Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson did a TV programme for Middle East show casing some aspect of 'faces' of Islam across the globe :
In Malaysia he came right smack into the vociferous but often ignorant voices within 'Sisters in Islam'[ oftentimes, if one closes one's eyes and listen carefully, sounds like 'Sisters sans Islam', from the animal noise they make !....a biased personal opinion of mine and a few others, no doubt, I must concede. ]
click here
click here
click here
Hamza in France,
click here
click here
and in Spain,
click here
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Faces in Islam : Still on Happiness.........
Well , you may say Prof Hoesien Nasr and Prof Sayyid Muhammad Naguib, being pure theological academicians, may be speaking above our heads. And especially with Prof Nasr who is earning his keep in Georgetown University just may be 'woolly woolly' on the issue of religion in view of his elevated status there.
[ I am still personally confused on his stand on Periennial Philosophy for instance, despite his scholarly stature,it is to my ignorant and probably shallow understanding, that he may be unconciously and partially playing to a kufr gallery, pardon my ignorance Prof Nasr ! " I am just being naugthy. Uppermost in my mind is Prof, why cannot we call a spade a spade and put aside for once,political correctness ? Please pardon my ignorance Prof. I may just be an enlightened 'sparrow' rebutting an eagle.....to me an aberration of the original aqidah is an aberration, whatever you may choose to 'cloth' it or call it be it Red Indian philosophy, ancient Inca rites or even the Holy Trinity. It is just about calling a spade a spade. ]
Let as 'turun padang ' and listen to a bread and butter scholar, who has nothing to gain, and listen to his take on the nature of happiness in Islam, and then ponder further on our own..........
Shaykh Ninowy on 'Happiness', click here
Some magical and most powerful "mantra" to repeat, remember and commit to memory:
Hasbunallah wa ni'mal wakeel
(Al Imran , 3 : 173)
Dua Prophet Ibrahim alaihisalam
Those to whom the people said: Surely men have gathered
against you, therefore fear them, but this increased their faith,
and they said:
[Allah is sufficient for us, and He is Al Wakeel { best disposer of affairs }]
Hasbiyallahu, la ilaha illa, huwa alaihi tawakkaltu, wa huwa Rabb al- arshal -azhiim
{ Al Taubah , 9 : 129 }
[ Allah is sufficient for me, I have placed my trust in Him, He is the Lord of the Magestic Throne. ]
Friday, July 22, 2011
Faces in Islam : Prof Seyyed Hossien Nasr on The Pursuit of Happiness, An Islamic Perspective
'Pope' is dead!
'Pope' aka Prof Wan Burhanuddin, one time dean of USM School of Architecture, sufi disciple, streetwise philosopher of sort, school day rebel, self-stlyed Lingzi exponent,died yesterday after a long, very private and painful struggle with cancer.
Pope, my classmate from form four science 2, at the Malay College from 1968, lead a very colorful multifaceted life veering to the extreme left in his schooldays experimenting with all that need to be experimented in the whirling and dizzying days of the 60's and the 70's to the extreme right in the 90's and the 10's in his later day life, with Quran and tafseer oozing out like water filled to the brim ! I am already missing him.........his oft tangent comments, his sharp and witty rebuttals and above all his criticism without barbs and poison.
May his soul be amongst those accepted by The Beloved. May God be content with him.
In essence, Life, is just truly a collection of breath. If we already have used up X numbers of breath, mathematically, the number Y of what is left of it, grow less and less in actual numerical significance. This does not require the IQ of Albert Einstein or rocket science to know but we, collectively, do continue to live on in almost total heedlessness. We are just like those cows and goats in the abattoir, munching on hay and chaff 'happily' regardless of the fact that our turn is just a few very precise moment away, all already predetermined, to the precise millisecond,by the cogwheel already in motion.....
Last night,myself, my new-found relative Nadzru Azahari,CEO of Ranhill Worley and long-time classmate during my Sultan Ismail College days in the early 60's and an 'Arabist' par excellence,[ I just discovered he is also a Rao from the Mandor Diman lineage of Kelantan, 'click here' for Rao of Malaysia ], Prof Wan and Prof Zainey were supposed to 'dissect' Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuoen, Prof Nasr and Perennial/Traditional Philosophy at our 'mandi' dinner at an Arab restaurant just outside Masjid Al Falah, Taipan USJ. Our two knowledgeable professors 'politely' called back earlier to say they were not able to attend. I suspect the subject matter must be deemed too heavy. It is my bad habit to throw 'heavy stuff at these academic friends of mine!
Me and Nadzru, we ended up discussing 'Happiness' instead.
The nature of happiness is oftentimes discussed within Islamic milliue. The pursuit of happiness, however, is very much a Western and secular concept. True Muslims do not pursue 'happiness' per se as a 'station'. The wise ones from amongst us celebrate the remembrance of God in zkir, prayer and doa an in every move of our lives and in the process acheive the higher states of Contentment and Rida. 'Happiness' that comes with being in these states is just regarded as incidental 'collateral' damage !.
From the perspective of Prof Syed Muhammad Naguib al Attas, our very own home-grown philosopher, Happiness in Islam has to do very much with having the proper 'ADAB' but this would be addressed in future discussion.........
For the present, let us listen to what Prof Seyyed Hossien Nasr has to say :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8kSiNLnEQ&feature=related
The journey to God is the journey of our Qalb to free themselves from the 'naf'.
Superior freedom is not the freedom of the 'naf', but freedom from the 'naf'.
Happiness is not happiness distant from the Source of happiness but rather nearness to The Source of happiness.
Knowledge is not knowledge of created things but knowledge of the Creator.
Shaykh Mukhtar al Maghraoui,
Al Medina Institute, USA
Double PHD in Physics and Electronics Engineering.
PS :
The 'mandi' in USJ is not that great. I have yet to find an ideal 'mandi' here in KL. An ideal 'mandi' rice should not be too dry and neither should it be too wet but the 'piece de resistance' is really in the meat: the mutton should still be slightly dripping in its own juice, but again not too wet, just nicely wet. I had that some years ago in Jeddah at a friend of friend's house, Salleh al Patani. A home cooked 'mandi'.
I have been searching for that kind of'mandi' all these years. Ideal things in your mind are always illusive ! One of the pleasures of life is the search, they say.....
For a short sojourn on Prof Naguib al Attas, click here
For part 2, click here
'Pope' aka Prof Wan Burhanuddin, one time dean of USM School of Architecture, sufi disciple, streetwise philosopher of sort, school day rebel, self-stlyed Lingzi exponent,died yesterday after a long, very private and painful struggle with cancer.
Pope, my classmate from form four science 2, at the Malay College from 1968, lead a very colorful multifaceted life veering to the extreme left in his schooldays experimenting with all that need to be experimented in the whirling and dizzying days of the 60's and the 70's to the extreme right in the 90's and the 10's in his later day life, with Quran and tafseer oozing out like water filled to the brim ! I am already missing him.........his oft tangent comments, his sharp and witty rebuttals and above all his criticism without barbs and poison.
May his soul be amongst those accepted by The Beloved. May God be content with him.
In essence, Life, is just truly a collection of breath. If we already have used up X numbers of breath, mathematically, the number Y of what is left of it, grow less and less in actual numerical significance. This does not require the IQ of Albert Einstein or rocket science to know but we, collectively, do continue to live on in almost total heedlessness. We are just like those cows and goats in the abattoir, munching on hay and chaff 'happily' regardless of the fact that our turn is just a few very precise moment away, all already predetermined, to the precise millisecond,by the cogwheel already in motion.....
Last night,myself, my new-found relative Nadzru Azahari,CEO of Ranhill Worley and long-time classmate during my Sultan Ismail College days in the early 60's and an 'Arabist' par excellence,[ I just discovered he is also a Rao from the Mandor Diman lineage of Kelantan, 'click here' for Rao of Malaysia ], Prof Wan and Prof Zainey were supposed to 'dissect' Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuoen, Prof Nasr and Perennial/Traditional Philosophy at our 'mandi' dinner at an Arab restaurant just outside Masjid Al Falah, Taipan USJ. Our two knowledgeable professors 'politely' called back earlier to say they were not able to attend. I suspect the subject matter must be deemed too heavy. It is my bad habit to throw 'heavy stuff at these academic friends of mine!
Me and Nadzru, we ended up discussing 'Happiness' instead.
The nature of happiness is oftentimes discussed within Islamic milliue. The pursuit of happiness, however, is very much a Western and secular concept. True Muslims do not pursue 'happiness' per se as a 'station'. The wise ones from amongst us celebrate the remembrance of God in zkir, prayer and doa an in every move of our lives and in the process acheive the higher states of Contentment and Rida. 'Happiness' that comes with being in these states is just regarded as incidental 'collateral' damage !.
From the perspective of Prof Syed Muhammad Naguib al Attas, our very own home-grown philosopher, Happiness in Islam has to do very much with having the proper 'ADAB' but this would be addressed in future discussion.........
For the present, let us listen to what Prof Seyyed Hossien Nasr has to say :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8kSiNLnEQ&feature=related
The journey to God is the journey of our Qalb to free themselves from the 'naf'.
Superior freedom is not the freedom of the 'naf', but freedom from the 'naf'.
Happiness is not happiness distant from the Source of happiness but rather nearness to The Source of happiness.
Knowledge is not knowledge of created things but knowledge of the Creator.
Shaykh Mukhtar al Maghraoui,
Al Medina Institute, USA
Double PHD in Physics and Electronics Engineering.
PS :
The 'mandi' in USJ is not that great. I have yet to find an ideal 'mandi' here in KL. An ideal 'mandi' rice should not be too dry and neither should it be too wet but the 'piece de resistance' is really in the meat: the mutton should still be slightly dripping in its own juice, but again not too wet, just nicely wet. I had that some years ago in Jeddah at a friend of friend's house, Salleh al Patani. A home cooked 'mandi'.
I have been searching for that kind of'mandi' all these years. Ideal things in your mind are always illusive ! One of the pleasures of life is the search, they say.....
For a short sojourn on Prof Naguib al Attas, click here
For part 2, click here
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Keys To The Garden : Timothy John Winter on Rida.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN0_WD-fpEQ
Feature Interview: Tim Winter (aka Abdul Hakim Murad)
18/04/2004
University Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, England, and Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College. His research work focuses on Muslim-Christian relations, Islamic ethics and the study of the Orthodox Muslim response to extremism.
John Cleary: In this hour, we turn to Islam, as a guide to life. Our guest is a Cambridge Divinity scholar who also happens to be a Muslim.
My guest now is somebody whose life is lived in two worlds. Now he may choose to dispute that, but for most people Timothy J. Winter is a university lecturer, a graduate of Cambridge and somebody who has followed the English middle-class path to academia and success.
To many others, Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad is a religious scholar of eminence. Eminence in the Islamic community. Both of these people reside in the one body, Tim Winter, welcome to the program.
Tim Winter: Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here.
John Cleary: Do you ever feel you live in two worlds?
Tim Winter: Yes, and I enjoy it enormously. I think everybody has a complex identity nowadays, we’re all hyphenated one way or another, and I’m Anglo-Muslim, and I find that rather an interesting sort of identity to have.
John Cleary: Many Anglo-Muslims have a Muslim heritage, that is, their parents or grandparents come from an Islamic tradition; that’s not the case with you.
Tim Winter: Well British Islam is a complicated, broad sort of church, and we have perhaps towards its core, a nucleus of converts, and that goes right back to actually the 18th century; there have always been Anglo-Muslims, or Anglo-Mohammedans, as the Victorians called us, and we had census figures released just a few months ago from the 2001 census, that indicate that there’s now 63,000 converts to Islam or descendents of converts in the United Kingdom. So, we’re a small group of eccentrics, but not small to vanishing point.
John Cleary: How did you first discover this community which you’re now so much a part of?
Tim Winter: Well I went into the religion through a rather dry and bookish route I suppose, through comparing various philosophies and theologies, and I suspect that I never met a proper practising Muslim before I actually decided to take the plunge. So it was very much principles first and then the realities of the community after.
John Cleary: Well let’s talk about those principles for a moment, because you grew up in a society, a culture that’s steeped in Christian values. Now whether or not they’re practiced is a different question, but the value system was still there and evident before you. Christianity recommends itself to millions, Islam recommends itself to millions. What were the critical elements in the choice? First the rejection of Christianity, and then the acceptance of Islam, or did it happen the other way around?
Tim Winter: Well my own background is Norfolk non-conformist, we were Congregationalist ministers in various small chapels, and temperance folk as well. My grandfather was from the last generation that took the pledge, and he never touched the demon drink until the day he died. And one ingredient in that sort of dissent was a certain hesitation about the doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps a certain Anglo Saxon pragmatism could never quite get its mind around the intricacies of at least the classical definitions of three in one.
John Cleary: There’s a very strong history of that in British dissent too, it led to the Unitarians and other groups over the years, so it’s got a strong hold on the British imagination, that dissenting tradition, particularly on such doctrines.
Tim Winter: Yes, I’m from Cambridge, and Newton is perhaps Cambridge’s most famous product, and Newton was at least a closet Unitarian, and many other people in the 17th and 18th century privately harboured serious reservations about whether Christ and the Bible had actually taught anything resembling the later doctrine of the Trinity, and whether it actually made sense to solid, no-nonsense, English pragmatists. So I come very much out of that tradition, although I ended up in a direction rather different from the one that they would have favoured.
John Cleary: Then take us through that path.
Tim Winter: Well it was I suppose the usual earnest late-night coffee-drinking teenage angst talking about the meaning of life, and trying to figure out where I was, what I was heading for. And this was the ‘70s, the tail end of the sort of hippy trail to India. People were still experimenting with sort of oriental, exotic alternatives to solid, middle-class, tedious, worthy, Christendom. But I ended up not in the subcontinent or the Far East, as most of my generation did, but actually in the Middle East, because I felt that to switch to something so radically different as a traditional Indian religion, or Zen Buddhism, would have represented too much of a tearing, too much of a ripping out of my soul, of some of the stories that were there from my childhood, and were really part of who I was. I didn’t really want to be anything strange or exotic, I wasn’t looking for an alternative identity, but rather for a way of continuing in some way with what I already knew, and the person of Jesus was very much central to that, sort of unbesmirchable, great hero of the West’s religious history. But at the same time, squaring my conscience with the core doctrines, and it came to a point where I really could no longer recite the Creed in church and accept the doctrines of incarnation, atonement, and Trinity.
John Cleary: They seemed unreasonable?
Tim Winter: They seemed unreasonable, and also they didn’t seem to correspond very much with what historians were, certainly in the ‘70s, discerning as the original teachings and lifestyle of the historical Jesus. There’s a big crisis now in New Testament scholarship, over whether the Christ of faith is actually the same person as the Jesus of history, the great resurrected Christ that you see in the cupolas of misty Byzantine domes, staring down from on high; is that actually the same person as that amazing wandering rabbi of 1st century Palestine with his extraordinary message of reconciliation?
John Cleary: Many of those same challenges are now being presented to Christians through the Mel Gibson film ‘The Passion’, which incarnates Christ very much as a human being.
Tim Winter: Yes, I have my own problems with the Mel Gibson sort of over-technicolour version of the suffering of Christ.
John Cleary: Yes, somebody’s described it as ‘sanctified splatter’ to me.
Tim Winter: Yes. He represents a particular kind of very conservative Catholicism that exaggerates the passion beyond the mediaeval position. If you look at mediaeval portrayals, particularly the Eastern tradition of the passion, it’s rather toned down, it’s dignified, there isn’t this sense of twisted, tortured agony, that represents I think an exaggerated, what could technically be termed a Jansenist view of original sin, and the misery of the human condition, that I think most people nowadays find rather distasteful: the idea that we’re so deeply sunk in sin and guilt and evil, that God himself has to suffer infinitely to pull us out of this mess that we’ve got ourselves in. It doesn’t speak to me, really, I find even most atheists can live reasonably decent lives. The idea that we’re sunk in a mire of despond and original sin, I think is rather a miserable under-estimation of the way that God’s actually created us. But it’s a great film.
John Cleary: which moved you away from Christianity. What then recommends Islam to you?
Tim Winter: My capacity for faith in abstract doctrines is rather limited. I’m very much a child of my time in that, and I could never really take the leap of faith required to subscribe to the indispensable Christian doctrines of Trinity, vicarious atonement.
John Cleary: And incarnation?
Tim Winter: And the incarnation, yes. And also I don’t see that it’s necessary. The Jesus that appeals to me is the Jesus of, say, the parables, particularly The Prodigal Son, who is ultimately a Jewish teacher, that the great message of the Hebrew Bible is that human being can be reconciled to God through God’s infinite power to forgive, that the prodigal returns to the father, and there’s no sign of a vicarious atonement, or the father suffering on the son’s behalf. He just forgives him and embraces him. I think that’s the highest form of monotheism for me, and I find that enshrined in Islam actually rather more accurately than at least in the developed forms of Christianity that I was brought up with.
John Cleary: You’re on Sunday Night on ABC Radio. Our guest is Timothy J. Winter, university lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge in England. He is also known as Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, a Muslim scholar of eminence throughout the Islamic world.
Tim, there’s a cultural element to all this as well. Introduce us to a little music.
Tim Winter: Well, Islam is not just a great enterprise of faith and works, but it’s produced some of the world’s great civilisations. You think visually of the great world that stretches from the Taj Mahal to the Alhambra, some of the world’s great architecture. It also has wonderful sounds as well, and the key to Islamic tonality and melody is actually the formal recitation of the Holy Qu’ran. I used to walk down a little street when I was living in Cairo in the early morning when the shopkeepers were putting out their wares, and I counted 38 shopkeepers who actually were listening to the 24-hour a day, wall-to-wall Qu’ran radio station, which sort of invested the mundanity of their lives with the fragrance of the absolute. That’s certainly my favourite sound, it was one of the things that magnetised me and brought me towards Islam, and it is the greatest of the Islamic art, the naked, unadorned, projection of the human voice into some great dome of a sacred space; that still moves me more than any other sound.
MUSIC/CHANTING
Tim Winter: But of course we have other traditions as well. We have great traditions of singing the praises of God and of the blessed prophet, in an almost infinite variety of modes. The African Islamic sound is very different from the Bosnian Islamic sound, the Turkish Islamic sound, the Uzbeks, the Malays, Islam is not just one civilisation, but a huge range of civilisations, which all have their own particular way of being Muslim, as it were metaphorically facing the same direction of prayer in Mecca, but from often quite different directions. It’s a diverse world.
John Cleary: Well let’s hear one of your favourites, from Turkish music.
MUSIC/CHANTING
John Cleary: You’re on Sunday Night on ABC Radio around Australia; John Cleary with you. My guest is Timothy Winter, lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. He is also a committed Muslim; as Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, he has produced a number of works on Islam and the faith, from the perspective of a believer. Tim, let us for a moment talk about some of the issues which confront us today. Writers have spoken of the clash of civilisations; you have the Huntington thesis and other things. To what extent do events such as those unfolding in Iraq influence the Muslim world as a body, that is the world of faith, to say Look, there is really a subtle clash of civilisations going on here beneath the surface. And I guess I ask it for two groups of people: one, the ordinary Muslims as they go to the mosque each week, but also the Islamic scholars and the range of people who seriously think about Islam.
Tim Winter: Well there’s certainly a clash regrettably, between the zealots on both sides, the Christian Fundamentalists in the Pentagon rattling their swords against the evil, Saracenic East, and reciprocated by Muslim zealots and Fundamentalists who are convinced that the Pentagon represents all America and the West can possibly be, and is just a negative force of domination and contempt. But I think the only positive aspect of the current standoff is that I travel a lot in the Muslim world, and in the West, and my sense is that the mainstream of the two religions actually don’t regard each other with enmity that I suppose they did in the past. Just last week I was in Washington with the Archbishop of Canterbury and a group of Muslim scholars and a group of Christian scholars, and we were actually amazed and reassured by the extent to which we’d agree, not just humanly in a sort of courteous level of interaction and shared faith, although obviously there are sharp doctrinal differences between the two religions, but also on political matters. The previous time our group met was in Qatar this time last year at the height of the war in Iraq. It was a very tense time, and the hotel where we were staying, 80 of the rooms were occupied just by the CNN team, and we were very much operating against that backdrop of a failure of communication between two parts of the world. But all of the Christian clergy and all of the Moslem clerics present were really united in their opposition to the war on Iraq. The Archbishop of Canterbury had spoken against it previously, the Vatican whose spokesman was there, had spoken against it, so the main stream clergy on both sides, actually I think view the world in rather convergent, similar ways. It’s the radicals and the zealots on both sides that unfortunately are the focus of attention for the mass media, who are really responsible for this very tragic and I think rather threatening polarisation.
John Cleary: One of the elements of the polarisation that’s pushed even in semi-serious Christian circles is a theological issue, and that is the critique that ultimately Islam in the way it is taught, in the majority of places, has at its heart, a notion of theocracy, which is fundamentally incompatible, and I use ‘fundamentally’ quite deliberately there, incompatible with any notion of secular pluralism.
Tim Winter: Well clearly, religion in any traditional sense is going to adopt a position of prophetic criticism of the structures of liberal consumer society. There are many aspects of the modern world and globalisation, the degradation of the environment, the control exercised over the planet by the corporations, media moguls etc., that I think people in all religions really want to criticise very sharply, and Islam is certainly not different in that respect. The issue of religion and politics, you have to remember that before say the 18th century, all religious assumed that the two were two ways of expressing the same thing, that the head of the church was the head of the State, and in Christendom, as in the Islamic world, the two were very much elided. But the Muslim tradition is actually to keep the institutions of religion very separate from the institutions of State. The men of the sword are not the men of the pen, to use the traditional language. In the Ottoman Empire the traditional Moghul Empire and elsewhere, while the Sultan, the Caliph claimed some kind of general aura of religious legitimacy, he didn’t legislate, and he had no control over religion. And religion had no formal control over him. What’s happening in modern fundamentalism, is that the tradition Sultan or Caliph figure is being abolished, because the Royal Family has become too decadent, as in the case of pre-revolutionary Iran, for instance, and the ‘clergy’ think that it’s their responsibility now really for the first time in Islamic history, to step into the vacuum and try and put things right. So what we’re seeing now, the sort of theocratic model, the Islamic republican model in many parts of the Islamic world, is something that’s radically new and doesn’t really represent our traditions.
John Cleary: Some people have also compared it to the Cromwellian period in British history, that is once one overturns one mode of government, one necessarily goes through a sort of theological Puritanism in order to sort things out, but Cromwell didn’t last all that long in England and his legacy is regarded as very mixed.
Tim Winter: Yes, I think that’s an interesting precedent. The Anglo Saxon world has, as it were, worked through the experiment of religiously zealous government, and found that it didn’t particularly deliver even religiously. One of the consequences of Cromwell’s period was the unleashing of a long tradition of English scepticism about religion, that it had behaved so badly when in power because of its well-meaning desire to drag everybody into heaven by the scruff of their necks, that many people reacted in the normal human way, by wanting to run away from religion. If you force it down people’s throats, then the danger is many of them will want to vomit it up again. And we’re seeing that in many parts of the Islamic world. If you look at the Iranian experience, after 25 years of Islamic rule, their Ministry of Religious Guidance recently published figures that show that only 3% of Iranians now attend Friday prayers. Before the revolution, it was almost 50%. So what kind of Islamic reformation and revival has that actually delivered? Religion is now identified with a kind of prison, the pan-optican idea of the man at the centre of the State looking at everybody, Calvin’s city of glass, nobody being able to misbehave in a way that annoys the clerics or the mullahs without calling down on them, not just the sanction of heaven, but the repressive capacities of the modern corporate State. So I think that there’s a dawning awareness in the Islamic world that the totalitarian model of Islamic government doesn’t actually deliver, even on its own terms, and it may well be that many Muslim countries have to work through that experience by themselves, that the West should actually let the Algerians, the Egyptians, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis and other people, experiment with the model that many of the people clearly want, and after 20 years perhaps they’ll come down to earth and they’ll see that perhaps there’s a more convivial, more sort of compromising, more real politik style of integrating religion with politics that’s more open to the outside world and ultimately more humane. But it may take a long time.
John Cleary: A recent success, surprising to many, particularly in Australia, given the testy relationship the government of this country has with Malaysia: the recent elections in Malaysia have seen a triumph of the middle-classes, which many people say is the cornerstone to success of any democracy, and belief will soon be subsumed by the good life of the middle classes.
Tim Winter: That’s possibly the case, yes. It may well be that in our consumerist world a totalitarian political order that can’t deliver economically will eventually be superseded. But to do that you have to have a middle-class, as you suggest, with substantial spending power, and given the demographic profile of many Muslim countries, or many Third World countries at the moment, the societies are bottom-heavy, that is to say that the peasantry, the urban proletariat, have very large families, and the middle-class, where it exists in recognisable form, is actually a very small sliver, stratum of the population, and not really enough to deliver the kind of Malaysian model that certainly under Badawi many people in this part of the world were regarding as really rather a positive way forward.
John Cleary: Let’s have a little more music now, Tim, and then I’d like to come back and talk about your life in the Islamic community.
MUSIC
John Cleary: ‘Sut el Islam’, the music of Islam, a contemplative tune from an album of authentic Arabia, the Islamic world, that’s a Sonaton authentic series recording, on Sunday Night.
How does your life as a Muslim unfold itself, Tim, during the week, how are you seen in the community? You’re seen as a scholar in your own right. How does this play out? Is the role of the scholar purely intellectual, or does it have faith and devotional aspects to it as well?
Tim Winter: Well I teach in a divinity school, and most of my colleagues, after giving their lectures, discreetly slip on the dog-collar and go off and thunder from the pulpit in Cambridge parish churches. In a sense, I’m in the same mould, and I find that actually rather stimulating, because I do want to teach and write and expound my scholarship in a way that serves ultimately the glory of God. I take it that that’s the best way of being objective.
John Cleary: And touches the people in the pews as well.
Tim Winter: Well I’m not allowed religiously to touch my students, I have to explain Islam or world religions or the philosophy of religion, a course that I also teach, in ways that are accessible to the wider secular academic world, because that’s the rules by which one has to play, and I think it’s quite bracing and helpful that you can’t take anything on trust, everything has to be proven from the word go. But then of course, I slip off Friday lunchtimes after my last seminar, and wind on my turban and mount the pulpit in the Cambridge mosque and thunder from the pulpit there, to a very diverse congregation, really couldn’t be further removed from the kind of rather languid, apathetic, middle-class English students that I teach in the morning.
John Cleary: There’s a sense in which though each influences the other. I mean the way one responds to an audience in the mosque, to a congregation, actually begins to crystallise the way one’s thoughts academically, I mean life influences art, in the broadest sense.
Tim Winter: Yes, I think particularly in a modern or to use the trendy term, post-modern academic environment, to think that one has to separate the two worlds absolutely, the world of faith and piety and quoting from the Scriptures, and on the hand the world of being philosophical and scientifically objective on the other. That’s not really necessary any longer; nobody expects it. We have different definitions of objectivity now. But in a divinity school where I work, where I find my mainly Christian but also Jewish colleagues actually very convivial and interested into entering into conversations with other faith traditions, I find that there’s a kind of half-way house between the academic objectivity and thundering from the pulpit, that we get together regularly to look at related issues in each other’s scriptures, so because we have great linguists amongst my colleagues, the Hebrew Bible about Abraham, St Paul in Greek, about Abraham, and then the Qu’ran about Abraham, and at quite a high level we’re able to share insights and compare and contrast. And it’s interesting to see how a kind of fellowship, that’s actually a sort of religious fellowship, can develop in an academic milieu that actually crosses the religious boundaries. So while one remains, as it were, vertically part of one’s own denomination, there’s a kind of horizontal way in which one can be in fellowship with people from very different religious traditions, because we share the same kind of academic method of looking at your heritage. So I find it a rather interesting overlap zone in which to work.
John Cleary: On the streets in Europe, religion is becoming an issue. We’ve had France recently take a recourse to their ancient republican heritage and say Look, all religious symbols are out, we just can’t afford to play the game this way. Now one can understand from the position of an intellectual heritage why France would take that line; a similar line is not being taken in Britain and in other countries, as yet. But nevertheless there is a real problem which the French are genuinely trying to come to terms with, and it’s a problem for pluralism. That is, how does one genuinely honour pluralism? Is by saying “All shall tow the same line”, or is it by saying “All shall keep their faith to themselves”? I mean this is a genuine dilemma, is it not?
Tim Winter: Yes, the French are now trying to grapple with the consequences of imposing church-State separation that was formulated at a time when religion only meant the Roman Catholic church, and was really based on a specifically anti-Catholic and anti-clerical rhetoric in the late 19th century, with the fact of a very religiously plural modern Parisian reality. So they banned the headscarf in schools, saying, We’re not specifically targeting Muslims, perish the thought, but then they find that the small Sikh community says We really have to keep our turbans on, so Lionel Jospin goes into conclave with his experts for a couple of weeks, and then they say Well you can have invisible turbans, and the Sikhs say What do you mean exactly? And they go silent for a couple of weeks and then they say, Hairnets, and we’ll give you the model of the Sikh hairnet in the schools, and that becomes absurd. And then the Assyrian community in Paris that nobody had ever heard of before, pops its head above the parapet and says But our religion requires us to have big crucifixes, this has never been a problem in schools before. And so the French secular, rather narrow tight-lipped ideology, finds itself butting its head against a French demographic reality that’s become extraordinarily diverse and rich. The Germans have taken rather a different course two weeks ago: two of the German laender provinces announced that it was specifically Islam that would not be tolerated, that the headscarf would be banned, but other religious symbols would be allowed. And I think the Danes are going to go the same way. That’s a little bit easier to administer, but of course in the context of Germany, people think about the Nuremberg laws singling out the Jews, making them dress in a way that was offensive to them, and it has a rather worrying pedigree there, and with the constant growth of neo-Nazi parties in many European countries, many in the Muslim communities are becoming quite disturbed.
John Cleary: Those countries which are taking these actions are doing it in the name of trying to preserve civil society, yet the remedies you’re suggesting and others, can have perverse side effects. But nevertheless, something needs to be done?
Tim Winter: I don’t see that it needs to be done. Why shouldn’t religious communities dress any way they please in public spaces?
John Cleary: Because they’re used as political symbols, as political rallying points.
Tim Winter: That is generally not the case. I don’t think that most young girls –
John Cleary: But that’s the accusation.
Tim Winter: But I don’t think it’s the case. Most Muslim girls who choose to cover their heads in schools do so because it’s their understanding that this is pleasing to God. They don’t assume that it has any consequences for how they’re going to vote, or their political affiliations. In the Muslim world, a woman covers her head without any indication that she supports any particular political party or orientation, it’s an act of piety, rather as a traditional Catholic woman or Jewish woman will often cover her head as an act of modesty, and because it seems to be recommended in scriptures, without any idea that it’s a political statement.
John Cleary: Yes, one of the amusing historical observations of this is, if this issue were stepped back 100 years, you could not find it because Catholic and Jewish women were wearing headscarves in the same way that Muslim women are today.
Tim Winter: That’s right. I think it was a universal assumption that females should be modest and a good way of expressing their modesty and demureness was for them not to project their physical charms too conspicuously in the public domain.
John Cleary: St Paul speaks about it in the New Testament
Tim Winter: Yes, it’s a good Christian and even in my own ancestral tradition, non-conformist tradition, that women dress modestly in public. It’s universal, it’s not just Islamic.
John Cleary: There are many schools in Islam, Tim. We talk about Suni and Shi’ite as the largest, there are also individual schools within those traditions, such as the Wahabis who dominate Saudi Arabia, Sufism is a long tradition that spreads itself across all of the main categories; it’s a means of doing business, if you like. When you look at contemporary Islamic theology and politics as it’s practiced, Wahabism seems to attract particular attention, and the Wahabies in Saudi Arabia attract a particular attention because of the strong Suni tradition of the imposition of law. Wahabism has a strong juridical element to it, which seems to be imposing itself very much on the way Wahabi Muslims express themselves in life, it’s leading to terrorism.
Tim Winter: Well I think that’s going a bridge too far. I’ve lived in Saudi Arabia, I know some of the Wahabi scholars, and there are really too broad tendencies within what’s conventionally called Wahabism at the moment. One you might define as the Royal Saudi Wahabies, that is to say the regime loyalists in Saudi Arabia, who certainly speak out very courageously against terrorism; and the Mufti of Saudi Arabia spoke out against suicide bombing and 9/11, but then an uneasy relationship with them, you have the radicals, who you might call the Wahabies of Mass Destruction, who’ve incorporated more recent ideas of the ideologising of religion, and particularly incorporating ideas of originally Western radical inspiration, to do with political violence and using terrorism and targeting civilians to secure a political end. And they exist in very uneasy tension at the moment in Saudi Arabia, each claiming legitimate inheritance or the original Wahabi mantle, that the movement was launched 200 years ago in Central Saudi Arabia; and the argument is, does this mean an essentially accommodationist relationship to the West and particularly America, which is the official Royal position in Riyadh, or does it mean some kind of Cromwellian international insurrection in order to impose God’s law on earth? And so intense is this tension now in Saudi Arabia that they’ve been fighting in the streets, and there have been very serious incidents in a number of Wahabi heartland towns in North Central Saudi Arabia. Several dozen people have been killed, thousands have been incarcerated with the blessing, or at least the uneasy consent of regime scholars. So it’s certainly not fair to say that somebody who identifies himself with the teachings of Wahabism is automatically a problem in Australia or in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. But nonetheless, it’s also the case that the great majority of people who do believe in the legitimacy of terrorism to secure purportedly Islamic ends, do tend to subscribe to the rather literalist, dry, intense Wahibi theology. So there is a problem there, but you certainly shouldn’t generalise.
John Cleary: We’re looking at a Europe which is changing very rapidly. We’re looking at a Europe which is, there’s almost a re-Islamisisation of Europe. One could go back to the days of 1453, when the Spanish ruled the line, and said This far and no further, and similarly in the East up through Bosnia where we’re seeing the outcomes of many of those historic squabbles penetrating. But in another way the battle cannot be won by either side in that Turkey becomes part of the EU, and an Islamic country becomes part of the European identity. This is not something that rules and lines in the sand can change. There has to be at some point a cultural accommodation here. To what extent are intellectuals such as yourself and others, concerned that this long-term agenda is the real agenda? We actually need to come to a very sophisticated, mature, cultural accommodation here, and we need to have our sights clearly set on that, as a European idea.
Tim Winter: Well this has become one of the big lightning rods for the argument about European identity at the moment. Europe now is host, if you include Russia at any rate, to around 32-million Muslims, we’re by far the most substantial minority on the Continent, and given that Europe is largely surrounded by mainly Muslim areas, it’s likely that immigration will continue, families will continue, conversion will continue, and we’re part of Europe’s future. But I don’t like the language of there being a battle, because I travel a lot amongst the sort of mosque communities in the north of England and in parts of the Continent, in Spain, France and elsewhere, and overwhelmingly, the message that I pick up from the ordinary man in the mosque, is that they’re perfectly happy, they feel at ease with their Christian neighbours, they’re happy for Europe to retain a Christian identity, and they’d prefer that to some kind of vague secular alternative, and they do feel very much part of the European reality, although they like in certain aspects of their lives, to be separate and distinct, and there’s plenty of precedents for that, the Catholic communities, the Jewish communities, and many others. Unfortunately the media tends to focus on the sort of loudmouth radical fringe that is absolutely against any possibility of convivial life with Christian and other neighbours, but they’re really not representative. In England we have over 1,000 mosques that are officially registered and I would say maybe five or six are sort of block-headed, narrow-minded, fundamentalist establishments. Unfortunately they’re the ones that the television cameras always tend to focus on. But overwhelmingly I would say that the process of, well, Islamisation is too grand a word, but the cautious reception by Europe of substantial numbers of Muslims has been a considerable success, and in England now we have many successful Muslims in the media, we have Police Commissioners in London, we have Muslims in the armed forces, even in the SAS. A Muslim friend of mine is involved in guarding nuclear weapons in a submarine base, and we have Muslims in the House of Common s and the House of Lords. There is a mosque in the Palace of Westminster in London, there’s a mosque in the BBC. Overwhelmingly I think it’s a success story, and it’s regrettable that we assume that because Islam is said to be so different that there has to be some kind of problem. Inherently I think there isn’t a problem. The days of the Spanish Inquisition are over, Christianity clearly has become a hugely pluralistic and hospital force in the world, and Islam has a long tradition of dealing reasonably with religious difference. And I would describe it overwhelmingly as a success story. But those zealots who do exist are a problem, they are rocking the boat, they are giving us all a bad name, they are a source of guilt and contrition and confusion for us, and I think it’s probably fair to say that the Muslim leadership has not been as outspoken as it should be in condemning those people and trying to rein them in.
John Cleary: And we’re seeing examples of that of course in Britain in the last couple of weeks, Muslim leaders have spoken out against terrorism.
Tim, we’re rapidly running out of time, but let’s talk a bit about your life in the faith. What for you is the clear light of Islam, the thing that shines for you, that recommends it to you as a path that your life should honour?
Tim Winter: A simple definition of one God, ultimate reality is ultimately single, unconfused, uncomplicated, undifferentiated. That seems to me the clearest explanation for the otherwise intolerable mystery of human existence, and the diversity and richness and beauty of the world. And then a wonderful range of forms of meditation and worship by which one approaches and adores that one ultimate reality. One of the richnesses of Islam for me is that the core liturgy, the core practices of worship and of fasting and of charity, are the same everywhere, and have never changed. No well-meaning, liberal, woolly-minded reformers have said Let’s do mosque worship in a slightly different way. Let’s bring in the guitars and the trendy Imam with the winkle-picker boots and the jeans, trying to sing along with the Prophet, and update it. I go into a mosque and I know exactly what I’m going to get, a beautiful, unchanged, perfect ritual from a great age of faith, and I find that to be a unique privilege, one of the great things of being a Muslim for me, is that our core practices don’t change, and I think probably never will change. And then also the third thing is belongingness to the Abrahamic tradition. I don’t experience it as an Englishman, as something foreign. Superficially, I suppose it’s different, but at heart it’s part of the Judaeo-Christian scriptural, Middle Eastern family of faiths. I still love Jesus and Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Isaac, Ishmael, they’re all revered in the Qu’ran, they’re the great figures of my early childhood, and I still revere them to this day. So I don’t feel it’s an alienation.
John Cleary: How do you experience God? Is God then purely an intellectual abstract?
Tim Winter: One of the great mysteries of God is that the nature of God is pure compassion, and the God of compassion which is to be known by human beings, and has created the world as a diverse range of signposts, beautiful signposts pointing back to him. So wherever I look, whether it’s the beauties of the Australian outback, or the English countryside, or the deserts of the Middle East, I see the beauty of God, and that arouses in my heart a desire to return to God, to love that God, that despite his ultimate –
John Cleary: Otherness in a way.
Tim Winter: ….. Otherness, his ineffability, he can’t be described in himself, because he’s radically unlike ourselves, he’s infinite, perfect, all the things that we’re not. Nonetheless, in his compassion, he has consented to have a personal aspect, a personal face, so that we can worship, so that we can love, so that we can grow close to him and Islam has an extraordinarily rich tradition of sainthood and personal devotional poetry and prayer that certainly speaks very directly to my heart.
John Cleary: In some ways, one has to ask, it’s about the, say let’s go back to where we started, to that Trinitarian notion. In Trinitarian religions such as Christianity, the idea of the aspect of God that dwells within, the heart experience, the Holy Spirit, how is that reflected in Islam, the in-dwelling of God?
Tim Winter: Well in-dwelling, we might say very cautiously, is the nature of everything in the world, because it’s all absolutely dependent on God with every instance.
John Cleary: An eminence.
Tim Winter: There is an eminence, yes. The Qu’ran speaks of the God that’s utterly unlike ourselves, but also says God is closer to us than the jugular vein. He is with you wherever you may turn, wherever you turn, the Qu’ran says, there is the face of God. And whatever we see in terms of beauty in the world, in people’s faces, in humans, mutual compassion and love, there we discern that basic thirst that human beings have for the source of nourishment and richness and fullness that is in God. So it’s a kind of nostalgia. Religion is about awakening a nostalgia that we have for the place where we were before we were born, and the place that we hope we’ll return to after our death.
John Cleary: Tim Winter, it’s been great to have you on Sunday Night. Thanks so much for joining us.
Tim Winter: It’s been a pleasure.
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Feature Interview: Tim Winter (aka Abdul Hakim Murad)
18/04/2004
University Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, England, and Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College. His research work focuses on Muslim-Christian relations, Islamic ethics and the study of the Orthodox Muslim response to extremism.
John Cleary: In this hour, we turn to Islam, as a guide to life. Our guest is a Cambridge Divinity scholar who also happens to be a Muslim.
My guest now is somebody whose life is lived in two worlds. Now he may choose to dispute that, but for most people Timothy J. Winter is a university lecturer, a graduate of Cambridge and somebody who has followed the English middle-class path to academia and success.
To many others, Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad is a religious scholar of eminence. Eminence in the Islamic community. Both of these people reside in the one body, Tim Winter, welcome to the program.
Tim Winter: Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here.
John Cleary: Do you ever feel you live in two worlds?
Tim Winter: Yes, and I enjoy it enormously. I think everybody has a complex identity nowadays, we’re all hyphenated one way or another, and I’m Anglo-Muslim, and I find that rather an interesting sort of identity to have.
John Cleary: Many Anglo-Muslims have a Muslim heritage, that is, their parents or grandparents come from an Islamic tradition; that’s not the case with you.
Tim Winter: Well British Islam is a complicated, broad sort of church, and we have perhaps towards its core, a nucleus of converts, and that goes right back to actually the 18th century; there have always been Anglo-Muslims, or Anglo-Mohammedans, as the Victorians called us, and we had census figures released just a few months ago from the 2001 census, that indicate that there’s now 63,000 converts to Islam or descendents of converts in the United Kingdom. So, we’re a small group of eccentrics, but not small to vanishing point.
John Cleary: How did you first discover this community which you’re now so much a part of?
Tim Winter: Well I went into the religion through a rather dry and bookish route I suppose, through comparing various philosophies and theologies, and I suspect that I never met a proper practising Muslim before I actually decided to take the plunge. So it was very much principles first and then the realities of the community after.
John Cleary: Well let’s talk about those principles for a moment, because you grew up in a society, a culture that’s steeped in Christian values. Now whether or not they’re practiced is a different question, but the value system was still there and evident before you. Christianity recommends itself to millions, Islam recommends itself to millions. What were the critical elements in the choice? First the rejection of Christianity, and then the acceptance of Islam, or did it happen the other way around?
Tim Winter: Well my own background is Norfolk non-conformist, we were Congregationalist ministers in various small chapels, and temperance folk as well. My grandfather was from the last generation that took the pledge, and he never touched the demon drink until the day he died. And one ingredient in that sort of dissent was a certain hesitation about the doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps a certain Anglo Saxon pragmatism could never quite get its mind around the intricacies of at least the classical definitions of three in one.
John Cleary: There’s a very strong history of that in British dissent too, it led to the Unitarians and other groups over the years, so it’s got a strong hold on the British imagination, that dissenting tradition, particularly on such doctrines.
Tim Winter: Yes, I’m from Cambridge, and Newton is perhaps Cambridge’s most famous product, and Newton was at least a closet Unitarian, and many other people in the 17th and 18th century privately harboured serious reservations about whether Christ and the Bible had actually taught anything resembling the later doctrine of the Trinity, and whether it actually made sense to solid, no-nonsense, English pragmatists. So I come very much out of that tradition, although I ended up in a direction rather different from the one that they would have favoured.
John Cleary: Then take us through that path.
Tim Winter: Well it was I suppose the usual earnest late-night coffee-drinking teenage angst talking about the meaning of life, and trying to figure out where I was, what I was heading for. And this was the ‘70s, the tail end of the sort of hippy trail to India. People were still experimenting with sort of oriental, exotic alternatives to solid, middle-class, tedious, worthy, Christendom. But I ended up not in the subcontinent or the Far East, as most of my generation did, but actually in the Middle East, because I felt that to switch to something so radically different as a traditional Indian religion, or Zen Buddhism, would have represented too much of a tearing, too much of a ripping out of my soul, of some of the stories that were there from my childhood, and were really part of who I was. I didn’t really want to be anything strange or exotic, I wasn’t looking for an alternative identity, but rather for a way of continuing in some way with what I already knew, and the person of Jesus was very much central to that, sort of unbesmirchable, great hero of the West’s religious history. But at the same time, squaring my conscience with the core doctrines, and it came to a point where I really could no longer recite the Creed in church and accept the doctrines of incarnation, atonement, and Trinity.
John Cleary: They seemed unreasonable?
Tim Winter: They seemed unreasonable, and also they didn’t seem to correspond very much with what historians were, certainly in the ‘70s, discerning as the original teachings and lifestyle of the historical Jesus. There’s a big crisis now in New Testament scholarship, over whether the Christ of faith is actually the same person as the Jesus of history, the great resurrected Christ that you see in the cupolas of misty Byzantine domes, staring down from on high; is that actually the same person as that amazing wandering rabbi of 1st century Palestine with his extraordinary message of reconciliation?
John Cleary: Many of those same challenges are now being presented to Christians through the Mel Gibson film ‘The Passion’, which incarnates Christ very much as a human being.
Tim Winter: Yes, I have my own problems with the Mel Gibson sort of over-technicolour version of the suffering of Christ.
John Cleary: Yes, somebody’s described it as ‘sanctified splatter’ to me.
Tim Winter: Yes. He represents a particular kind of very conservative Catholicism that exaggerates the passion beyond the mediaeval position. If you look at mediaeval portrayals, particularly the Eastern tradition of the passion, it’s rather toned down, it’s dignified, there isn’t this sense of twisted, tortured agony, that represents I think an exaggerated, what could technically be termed a Jansenist view of original sin, and the misery of the human condition, that I think most people nowadays find rather distasteful: the idea that we’re so deeply sunk in sin and guilt and evil, that God himself has to suffer infinitely to pull us out of this mess that we’ve got ourselves in. It doesn’t speak to me, really, I find even most atheists can live reasonably decent lives. The idea that we’re sunk in a mire of despond and original sin, I think is rather a miserable under-estimation of the way that God’s actually created us. But it’s a great film.
John Cleary: which moved you away from Christianity. What then recommends Islam to you?
Tim Winter: My capacity for faith in abstract doctrines is rather limited. I’m very much a child of my time in that, and I could never really take the leap of faith required to subscribe to the indispensable Christian doctrines of Trinity, vicarious atonement.
John Cleary: And incarnation?
Tim Winter: And the incarnation, yes. And also I don’t see that it’s necessary. The Jesus that appeals to me is the Jesus of, say, the parables, particularly The Prodigal Son, who is ultimately a Jewish teacher, that the great message of the Hebrew Bible is that human being can be reconciled to God through God’s infinite power to forgive, that the prodigal returns to the father, and there’s no sign of a vicarious atonement, or the father suffering on the son’s behalf. He just forgives him and embraces him. I think that’s the highest form of monotheism for me, and I find that enshrined in Islam actually rather more accurately than at least in the developed forms of Christianity that I was brought up with.
John Cleary: You’re on Sunday Night on ABC Radio. Our guest is Timothy J. Winter, university lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge in England. He is also known as Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, a Muslim scholar of eminence throughout the Islamic world.
Tim, there’s a cultural element to all this as well. Introduce us to a little music.
Tim Winter: Well, Islam is not just a great enterprise of faith and works, but it’s produced some of the world’s great civilisations. You think visually of the great world that stretches from the Taj Mahal to the Alhambra, some of the world’s great architecture. It also has wonderful sounds as well, and the key to Islamic tonality and melody is actually the formal recitation of the Holy Qu’ran. I used to walk down a little street when I was living in Cairo in the early morning when the shopkeepers were putting out their wares, and I counted 38 shopkeepers who actually were listening to the 24-hour a day, wall-to-wall Qu’ran radio station, which sort of invested the mundanity of their lives with the fragrance of the absolute. That’s certainly my favourite sound, it was one of the things that magnetised me and brought me towards Islam, and it is the greatest of the Islamic art, the naked, unadorned, projection of the human voice into some great dome of a sacred space; that still moves me more than any other sound.
MUSIC/CHANTING
Tim Winter: But of course we have other traditions as well. We have great traditions of singing the praises of God and of the blessed prophet, in an almost infinite variety of modes. The African Islamic sound is very different from the Bosnian Islamic sound, the Turkish Islamic sound, the Uzbeks, the Malays, Islam is not just one civilisation, but a huge range of civilisations, which all have their own particular way of being Muslim, as it were metaphorically facing the same direction of prayer in Mecca, but from often quite different directions. It’s a diverse world.
John Cleary: Well let’s hear one of your favourites, from Turkish music.
MUSIC/CHANTING
John Cleary: You’re on Sunday Night on ABC Radio around Australia; John Cleary with you. My guest is Timothy Winter, lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. He is also a committed Muslim; as Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, he has produced a number of works on Islam and the faith, from the perspective of a believer. Tim, let us for a moment talk about some of the issues which confront us today. Writers have spoken of the clash of civilisations; you have the Huntington thesis and other things. To what extent do events such as those unfolding in Iraq influence the Muslim world as a body, that is the world of faith, to say Look, there is really a subtle clash of civilisations going on here beneath the surface. And I guess I ask it for two groups of people: one, the ordinary Muslims as they go to the mosque each week, but also the Islamic scholars and the range of people who seriously think about Islam.
Tim Winter: Well there’s certainly a clash regrettably, between the zealots on both sides, the Christian Fundamentalists in the Pentagon rattling their swords against the evil, Saracenic East, and reciprocated by Muslim zealots and Fundamentalists who are convinced that the Pentagon represents all America and the West can possibly be, and is just a negative force of domination and contempt. But I think the only positive aspect of the current standoff is that I travel a lot in the Muslim world, and in the West, and my sense is that the mainstream of the two religions actually don’t regard each other with enmity that I suppose they did in the past. Just last week I was in Washington with the Archbishop of Canterbury and a group of Muslim scholars and a group of Christian scholars, and we were actually amazed and reassured by the extent to which we’d agree, not just humanly in a sort of courteous level of interaction and shared faith, although obviously there are sharp doctrinal differences between the two religions, but also on political matters. The previous time our group met was in Qatar this time last year at the height of the war in Iraq. It was a very tense time, and the hotel where we were staying, 80 of the rooms were occupied just by the CNN team, and we were very much operating against that backdrop of a failure of communication between two parts of the world. But all of the Christian clergy and all of the Moslem clerics present were really united in their opposition to the war on Iraq. The Archbishop of Canterbury had spoken against it previously, the Vatican whose spokesman was there, had spoken against it, so the main stream clergy on both sides, actually I think view the world in rather convergent, similar ways. It’s the radicals and the zealots on both sides that unfortunately are the focus of attention for the mass media, who are really responsible for this very tragic and I think rather threatening polarisation.
John Cleary: One of the elements of the polarisation that’s pushed even in semi-serious Christian circles is a theological issue, and that is the critique that ultimately Islam in the way it is taught, in the majority of places, has at its heart, a notion of theocracy, which is fundamentally incompatible, and I use ‘fundamentally’ quite deliberately there, incompatible with any notion of secular pluralism.
Tim Winter: Well clearly, religion in any traditional sense is going to adopt a position of prophetic criticism of the structures of liberal consumer society. There are many aspects of the modern world and globalisation, the degradation of the environment, the control exercised over the planet by the corporations, media moguls etc., that I think people in all religions really want to criticise very sharply, and Islam is certainly not different in that respect. The issue of religion and politics, you have to remember that before say the 18th century, all religious assumed that the two were two ways of expressing the same thing, that the head of the church was the head of the State, and in Christendom, as in the Islamic world, the two were very much elided. But the Muslim tradition is actually to keep the institutions of religion very separate from the institutions of State. The men of the sword are not the men of the pen, to use the traditional language. In the Ottoman Empire the traditional Moghul Empire and elsewhere, while the Sultan, the Caliph claimed some kind of general aura of religious legitimacy, he didn’t legislate, and he had no control over religion. And religion had no formal control over him. What’s happening in modern fundamentalism, is that the tradition Sultan or Caliph figure is being abolished, because the Royal Family has become too decadent, as in the case of pre-revolutionary Iran, for instance, and the ‘clergy’ think that it’s their responsibility now really for the first time in Islamic history, to step into the vacuum and try and put things right. So what we’re seeing now, the sort of theocratic model, the Islamic republican model in many parts of the Islamic world, is something that’s radically new and doesn’t really represent our traditions.
John Cleary: Some people have also compared it to the Cromwellian period in British history, that is once one overturns one mode of government, one necessarily goes through a sort of theological Puritanism in order to sort things out, but Cromwell didn’t last all that long in England and his legacy is regarded as very mixed.
Tim Winter: Yes, I think that’s an interesting precedent. The Anglo Saxon world has, as it were, worked through the experiment of religiously zealous government, and found that it didn’t particularly deliver even religiously. One of the consequences of Cromwell’s period was the unleashing of a long tradition of English scepticism about religion, that it had behaved so badly when in power because of its well-meaning desire to drag everybody into heaven by the scruff of their necks, that many people reacted in the normal human way, by wanting to run away from religion. If you force it down people’s throats, then the danger is many of them will want to vomit it up again. And we’re seeing that in many parts of the Islamic world. If you look at the Iranian experience, after 25 years of Islamic rule, their Ministry of Religious Guidance recently published figures that show that only 3% of Iranians now attend Friday prayers. Before the revolution, it was almost 50%. So what kind of Islamic reformation and revival has that actually delivered? Religion is now identified with a kind of prison, the pan-optican idea of the man at the centre of the State looking at everybody, Calvin’s city of glass, nobody being able to misbehave in a way that annoys the clerics or the mullahs without calling down on them, not just the sanction of heaven, but the repressive capacities of the modern corporate State. So I think that there’s a dawning awareness in the Islamic world that the totalitarian model of Islamic government doesn’t actually deliver, even on its own terms, and it may well be that many Muslim countries have to work through that experience by themselves, that the West should actually let the Algerians, the Egyptians, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis and other people, experiment with the model that many of the people clearly want, and after 20 years perhaps they’ll come down to earth and they’ll see that perhaps there’s a more convivial, more sort of compromising, more real politik style of integrating religion with politics that’s more open to the outside world and ultimately more humane. But it may take a long time.
John Cleary: A recent success, surprising to many, particularly in Australia, given the testy relationship the government of this country has with Malaysia: the recent elections in Malaysia have seen a triumph of the middle-classes, which many people say is the cornerstone to success of any democracy, and belief will soon be subsumed by the good life of the middle classes.
Tim Winter: That’s possibly the case, yes. It may well be that in our consumerist world a totalitarian political order that can’t deliver economically will eventually be superseded. But to do that you have to have a middle-class, as you suggest, with substantial spending power, and given the demographic profile of many Muslim countries, or many Third World countries at the moment, the societies are bottom-heavy, that is to say that the peasantry, the urban proletariat, have very large families, and the middle-class, where it exists in recognisable form, is actually a very small sliver, stratum of the population, and not really enough to deliver the kind of Malaysian model that certainly under Badawi many people in this part of the world were regarding as really rather a positive way forward.
John Cleary: Let’s have a little more music now, Tim, and then I’d like to come back and talk about your life in the Islamic community.
MUSIC
John Cleary: ‘Sut el Islam’, the music of Islam, a contemplative tune from an album of authentic Arabia, the Islamic world, that’s a Sonaton authentic series recording, on Sunday Night.
How does your life as a Muslim unfold itself, Tim, during the week, how are you seen in the community? You’re seen as a scholar in your own right. How does this play out? Is the role of the scholar purely intellectual, or does it have faith and devotional aspects to it as well?
Tim Winter: Well I teach in a divinity school, and most of my colleagues, after giving their lectures, discreetly slip on the dog-collar and go off and thunder from the pulpit in Cambridge parish churches. In a sense, I’m in the same mould, and I find that actually rather stimulating, because I do want to teach and write and expound my scholarship in a way that serves ultimately the glory of God. I take it that that’s the best way of being objective.
John Cleary: And touches the people in the pews as well.
Tim Winter: Well I’m not allowed religiously to touch my students, I have to explain Islam or world religions or the philosophy of religion, a course that I also teach, in ways that are accessible to the wider secular academic world, because that’s the rules by which one has to play, and I think it’s quite bracing and helpful that you can’t take anything on trust, everything has to be proven from the word go. But then of course, I slip off Friday lunchtimes after my last seminar, and wind on my turban and mount the pulpit in the Cambridge mosque and thunder from the pulpit there, to a very diverse congregation, really couldn’t be further removed from the kind of rather languid, apathetic, middle-class English students that I teach in the morning.
John Cleary: There’s a sense in which though each influences the other. I mean the way one responds to an audience in the mosque, to a congregation, actually begins to crystallise the way one’s thoughts academically, I mean life influences art, in the broadest sense.
Tim Winter: Yes, I think particularly in a modern or to use the trendy term, post-modern academic environment, to think that one has to separate the two worlds absolutely, the world of faith and piety and quoting from the Scriptures, and on the hand the world of being philosophical and scientifically objective on the other. That’s not really necessary any longer; nobody expects it. We have different definitions of objectivity now. But in a divinity school where I work, where I find my mainly Christian but also Jewish colleagues actually very convivial and interested into entering into conversations with other faith traditions, I find that there’s a kind of half-way house between the academic objectivity and thundering from the pulpit, that we get together regularly to look at related issues in each other’s scriptures, so because we have great linguists amongst my colleagues, the Hebrew Bible about Abraham, St Paul in Greek, about Abraham, and then the Qu’ran about Abraham, and at quite a high level we’re able to share insights and compare and contrast. And it’s interesting to see how a kind of fellowship, that’s actually a sort of religious fellowship, can develop in an academic milieu that actually crosses the religious boundaries. So while one remains, as it were, vertically part of one’s own denomination, there’s a kind of horizontal way in which one can be in fellowship with people from very different religious traditions, because we share the same kind of academic method of looking at your heritage. So I find it a rather interesting overlap zone in which to work.
John Cleary: On the streets in Europe, religion is becoming an issue. We’ve had France recently take a recourse to their ancient republican heritage and say Look, all religious symbols are out, we just can’t afford to play the game this way. Now one can understand from the position of an intellectual heritage why France would take that line; a similar line is not being taken in Britain and in other countries, as yet. But nevertheless there is a real problem which the French are genuinely trying to come to terms with, and it’s a problem for pluralism. That is, how does one genuinely honour pluralism? Is by saying “All shall tow the same line”, or is it by saying “All shall keep their faith to themselves”? I mean this is a genuine dilemma, is it not?
Tim Winter: Yes, the French are now trying to grapple with the consequences of imposing church-State separation that was formulated at a time when religion only meant the Roman Catholic church, and was really based on a specifically anti-Catholic and anti-clerical rhetoric in the late 19th century, with the fact of a very religiously plural modern Parisian reality. So they banned the headscarf in schools, saying, We’re not specifically targeting Muslims, perish the thought, but then they find that the small Sikh community says We really have to keep our turbans on, so Lionel Jospin goes into conclave with his experts for a couple of weeks, and then they say Well you can have invisible turbans, and the Sikhs say What do you mean exactly? And they go silent for a couple of weeks and then they say, Hairnets, and we’ll give you the model of the Sikh hairnet in the schools, and that becomes absurd. And then the Assyrian community in Paris that nobody had ever heard of before, pops its head above the parapet and says But our religion requires us to have big crucifixes, this has never been a problem in schools before. And so the French secular, rather narrow tight-lipped ideology, finds itself butting its head against a French demographic reality that’s become extraordinarily diverse and rich. The Germans have taken rather a different course two weeks ago: two of the German laender provinces announced that it was specifically Islam that would not be tolerated, that the headscarf would be banned, but other religious symbols would be allowed. And I think the Danes are going to go the same way. That’s a little bit easier to administer, but of course in the context of Germany, people think about the Nuremberg laws singling out the Jews, making them dress in a way that was offensive to them, and it has a rather worrying pedigree there, and with the constant growth of neo-Nazi parties in many European countries, many in the Muslim communities are becoming quite disturbed.
John Cleary: Those countries which are taking these actions are doing it in the name of trying to preserve civil society, yet the remedies you’re suggesting and others, can have perverse side effects. But nevertheless, something needs to be done?
Tim Winter: I don’t see that it needs to be done. Why shouldn’t religious communities dress any way they please in public spaces?
John Cleary: Because they’re used as political symbols, as political rallying points.
Tim Winter: That is generally not the case. I don’t think that most young girls –
John Cleary: But that’s the accusation.
Tim Winter: But I don’t think it’s the case. Most Muslim girls who choose to cover their heads in schools do so because it’s their understanding that this is pleasing to God. They don’t assume that it has any consequences for how they’re going to vote, or their political affiliations. In the Muslim world, a woman covers her head without any indication that she supports any particular political party or orientation, it’s an act of piety, rather as a traditional Catholic woman or Jewish woman will often cover her head as an act of modesty, and because it seems to be recommended in scriptures, without any idea that it’s a political statement.
John Cleary: Yes, one of the amusing historical observations of this is, if this issue were stepped back 100 years, you could not find it because Catholic and Jewish women were wearing headscarves in the same way that Muslim women are today.
Tim Winter: That’s right. I think it was a universal assumption that females should be modest and a good way of expressing their modesty and demureness was for them not to project their physical charms too conspicuously in the public domain.
John Cleary: St Paul speaks about it in the New Testament
Tim Winter: Yes, it’s a good Christian and even in my own ancestral tradition, non-conformist tradition, that women dress modestly in public. It’s universal, it’s not just Islamic.
John Cleary: There are many schools in Islam, Tim. We talk about Suni and Shi’ite as the largest, there are also individual schools within those traditions, such as the Wahabis who dominate Saudi Arabia, Sufism is a long tradition that spreads itself across all of the main categories; it’s a means of doing business, if you like. When you look at contemporary Islamic theology and politics as it’s practiced, Wahabism seems to attract particular attention, and the Wahabies in Saudi Arabia attract a particular attention because of the strong Suni tradition of the imposition of law. Wahabism has a strong juridical element to it, which seems to be imposing itself very much on the way Wahabi Muslims express themselves in life, it’s leading to terrorism.
Tim Winter: Well I think that’s going a bridge too far. I’ve lived in Saudi Arabia, I know some of the Wahabi scholars, and there are really too broad tendencies within what’s conventionally called Wahabism at the moment. One you might define as the Royal Saudi Wahabies, that is to say the regime loyalists in Saudi Arabia, who certainly speak out very courageously against terrorism; and the Mufti of Saudi Arabia spoke out against suicide bombing and 9/11, but then an uneasy relationship with them, you have the radicals, who you might call the Wahabies of Mass Destruction, who’ve incorporated more recent ideas of the ideologising of religion, and particularly incorporating ideas of originally Western radical inspiration, to do with political violence and using terrorism and targeting civilians to secure a political end. And they exist in very uneasy tension at the moment in Saudi Arabia, each claiming legitimate inheritance or the original Wahabi mantle, that the movement was launched 200 years ago in Central Saudi Arabia; and the argument is, does this mean an essentially accommodationist relationship to the West and particularly America, which is the official Royal position in Riyadh, or does it mean some kind of Cromwellian international insurrection in order to impose God’s law on earth? And so intense is this tension now in Saudi Arabia that they’ve been fighting in the streets, and there have been very serious incidents in a number of Wahabi heartland towns in North Central Saudi Arabia. Several dozen people have been killed, thousands have been incarcerated with the blessing, or at least the uneasy consent of regime scholars. So it’s certainly not fair to say that somebody who identifies himself with the teachings of Wahabism is automatically a problem in Australia or in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. But nonetheless, it’s also the case that the great majority of people who do believe in the legitimacy of terrorism to secure purportedly Islamic ends, do tend to subscribe to the rather literalist, dry, intense Wahibi theology. So there is a problem there, but you certainly shouldn’t generalise.
John Cleary: We’re looking at a Europe which is changing very rapidly. We’re looking at a Europe which is, there’s almost a re-Islamisisation of Europe. One could go back to the days of 1453, when the Spanish ruled the line, and said This far and no further, and similarly in the East up through Bosnia where we’re seeing the outcomes of many of those historic squabbles penetrating. But in another way the battle cannot be won by either side in that Turkey becomes part of the EU, and an Islamic country becomes part of the European identity. This is not something that rules and lines in the sand can change. There has to be at some point a cultural accommodation here. To what extent are intellectuals such as yourself and others, concerned that this long-term agenda is the real agenda? We actually need to come to a very sophisticated, mature, cultural accommodation here, and we need to have our sights clearly set on that, as a European idea.
Tim Winter: Well this has become one of the big lightning rods for the argument about European identity at the moment. Europe now is host, if you include Russia at any rate, to around 32-million Muslims, we’re by far the most substantial minority on the Continent, and given that Europe is largely surrounded by mainly Muslim areas, it’s likely that immigration will continue, families will continue, conversion will continue, and we’re part of Europe’s future. But I don’t like the language of there being a battle, because I travel a lot amongst the sort of mosque communities in the north of England and in parts of the Continent, in Spain, France and elsewhere, and overwhelmingly, the message that I pick up from the ordinary man in the mosque, is that they’re perfectly happy, they feel at ease with their Christian neighbours, they’re happy for Europe to retain a Christian identity, and they’d prefer that to some kind of vague secular alternative, and they do feel very much part of the European reality, although they like in certain aspects of their lives, to be separate and distinct, and there’s plenty of precedents for that, the Catholic communities, the Jewish communities, and many others. Unfortunately the media tends to focus on the sort of loudmouth radical fringe that is absolutely against any possibility of convivial life with Christian and other neighbours, but they’re really not representative. In England we have over 1,000 mosques that are officially registered and I would say maybe five or six are sort of block-headed, narrow-minded, fundamentalist establishments. Unfortunately they’re the ones that the television cameras always tend to focus on. But overwhelmingly I would say that the process of, well, Islamisation is too grand a word, but the cautious reception by Europe of substantial numbers of Muslims has been a considerable success, and in England now we have many successful Muslims in the media, we have Police Commissioners in London, we have Muslims in the armed forces, even in the SAS. A Muslim friend of mine is involved in guarding nuclear weapons in a submarine base, and we have Muslims in the House of Common s and the House of Lords. There is a mosque in the Palace of Westminster in London, there’s a mosque in the BBC. Overwhelmingly I think it’s a success story, and it’s regrettable that we assume that because Islam is said to be so different that there has to be some kind of problem. Inherently I think there isn’t a problem. The days of the Spanish Inquisition are over, Christianity clearly has become a hugely pluralistic and hospital force in the world, and Islam has a long tradition of dealing reasonably with religious difference. And I would describe it overwhelmingly as a success story. But those zealots who do exist are a problem, they are rocking the boat, they are giving us all a bad name, they are a source of guilt and contrition and confusion for us, and I think it’s probably fair to say that the Muslim leadership has not been as outspoken as it should be in condemning those people and trying to rein them in.
John Cleary: And we’re seeing examples of that of course in Britain in the last couple of weeks, Muslim leaders have spoken out against terrorism.
Tim, we’re rapidly running out of time, but let’s talk a bit about your life in the faith. What for you is the clear light of Islam, the thing that shines for you, that recommends it to you as a path that your life should honour?
Tim Winter: A simple definition of one God, ultimate reality is ultimately single, unconfused, uncomplicated, undifferentiated. That seems to me the clearest explanation for the otherwise intolerable mystery of human existence, and the diversity and richness and beauty of the world. And then a wonderful range of forms of meditation and worship by which one approaches and adores that one ultimate reality. One of the richnesses of Islam for me is that the core liturgy, the core practices of worship and of fasting and of charity, are the same everywhere, and have never changed. No well-meaning, liberal, woolly-minded reformers have said Let’s do mosque worship in a slightly different way. Let’s bring in the guitars and the trendy Imam with the winkle-picker boots and the jeans, trying to sing along with the Prophet, and update it. I go into a mosque and I know exactly what I’m going to get, a beautiful, unchanged, perfect ritual from a great age of faith, and I find that to be a unique privilege, one of the great things of being a Muslim for me, is that our core practices don’t change, and I think probably never will change. And then also the third thing is belongingness to the Abrahamic tradition. I don’t experience it as an Englishman, as something foreign. Superficially, I suppose it’s different, but at heart it’s part of the Judaeo-Christian scriptural, Middle Eastern family of faiths. I still love Jesus and Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Isaac, Ishmael, they’re all revered in the Qu’ran, they’re the great figures of my early childhood, and I still revere them to this day. So I don’t feel it’s an alienation.
John Cleary: How do you experience God? Is God then purely an intellectual abstract?
Tim Winter: One of the great mysteries of God is that the nature of God is pure compassion, and the God of compassion which is to be known by human beings, and has created the world as a diverse range of signposts, beautiful signposts pointing back to him. So wherever I look, whether it’s the beauties of the Australian outback, or the English countryside, or the deserts of the Middle East, I see the beauty of God, and that arouses in my heart a desire to return to God, to love that God, that despite his ultimate –
John Cleary: Otherness in a way.
Tim Winter: ….. Otherness, his ineffability, he can’t be described in himself, because he’s radically unlike ourselves, he’s infinite, perfect, all the things that we’re not. Nonetheless, in his compassion, he has consented to have a personal aspect, a personal face, so that we can worship, so that we can love, so that we can grow close to him and Islam has an extraordinarily rich tradition of sainthood and personal devotional poetry and prayer that certainly speaks very directly to my heart.
John Cleary: In some ways, one has to ask, it’s about the, say let’s go back to where we started, to that Trinitarian notion. In Trinitarian religions such as Christianity, the idea of the aspect of God that dwells within, the heart experience, the Holy Spirit, how is that reflected in Islam, the in-dwelling of God?
Tim Winter: Well in-dwelling, we might say very cautiously, is the nature of everything in the world, because it’s all absolutely dependent on God with every instance.
John Cleary: An eminence.
Tim Winter: There is an eminence, yes. The Qu’ran speaks of the God that’s utterly unlike ourselves, but also says God is closer to us than the jugular vein. He is with you wherever you may turn, wherever you turn, the Qu’ran says, there is the face of God. And whatever we see in terms of beauty in the world, in people’s faces, in humans, mutual compassion and love, there we discern that basic thirst that human beings have for the source of nourishment and richness and fullness that is in God. So it’s a kind of nostalgia. Religion is about awakening a nostalgia that we have for the place where we were before we were born, and the place that we hope we’ll return to after our death.
John Cleary: Tim Winter, it’s been great to have you on Sunday Night. Thanks so much for joining us.
Tim Winter: It’s been a pleasure.
Related Articles on the blog:
Redzha, click here
Redzha Revisited, click here
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Something Bright For Us To Ponder...........
Cambridge University Prof TJ Winter aka Abdal Hakim Murad, some 10 years ago in a Chicago International Mawlidil Nabi Conference reminded us Muslims not to feel despondent. Despite what has been said and bandied around the world over and over again, the future is still bright for us Muslims.
10 years on, his message is still very relevant. We do not need to apologize or feel despondent as so many within us feel we should............
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09SJeh5qGL0&NR=1
" Ya ghaliba illallah "
God alone is victorious
10 years on, his message is still very relevant. We do not need to apologize or feel despondent as so many within us feel we should............
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09SJeh5qGL0&NR=1
" Ya ghaliba illallah "
God alone is victorious
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Knowledge of The Unseen : Ramadan
Three different approach on Ramadan:
One, steeped in the sufic training of hidden and profound meanings of The Word, from the dry arid desert of Mauritania to Algeria and Morocco, Muslim revert,Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson.
The other,the rarefied academia of Oxford with a pedigree that is as 'cold as ice' as it can get, Prof Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Shaykh Hasan al Bana, martyr and founder of Ikhwanul Muslimin.
And yet the other, equally rarefied academia, as exemplified by Prof Abdal Hakim Murad aka TJ Winter, a student of Imam Al Ghazali.
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, click here
Prof Tariq Ramadan, click here
Prof Abdal Hakim Murad,aka TJ Winter, click here
I love to listen to all these learned scholars.....sweet music to my ears.
Islam is the greatest gift on earth. It is only us, given as a birthright, who failed to appreciate this greatest gift fully.
One, steeped in the sufic training of hidden and profound meanings of The Word, from the dry arid desert of Mauritania to Algeria and Morocco, Muslim revert,Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson.
The other,the rarefied academia of Oxford with a pedigree that is as 'cold as ice' as it can get, Prof Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Shaykh Hasan al Bana, martyr and founder of Ikhwanul Muslimin.
And yet the other, equally rarefied academia, as exemplified by Prof Abdal Hakim Murad aka TJ Winter, a student of Imam Al Ghazali.
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, click here
Prof Tariq Ramadan, click here
Prof Abdal Hakim Murad,aka TJ Winter, click here
I love to listen to all these learned scholars.....sweet music to my ears.
Islam is the greatest gift on earth. It is only us, given as a birthright, who failed to appreciate this greatest gift fully.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Knowledge of The Unseen : Spiritual Path to God.
I like to listen and relisten to Shaykh Mukhtar al Maghraoui. This double PHD chap from Algeria/Morocco: his voice and intonation, so much soothing; his depth of knowledge of the 'seen' and the 'unseen', phenomenal; his presentation, sublime.
He is my vision of the 'Contemporary Ulama'. Someone who is equally at home, and not overwhelmed, by 'The God particle' and The Cern particle, The String theory of the formation of the universe, as well as Mikraj and life before life, and life after life.
Just listen to him and you will come to know:
The journey to God is the journey of our Qalb to free themselves from the 'naf'.
Superior freedom is not the freedom of the 'naf', but freedom from the 'naf'.
Happiness is not happiness distant from the Source of happiness but rather nearness to The Source of happiness.
Knowledge is not knowledge of created things but knowledge of the Creator.
Shaykh Mukhtar al Maghraoui,
Al Medina Institute, USA
Double PHD in Physics and Electronics Engineering.
Part 1, click here
Part 2, click here
Part 3, click here
Part 4, click here
Part 5, click here
Part 6, click here
Final part, click here
Related article in the blog by Maghraoui
on " al qada' wal qadar "
click here
He is my vision of the 'Contemporary Ulama'. Someone who is equally at home, and not overwhelmed, by 'The God particle' and The Cern particle, The String theory of the formation of the universe, as well as Mikraj and life before life, and life after life.
Just listen to him and you will come to know:
The journey to God is the journey of our Qalb to free themselves from the 'naf'.
Superior freedom is not the freedom of the 'naf', but freedom from the 'naf'.
Happiness is not happiness distant from the Source of happiness but rather nearness to The Source of happiness.
Knowledge is not knowledge of created things but knowledge of the Creator.
Shaykh Mukhtar al Maghraoui,
Al Medina Institute, USA
Double PHD in Physics and Electronics Engineering.
Part 1, click here
Part 2, click here
Part 3, click here
Part 4, click here
Part 5, click here
Part 6, click here
Final part, click here
Related article in the blog by Maghraoui
on " al qada' wal qadar "
click here
Monday, July 11, 2011
BERSIH 2.0............
9th July, 2011
BERSIH,
Kuala Lumpur
BERSIH as seen through ALJAZERA, click here
and even The Queen of England was having a good fun at NTR. Resplendent in her ' Bersih Yellow', a class act of language without words !
click here
I have my very own small private 'altercation' with 'POWER' two days after BERSIH. Nothing spectacular.
Let us start with a YB Mat Sabu's ceramah done sometime ago probably a week or two in Teganung before BERSIH's 9th July, to put us in the right tone and mood.
click here,
..........................
Friends,
I have a confession to make here.
I was not with BERSIH on 9th July.
The internal 'boiling' building up was too much.....weeks of brainless intimidations by our men in blue with massive jams on almost all major roads leading to KL, tempers and horn blaring, polemics and name calling in the National Press etc etc. Make one wonder what band of people are advising NTR nowadays...they do not seem to be too clever ! Certainly they are losing those votes from 'fence sitters' like me and millions others.
I was in Gua Musang tending and speaking to my Gaharus on 9th July...sorry folks.
Like millions others I could not stand anymore of these nonsense. If I continue to be in KL on the 9th I would either end up 'killing someone' or most probably end up like that young boy on the utube...on the street of KL..beaten up till his leg broke. He must be famous now but at 59 I do not need to be famous. We are old newspapers.
And the best thing UTUSAN MELAYU can come up was:
" Bising2, Tapi hanya Enam Ribu "....this is the standard of our journalism. When all the road To KL were baricaded with police ready with Bren Guns and potable loos for the last 3 days !
Come 'General Election', LET US ALL VOTE all THESE BAS....DS OUT !
I wonder what goes on in the 'mind' of media numero uno like Dato' JJ or Dato' Syed of NSTP. Do they have a mind of their own ?! One might be forgiven to wonder, at some point in time ? Is there an ounce of intellectual honesty or self audit every night they go to bed ?
Nik Howk
.........................
From Dato JJ :
[ from Mediapreema Apakahnamadiadah ! ]
F..k you Sir.
Didn't I tell u to exclude me from your list? Go fly your f..king kite some place else! (No pun intended here).
My BP actually came down few notches I swear these last few weeks or so, when u promised me to take out this pacal from your email list.
Some of you clever folks can't even understand simple English.. Sigh.
Read my lips: What fools these mortals are! Sent by Maxis from my BlackBerry® smartphone
...............................
TQ Datuk
This confirm the standard of our journalism.
No wonder, on the scale of press freedom ,we are now at the same level of Myanmar and Zimbabwe.
I would not bother to ccmail my grouses to you guys if both of you are just selling chapatis or tea tarik at the corner mamak stalls. Your commission, directions, additions and editions, are heard and read by millions....in your business, and mine included, intellectual honesty is a paramount and integral virtue. We are not politicians who can bluff, and need to bluff, their way to Putrajaya !
Nik Howk
.....................................
And it confirms the standard of discourse among the pseudo-intellectuals in the country hiding behind their fat pension packages to perfect the art of cynicism and casting aspersions on others ...Good luck to u Sir. [Sent by Maxis from BlackBerry® smartphone]
Dato JJ
.......................................
Dato JJ,
I am not yet pensioned off. Just like you I am working my guts out with my bare hands and occasionaly with both feet for an honest mussel here and a mussel there.
Of course if we have a govt change come next 'Erection', you can be sure you can start enjoying your 'fat' pension rightaway. I do not think Anuar, Mat Sabu and co would need your kind of expertise.
Good luck to you Datuk and your kinds.
I am sorry you guys cannot see your profession as sacred. It is sad. very sad.
Nik Howk
.....................................
Datuk,
I propose Nik Hawk take charge of the media. Let's see how he does it. Hehehe. Budak kolet! Apa ni??
Dato' NSTP
.......................................
Dato NSTP,
In the 1st place I would certainly not accept your job....does not matter it is five figures with all the perks thrown in. Peanuts compared to the price, sacrifice and questions I would have to answer latter.Susah nak jawab to the 'CEO of the Universe' latter ,on the disparities and the summation of raised bp 's and collective heartache and anger I cause by my commission,omission and my miss'edition'.
Frankly Dato', I would rather 'jual goreng pisang tepi jalan than take your job' . I view my akhirat more important than a big fat pay check. I am not that clever by 2011standard you may say. For that matter Dato',even a cabinet or a PM's post is not worth the sacrifice and the awesome responsibility. I pity you guys actually. As our Teganung friends would say, " Setabuk pong aku tak kenang kerja mung !"
Your's is a sacred job affecting millions. You may say most time you guys have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea...our Prophet Ibrahim chose the deep blue sea and got himself 'burned'.
As you can see Dato kita 'dudok dibumi ini bukan pasal cari makan saja, pasal akhirat pun nak dijaga'. If we just take care of the stomach, what we finally get at the end of the 'tunnel' is what comes out of it.
And I do not have to tell you what it is !
Nik Howk
....................................
Doc,
Let's not go into the dunia-akhirat issue. Who are we to pass judgments on each other? "Dia ni masuk neraka, dia ni pergi syurga."
I think we are mere mortals, Mungkin orang yg cepat mengutuk org lain based on emotion to kena jawab lebih nanti. Kita semua nanti. Tengok hati masing2. Tq
[Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless]
Dato NSTP
.......................................
Dato'
I am not accusing anybody of going to hell. Far from it. If you read carefully..I am not naive. Certain jobs like yours though affect millions that one need to give serious thought on its execution. PM, Cabinet ministers, Sultans and King, 'lagi lah besar responsibility mereka. That goes with the job. Pak Mat Nyadap from Kuala Ketil or Padang Pa' Amat may just be asked about his lembu but if you are PM the questioning would be a thousand time more substantive. Allahualm but that is why I do not want to be Pm even if you give a million RM salary a month!
Your kind of job is a difficult one. A very big one indeed.
In fact in my estimation bigger than the socalled judiciary.
You press peope if you guys do your job properly could reduce executive unaccountability and excesses decades ago , etc etc and etc . You know this and I of all people cannot give a lecture on this. Press freedom is the panacea and catalyst for democracy and good governance. That is universal. You guys are very very big and important!!! You guys represent 'preventative medicine' in nation building.
As for the judiciary, they are there only after the damage is already done.
How many more decades do we have to wait until you guys grow up and mature?
No emotion involve with me, just cold facts.
Just like you, I have no love for Mat Sabu, Lim Guan Eng,Haji Hadi, Anuar or Karpal Singh.But following the antics of KJ, Nazri,Ibrahim Ali and even NTR, I am not sure they can comprehend the 'gravity' of their proffesion. [click here]
50 years on we are still grappling with the basics and having to deal with these clowns determining the National Agenda.
Of course we still have THE PRESS and THE JUDICIARY, one may say.
But our Judiciary now has been pummelled beyond comprehension.
We heard stories of big businesses and important individuals 'buying' their judges etc etc and etc.
So we are left with just the Press.
And there we are, we have to depend on you guys !
But even The Press have failed us miserably......nothing emotive about that.
Our institutions are next to non existent.
Don't tell me you are happy with the standard of governance right now!!
We are on par with Vietnam and Cambodia. Slightly better, sorry. Much better than Myanmar of course.
I have no querrel with you guys .
I am querelling with the fact that in 2011 we still have boys filling in for jobs meant for men.
Has bunallah wa ni' mal Wakeel.
Nik Howk
............................
Doc,
We are accountable by what we do, say, think, etc. And that includes insulting your fellow beings. I never did that to you.
[Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone-Celcom Mobile.]
Dato NSTP
.............................
My God Dato'
You are beginning to sound like a poodle
Substantive numero uno of NSTP
One who is supposed to catapult us into good governance and more accountability. You can do better than that.
Yours is a sacred duty to Allah, King and country.
We expect high things from you guys....or are we expecting too much?
We cannot leave all these to the politicians.
Men are by nature corrupt. Whether they are in Pakatan , PAS, or UMNO.
We need you guys to be the eyes and soul of the people.
The alternative to free and fair press is street demo! And we certainly do not need this !
May God help us !
Remember our Malay College motto :
FIAT SAPEINTIA VIRTUS [ Manliness Come Thru Wisdom ]
Wise up man.
Nik Howk
...........................
OK, My daughter from Malacca GH just emailed me just now to stop "harrasing the PRESS people, PA !". I told her I was just doing my bit for BERSIH 2.0
A fair and free press is sacrosanct to democracy and governance but,........ to please her, I will stop my ranting here with an editorial from Jakarta Post and Shaykh Hussien Yee's advisory, a perspective from a Muslim :
Editorial: Malaysia: Rich but not free
The Jakarta Post | Mon, 07/11/2011 10:20 AMA | A | A |The leaders of Malaysia are laboring under an old paradigm that says you can have development or democracy, but not both. We have news for them: You can be rich and free at the same time. Malaysians deserve both and they deserve it now — not sometime in the future.
The lengths the government went to in trying to prevent and then break up the Bersih 2.0 rally in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday shows that the nation’s leaders were still not prepared to let go — even when an increasing number of Malaysians of all races have been pressing for more freedom and justice.
The rally, defying a government ban, went down as the largest in Malaysian history. It was significant that representatives from all three major races participated.
The government vainly tried to play the race card, suggesting it was a concerted move to undermine the dominant Malay race. Earlier it suggested that the rally was a communist plot.
There was nothing subversive about the rally. It was held to demand electoral reforms ahead of the next election in 2012.
The demonstrators, who numbers were independently estimated to top 10,000, were simply trying to exercise their rights of free speech and assembly.
They may have defied the law, but they were still marching peacefully. A few clashes erupted when the police tried to break them up. When they did disperse, they did so peacefully.
The police clearly overreacted. They did not need to invoke the Internal Security Act to arrest some of the protest’s leaders before Saturday. They certainly did not need to detain more than 1,600 on the day of the demonstration.
Aspirations for freedom and democracy are universal. Governments everywhere will, sooner or later, have to make accommodations. You cannot suppress the people and deprive them of their freedom forever. You must give them their due — or else they will get it by force. The Arab Spring is a case in point.
Given its current economic strength, Malaysia is in an enviable position to allow greater freedom and democracy. It can afford to take some risks without necessarily undermining development. A few powerful people may stand to lose their economic privileges, but they should have been phased out by now.
The Bersih 2.0 rally is the clearest sign that Malaysians want freedom and justice, as well as wealth.
.......................
Some final wisdom from Shaykh Hussien Yee, click here
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An alternative viewpoint from within the family,
click here
BERSIH,
Kuala Lumpur
BERSIH as seen through ALJAZERA, click here
and even The Queen of England was having a good fun at NTR. Resplendent in her ' Bersih Yellow', a class act of language without words !
click here
I have my very own small private 'altercation' with 'POWER' two days after BERSIH. Nothing spectacular.
Let us start with a YB Mat Sabu's ceramah done sometime ago probably a week or two in Teganung before BERSIH's 9th July, to put us in the right tone and mood.
click here,
..........................
Friends,
I have a confession to make here.
I was not with BERSIH on 9th July.
The internal 'boiling' building up was too much.....weeks of brainless intimidations by our men in blue with massive jams on almost all major roads leading to KL, tempers and horn blaring, polemics and name calling in the National Press etc etc. Make one wonder what band of people are advising NTR nowadays...they do not seem to be too clever ! Certainly they are losing those votes from 'fence sitters' like me and millions others.
I was in Gua Musang tending and speaking to my Gaharus on 9th July...sorry folks.
Like millions others I could not stand anymore of these nonsense. If I continue to be in KL on the 9th I would either end up 'killing someone' or most probably end up like that young boy on the utube...on the street of KL..beaten up till his leg broke. He must be famous now but at 59 I do not need to be famous. We are old newspapers.
And the best thing UTUSAN MELAYU can come up was:
" Bising2, Tapi hanya Enam Ribu "....this is the standard of our journalism. When all the road To KL were baricaded with police ready with Bren Guns and potable loos for the last 3 days !
Come 'General Election', LET US ALL VOTE all THESE BAS....DS OUT !
I wonder what goes on in the 'mind' of media numero uno like Dato' JJ or Dato' Syed of NSTP. Do they have a mind of their own ?! One might be forgiven to wonder, at some point in time ? Is there an ounce of intellectual honesty or self audit every night they go to bed ?
Nik Howk
.........................
From Dato JJ :
[ from Mediapreema Apakahnamadiadah ! ]
F..k you Sir.
Didn't I tell u to exclude me from your list? Go fly your f..king kite some place else! (No pun intended here).
My BP actually came down few notches I swear these last few weeks or so, when u promised me to take out this pacal from your email list.
Some of you clever folks can't even understand simple English.. Sigh.
Read my lips: What fools these mortals are! Sent by Maxis from my BlackBerry® smartphone
...............................
TQ Datuk
This confirm the standard of our journalism.
No wonder, on the scale of press freedom ,we are now at the same level of Myanmar and Zimbabwe.
I would not bother to ccmail my grouses to you guys if both of you are just selling chapatis or tea tarik at the corner mamak stalls. Your commission, directions, additions and editions, are heard and read by millions....in your business, and mine included, intellectual honesty is a paramount and integral virtue. We are not politicians who can bluff, and need to bluff, their way to Putrajaya !
Nik Howk
.....................................
And it confirms the standard of discourse among the pseudo-intellectuals in the country hiding behind their fat pension packages to perfect the art of cynicism and casting aspersions on others ...Good luck to u Sir. [Sent by Maxis from BlackBerry® smartphone]
Dato JJ
.......................................
Dato JJ,
I am not yet pensioned off. Just like you I am working my guts out with my bare hands and occasionaly with both feet for an honest mussel here and a mussel there.
Of course if we have a govt change come next 'Erection', you can be sure you can start enjoying your 'fat' pension rightaway. I do not think Anuar, Mat Sabu and co would need your kind of expertise.
Good luck to you Datuk and your kinds.
I am sorry you guys cannot see your profession as sacred. It is sad. very sad.
Nik Howk
.....................................
Datuk,
I propose Nik Hawk take charge of the media. Let's see how he does it. Hehehe. Budak kolet! Apa ni??
Dato' NSTP
.......................................
Dato NSTP,
In the 1st place I would certainly not accept your job....does not matter it is five figures with all the perks thrown in. Peanuts compared to the price, sacrifice and questions I would have to answer latter.Susah nak jawab to the 'CEO of the Universe' latter ,on the disparities and the summation of raised bp 's and collective heartache and anger I cause by my commission,omission and my miss'edition'.
Frankly Dato', I would rather 'jual goreng pisang tepi jalan than take your job' . I view my akhirat more important than a big fat pay check. I am not that clever by 2011standard you may say. For that matter Dato',even a cabinet or a PM's post is not worth the sacrifice and the awesome responsibility. I pity you guys actually. As our Teganung friends would say, " Setabuk pong aku tak kenang kerja mung !"
Your's is a sacred job affecting millions. You may say most time you guys have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea...our Prophet Ibrahim chose the deep blue sea and got himself 'burned'.
As you can see Dato kita 'dudok dibumi ini bukan pasal cari makan saja, pasal akhirat pun nak dijaga'. If we just take care of the stomach, what we finally get at the end of the 'tunnel' is what comes out of it.
And I do not have to tell you what it is !
Nik Howk
....................................
Doc,
Let's not go into the dunia-akhirat issue. Who are we to pass judgments on each other? "Dia ni masuk neraka, dia ni pergi syurga."
I think we are mere mortals, Mungkin orang yg cepat mengutuk org lain based on emotion to kena jawab lebih nanti. Kita semua nanti. Tengok hati masing2. Tq
[Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless]
Dato NSTP
.......................................
Dato'
I am not accusing anybody of going to hell. Far from it. If you read carefully..I am not naive. Certain jobs like yours though affect millions that one need to give serious thought on its execution. PM, Cabinet ministers, Sultans and King, 'lagi lah besar responsibility mereka. That goes with the job. Pak Mat Nyadap from Kuala Ketil or Padang Pa' Amat may just be asked about his lembu but if you are PM the questioning would be a thousand time more substantive. Allahualm but that is why I do not want to be Pm even if you give a million RM salary a month!
Your kind of job is a difficult one. A very big one indeed.
In fact in my estimation bigger than the socalled judiciary.
You press peope if you guys do your job properly could reduce executive unaccountability and excesses decades ago , etc etc and etc . You know this and I of all people cannot give a lecture on this. Press freedom is the panacea and catalyst for democracy and good governance. That is universal. You guys are very very big and important!!! You guys represent 'preventative medicine' in nation building.
As for the judiciary, they are there only after the damage is already done.
How many more decades do we have to wait until you guys grow up and mature?
No emotion involve with me, just cold facts.
Just like you, I have no love for Mat Sabu, Lim Guan Eng,Haji Hadi, Anuar or Karpal Singh.But following the antics of KJ, Nazri,Ibrahim Ali and even NTR, I am not sure they can comprehend the 'gravity' of their proffesion. [click here]
50 years on we are still grappling with the basics and having to deal with these clowns determining the National Agenda.
Of course we still have THE PRESS and THE JUDICIARY, one may say.
But our Judiciary now has been pummelled beyond comprehension.
We heard stories of big businesses and important individuals 'buying' their judges etc etc and etc.
So we are left with just the Press.
And there we are, we have to depend on you guys !
But even The Press have failed us miserably......nothing emotive about that.
Our institutions are next to non existent.
Don't tell me you are happy with the standard of governance right now!!
We are on par with Vietnam and Cambodia. Slightly better, sorry. Much better than Myanmar of course.
I have no querrel with you guys .
I am querelling with the fact that in 2011 we still have boys filling in for jobs meant for men.
Has bunallah wa ni' mal Wakeel.
Nik Howk
............................
Doc,
We are accountable by what we do, say, think, etc. And that includes insulting your fellow beings. I never did that to you.
[Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone-Celcom Mobile.]
Dato NSTP
.............................
My God Dato'
You are beginning to sound like a poodle
Substantive numero uno of NSTP
One who is supposed to catapult us into good governance and more accountability. You can do better than that.
Yours is a sacred duty to Allah, King and country.
We expect high things from you guys....or are we expecting too much?
We cannot leave all these to the politicians.
Men are by nature corrupt. Whether they are in Pakatan , PAS, or UMNO.
We need you guys to be the eyes and soul of the people.
The alternative to free and fair press is street demo! And we certainly do not need this !
May God help us !
Remember our Malay College motto :
FIAT SAPEINTIA VIRTUS [ Manliness Come Thru Wisdom ]
Wise up man.
Nik Howk
...........................
OK, My daughter from Malacca GH just emailed me just now to stop "harrasing the PRESS people, PA !". I told her I was just doing my bit for BERSIH 2.0
A fair and free press is sacrosanct to democracy and governance but,........ to please her, I will stop my ranting here with an editorial from Jakarta Post and Shaykh Hussien Yee's advisory, a perspective from a Muslim :
Editorial: Malaysia: Rich but not free
The Jakarta Post | Mon, 07/11/2011 10:20 AMA | A | A |The leaders of Malaysia are laboring under an old paradigm that says you can have development or democracy, but not both. We have news for them: You can be rich and free at the same time. Malaysians deserve both and they deserve it now — not sometime in the future.
The lengths the government went to in trying to prevent and then break up the Bersih 2.0 rally in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday shows that the nation’s leaders were still not prepared to let go — even when an increasing number of Malaysians of all races have been pressing for more freedom and justice.
The rally, defying a government ban, went down as the largest in Malaysian history. It was significant that representatives from all three major races participated.
The government vainly tried to play the race card, suggesting it was a concerted move to undermine the dominant Malay race. Earlier it suggested that the rally was a communist plot.
There was nothing subversive about the rally. It was held to demand electoral reforms ahead of the next election in 2012.
The demonstrators, who numbers were independently estimated to top 10,000, were simply trying to exercise their rights of free speech and assembly.
They may have defied the law, but they were still marching peacefully. A few clashes erupted when the police tried to break them up. When they did disperse, they did so peacefully.
The police clearly overreacted. They did not need to invoke the Internal Security Act to arrest some of the protest’s leaders before Saturday. They certainly did not need to detain more than 1,600 on the day of the demonstration.
Aspirations for freedom and democracy are universal. Governments everywhere will, sooner or later, have to make accommodations. You cannot suppress the people and deprive them of their freedom forever. You must give them their due — or else they will get it by force. The Arab Spring is a case in point.
Given its current economic strength, Malaysia is in an enviable position to allow greater freedom and democracy. It can afford to take some risks without necessarily undermining development. A few powerful people may stand to lose their economic privileges, but they should have been phased out by now.
The Bersih 2.0 rally is the clearest sign that Malaysians want freedom and justice, as well as wealth.
.......................
Some final wisdom from Shaykh Hussien Yee, click here
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An alternative viewpoint from within the family,
click here
Friday, July 8, 2011
Knowledge of The Unseen : Yasir Qadhi on Jannatul Firdaus
I like to listen to people like Yasir Qadhi of Houston,Texas, USA; Al Margroui who originated from Sufi land of Morocco/ Algeria; and occasionally Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, a convert from Christianity reverting to Islam in his late teen in the USA and had learn about Islam from amongst all places, Mauritania, Africa. Not to leave out Shaykh Ninowy now domiciled in USA, originally from Syria and a couple other scholars like Dr Bilal Phillips who had found Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia amongst the sons and daughters of people from the diplomatic enclave ,'secular'[ an unsurprising fact of course ]. He grew up for some years in his early youth in KL. Taught English later in Saudi Arabia and had sustained 'permanent head damage' there and now in the forefront of daawah since then!
The common denominator amongst them is they all have deep knowledge plus plus on the faith AND a mastery of English, which whether we like it or not now in this 21st century , is the language of DAAWAH. You want the spirit of the faith, you need to master Arabic to get to feel the real essense of Islam, but to bring back lost 'flocks to the fold', it is back to English
There is an obvious distinct difference in the theological approach between those schooled in the Nedj peninsula namely from the Medinan/ Makkah axis and that from elsewhere. Oftentimes if you are bent on sticking to the minutiae , you may say the differences are major and irreconciliable!
But if you are really generous with yourselves and can differentiate between the trees and the forest, the differences are really small and 'branches' in nature.
In essense,all boils down to a Knowledge of The Unseen, and how far deep one would like to go into this path.In a world of meanings related to The Unseen, one can choose to take a 'literalist' approach or a 'figurative' approach. Both are right or both could be wrong, but if our 'nawaitu' are right, we are not far away from The Straight Path. LIFE IS A jOURNEY, and if we always are guided by the Quran, we are OK.
We will start with Shaykh Yasir Qadhi on this interesting journey
Jannatul Firdaus by Yasir Qadhi, click here
For related articles on the blog :
Ru, Joe, Sha and Nina,click here
Mixing the Profane and the Sublime, click here
The common denominator amongst them is they all have deep knowledge plus plus on the faith AND a mastery of English, which whether we like it or not now in this 21st century , is the language of DAAWAH. You want the spirit of the faith, you need to master Arabic to get to feel the real essense of Islam, but to bring back lost 'flocks to the fold', it is back to English
There is an obvious distinct difference in the theological approach between those schooled in the Nedj peninsula namely from the Medinan/ Makkah axis and that from elsewhere. Oftentimes if you are bent on sticking to the minutiae , you may say the differences are major and irreconciliable!
But if you are really generous with yourselves and can differentiate between the trees and the forest, the differences are really small and 'branches' in nature.
In essense,all boils down to a Knowledge of The Unseen, and how far deep one would like to go into this path.In a world of meanings related to The Unseen, one can choose to take a 'literalist' approach or a 'figurative' approach. Both are right or both could be wrong, but if our 'nawaitu' are right, we are not far away from The Straight Path. LIFE IS A jOURNEY, and if we always are guided by the Quran, we are OK.
We will start with Shaykh Yasir Qadhi on this interesting journey
Jannatul Firdaus by Yasir Qadhi, click here
For related articles on the blog :
Ru, Joe, Sha and Nina,click here
Mixing the Profane and the Sublime, click here
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
BERSIHBERSIHBERSIHBERSIHBERSIHBERSIHBERSIH
Peludah Warna
Kuasa gusar kini menggelegak murka;
warna kuning diisytihar racun terbisa.
Diragutnya baju-T segeram tenaga
dan diumum itulah busana bahaya.
Tapi, kita jahit semula perca kain,
menjadikannya panji terindah dan tulen.
Warna kuning yang teramat tenang dan syahdu
kita kembalikan damai ke dalam qalbu.
Kini cahaya mentari mungkin diramas
dan sinar kuningnya juga mungkin dicantas.
Memanglah mereka kini peludah warna
sedang menghimpun lendir kahak sebanyaknya.
Kerana nikmat amat lama berkuasa,
kuasa pun seolah menjadi hartanya.
1. 7. 11. A. SAMAD SAID
Related Articles in the blog:
Are we Malaysians ready for good governance ?,click here
ASB from 52 billion RM to 2 billion, click here
From Libya to Tok Bali, click here
1 billion RM Naval Frigate,click here
Kuasa gusar kini menggelegak murka;
warna kuning diisytihar racun terbisa.
Diragutnya baju-T segeram tenaga
dan diumum itulah busana bahaya.
Tapi, kita jahit semula perca kain,
menjadikannya panji terindah dan tulen.
Warna kuning yang teramat tenang dan syahdu
kita kembalikan damai ke dalam qalbu.
Kini cahaya mentari mungkin diramas
dan sinar kuningnya juga mungkin dicantas.
Memanglah mereka kini peludah warna
sedang menghimpun lendir kahak sebanyaknya.
Kerana nikmat amat lama berkuasa,
kuasa pun seolah menjadi hartanya.
1. 7. 11. A. SAMAD SAID
Related Articles in the blog:
Are we Malaysians ready for good governance ?,click here
ASB from 52 billion RM to 2 billion, click here
From Libya to Tok Bali, click here
1 billion RM Naval Frigate,click here
Monday, July 4, 2011
Jannatul Firdaus and Hell.........
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3SZwQwsJVM&feature=related
Ru, Sha, Joe, Yazman and Nina,
You guys may ask Papa, of the Quran's 6600 plus ayats from 114 surah, how many describe Jannah and hell.
The answer is : many and uncountable.....mostly all are allegorical or figurative[ in Arabic known as Mutashabihat ], meaning: they are beyond our comprehension and understanding. What the good shaykhs were alluding to were meant to be comprehensible to the imagination of the 7th century Arabs: Seventy two houris, gold and silver goblets, gardens with streams flowing, over hanging grapes with assortment of fruits within reach etc and etc....Nina and Shasha, do not be disheartened. Paradise is both for you as it is for Ru, Joe and Yazman. All need to work very hard for it. It is beyond our mortal comprehension. And so is Hell, mind you.We live in a four dimensional world bounded by Time, Space,Place and Person. Our description and perception of hell and heaven are limited by our senses and a narrow and myopic world view, determined by the limitations imposed on us by our very limited 'senses'. Our brains are limited by that billions of neurons and circuits. No great shake ! Only clowns, the likes of Christopher Hithens,Carl Sagan, Darwin and of late the Oxford biologist,Richard Dawkin, who thought we are 'unlimited' in our thinking. They are deluded, lost souls.
Jannatul Firdaus and Hell are there!
To us, ignorant souls, it seem a lifetime away...a very distant lifetime away from you guys perspective. Not too distant from Papa's five score and nine. In Godly terms though, Eternity, Hell and Heaven have already occured. Time and space are just God's creation. He operates beyond these realm...the Sixth dimension if you may. The Fifth dimension is the world of the 'malaikats and the jinns'.
But back to our world, life is just a collection of finite days, a summation of X- number of breaths ! To the sufis and those gifted with wisdom,Death or the end of this finite life, is just a breath away. One wise man of old noted that 'Life is just three breath. One that has just gone . The other that is not yet completed and the next which is truly not yet yours !' The next station is Life after death !.To them wise people, that is the 'real life'.
Does this all mean we just have to drop everything and only position ourselves on our sajadah and just pray!? Certainly not.
Islam is about EXCELLENCE.
Excellence in thought, words and deeds.
It means we need to find a vocation in our lives that can contribute to the total summation of human goodness....be you a plumber, a road sweeper, a train driver, a jetliner's pilot, a doctor, a farmer, an investment banker, a merchant, a king or a prime minister. Some vocations, like Papa's, are easier to do 'nawaitu' at, on a daily basis, towards goodness. Some, say a banker or pilot, would require more imagination. Some would be next to impossible, for example bartenders, futures trader, Mafia godfather and all that sort. Choose your vocations carefully so that ' contributing to goodness' can become your daily activities. A teacher , like your mom is an excellent example. A comic writer even in Papa's estimation, with the right nawaitu, is great ! Politics is Ok, in fact a fardzu if you have the talents but do not follow some overt examples like what you are seeing now...Papa would not have to name names, you guys already know.
It just mean when we leave our homes in the morning, we do it with sincerity and accountability, with the right 'nawaitu', with a dua, to contribute to human goodness....giving adequate sustainence to wife and family is goodness, providing education and a future to your offsprings is goodness, smiling and giving salam to a stranger is goodness, paying your income tax in time is goodness let alone paying your zakat fitrah and property etc and etc,....feeding the poor and the indigent is goodness....even picking a torn or broken glass on a lonely street without anyone noticing you is goodness! Yes, picking a broken glass on a desolate road with no one watching you especially would be an extreme act of 'goodness'. That is piety....You may not see HIM but He sees you.
But 'goodness' alone is not enough. The CEO and OWNER of this universe has set some minimum standards, SOP as you call it, and that in the main apart from other 'rukun',is your daily SOLAT.
It goes without saying that you guys should observe your solat. The obligatory five times a day solat to start with. Later in life, the sunat ones as well. Of course once you guys derive pleasure in this kind of private communion with HIM, you will even find waking up in the wee hours of the morning to do Tahajjud a sublime hobby. This probably will come much later in your lives, if papa were to be right, unless of course papa are blessed with genius offsprings of which papa think at present papa is not, and papa have no complaint on that issue !
Papa's SOP and ISO is much easier and precise. If you guys can join Papa for Subuh on time, you guys are already 'genius' material! The rest will subsequently fit in according to your scales of things.
On your onward journey to reach HIM of course Dua and Zikir are very useful tools. If you guys can comprehend the power of Dua and Zikir, you will find great pleasure in these two activities. Papa always believe in Time being the great healer, even in physical illnesses, and more so in the spiritual ones. With Time you guys will find out by yourselves Dua and Zikir are really great tools for healing our physical and inner pain.
And you guys may finally ask : What could empower one towards HIM ?
Solat, fasting, giving alms and sedekah, continous zikir and dua, and working for the 'goodness' of man all are easily said than done !
It has to be KNOWLEDGE. Ilm, Ilm Ilm and Ilm.
When you know HIM,nothing is impossible. We have to get to know HIM through
ILM, ILM, IlM and ILM.
Comprehend your Quran...Read the Quran with comprehension daily.Even one ayat a day will do. Start reading simple tafseer early if you can. Constancy ,rather than volume is the BIG secret.
Enhance your daily work and career thru more knowledge in your respective fields. If you are a road sweeper, a pilot or an investment banker, take a PHD in your respective field. If you are in mangement do an MBA or a DBA.........Papa always subscribe to the view that even a Quantum physicist who is entirely honest and humble with himself will be able to strengthened his relation with Allah much further thru more depth in his knowledge of his vocation.
Knowledge in the 'seen' [ BA, MA, DBA, PHD, MBBS, Accounting, Arts, Literature etc etc ] and the 'unseen' [ Fekah, Usuluddin, Tafseer, tasauf, etc etc ] must go hand in hand. There is a Malay proverb that goes like this " berkilau air di sungai, sudah tahu dia jantan betina ikan itu ! "..
We need KNOWLEDGE to find pleasure in celebrating HIM.
Allahualam.
Papa
Related Articles in the blog:
Lina Joy Revisited, click here
We have to Reexamine our Shahadah, click here
Letter to Ru, Sha, Joe and Nina, click here
An Aidil Azhar letter to an Agnostic friend, click here
Shaykh Ninowy's 'Our Purpose in Life', click here
Ru, Sha, Joe, Yazman and Nina,
You guys may ask Papa, of the Quran's 6600 plus ayats from 114 surah, how many describe Jannah and hell.
The answer is : many and uncountable.....mostly all are allegorical or figurative[ in Arabic known as Mutashabihat ], meaning: they are beyond our comprehension and understanding. What the good shaykhs were alluding to were meant to be comprehensible to the imagination of the 7th century Arabs: Seventy two houris, gold and silver goblets, gardens with streams flowing, over hanging grapes with assortment of fruits within reach etc and etc....Nina and Shasha, do not be disheartened. Paradise is both for you as it is for Ru, Joe and Yazman. All need to work very hard for it. It is beyond our mortal comprehension. And so is Hell, mind you.We live in a four dimensional world bounded by Time, Space,Place and Person. Our description and perception of hell and heaven are limited by our senses and a narrow and myopic world view, determined by the limitations imposed on us by our very limited 'senses'. Our brains are limited by that billions of neurons and circuits. No great shake ! Only clowns, the likes of Christopher Hithens,Carl Sagan, Darwin and of late the Oxford biologist,Richard Dawkin, who thought we are 'unlimited' in our thinking. They are deluded, lost souls.
Jannatul Firdaus and Hell are there!
To us, ignorant souls, it seem a lifetime away...a very distant lifetime away from you guys perspective. Not too distant from Papa's five score and nine. In Godly terms though, Eternity, Hell and Heaven have already occured. Time and space are just God's creation. He operates beyond these realm...the Sixth dimension if you may. The Fifth dimension is the world of the 'malaikats and the jinns'.
But back to our world, life is just a collection of finite days, a summation of X- number of breaths ! To the sufis and those gifted with wisdom,Death or the end of this finite life, is just a breath away. One wise man of old noted that 'Life is just three breath. One that has just gone . The other that is not yet completed and the next which is truly not yet yours !' The next station is Life after death !.To them wise people, that is the 'real life'.
Does this all mean we just have to drop everything and only position ourselves on our sajadah and just pray!? Certainly not.
Islam is about EXCELLENCE.
Excellence in thought, words and deeds.
It means we need to find a vocation in our lives that can contribute to the total summation of human goodness....be you a plumber, a road sweeper, a train driver, a jetliner's pilot, a doctor, a farmer, an investment banker, a merchant, a king or a prime minister. Some vocations, like Papa's, are easier to do 'nawaitu' at, on a daily basis, towards goodness. Some, say a banker or pilot, would require more imagination. Some would be next to impossible, for example bartenders, futures trader, Mafia godfather and all that sort. Choose your vocations carefully so that ' contributing to goodness' can become your daily activities. A teacher , like your mom is an excellent example. A comic writer even in Papa's estimation, with the right nawaitu, is great ! Politics is Ok, in fact a fardzu if you have the talents but do not follow some overt examples like what you are seeing now...Papa would not have to name names, you guys already know.
It just mean when we leave our homes in the morning, we do it with sincerity and accountability, with the right 'nawaitu', with a dua, to contribute to human goodness....giving adequate sustainence to wife and family is goodness, providing education and a future to your offsprings is goodness, smiling and giving salam to a stranger is goodness, paying your income tax in time is goodness let alone paying your zakat fitrah and property etc and etc,....feeding the poor and the indigent is goodness....even picking a torn or broken glass on a lonely street without anyone noticing you is goodness! Yes, picking a broken glass on a desolate road with no one watching you especially would be an extreme act of 'goodness'. That is piety....You may not see HIM but He sees you.
But 'goodness' alone is not enough. The CEO and OWNER of this universe has set some minimum standards, SOP as you call it, and that in the main apart from other 'rukun',is your daily SOLAT.
It goes without saying that you guys should observe your solat. The obligatory five times a day solat to start with. Later in life, the sunat ones as well. Of course once you guys derive pleasure in this kind of private communion with HIM, you will even find waking up in the wee hours of the morning to do Tahajjud a sublime hobby. This probably will come much later in your lives, if papa were to be right, unless of course papa are blessed with genius offsprings of which papa think at present papa is not, and papa have no complaint on that issue !
Papa's SOP and ISO is much easier and precise. If you guys can join Papa for Subuh on time, you guys are already 'genius' material! The rest will subsequently fit in according to your scales of things.
On your onward journey to reach HIM of course Dua and Zikir are very useful tools. If you guys can comprehend the power of Dua and Zikir, you will find great pleasure in these two activities. Papa always believe in Time being the great healer, even in physical illnesses, and more so in the spiritual ones. With Time you guys will find out by yourselves Dua and Zikir are really great tools for healing our physical and inner pain.
And you guys may finally ask : What could empower one towards HIM ?
Solat, fasting, giving alms and sedekah, continous zikir and dua, and working for the 'goodness' of man all are easily said than done !
It has to be KNOWLEDGE. Ilm, Ilm Ilm and Ilm.
When you know HIM,nothing is impossible. We have to get to know HIM through
ILM, ILM, IlM and ILM.
Comprehend your Quran...Read the Quran with comprehension daily.Even one ayat a day will do. Start reading simple tafseer early if you can. Constancy ,rather than volume is the BIG secret.
Enhance your daily work and career thru more knowledge in your respective fields. If you are a road sweeper, a pilot or an investment banker, take a PHD in your respective field. If you are in mangement do an MBA or a DBA.........Papa always subscribe to the view that even a Quantum physicist who is entirely honest and humble with himself will be able to strengthened his relation with Allah much further thru more depth in his knowledge of his vocation.
Knowledge in the 'seen' [ BA, MA, DBA, PHD, MBBS, Accounting, Arts, Literature etc etc ] and the 'unseen' [ Fekah, Usuluddin, Tafseer, tasauf, etc etc ] must go hand in hand. There is a Malay proverb that goes like this " berkilau air di sungai, sudah tahu dia jantan betina ikan itu ! "..
We need KNOWLEDGE to find pleasure in celebrating HIM.
Allahualam.
Papa
Related Articles in the blog:
Lina Joy Revisited, click here
We have to Reexamine our Shahadah, click here
Letter to Ru, Sha, Joe and Nina, click here
An Aidil Azhar letter to an Agnostic friend, click here
Shaykh Ninowy's 'Our Purpose in Life', click here
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Magna Carta; English Common Law; Life , Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness
What has Magna Carta, The English Common Law and the famous Thomas Jefferson's American Declaration of Independence to do with the Syariah ?
A lot.....if one care to look into history objectively.
Listen to Yasir Qadhi and Yasir Birjas :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p8-3nvsewA&feature=related
Once we can comprehend the true meaning of our life, time,period, age,geographical locations and our positions in this life become irrelevant.........whether one is from Timbuktu,London, New York or Makkah; road sweeper, king or billionaire; during Spain's Andalucia, now or in the future...Allah is just One. We pray and celebrate His names because we need Him. He does not need us. We are 'replaceable'.
A lot.....if one care to look into history objectively.
Listen to Yasir Qadhi and Yasir Birjas :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p8-3nvsewA&feature=related
Once we can comprehend the true meaning of our life, time,period, age,geographical locations and our positions in this life become irrelevant.........whether one is from Timbuktu,London, New York or Makkah; road sweeper, king or billionaire; during Spain's Andalucia, now or in the future...Allah is just One. We pray and celebrate His names because we need Him. He does not need us. We are 'replaceable'.
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