The recent atrocity at al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan underscores the brutality of Israel’s settler colonial project. Our guest this week, Palestinian and Islamic activist Dr Azzam Tamimi gave us a background to the apartheid policies of the state and explained why he believes, ultimately, the severity of Israel’s brutality only serves to express its sheer failure as a project.

Professor Ovamir Anjum, the translator into English of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Madarij al-Salikin, talks to The Thinking Muslim about the great Damascene scholar’s spiritual perspectives, including the wisdom of sin, what attributes a believer should shun and acquire, the multiple stations on the route to this journey and the role of obedience to Allah for spiritual felicity.

This fascinating interview with Dr Sohail Hanif looks to uncover the secrets of Ramadan. What should the month indeed mean to believers? And what should we be striving to achieve this month? How should we treat its minutes and hours? And how do we know whether, as the hadith suggests, we have lost its blessings or gained success out of it?

Dr Imran Waheed is a consultant psychiatrist who specialises in acute mental health cases. We ask him about the mental health crisis, whether the lack of iman has a role in its prevalence and whether Islam has role in its cure. We look at consumer capitalism and sadness, the absence of community and faith and how one can build mental resilience.

Dr Jonathan Brown joins us this week to engage in an in-depth discussion about the Hadith corpus and why contemporary arguments forwarded by orientalists and modernists lack rigour. He takes us on a journey of informed exploration of some of the key personalities and thinkers of early Islam and the lengths they went through to determine the veracity of a tradition attributed to the Messenger of Allah (saw).

We speak with Ottoman historian Yakoob Ahmed about the causes behind the removal of Abdulmejid II, Ottoman decline and the impact this event had on the Muslim world.

We have spoken previously about the British Conservative government’s policy of Prevent, an extraordinary state plan to compel all public servants to monitor Muslims in their midst and report on them if they showed signs of extremism. William Shawcross, known for his anti-Islamic opinions was commissioned to lead an independent review into Prevent and suggest a way forward. We ask Dr Layla about the Shawcross review and its implications for the Muslim community.

We ask Omar Suleiman what Islam says about earthquakes and whether they are punishments from Allah? We also ask him to address the inconsistencies in some political positions towards Assad and the Syrian civil war.

We talk to former Guantanamo detainee and outreach director at CAGE International, Moazzam Begg about navigating activism without compromising one’s Islamic faith and the current state of the War on Terror.

Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, in this very personal interview addresses his life in da’wah, imparts advice to young Muslim men and covers the controversies surrounding Andrew Tate and such role models.

Joram van Klaveren understands the far-right in Europe, this is because he was one of them. As a leading member of Geert Wilder’s Dutch Freedom Party and MP in parliament, he argued for a Netherlands without Islam. This was until he decided to write a book to attack Islam, and his research ultimately led him to embrace the faith. Today he calls for Europe to reconsider its irrational hatred towards Muslims. I ask him to tell us his story, address immigration and explain how the far-right functions.

Mobeen Vaid has been at the forefront of addressing the creeping liberalisation of social attitudes of the Muslim community and how these opinions often are way out of sync with the global Muslim ummah and Islam. Mobeen’s erudite commentary has looked to counter and critique these trends and today he lectures at Mosques and community centres across the US.

Dr Layla Aitlhadj is the Director of PreventWatch. Her most recent contribution as co-author of the People’s Review of Prevent drew support from over a dozen human rights NGOs, including Amnesty International and the UN rapporteur on protecting freedoms. I ask Dr Layla to help us understand Prevent, analyse the broader impacts of this policy and draw on her extensive casework to help us visualise why Prevent is toxic within our communities.

In this interview, journalist Peter Oborne provides an insiders perspective of how Islam has been deliberately fashioned to be the ‘enemy within’. Many will find his analysis explains their lived experience since 9/11. The conversation takes us to British conservatism, King Charles’ comments on Islam and how many young Muslims are looking to leave the UK.

Imam Dawud Walid has recently published a serious contribution to the subject of manhood. He argues that the rich classical scholarly works detailing how to bring up young men have been forgotten. This sacred idea of chivalry may look out of place in modernity, but it produced well-balanced young men that combine courage with humility, strength with forgiveness and public duty with prayer. Imam Dawud Walid believes Islamic masculinity is not naturally acquired but has to come from revelation and reinforced by models of manhood within families and communities. He has recently authored a brilliant book titled, Futuwwah: and Raising Males into Sacred Manhood, a timely contribution to the topic.

Our guest this week, Professor Ovamir Anjum argues that any future reconstruction of this sacred institution has to be premised upon what he calls an Ummatics framework, an ummah-centric model. He argues that the Rashidun model was fundamentally based on the consent of the ummah, and through shura, that is, consultation, and this is how the earlier caliphs successfully built an empire unlike any other. In this interview, Muhammad Jalal asks him to spell out what it means to think in an ummatic way and elucidate on the practicalities.

In this discussion with Riaz Hasan, Harris Irfan talks candidly about how much Islamic finance depends on a capitalist riba-based architecture. He recalls his part in acquiring funding for the Makkah clock tower, a project he now regrets. This is a fascinating look at the players and motives of an industry. Harris also offers his views on Bitcoin as a more Islamic alternative above the gold standard, traditionally accepted as a stable shariah-based currency.

Is there a problem with Muslim public intellectuals and scholars that engage with the political right? My guest this week, Yayha Birt, believes that white convert scholars that interact with the likes of Jordan Peterson should evaluate whether they risk confirming their anti-Islam prejudices and a distasteful pro-white ideology that today undergirds the populist white nativist backlash.

Our guests this week, all distinguished in their fields take a deeper look at the issues arising from the revocation of abortion as a constitutional right. What exactly is the position of shari’ah regarding abortion? What did the classical scholars say about the issue and is there a difference with more modern takes? How do we appreciate the political context of the Supreme Court decision and what are the social repercussions?

The Trojan Horse affair upended education policy in the UK and gave rise to one of the most problematic policies, the prevent duty. Riaz Hasan and Muhammad Jalal caught up with Tahir Alam - the man at the centre of the scandal - to try to understand the broader motivations of the government and others hell-bent on tuning back the tide of young Muslim achievement and in the process stoking Islamophobia.