that we're going to see this new generation really powering ahead which will be i think a good thing 0:56:52 and it is often like in our mosque in cambridge which tries to be 0:56:56 british as well as islamic in various ways using local british patterns of brickwork and 0:57:03 gothic vaulting and so forth that's been very strongly supported by the local community which is 0:57:10 bangladeshi turkish and so forth once it's explained to them that this is a way of being 0:57:14 courteous to your neighbors you don't really want a mosque that they experience as an insult 0:57:20 it has to be courteous as long as it's not violating something in the scripture 0:57:25 what's wrong with courtesy and courtesy is is an islamic virtue it's something of course 0:57:31 i've talked about endlessly this is not some kind of english gentleman virtue this is an 0:57:36 islamic virtue as well yeah it's neighboriness yeah so um somebody once came to the holy prophet 0:57:42 sallallahu alaihi wasallam offering him some stew and his reply was
0:57:51 have you offered some to your jewish neighbor so this idea of neighbourliness which is very big 0:57:57 in islam doesn't just mean muslim neighbors but also non-muslim neighbors and this is something 0:58:03 that you can see again and again in this era um so uh yeah the the the public statements of 0:58:10 islam's presence have to be if we're sensible respectful rather than irritants yeah uh i was 0:58:19 recently uh looking at the speech of the mayor of pech i think it is in southern hungary for some 0:58:28 oraban's party anti-immigrant building fences and so forth and there's a historic mosque in petrus 0:58:35 which was built by the ottomans and the interviewer was saying well we've 0:58:39 got the muslim community here why don't you allow the mosque to open up again 0:58:44 and he said no no because they have different traditions they dress differently and they eat 0:58:49 food that's very different from ours and he named all of the things that have nothing to do with 0:58:53 islam as a religion but to do with the orf of recently arrived people as he understands it so 0:58:59 very often islamophobia fixes on superficial things that are religiously dispensable anyway 0:59:05 so i'm in the longer term quite optimistic because you see with the new generation 0:59:09 certainly the third generation they're really very french and swedish i was talking to a guy in 0:59:15 um cologne recently there's a huge new mosque there and as you go into the mosque the sign 0:59:22 says turkish mosque turkish mosque on every door a big sign turkish mosque 0:59:28 the turks are maybe 50 of the muslims of cologne but they wanted to make this statement 0:59:35 and there's a bookshop but it has books in turkish all books in german all translated from turkish 0:59:40 you know the kind of scene and this young guy even though he's the second generation his parents at 0:59:46 turkish says i'm german i'm not turkish yeah so i don't really feel that that's my place 0:59:53 and there's going to be more and more people like that and as the mosques make the transition 0:59:58 which is pretty easy to do in many ways because you don't have to change the 1:00:02 abada or any of the essential functions from being a place of refuge for first generation 1:00:09 understandably kind of defensive communities to something that's more open and our oriented then 1:00:15 you'll see not just the younger generation feeling more at home in the mosque but also more and more 1:00:19 non-muslims coming to the mosque recognizing islam for what it is and inshallah joining us so 1:00:25 in the longer term i'm pretty optimistic i i'm very pleased to hear this uh optimistic 1:00:31 uh prognosis for the future um i i'm just very fine are you working on anything yourself in 1:00:36 terms of uh books or articles or lectures that we might look forward to well i'm i have various 1:00:46 sort of projects up my sleeve one of them that i'd really like to do although it might 1:00:50 be quite a short book is a book on life the principle of life and all that it means because 1:00:59 all of the the basic scientific presumptions about how the world came to be and why it is the 1:01:06 way it is are arguable and mysterious the big bang mystery where did the physical constants come from 1:01:14 mystery uh where did life come from what is life mystery where does consciousness come from what 1:01:22 is consciousness mystery religion answers those things pretty well secularity is really struggling 1:01:29 it's kind of agnostic so life is one of the big mysteries and it seems to me that 1:01:34 the quran is very much a celebration of life it says not just look at the sky and the mountains 1:01:41 but at the living things and all of those beautiful hadiths about kindness to animals 1:01:46 uh which is not there in the new testament really it's not much about animals though there's unless 1:01:52 you count the episode of the gadarene swine which is perhaps not a kind of ideal proof 1:01:57 text for animal rights activists i don't know but um the one of the different things about islam is 1:02:04 this valorizing of the the natural world and it's a very beautiful joyful thing because 1:02:10 of course nature is indicative of transcendence uh and gender of course comes into that because 1:02:15 life comes into being by and large through the interaction of alternate principles
1:02:24 recent discovery uh not just dna but actually actually you know um within the human cell or all 1:02:30 cells actually is biological machines now that's the term that biologists use not me calling them 1:02:36 biological machines and these are extraordinarily complex pieces of scenery in the naked eye but 1:02:42 they're there within living organisms incredibly complex tasks to do with the duplication of the 1:02:49 cell and creation of dna and so on i'm looking at this i'm thinking good grief you know i mean 1:02:54 if that's not designed what is i i and uh it kind of cries out for a transcendent explanation 1:03:01 i've got an atheist friend of mine who uh has uh some scientific background i said how does 1:03:07 on your materialist darwinian uh explanation how do you account for this he said oh i'm sure 1:03:13 it's been explained and he's never actually been able to present me anything that hasn't explained 1:03:17 this extraordinary complex machinery which we can observe that does incredibly complex computer-like 1:03:24 tasks that's supposedly a product of random materialistic evolution i mean it's amazing 1:03:30 i think yeah i think it's it's a youtube clip even the inner life of the cell or something that comes 1:03:34 from harvard which is mind-blowing particularly when you consider that there's several billions 1:03:39 of them in every one of us so you know it's a good example of the fact that atheism is more 1:03:46 a leap of faith and more speculative and i think more ego driven than monotheism um you know but 1:03:55 unfortunately we live in an age of the wrong kind of fundamentalism and we're up against a kind of 1:04:00 really unreflective anger because people in their egotistic cells really don't want to self-identify 1:04:06 as religious because that's not cool they think they'll be socially blanked and cancelled and that 1:04:12 it's a kind of fear of that but yeah the cell is is a miracle every organ of the body is is 1:04:17 an extraordinary miracle yeah and it makes sense that there is an ordering principle 1:04:24 because you don't need to be a philosopher to realize that principles of subtle order 1:04:29 uh are not intrinsic in the nature of chaos and nothingness british philosopher
1:04:39 a flu professor
1:04:42 who spent decades uh very eminent academic at uh as well uh arguing against um theism against god 1:04:50 as an atheist and towards the end of life he maintained complete consistency he argues in his 1:04:56 book his consistency where's the evidence taking me and he argued that the evidence now took him 1:05:02 to belief in god because science was uncovering the most extraordinary the universe i mean he 1:05:08 referenced dna uh and and not the fine-tuning of the universe so he became a believer in god 1:05:16 in the last few years of his life having spent an entire lifetime arguing for the truth of atheism 1:05:22 purely he said on the basis of science now whether or not that's i think that's the fit 1:05:27 fitra kicking in ultimately but he felt there was good reason to believe in god now especially now 1:05:33 and this is why the quran when it speaks of unbelief and error speaks of it in terms of 1:05:40 in other words whims or passions it's the ego and the lack of self-knowledge that puts people in a 1:05:47 position where they end up believing in complete absurdities that the subtlety of shakespeare for 1:05:53 instance is possible in a completely random universe whose existence is itself a kind of 1:05:59 bizarre impossibility but yeah we live in an age where i think it's it's theists like you 1:06:06 and me who are the skeptics because we're just skeptical of the idea that all of this order and 1:06:12 beauty and symmetry and all of those 50 or so physical constants just pop up out of the primal 1:06:19 void we're kind of a bit cynical about that and they're they're the those who have taken the leap 1:06:25 of blind faith and i think ultimately that's why monotheism in one shape or another will prevail 1:06:31 and people again when the ego is set aside and they have a contemplative dimension will recognize 1:06:36 that the beauty of islam at its forms once the kind of matamoros cry has subsided and some of the 1:06:44 veiling bad habits of the muslims are set aside um islam is is a is really trumps everything else 1:06:51 in my experience wow that's a beautiful um finale there um and uh just thank you so much sir for uh 1:07:00 your precious time and i know the viewers of whom there will be many i'm sure will 1:07:05 learn hugely from uh what you've said and um i i do recommend uh your latest book traveling home 1:07:11 essays on islam in europe it's a challenging read but um based i think on a series of electives and 1:07:18 talks on different occasions that we've given um but um there's a lot of uh many gems in there i 1:07:24 think to to ponder uh for people for those people who think i think that's a chronic expression for 1:07:30 those who reflect and think that that's the material there so um thank you so much for 1:07:35 your time sir and um i wish you well thank you for your time thank you bless you okay