Ep 181. - Can Muslims Resist Modernity? with Hasan Spiker
How do Muslims deal with what looks like the comprehensive success of Western civilisation. Is it time to accept defeat, as one writer put it? Or does Islam have something to offer the world that can move us beyond this dysfunctional world. Our guest today is Hasan Spiker, he argues that modernity is not neutral. The assumption is that modernity is regarded as universal is false. He argues that modernity is Western and its embrace is a means to Western hegemony and domination. He is the author of this soon to be published work, published on the 26th November – The Unraveling of Intelligibility.
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Transcript - This is an AI generated transcript and may not reflect the actual conversation
Introduction
0:00
Islam is a transformative path like no other you're challenging the air that they breathe
0:05
yeah questioning it is very very difficult if Islam was so successful then why did we leave
0:11
all of that and embrace a western modernity we in the Muslim World mistook a marshal victory
0:19
for an intellectual Victory that's a Sufi way of thinking separating the sacred law
0:24
from the spirit Nazism liberalism just and communism they are all
0:30
they're different manifestations of the same phenomenon which is modernity it's not possible
0:36
to import liberalism elsewhere Islam won't come in and be a polite minority Gaza is the real mask off
0:44
moment how do Muslims deal with what looks like a comprehensive success of Western Civilization is
0:54
it time to accept defeat as one right to put it or does Islam have something to offer the world
1:01
that can move us Beyond this dysfunctional system Our Guest today is Hassen Spiker he argues that
1:09
modernity is Western and its Embrace is a means to Western hegemony and domination he's the author of
1:16
a soon to be published book published on the 26th of November the unraveling of intelligibility H
1:23
spum and welcome back to the thinking Muslim lovely to see you again well it's wonderful to
1:29
have you with us and I think we've got a really interesting conversation today about many topics
1:34
which I think come together and I think a lot of our Muslims and non-muslim viewers would like to
1:40
understand just how Islam gets in to the modern world uh and whether Islam can fit into the modern
1:46
world and and there's a lot of there's a lot to unpack here but there's also a lot to Define even modern world needs to definition it uh but let's start with your framework you place this topic
1:57
within a framework of disempowerment you argue that the Muslim Community are disempowered like
Muslims Disempowered?
2:03
explain that idea to me please well I think what it is is that we are profoundly disempowered by
2:10
our general belief that modernity is universal and neutral so it's not specifically Western now
2:19
of course everyone knows that it is Western in historical Genesis it took place as a result of
2:25
particular changes and crystallized in the postl post Enlightenment period perod and then you have the Industrial Revolution and then colonialism and it spreads around the world yeah but there's this
2:35
fundamental belief that somehow that particularity just like every other civilization is particular
2:41
has been transcended somehow somehow it's become Universal right you'll find in the book that there
2:47
are several authors one of them is vs nle for example who has a very famous article on the
2:52
universal civilization which he identifies with Western modernity and he says sure it was there is
2:59
a colonial past there there is this eurocentricism there is this racism and that still causes pain
3:04
but that's all in the past it became Universal at a particular point it became the the property of
3:11
all of mankind um and I think what disempowers the Muslims is this false belief that something which
3:18
is profoundly idiosyncratically Western is in fact Universal and neutral so what do I mean by say you
3:26
one might say that's a genetic fallacy who cares if it's West just because we find out where it
3:31
comes from doesn't mean that there's something wrong with it right and of course look there isn't in every way something wrong with it this is the the world that we live in the the the air we
3:40
breathe you know and as we'll find out you know as one will find out in the in the course of reading
3:46
the book and and and I'm sure we come out in our conversation today I'm not in any way advocating
3:51
bashing the west or hoping that it disappears or not partaking in in life in the west and so on
4:00
um what this empowers us is this belief that modernity is universal and neutral when modernity
4:08
developed in order to provide solutions for very idiosyncratic tensions that Afflicted Christian
4:19
civilization in Europe in the late Middle Ages and specifically the Renaissance the
4:27
Reformation that led to the emergence of what we call Early modernity yeah so when we when we talk
4:32
about modernity what are we really talking about here I mean I I would imagine that um many people
What is Modernity?
4:38
when they hear the word modernity they think the iPhone you know technology science progress AI
4:46
like how do you understand maternity yeah I'm not advocating that we all become Lites and and um to
4:53
the farm or culture communities right yeah yeah the I mean with provisos that's not quite what I'm
4:59
advocating at all so yes exactly what I was saying was leading directly onto your aggression which is what is modern there now there's a there's an ambiguity just on a very basic level in the
5:10
word modern because modern can mean at least two things for our purposes here two things one is
5:16
just the people who happen to be alive right now are modern so if they were alive in the late 19th
5:22
century they would have been modern and if they alive in the 15th century they would have been modern yeah a lot of the times when people hear you talking about modernity and their puzzled
5:29
they're like what's your problem with us being alive right now you know and that's that's really not what it is at all modernity is a specific par philosophy just like every other philosophy is so
5:41
you have the philosophy of modernity yeah it has specific commitments it's a specific ideology what
5:47
it basically means is the rejection of authority the rejection of traditional god- centered a
5:58
traditional god- centered hierarchical view of the cosmos of being right so typically in both the
6:07
Islamic world and the Christian world just to take these two examples I mean I don't want to that's enough I think for us to deal with those two very broad examples uh typically this is really a theic
6:19
understanding which is that the world is in some sense in some sense reveals the presence of God
6:28
nature reveals the presence of God you know we have in Islam the concept of the aat you know the
6:35
aat in the s in the soul in themselves rather and on the horizons these are signs these are
6:41
signs right by which we move in our heart in our intellect from the physical phenomena as we call
6:51
it today to the underlying metaphysical reality right and this idea that on those Horizons in
6:59
in our eles we acquire through the F through the you know a pure original disposition yeah
7:07
knowledge of aesthetical judgments what is the beautiful knowledge of moral judgments what is
7:14
the good and knowledge of metaphysical truths right what is the true what is true about what
7:22
is the fundamental nature of this existence now what modernity involves and again you know
7:29
I have have to kind of condense it here because it's going to it can only come out I think when we talk about the five bations yes in detail but what it basically involves is at a certain
7:40
point in European history yeah a point of Crisis was reached where it didn't seem possible to any
7:48
longer believe in that theophanic unified vision of existence and so you have several raptures very
7:57
very cataclysmic events um like the Protestant Reformation like the 30 years war that followed
8:06
in which 4 million Europeans died it's by far the largest loss of life until you you know have
8:13
the mechanized Warfare of the 20th century yes and you know suddenly Europe is is Ren in two and this
8:22
what it fundamentally involves is a rejection of the old Catholic order right and this new
8:29
focus on the individual as the ultimate Arbiter of Truth when it comes to metaphysical matters and
8:38
really the broad idea that we are cut off from the metaphysical fundamentally except through
8:44
pure faith and all we can really hope to know is the physical world and particularly in so far as
8:53
it's knowable through the scientific method and so you have the Scientific Revolution following
8:58
on very quick ly from the Protestant Revolution but we'll we'll get to that when we come to but but essentially it's a split you know obviously can be summed up as the secular split yes where
9:14
we all of our social formations our social organization our political structures our
9:20
even even our understanding of ethics and now all carried out systematically without reference to re
9:29
ation or metaphysics we have sorry but we have we have we are now self-enclosed right in this
9:37
in this world we don't need anything outside of it or Beyond it I mean husand we have a lot of non-muslims who listen to and watch our show and they will be surprised that you find that to be
Metaphysics and progress
9:47
contentious I mean in the modern world there is this assumption that we can't connect all of our
9:55
live all of our life all of our life's problems to a metaphysical uh reality we can't say that you
10:04
know there needs to be God needs to participate in our daily lives in our political Affairs in
10:11
our social Affairs in in what we call Justice in our moral understanding fine you know we may have
10:17
some moral codes that guide us but fundamentally that connection should be severed because when it
10:23
was present in Europe uh and and maybe other parts of the world it uh stifled creativity it's stifled
10:31
progress and what's your retort to that well it's definitely multifaceted I would say first
10:39
of all yes I'm arguing from a very very marginal position right and when you arguing from a very
10:46
very marginal position it's sometimes difficult to communicate what you mean to people because
10:51
you're challenging the air that they breathe yeah you're challenging it's it's like nature said we
10:57
cannot see it because it has been Victorious because this worldview of modernity has been
11:04
so triumphantly successful everywhere questioning it is very very difficult it's like questioning
11:12
something so fundamental that you've never noticed it's there before in it's well it's it's it's almost difficult to countenance now but why is this so important and in reality not a marginal
11:25
view at all well it's because everything which was B ific at and severed in the west including
11:32
this broad secular split we've been describing remained whole in the Islamic world right until
11:39
the end end being 20th century well right until it it differs depending on the place I mean there
11:45
are convenient dates one can give you know Indian Mutiny uh end of the copit uh there are various
11:53
and it's it's it's impossible to give a particular date and it's not that everything has completely disappeared sure and and of course there there there you many many uh things to discuss about
12:05
that and kind of almost Infinity of details about the precise status of that traditional worldview in the Muslim world yeah that's in in a to a large degree what the the book is
12:14
about um because many of the most passionate and committed Advocates of this Universal neutral sent
12:29
ific civilization are Muslims within Muslim countries right um and I think that is more than
12:35
anything else what the book is trying to tackle yeah but um but what I'd say is that is uh the
12:42
yes we grow up I mean speaking to the the Western interlocutor non-muslim perhaps interlocutor that
12:48
you were referring to I think it's just realizing that what we think is just the way the world is
12:57
is actually a very specific philosophical choice that we have inherited we haven't usually thought
13:03
about very much most of that stuff about well human flourishing social Mobility creativity
13:12
all that stuff it didn't exist in the medieval world most of that is Protestant propaganda which
13:17
has been very successful for hundreds of years right there are many studies and one can Google this which show definitively there was more social mobility in the Middle Ages in Europe than there
13:28
is today and there are many there there many of the assumptions that we make are simply not true
13:39
but I think that I think what we would I think where we'd get to the meat of this is when we talk about the five bations which or the severances or the splits you might say which forms the the the
13:49
main explanatory kind of means of analysis in this book yeah um I think there we'd be able to to kind
13:57
of bring out um details of exactly how it's not tenable to look at modernity as as universal and
14:05
neutral it was a choice it could well never have happened um and it was very much and it didn't
14:13
happen in outside of Europe right and why did it not happen it's because those very specific
14:19
tensions that existed quite uniquely in Europe mostly in vir of the nature of Christianity and
14:25
the absence of Islam didn't ex exist elsewhere and so it's a very much an anachronistic you know
14:33
out of proper chronology and anatopism place M phenomenon for the Muslim world to Simply
14:41
blly accept all of this uh all of these Western cultural products as if they are neutral but it
14:49
begs the question if if Islam was so successful in creating a type of society that innovated and
Islam and modernity
14:59
that had progress and that uh produced culture and civilization and science then why did we uh
15:07
leave all of that and embrace a western modernity like what's the cause behind that Embrace in the
15:16
first place beautiful question it's summed up by a quotation from by muster sub the last in Islam
15:25
in his three volume work which was written in the 50 and and is his it's a critique of modernity and
15:33
critique of Islamic modernism all sorts of amazing things he says we in the Muslim World mistook
15:41
a marshal victory for an intellectual Victory right so we assumed because we've been defeated
15:49
militarily they must have everything right it's so overwhelming this defeat it's so crushing for
15:55
our spirit it's so difficult for our pride we need to catch up we've fallen behind whereas
16:02
yes there's no doubt the Western World developed scientifically again we tend to think of science
16:14
as neutral there's a sense in which it is there's another sense in which it's absolutely not and and
16:23
this is something that we'll discuss when we get to the severance of knowing subject in nature but
16:28
what it basic basically involves is at a certain point in the mostly 17th century in the Scientific
16:37
Revolution the West turned from a view of nature decisively turned away from a from the previously
16:46
dominant view of nature which is more largely shared by the Islamic world as a theophonic
17:00
the fundamental purpose of study of the study of nature in that uh in that worldview in that
17:06
framework is to get us closer to God closer to knowledge of God right yes there is a place for
17:14
practical contrivances and Technology but it's not a central place what changes is a a shift
17:22
from the view of nature as theophanic as revealing the Divine to a view of nature as simply so much
17:29
raw material as Brad Gregory puts it awaiting the imprint of our desires right as in uh science is
17:38
about the Mastery of nature the exploitation of nature we don't care what it is we don't care
17:45
what spiritual reality it has we don't care about any of that that's all subjective that's all your belief you're welcome to it but the real world is US exploiting nature and making lots of money
17:57
right so I me that's a bit of no it's it's very useful and before we get to your fications that in
18:03
a sense I think that's the meat of your argument um how much like so we've said secularism almost
18:10
underpins modernity it's division between uh you know human life and God and we will come to that
18:19
um like would you would you place liberalism even Marxism within uh this Broad La of modernity oh
18:30
absolutely yeah yeah both of them yeah and so in a in a sense what what you're arguing and I suppose
18:36
will come to this is that Muslims have to reject these ideologies U because they're not Universal
18:44
they're very particular to a western experience in particular Western experience of religion exactly
18:50
so let's let's then talk about these bations or severances as you call them or separations
18:56
because I think that was really really fascinating so the first uh bation you talk about in your in
The 5 Bifurcations
19:02
your great book is is the division between sacred law and spirit explain that to me kids okay so
19:09
one of the most characteristic aspects of Corine Christianity right of course Paul of tarus is this
19:18
disciple of Jesus is except he's not he never met Jesus or but I'll say Jesus because we're talking
19:27
in the context of you the contemporary Christian view of everything we're discussing he never met
19:35
Jesus and he was of course a Jew who before he became a Christian was actually persecuting the
19:42
church quite avidly he was a major antagonist and enemy of the early church and on the road to
19:51
Damascus he purports to have had a vision where Jesus invited him to joined his church and he
20:01
became a Christian having had this charismatic experience this mystical experience and without
20:09
getting into too many of the details of his life he departed from the Christianity of the actual
20:15
Disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem and this is even recounted in the Acts of the Apostles in the New
20:23
Testament by wanting to bring the da as it were the the message of Christianity to the Gentiles
20:32
whereas Jesus even in the gospel says that he was only sent to the lost sheep of the children
20:37
of Israel right just as indeed the Quran says of him just as indeed Islam says of him that he was
20:43
only sent um to the the the Jewish people with his message and the key aspect of this is that
20:52
Paul said the law is abrogated we don't need to to ask new converts to follow the law it's been
21:02
abrogated by Christ crucified Christ's sacrifice where he takes away our sins and through that act
21:11
of belief in him that pure grace it's abated the law the law was this curse on us he even
21:17
uses that word because we could never live up to it we had to follow every jot and title as
21:23
in as indeed Jesus says in the gospels or every fine detail I mean that's the King James version
21:28
J and title um every fine detail of the law must be adhered to he says well that's impossible can't
21:34
even do it in principle so it's this curse the law Jesus has come to abrogate the law and the
21:39
new dispensation is pure is based on this leap of faith in Christ and this affective personal
21:46
relationship with the Christ the crucified Christ um what has this led to it's led to an inability
21:54
to understand that in Islam we have a Shar to a certain extent in Judaism but in Islam we have
22:02
the Sharia which is we understand as sanctifying it's not this kind of obsessive compulsive list
22:07
of things that we have to worry about all the time we all gosh it's something that allows us to get closer to God in every scenario in every object in every action right it's a detailed revealed law
22:21
Christianity poor land Christianity doesn't have that uh it doesn't have this understanding that
22:28
you follow a a detailed law which governs every aspect of your life right all right um and so
22:36
there's this disconnect and there's this sense not only that they don't NE need to go together the
22:41
revealed law and the spirit but they're somehow really opposed to one another really the spiritual life is exactly not adhering to a law yeah that's because this world is fundamentally self-contained
22:56
I mean I'm bringing in a little bit of Lutheran here I should probably save that to the for the to the faith and and reason split but the basic idea is God hasn't revealed a detailed uh plan for
23:10
every single action every single item is it Halal is it haram and so on um and that's not what would
23:18
save us anyway that's an outdated understanding of religion what saves us is simply that faith in
23:23
Christ crucified yeah and that is the litmus tast that is the so that is what is so serologically
23:32
think I said that right soteriology it means the the uh the Salvation the nature of Salvation what
23:42
what what brings about salvation and for them it's not adherence to a revealed law it's uh simply the
23:49
act of belief belief in in in Christ and and as with later yeah it would it's not just Christ
23:56
crucified but it's Christ when the the Incarnate God crucified so it becomes even more significant
24:05
and momentous it you know God himself and AR only comes into is it only purported to come into the
24:10
flesh once at one particular moment in history you know if you miss that you're in trouble right I
24:16
think that's really interesting so because of it is the case that we come across Muslims over time today I suppose now you're packaging it you're explaining it in the context of the supremacy
Importance of Sharia
24:26
I suppose of modernity Upon Our Lives m who argue that who almost underplay the role of sharia and
24:33
claim that the Sharia is is not really important in our lives and what is important is that of his
24:39
over overarching spiritual claims ex that a Muslim need to subscribe to exactly that's so in a sense
24:45
you're saying that that comes originally from Christianity and modernity universalizes that
24:53
way of thinking absolutely what I'm also saying is it is the first chronologically in these series of
24:59
bations so one thing leads to another right yes exactly as you say it's a very insightful point
25:05
because who are those Muslims who are say who are advocating what you're what what you're saying yeah they're the modernists right usually so that's very significant it's because of precisely
25:14
what we're discussing but but more immediately the relevance of the split between LA and spirit
25:21
is that it leads directly onto the other bations and informs them I'm going to be terribly unkind
25:27
and and and ignorant here in a way but I often hear people say no that's a Sufi way of thinking
25:33
uh separating the sacred law from the spirit um you know you we have a lot of non-muslims who
Separating sacred from spirit
25:40
may come into Islam through Sufism that's true so explain the Sufi perspective on this matter
25:46
yeah that's the exact diametrical opposite of the truth but um but you're absolutely right that is
25:52
a this is a common conception today and I suppose that's for for number of reasons I think very much
26:00
it's to do with as you said these fundamentally Christian conceptions of the of the fundamental
26:08
split between law and spirit they've got nothing to do with each other you don't need law if you've got Spirit yeah um and simply informing the modern mindset whether someone's a Muslim or a non-muslim
26:19
and then when people want to make Islam on a DA level uh more attractive to spiritually minded
26:27
Muslims they say well here you go you've got Sufism where you don't need the the law because that's the spiritual aspect if there's a spiritual if there's a mystical aspect it must be antinomian
26:36
right whereas that just doesn't follow in our context but I think that's just a basic assumption they make that if if there's a spirit if there's a mystical path it must be anomen right
26:44
you know it must be opposed to the law it's quite it's it's the total opposite of the truth um you
26:49
know the the conception in Sufism is that and so revealed law or sacred law and spiritual reality
27:03
are absolutely Inseparable and complimentary yeah you can't have one without the other without one
27:10
being incomplete and having something wrong with it um so in order to regulate and provide solid
27:19
foundations for one's one's servanthood to God which is the ultimate purpose of Sufism on one
27:25
important level yes one has to adhere one has to have that submission to the detailed law one can't just say why I'm so spiritual I don't need to pray anymore cuz I'm already seen God no that that's
27:36
part of our overa are part of our servanthood and submission to God and then the other way around a
27:42
detailed adherence to the law while forgetting that it's God that you're worshiping that's uh
27:48
that's not very good either so I think that would be the basic Sufi understanding and and
27:54
just to I know we want to go into all five of the bations but think I find it's really interesting because uh you do find that a number of non-muslims and Muslims who come back into the
Sharia vs Spiritual
28:05
faith they Embrace this version of Sufism uh to the degree as you said that they downplay the
28:11
Sharia but then they site Imam gazali for example as someone who rejected at the age of 40 or in in
28:18
the midlife he rejected the Sharia and he placed the spiritual side of his Spirit to be of a higher
28:27
value is that a misreading of there's very much a misreading of elali but I can understand how that
28:34
narrative can take c um and it's because what Imam Al gazali critiques are precisely what we
28:43
were just discussing which are the fuka or those who are well would you say the doctors of law or
28:49
those who are engage legal scholars in the most basic sense yeah legal Scholars he's critiquing
28:54
legal Scholars who have lost sight of of the spiritual reality which is the whole you the
28:59
whole Telos the whole purpose the whole underlying motivation for engaging in um a detailed study of
29:08
the Sacred law and so his critique is that because they lose sight of the spiritual reality and
29:14
what it's all for they fall into worldliness and there even though it has you know it it presents
29:21
itself as Dean and F and all this stuff it it's actually becomes worldly for them purely worldly
29:28
um and so that's really what he's critiquing but he's absolutely not opposed to the Sharia in any way and in fact he's quite to the contrary of course on every level but but incidentally he's
29:38
also one of the most important Sher scholars in in history of course one of the the four schools
29:43
of Islamic law um he he's one of the four or five most important shery Scholars of them all great uh
29:52
your second Severance or verification of modernity is the separation of tor power sacred power yeah
The second bifurcation
30:00
explain that to me J so Jesus in the gospels is supposed to have said Render unto Caesar such
30:08
things as a Caesars and Render unto God such things as a Gods now I'm not in a position to
30:15
say didam actually speak these words or not and I don't think anyone really is and we have to
30:22
suspend judgment on that and is there a legitimate way of is there a legitimate way of interpreting
30:30
that from a Muslim perspective from Islamic perspective from an authentic Islamic perspective very possibly but let's look at the actual impact that it had on subsequent Western Civilization
30:40
yeah this is fundamentally the secular principle and it plays out and gets lots of people in lots
30:47
of trouble throughout the Middle Ages lots of conflict between popes and princes and we'll mention one in just a moment and it then with lu uh with the Treaty of olsburg and the Peace
31:01
of West failure and you know the aftermath of the of the religious wars and then trying to actually
31:08
theorize about tolerance of the religious other and so so than lock and so on then it finally
31:14
crystallizes into secularism proper but what it basically means is unlike in the Islamic world
31:22
where you have a single Shere detailed law which encompasses the political which by finds Prince
31:30
and King and temporal power and the alike you simply don't have the problems that arise in the
31:41
west because of this split between temporal power and sacred power so what it basically amounts to
31:49
is the fact that you have a pope who possesses the ultimate Authority on spiritual matters
31:58
mhm and he doesn't have a detailed Shar because there isn't one he's arbitrarily The Authority
32:07
it's him what's his criteria being the pope right whatever he says that is the actual fact
32:18
of the matter when it comes to religious Doctrine spiritual reality and so on now the princeling the
32:25
prince the king is under the Pope on the spiritual level because he's a Catholic so he's under the
32:34
the Pope's Spiritual Authority but Render unto Caesar such things as the Caesars so the temporal
32:43
ruler has jurisdiction when it comes to temporal matters however because they're not they're not
32:52
governed by a Sharia that is binding on them both you have this series of hugely disruptive disputes
33:02
throughout the Middle Ages between the pope and the temporal powers that be just one example is
33:08
the 14th century dispute between Pope bonatti and King Philip the fair of France now this is one of
33:18
the most famous of these disputes these secular disputes the or what would later come to be known
33:25
as secularism what took place is that Pope bonae wanted his clergy in France to be Exempted from
33:37
all taxation because they're clergy MH um he didn't want to be subject to taxation by the
33:45
king of France and he told the king of France as much we're not going to be taxed yes right um we
33:54
are exerting our Spiritual Authority and it's you know we must not be attacked because you know we
34:00
are the spiritual Authority and we have a special status and he was hoping that King philli was just
34:06
going to go along with this but unfortunately for Pope bfactory Philip was having absolutely
34:14
none of it and he said no I'm not going to exempt under any circumstances and of course you have to
34:19
imagine the Catholic church has immense well this is a this is a huge source of tax revenue for him
34:25
it makes a difference so Pope manufa issues a very very famous Pap ball called Unum sanum it's a very
34:38
famous document in the history of the of well of the of secularism as I suppose we'd rather anistic
34:45
call it and of the Catholic church and of Western Civilization RIT large and in that document Bona
34:54
asserts the papal authority over over even the temporal powers on most occasions we're fine to
35:02
leave the temporal powers to their own business and get on with it but there are questions like this where we actually do have ultimate authority over you and what he tries to do is he tries to
35:13
invoke the hierarchy of being and you know we actually are you know our hierarchy of of the
35:20
church is reflective of the hierarchy of the angels and we actually do metaphysically have power over you so you better listen and he he's invoking there the dionan dius the aropa his
35:32
account of of hierarchy and metaphysical hierarchy I've written about that this particular episode
35:38
in this book but also in my other book hierarch in Freedom where specifically about UNAM sanctum in that book um and you know the pope was hoping that this would be an end to it and he'd he'd be T
35:49
tax exempt um and uh what happened is King Philip decided instead that well I think we're just kidna
35:57
pope benaa then yes and they kidnapped him and took him away to a castle and said no it's not
36:03
going to happen well uh you know you've got to pay your taxes and um Pope benat a few days later
36:11
actually died of the shock unfortunately so that's just one episode in you know many many uh many
36:19
many episodes in the history of the this tension between the secular powers and and the sacred
36:26
Powers you know there's a similar thing at play um in um the uh the assassination of of Archbishop
36:38
um uh Beckett uh in the in the in the Cathedral at Canterbury um that's one other major major uh
36:50
violent uh dispute between the Pope the church and the King and then of course you know you have what
37:00
takes place in the English Reformation between King Henry VII and the pope and that leads to a
37:05
huge Rapture which again is one of the things that we that is discussed in the book um so there's
37:13
always been this tension and what It ultimately leads to is this understanding that these two
37:20
domains have to be kept strictly separate the temporal and the sacred the temporal and the sacred and the sacred is ultimately going to become something just as it is today personalized
37:31
it's personalized you don't talk about it in public it's not polite it's embarrassing we
37:37
protect your right to engage in that but it's a personal choice and you keep it at home how how
Protestantism and secularism
37:44
important was the development of protestantism in the 16th century to the secularism process
37:50
because my understanding and and correctly if I'm wrong is you know if we're talking about the personalizing of Faith then protestantism lends itself to very much to a personalized faith more
38:00
so than Christianity with the melding of temporal in sacred power is that is that a fair reading of
38:07
of Christian history I think very much so I think one of the things that lends itself to secularism
38:15
secularism as it develops in protestantism is the fact that Luther what he does he's very big
38:23
on this render under Caesar thing right he's very into obeying the temporal authorities yeah and the
38:32
settlement what actually Saves the Day for Luther is that the local Prince becomes a Lutheran oh
38:41
right he protects Luther the settlements which bring the terrible Strife between Catholic and
38:49
Protestant to an end Augsburg and West failure are all about saying we respect we will tolerate
38:59
we will not wage war on we will protect the rights of subjects within a PO as long as they follow the
39:09
religious choice of their ruler so he can become a Lutheran or he can become a Catholic and this
39:17
is and that this will become a a Lutheran land and this will remain a Catholic land and we will enter
39:24
into a treaty of Peace on that basis of respect that yeah that the the religion of the people
39:30
is to follow the religion of the ruler now you can see that is a relativizing factor to a large
39:36
extent it's no longer relevant which of them is true we have a political set set settlement which
39:42
is fundamentally credential and pragmatic right and um and you know this gives rise to the in
39:50
know it contributes in large to the birth of the this conception of the nation state the sovereign
39:57
nation state which is has a national church and has a n National religion and this this tradition
40:10
is kept in the line of succession of the kings that this is a a Lutheran country or this is a an
40:16
Anglican country in the case of England or this is a a Catholic country so um yeah this is very much
40:25
a consequence to a large extent of the Protestant Reformation absolutely so I want to ask you about
40:32
that because 1648 is the Treaty of West failure and uh According to some Western historians that's
40:38
sort of the birth case of the nation state and you've explained that very well that you know now
40:43
the RIT of a centralized church is torn apart and and it's really now up to each individual
40:50
principality and PR to to Define their religious complexion and there should be non-interference
40:56
between states so uh is the nation state project then intertwined with this project of modernity
Nation-state and modernity
41:03
can we add nation state to his bucket uh and if so is there something particular about the
41:09
nation state that uh Islam would be antagonistic towards absolutely and I think it's very much
41:19
bound up with what we've just been discussing um I mean nationalism involves making the ultimate
41:27
Criterion for identity for Collective identity what you know a particular ethnic background a
41:34
particular Geographic situatedness and context and and location and this in many ways has proved to
41:43
be a replacement for religion but it's it's antithetical to Islamic conceptions of our
41:52
fundamental you know Brotherhood and Sisterhood Umma exactly um you we are all from Adam and Adam
42:02
is from clay there's no superiority of a of an Arab over a non-arab except but you know through
42:09
Taqua um and this was played out in throughout Islamic history and you know one of the saddest
42:19
I think departures from this and and this is very relevant to the context that we're talking about is the nationalism that you now see and you it's been some time some decades now emerging in the
42:31
in some places close to a century emerging in the Muslim world for example in Turkey where you have
42:37
this very very strong sense of Turkish identity and nationalism to the extent that if someone's Bosnian or Albanian they will tend to hide it because it will lead to a kind of lower social
42:46
status and suspicion and so on um whereas in the Oban world no one knew who was Arab or this or
42:54
that or Albania or balcan or Turkish and I mean it's not that it was completely unknown but it was not a significant factor at all right um and it's true that in the later otoman period there
43:08
were because of the infiltration of certain Western ideas there were various nationalist movements that's why sulan Abdul Hamed for example made sure to get an Arab Shak Islam because he
43:19
really wanted to aim towards Islamic Unity he wanted to just break that because he could see
43:24
that it was a cancer um so so absolutely I think that nationalism is very very much bound up with
43:32
this the identitarian understanding that there is self-creation um of identity uh it doesn't
43:43
reflect a Transcendent reality it will basically fundamentally be based on political realities and
43:50
so you know the the because the the fundamental reality is the political then we're going to
43:56
Define our identity as a collectivity in terms of that political framework which is very specific
44:02
um it's the nation and so on um I know we we're still on our second bif fication or Seance but I'm
Liberalism development
44:09
fascinated by all of this because it's putting together a lot of discret ideas in my mind so thank you very much for that so liberalism uh you commonly it's John known that John Lock developed
44:20
the idea or the the basic Contour of this ideology of liberalism so how how important was what you've
44:27
just discussed so far the severance of sacred law and spirit and temporal power and sacred power how
44:34
important were these events or these formations to the development of liberalism as an idea they're
44:42
immensely important very very important of the absolute utmost importance and again this is
44:49
very relevant to the non-transferability of liberalism to anywhere outside of Europe and
44:55
it's just anachronistic and and the top istic um it's one of my new favorite words I managed
45:01
to say it correctly twice now um so it it's not possible to import liberalism elsewhere and when
45:10
you try it it just it doesn't work right um now it's basically for the following reason liberalism
45:19
was in its Inception meant to provide a larger neutral societal framework for different Christian
45:34
denominations to exist together yeah in that neutral domain and religion has become a private
45:47
Affair it's Blind Faith it's a leap of faith it's you know the individual with his subjectivity with
45:55
his translated Bible and it's something that one keeps to oneself it's such a source of dissension
46:04
when it's brought outside and claims are made and so we've moved beyond that now these interminable
46:12
theological debates which can't be can't be resolved even in principle again it's a kind
46:19
of self-fulfilling prophecy to say they can't be resolved because one of Luther's great moves as we'll find out when it comes to Severance number three faith and reason was to say you know reason
46:30
human rationality has nothing to do with theology never it can't resolve anything it's afflicted by
46:38
original sin just like the accursed natural world is as well he's a bit negative um Luther and so
46:46
this has been one of the Great Tricks of the devil in the Catholic order that Aristotle was brought
46:53
in and everything was highly rationalized so it's a kind of self aill prophecy that these debates are interminable um but the point is they were you know in practice interminable and they
47:04
were causing immense dissension so the general and of course we're talking very broad Strokes
47:09
here because we're covering lots of history but the the general approach in early modernity post
47:17
Reformation was Faith becomes a personal thing right liberalism provides the framework in which
47:27
different Christian denominations can coexist peacefully so it's a step above just saying
47:34
you're going to be whatever religion your ruler happens to be it's saying we could actually have different Christian denominations here now it was very limited as you know for John lock that
47:43
didn't include Catholics um no Catholics and no no atheists at that point um now I have often
47:52
said and thought that it makes perfect sense that liberalism in ultimately was not able to
48:01
fulfill its own promise that it would actually be able to genuinely tolerate Muslims yeah and we're
48:07
seeing that playing out on so many levels today and and really post 911 onwards it it escalate
48:13
and then post Gaza it's become a big thing again but you know when you look at the history this
48:19
makes perfect sense liberalism wasn't created actually to host um every species of Bel there
48:27
had to be a commitment to the severance that made it possible in the first place the severances that
48:35
made it possible in the first place I.E either Christian or post-christian but not Islam that's
48:41
completely different that doesn't make sense especially because Islam won't come in and be a
48:49
polite minority and say we're not actually making claims to the objective truth of Islam because
48:56
they would like is an Islam which will come and say well I'll just be a polite minority with my private Faith as well and and get on with you know contributing to being a good British Citizen
49:04
and that's more important to me more British than this um which is what you know many in
49:11
the western establishment want Muslims to say and and you know many Muslims have been very obliging
49:17
unfortunately um but I think the reason that liberalism has such trouble really tolerating
49:24
Islam is because it's a counter Germany MH that's how they really view it to be fair that's what it
49:31
really is good yeah um and the only thing that liberalism cannot tolerate is anything which
49:40
undermines liberalism fantastic let's move on I mean there's a lot more to disc that but I think
49:46
we could insh I think we've almost got three or four episodes that insh we'll in the future but
The third bifurcation
49:52
let's when talk about faith and reason your third Severance explain the that bation between faith
49:58
and reason okay this is very interesting you know mely the new atheists which you know were Richard
50:06
Dawkins Daniel Dennett Sam Harris all these people you know when I was growing up in the early 2000s
50:12
they were very very popular and very very dominant they're not massively that popular anymore thank god um but I think that they're useful they're useful case study just in terms of making sense of
50:24
the split between faith and reason because it is it is a historical phenomenon but what it led to
50:29
and this is the test of all these severances what do do they lead to this fundamental shaping of the
50:37
basic assumptions of the average man and woman in the street now Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris
50:44
were actually completely inept philosophically and theologically and many people you to give them credit many excellent books came out and and showed this but they were able to gain many
50:59
committed followers to take a lot of people along with them in their argument because they got you
51:06
to accept their basic premise now I didn't accept that premise you wouldn't have accepted that premise you only go along with someone's argument if you haven't stopped at the first hurdle and
51:15
said although I didn't accept that premise that you started with I'm not going to go along with you to your conclusion that premise was religious faith is Blind Faith you may as well believe in a
51:25
pink elephant on Venus you might say this person's religion is that there exists an all powerful pink
51:32
elephant or very powerful at least on Venus and that's their religion we have to respect that because we're liberal it's nonsense you know it's nonsense as with all religious believe that
51:41
we respect it yeah we're we're tolerant well let everyone believe whatever silly nonsense they want as long as they don't try and impose it on us right so um basically uh this conception of
51:53
Faith as necessarily blind faith is something that let's say it it passes although I hate using this
52:01
term because there's no such thing but it passes the average person in the street test it's basic
52:07
common knowledge and basic common sorry common wisdom and that is because of fundamentally the
52:15
split between which is a a consequence of the split between knowing subject and nature the
52:21
split between the humanities and the hard Sciences the only real binding knowledge we can have is of
52:28
that which is empirical um or rooted directly in the empirical and everything else at the end of
52:34
the day is just subjective interpretation and it has no real evidence for it and this is the this
52:41
is what and and enabled the dorkin and others of this world to make so much Headway because
52:48
people were going along with this completely false initial premise but this is the the
52:56
the difficulty if you play into common assumptions you can make a lot of progress it's all it's all false can you explain that initial premise uh suly are you arguing that at premises that
Reasoning religious belief
53:08
uh religious Dogma can never be reasoned and that's their premise yeah so this comes from a
53:14
bation of knowing subject and knowing subject and nature and if we would say more broadly
53:24
knowing subject which is you know the individual the individual self-consciousness self-awareness
53:32
in inward Universe The Knowing subject who knows the world and then instead of nature more broadly
53:40
you could just say the extra mental whatever is real outside of our minds this fundamental split
53:46
between the two that the real properties and the extramental world are the properties that
53:54
the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century decided are really there and they're actually
54:01
a very questionable list and the historical reality is that list was arrived at not so
54:07
much because they're saying that is what's really there in nature as because they were saying this
54:12
is a methodological choice we're making because treating nature in that way is more conducive to
54:19
producing technology to mastering nature right to to exploiting Nature to harnessing nature
54:26
to our purposes decart is very explicit about this Galileo is very explicit and that's obviously you
54:32
know another split um I think we're still on the faith and reason one here they're all related to
54:37
each other um so this is again something we simply take for granted well surely that's true well in
54:47
fact the very methodological division the choice to separate hard Sciences which are supposed to
54:58
pertain in some sense to the empirical world and the humanities let's say let's let's call
55:04
them which are all ultimately fundamentally subjective they're not really binding you can have someone who's more sophisticated or less sophisticated but even the really sophisticated
55:12
but he's not really getting it objective reality because it's not knowable even in principle okay
55:18
that very methodological choice that there's Humanities and there's hard changes is not
55:26
itself an empirical judgment it's not itself empirical judgment the experience we have of
55:35
aesthetic judgments is something beautiful right is an experience just as much of our experience
55:42
as a of a sensible object is an experience right our experience of let's say seeing sorry for the
55:53
horrible image but seeing someone Del run over an old lady in the street God forbid oppos as opposed
56:01
to seeing someone flying across the road to save the person saving them the feeling that we have
56:08
the ethical judgment that that is good and the other one is evil is just as much an experience
56:14
as our experience of the empirical object our metaphysical sense that they're underlying all
56:20
of the phenomena there is a Unity which gives meaning to it all which is beyond time that
56:26
we are moving towards that reality we come from that reality as in our our our intuition of the
56:32
Divine is an experience just as much as that empirical one by what rate and on what empirical
Empirical vs Metaphysics
56:38
basis what empirical object tells me that this is real science and all of that is just subjective
56:48
there's no empirical experience it's not itself an empirical judgment that is where metaphysics comes
56:54
in that is a metaphysical physical judgment and premodernity in the Islamic World obviously that
57:02
goes up all the way up until early 20th century and it's still retained to some extent but not
57:08
with a very great degree of intelligibility and in the Christian World up to 16th 17th century um and
57:16
still kind of the flag was still held aoft by some traditionalist Catholics right the way to the end
57:22
um so there is continuity um but what they shared in common is this understanding of the human
57:29
Sciences as all interrelated and the physical sciences not having a a privileged status and
57:35
the idea that you can apply logic and very precise modes of reasoning to non-sensible questions just
57:44
as much as to empirical questions so questions like the existence of God the existence of God
57:52
objective morality yeah objective aesthetical judgment and what everything that the the the
58:00
20th century early 20th century positivist in the Vienna Circle for example would have called literally nonsense because they don't refer to any empirical reality and guess what
58:10
exactly the same thing happened to them to what I just described about the Humanity's hard Sciences split they realized hold on our own verification principle which says that all true knowledge must
58:21
have an empirical reference that very sentence all true knowledge must have an empirical reference where is the empirical reference and and that was literally I mean simplifying it a bit but that was
58:31
basically the way that positivism was decisively discredited so this is again it's the air we
58:38
breathe we we just tend to think of you know the the hard Sciences are objective and and everything
58:43
else is not but that is purely a theory Choice presupposes a very idiosyncratic history and it's
58:52
not at all what our tradition has ever thought I challenge anyone to give me an Islamic thinker who
58:59
has ever thought that who is not you know he's obviously pre modernity who's who who was prior
59:05
to any influence from Western post Enlightenment modernity so you've covered your third and fourth
The fourth bifurcation
59:12
Severance fair is there anything more to be said about the knowing subject and nature ideal should we move on I think we should we should do a little bit more on that because it's really really
59:20
important it's about this issue of the neutrality of CCH yeah the the you know modern science is
59:28
extraordinary it's produced amazing technology the main I don't Advocate people stopping using it I
59:37
can't live without it personally I don't think that most people can either I think there are very important ways that we can ameliorate some of the very negative impacts that it
59:47
has and you know that's obviously everyone's very familiar with with all of that I'm not in any way
59:53
Advocate advocating becoming a Lite or whatever which is another very interesting historical
59:59
movement which is actually discussed here um Rage Against the Machines but all I'm saying
1:00:05
is it's just a factual matter modern science is not neutral it's not and what I mean is it's
1:00:14
the it's this the the set of Sciences of modes of human knowledge which purport to study the nature
1:00:21
of the natural world well the way it does it is not neutral it's not the way that Muslims did it
1:00:27
either it's not the way that Muslims practiced natural sence Now using the term science is very
1:00:36
anacronismo istic and it's and it's the same even of the of the of the Western World until
1:00:44
very recently this was called natural philosophy the word science came in very very late there's
1:00:49
a few faculties I think in abedine or something but they still call it natural philosophy just because they're you know the kind of it's a kind of Heritage thing um and what what does that mean
1:01:00
it means it used to be subordinated to philosophy in their understanding of the Mana the the T the
1:01:06
the kind of scheme of the Sciences it it it had a place that was actually below metaphysics in The
1:01:13
Ordering of the sentences it needed metaphysics for its fundamental assumption so I can prove
1:01:19
that it's not neutral in a few sentences there is a theory Choice a methodological iCal move that is
1:01:27
made in the Scientific Revolution in the guise of thing and these are this is the these these
1:01:34
particular things are cited with you know from the primary sources in the book in the scientific re
1:01:41
Revolution which are common to all of the major thinkers Francis Bacon rened de cart Galileo and
1:01:52
so on we'll just stay with those three for now so what the but of course it encompasses all of them
1:01:57
I mean you know you could go on and on and on and you and even when the santic revolution becomes
1:02:03
more explicitly Phil philosophical have think is like Hobs and lock and so on they all reject final
1:02:12
causation and formal causation now I'm going to explain these the Aristotelian understanding of
1:02:21
nature that they can't escape from because that was what was dominant and they were all respons in to it and they all know it and they're all using the language recognizes four modes of explanation
1:02:33
of nature they're actually called causes I mean it it it transcends what we call nature but anyway
1:02:40
we call them the four causes so they are the efficient cause the material cause the formal
1:02:49
cause and the final cause Okay so let's take the classic example of a a bed that a carpenter
1:02:55
making because it's just a met classic example and it's very illustrative so the effici the efficient
1:03:01
cause which brings the thing out of non-existence into existence the action is the carpenter right
1:03:09
the material cause are the pieces of wood that he uses the wood the formal cause is the
1:03:17
configuration the relations of the components that configuration which is in his mind before it's
1:03:25
out there there's a plan of it exactly how all the parts relate that very configuration the aggregate
1:03:32
of all the relations is the form okay that's what the thing is but there's another very important
1:03:41
aspect of what the thing is which is the final cause the purpose what is it for so a bed is for
1:03:50
sitting on or sleeping in right the carpenter is deficient cause he's the one who brings it out of
1:03:57
non-existence into existence on a pattern the form that he has in mind the idea that he has in mind
1:04:05
which is the um uh that specific configuration and it's all tending towards a purpose which is the
1:04:12
final cause now in traditional science science and this is all the provider says about using the word
1:04:22
science studies all the four causes when it comes to Nature the form is also called The Essence the
1:04:30
essence of a thing it's innermost nature now we were talking about a man-made object but things in
1:04:35
nature have Essences as well they have forms now those forms there's human nature there's a n the
1:04:41
nature of a tree there's a nature of whatever it happens to be these are not construable as
1:04:47
physical because they are the metaphysical pattern that orders the physical aspects the empirical
1:04:53
properties and so on and and everything in nature has a purpose as well so the a
1:05:01
traditional conception of physics as subordinated to metaphysics absolutely took into account the
1:05:09
purposes of nature what are they for what are they tending towards so and that's of course
1:05:17
their Telos to use the artian term so there was a methodological move again we have the actual qu
1:05:26
original quotation from the primary text and bacon and deart and others we have this methodological
1:05:31
move to explicitly throw out purposes and Essences from nature that's not because they were saying
1:05:42
this is objectively true they were and this is how it's misunderstood as neutral this they're just saying what reality is really like they don't know what reality is really like they've already
1:05:50
excluded everything which would make sense of what it is what what what are left are the efficient
1:05:57
cause and the material cause that's what uh the physical sciences should study the other thing is
1:06:08
they have this distinction between there are many things but one other important thing is
1:06:13
disting between secondary qualities and primary qualities and they say all that actually exists in nature are primary qualities which are purely quantitative things like number figure solidity
1:06:25
things which can be empirically measurable and all those other things which are part and parcel of the experience of a thing you know like the colors that make up the world and so on are and
1:06:39
more or less everything which is on the level of real quality as as the the Aristotelian category
1:06:45
become purely subjective those are not actually there in the object and just as we have in the
1:06:51
modern conception you know oh modern science tells us that what's really here is not me and Jalal
1:06:57
but it's all of these fundamental particles and interacting and and and purely physical properties
1:07:04
which are somehow what is real and we're somehow just kind of parasitic somehow and that we not
1:07:11
well what's not really real even our Consciousness is supposed to be an epip phenomenon of these of
1:07:16
these neurons blindly firing funny irony is how did we find out about that that that was the
1:07:24
case it's through this epop phenomenon which is supposed to be parasitic so the whole idea that
1:07:30
somehow Consciousness is not real whereas only by Consciousness that you've been able to say that it's not real so that's a kind of another Paradox um but so you know yeah I mean that's that's what
1:07:41
is most fundamental to and this is this is a forgotten methodological move and that's never
1:07:50
changed and what was this all in Aid of it was in Aid of a mechanis IC understanding of nature which
1:07:59
could be manipulated and exploited through the predictive power of mathematical modeling right
1:08:09
as in it's not so much they're saying this is the real nature of nature it doesn't have purposes or Essence they're saying for for our purposes we don't want to look at that they're a distraction
1:08:19
yeah that's really interesting so in a sense are you arguing there sort of it's nonrecognition of
non-recognition of Metaphysics
1:08:25
the metaphysical in modern scientific method is essentially an irrational uh uh move it's
1:08:34
it's an irrational way of looking at uh at the scientific world I think it can be rational as
1:08:44
long as you acknowledge this is a methodological move I'm making I'm not saying this is the real
1:08:50
nature of reality but it's a methodological move because I want to produce technology sure
1:08:55
and looking con construing nature in this way even if I know that there's more to it than that is
1:09:02
conducive to the production of the development of Technology yeah the problem I have is when Muslims
1:09:11
blly accept modern science as the ultimate knowledge standard so as I say in the book
1:09:16
you have this kind of new priesthood this kind of fetishization and totalization of modern science
1:09:24
and the enger and the Doctor Who become the new kind of high priest of the society you go to the engineer and the doctor for everything they will tell you everything because they know everything
1:09:33
um because of the way that uh the way that modern science has been misconceived um and I think that
1:09:42
uh unfortunately in the period of colonialism um and colonization there was not a and I don't blame
1:09:50
obviously I mean it was it was not a time where it was possible for um thought and philosophy and
1:09:59
this type of investigation to necessarily Thrive easily but there was an insufficiently critical
1:10:06
appraisal of the nature of mity when it came in and I would say that it mostly comes down to what
1:10:12
must of a subri the last sh Islam says we mistook a marshal victory for an intellectual Victory we
1:10:17
were just so overwhelmed by by being taken over and conquered yeah and we felt well you know
1:10:25
we've we we need to catch up one has to remember the imposition of these positivist and in many
1:10:35
cases kind of Proto or Quasi liberalist on the political and ethical level conceptions uh through
1:10:44
the imposition of this kind of universalized and really mostly rather Third Rate unfortunately uh
1:10:52
secular educational system on the Muslim world was absolutely simultaneous with a systematic
1:10:58
dismantling of our indigenous alternative right which is Islam which is Islam and our knowledge
1:11:06
structures and our knowledge systems so we don't even have that authentic lens through which to appraise what we're seeing you're seeing that's been taken away from us at the
1:11:15
same time as the alternative has been forced upon us and we're being told it's neutral I mean it's not surprising then that after the Indian Mutiny maybe tens of thousands of of Imam
1:11:25
were were murdered were executed by the British Absolut this is to remove that Islamic Knowledge
1:11:33
from from society very similar thing under yeah very similar thing yeah so your fifth uh and
The final bifurcation
1:11:40
final bation or Severance is a division between metaphysics and morality explain that division
1:11:47
please yeah you might also say you know between morality and ontology what it basically means and
1:11:54
it's if you'll forgive me for introducing this here it's what leads to the Gaza genocide is the
1:12:01
idea that ethical Frameworks might sound nice might sound might sound lovely but at the end
1:12:11
of the day they're subjective they're not really bounding their choices their faith even and this
1:12:18
has very very weighty consequences because people are looking at horror gas why isn't International
1:12:25
law binding why isn't it being applied why is there no mechanism by which it can simply be
1:12:34
those concern can simply be compelled to abide by its dictates well it's because what is at play is
1:12:42
something much more fundamental than the internal structure of international law international
1:12:48
law is based on in in terms of philosophical buildup of propositions on natural law that's it
1:12:55
historical Genesis H grus and all of these key thinkers and so exists in this uneasy tension
1:13:05
with another dominant philosophical position in Western thought which is melanism I would
1:13:11
argue that what is really what is the reality on the ground politically in the western well today
1:13:19
and when it comes to international relations and international politics and power politics is mavan
1:13:25
is M that's the bottom line explain Melia melanism to our listen the melanism is to put it crudely
1:13:34
might is right whatever you need to do in order to achieve your political aims and cement your
1:13:42
power you do whatever you need to do the absence of Morality In in the political realm absolutely
The west’s Machiavellianism
1:13:49
the absence of Morality In the political realm the ends justify the means the ends are subjectively
1:13:57
determined they're basically determined by power interests and if we're America we're very immoral
1:14:06
so we believe in international law but then we're not going to apply it yeah because it's
1:14:14
actually a post or our power interests but we do believe in it and we are actually very good at moral because we believe in international law and fairness and you know an international rules
1:14:23
based system and some but we're not going to play it we're going to keep on vetoing vetoing vetoing
1:14:30
at the end of the day why because if you look at the actual structure of commitment philosophically
1:14:37
inescapably it's on a philosophical level what do we actually believe about the universe it's MERS rate Will To Power it's not actually natural law that there are inherent rates that every human
1:14:50
being has in virtue of their nature in virtue of the nature of things in light of the the nature
1:14:57
of things um there are intrinsic moral values and judgments which are binding on all human beings
1:15:06
that's what international law has to be based on because the problem with international law is it
1:15:12
transcends the internal positive law of a Nation but then which is of course binding because of the
1:15:20
um the structure of punishment and of enforcement on so it's binding in that sense you don't need to
1:15:27
invoke natural law it's binding because you're going to get in trouble and you're going to be punished the the problem comes when it when when you you're faced with the problem of the of the
1:15:36
pluralism of these systems of positive internal law domestic law and how are you going to relate
1:15:44
to one one another now again the kind of survival of the Fist might is right to rec of alienism is
1:15:50
say well if we're more powerful than you then you will do what we say well that is actually that
1:15:58
that that is and always has been operative just to say finally they have been you know why did
1:16:04
all this why why do you have the League of Nations and you have the uh Universal you know the charter of Human Rights and you have the um nurenberg trails and you have thec and the incj all of this
1:16:18
statute yeah I would say somewhat cynically but I would say that the these these obtain
1:16:25
in so far as you have a Europe and you have a USA and you have a a Soviet Union obviously you're
1:16:31
playing with different time periods here but to speak very broadly which are all real players they
1:16:38
have to be taken in consideration you know this is before the total you know uni polarization of the
1:16:45
world with America you actually it it matters that there is a there is a there's a real Power Balance
1:16:51
and you have to respect that and so we're going to have a system of of uh of you know rules-based
1:16:57
system in place which can uh provide this framework within which we're going to have our
1:17:04
treaties and we're going to interact and so on but the the reality is when it comes to a nation that
1:17:10
has no real standing and no real position in that game um it doesn't really apply I don't think it
1:17:17
ever has it's really interesting I know we spoke about this in our last conversation but liberals argue that they' moveed beyond that the FUSD milon dialogue the idea that might is right yeah and
Liberalism’s Façade
1:17:29
and now we do have something called International humanitarian law and we do have these moral codes
1:17:38
which everyone can subscribe to your argument is fact at best that's no more than a like a
1:17:45
a fig Le it's fair to pretend that there is a greater cause to the west and its International
1:17:52
order when in reality um it international law is is subservient to this Machiavellian power game
1:18:00
I would say that natural law international law is engaged in a losing battle with melanism right now
1:18:06
um look I don't want to be misunderstood I'm not saying that No One Believes In human rights and they're not sincere um and you know it doesn't have any reality whatsoever ever yeah um but
1:18:16
you have these moments where the masks come off you see the real exactly so the real underlying
1:18:22
Dynamic is not that yeah that's what they wanted that's what they wanted us to think and there's
1:18:29
been a lot of steps in that direction you know for throughout the history of the last 20 years and
1:18:34
you know the war on Iraq was a big moment and and the war on terror and and you know the that what
1:18:41
what took place with the the suspension of civil Li Liberties in the UK and the US and especially
1:18:47
directed towards Muslims and all sorts of things but I think Gaza is the real mask off moment the
1:18:52
decisive one and I think it's one which has you with this kind of resurgence Resurgence is not
1:19:00
really the word with this kind of sudden emergence of what they're calling the global South is this real um force to be reckoned with and that can't be ignored anymore yeah um simultaneous to this
1:19:12
kind of masks off moment I think it is a very very weighty and momentous significant let me ask you
Gaza western hegemony
1:19:18
about it because on X you sent out a post where you said October the 7th was a defining event that
1:19:24
exposes the DET terminal moral illegitimacy of the West can you elaborate on how that's how October
1:19:30
7 symbolizes this crumbl in Western hegemony I think there are so many different levels to it
1:19:37
I don't think it's going to be a straightforward process I don't think that you know I talk about the crumbling of hegemony um you know there are going to be a lot of twists and turns and ups and
1:19:46
downs and and the the West is still enormously powerful I don't think I think you know we can't get kind of lost in this in the the excitement of the moment because it is significant but we should
1:19:58
kind of constrain restrain ourselves constrain ourselves to its actual significance um I think uh
1:20:06
its actual significance is the is the breakdown of the post 1945 kind of moral narrative and
1:20:14
universe which is basically the Western World triumphed over evil the ultimate embodiment of
1:20:22
evil which was Nazism Nazis M was kind of Pure Evil and this is you know embodied by epitomized
1:20:34
by the concentration camps and you know the war was waged in order to liberate the concentration
1:20:42
camps and and to save the Jews and to instantiate Human Rights and that was what it was all about
1:20:50
it was you know it was a just war and you know one of the few truly just Wars because they were
1:20:56
fighting this absolute epitomy of evil and then in the newbur trials afterwards you know we had
1:21:02
to say never again so we instantiated the system of international law and accountability and so
1:21:09
on and we put them on trail now look let's just start with two things which are wrong with that narrative first of all the second world war wasn't waged in order to save the Jews it wasn't waged in
1:21:26
order to liberate the concentration camps yes in fact Jewish refugees were systematically
1:21:36
sent home yeah turned away yeah turned away in their boats still on their boats at the when you
1:21:44
know obviously the Nazi persecution of the Jews had become a reality and was had become to to a
1:21:54
certain extent known in the and was being reported in the western media at the outset of the war and
1:21:59
so on um there was a deliberate policy of turning the Jews away although it was known that they
1:22:05
were facing severe uh danger dangers um now one other thing is the Newberg Trails did you notice
1:22:18
them putting Churchill and bummer Harris and rth R well revelt had just died but did you notice them
1:22:27
putting themselves on trail for the firebombing of Hamburg for the firebombing of dresdon for the
1:22:37
obliteration of hundreds of other uh Germany German towns completely gratuitously because
1:22:45
they weren't even military targets and of course it came out after the war it was um by whatever
1:22:52
process um but it was eventually made public the documents which showed that this was deliberate
1:22:59
Pro policy this actually was Terror bombing it was deliberate Terror bombing the firebombing of Tokyo the nuking of Hiroshima they weren't put on trail under international law for these crimes
1:23:11
these atrocities um and so nonetheless were brought up with this narrative that the second
1:23:21
world war was this just War another thing is that the when it comes to the concentration camps the
1:23:31
uh Allied Powers knew about the concentration camps long before they um were liberated yeah
1:23:38
they never got rid of them they never bombed them they never um uh they never put a stop to it um
1:23:46
so and and of course all of the details of what came to be known in the 1970s as the Holocaust um
1:23:54
and I don't for a moment deny uh huge atrocities and indeed a holocaust which was perpetrated
1:24:01
against the Jews but this was not known During the period of the war in any way so um the the moral
1:24:10
narrative that has come down to us that this was fundamentally fighting ultimate you know
1:24:15
absolute evil of Hitler is just not accurate in any way that wasn't Hitler was the one who
1:24:21
was trying to make peace with Britain cons consistently throughout especially in 1940
1:24:27
and those uh those attempts were all rebuffed he actually wanted as his absolutely establish a main
1:24:34
mainstream history wanted to make peace uh with the British especially because of his admiration for the British Empire so I'm not denying that Hitler was evil he was an evil man but
1:24:46
churel was an evil man um he you know very likely played an instrumental role in the Bengal famine
1:24:57
which killed 4 million people um he was The Man Behind the firebombing even when Harris who was
1:25:05
very enthusiastic about it as well you know we're talking about February 1945 the Germans have lost
1:25:12
church WIll pushes him now we're going to flatten Dron going to kill tens of thousands of people of
1:25:18
course we don't know the real numbers of you know non-military Target civilians just you know for
1:25:25
the terror of it break break civilian morale so you know the point is all of these all of these
1:25:33
inconsistencies in the actual narrative are not generally known they're becoming much better known
1:25:40
now in the last 5 10 years but they certainly The Narrative that has dominated post 1945 about
1:25:48
you know the what the the liberal West saved the world and it was just such a wonderful thing sure
1:25:55
Nazism was a terrible thing but the slave trade the slave trade the African slave trade
1:26:05
colonialism all of the outrages of the colonial period the genocide of the Native Americans this
1:26:14
is all post Enlightenment liberal civilization so you know this Narrative of of light and darkness
1:26:23
were all brought up in it I used to believe it even though I was brought up in a you a very very
1:26:29
uh committed and and spiritually committed and and and religiously committed Muslim family but
1:26:35
you know I had a western schooling in an ordinary state school I was brought up to believe that as well I used to feel you burst with pride when I saw a documentary about the Battle of Britain
1:26:44
and we saved the world and everything when in fact you know who defeated the Nazis it was actually the Russians the role that we played was mostly in the air War bombing German CI cities it
1:26:56
was the real um uh ground war yeah yeah the real ground war was was totally um totally conducted
1:27:05
on the Eastern front in any case um the point is that is the narrative that held for a long long
1:27:11
time the reality is Nazism liberalism just one of the better term and communism they are all
Ideologies and modernity
1:27:22
the same that different manifestations of the same phenomenon which is modernity and I you
1:27:32
you can say that liberal civilization is let's say the the kind of Patron philosophers of the
1:27:40
British empiricists you know Hume and Loch and these people Adam Smith and so on and and you
1:27:46
know Nazi Germany was a more of a a nitrium modernity and of course you know the Soviet
1:27:54
modernity was more of a Marxist modernity but these are all ideologues of modernity in this
1:28:00
philosophical sense that I'm talking about I would say that was you know you know as it says in the
1:28:06
Quran you know these are these this was a this was a civil war of modernity between
1:28:17
there wasn't there wasn't a good guy there it it was it was evil against evil and of course I'm not saying on an individual level I don't believe that my great-grandfather who fought
1:28:25
in the battle of the S was evil but I'm saying in terms of the ideologies which were at play
1:28:31
I don't think that there was a good guy but what do we grow up with we grow up with this idea that the West is its whole CLA moral claim is based on defeating ultimate Evil and freeing the world in
1:28:42
the second world war yeah well it's it's not true on so many different levels finally the final point on this you know the second world war was you know the the ostensible cause the
1:28:56
ostensible occasion of the start of the war was protecting the sovereignty of Poland right that
1:29:03
was the ostensible occasion for for declaring war what happened at the end of the war the whole of
1:29:11
Eastern Europe including Poland was given over to an even worse well you know an arguably even worse
1:29:18
certainly more murderous dictator than Hitler yeah at East Stalin so you know even on that
1:29:24
there are large inconsistencies even on that level but what is Gaza Gaza is a live streamed horror
1:29:37
that we've all looked at those images and we've whipped we've all looked at those images and we've
1:29:44
cried and we have been deeply hurt by it deeply affected by it in a way that has never happened
1:29:53
before for and the images we're seeing are worse than anything we've ever seen at even at BV VA or
1:30:02
at or at at wherever it happens to be we've never seen images like that they have broken the barrier
1:30:10
they've pushed the boundaries of horror and it's all been live streamed to our phones and the technology that they created and we know they're in a position to stop this tomorrow yeah we know
1:30:24
they're in a position to stop this tomorrow and we know that they're not and it's calling into
1:30:30
question everything that we've ever been taught about the inherent goodness of Western liberalism
1:30:41
it's a masks off moment and it's a point of no return we can't go back after this you know look
1:30:48
the Iraq War was a was a horror and and I happen to know on a very close level people who were able
1:30:57
to make me feel what that was really about almost as much as what I know about Gaza because I of the
1:31:06
stories and the I know the people who died and the the the direct impact that it had on people but on
1:31:12
this Mass level that's only if you know people that wasn't live streamed to the world like what
1:31:18
we're seeing today and it wasn't as concentrated and as brutal and as Shameless as what we're
1:31:26
seeing today there wasn't this deliberate targeting of civilians in the same way that
1:31:32
we're s today there weren't you know these sniper shots to the heads of children um this systematic
1:31:39
genocide that we're seeing unfolding and again the whole moral claim of the West is supposed to
1:31:45
be or we saved the day when there was a genocide the ultimate genocide but now they're letting it
1:31:51
happen they're making it happen they are enablers they're more than enablers Hass this is really
Islams counter-hegemony
1:32:00
fascinating uh conversation and and I really would like to explore so many strands there and I think our viewers will probably suggest that we need to have you back in the studio to talk
1:32:09
about a lot of this in in a lot more detail but let's talk about the Islam part of this because
1:32:15
I I was struck by a phrasy used uh in in that conversation that Islam provides a counter hemony
1:32:24
um unpack that for me what what is it about Islam because of course that's not you know many Muslims
1:32:30
but certainly non Muses will not see you know they noticed your critique and then and you know very
1:32:36
many will agree with your critique of modernity uh but Islam doesn't seem the automatic Faith
1:32:43
at least for non-muslims to go to to provide this counter hemony so explain that counter hemony idea
1:32:50
to me please well what I meant by that is really the that this is an this is to view Islam in a
1:32:57
negative light from the liberalist perspective but what it also exposes in a way I mean I don't
1:33:06
necessarily want to use that sensationalist language yeah is the fact that uh liberalism is
1:33:13
hegemonic yeah now how that's paradoxical because one of the core tenants principles of liberalism
1:33:19
is it is setting up the societ in the kind of rulan way let's not go there to rules but let's
1:33:28
say they setting up the society in this neutral way so that everyone is able to pursue their own
1:33:35
vision of the god without let or hindrance yeah now there's one exception to this if your pursuit
1:33:41
of the good would serve to undermine liberalism itself that's a great danger for them because
1:33:49
they'll say well what will happen to the pluralism it will be awful they won't be able to host all of these different arbitrary beliefs anymore so I wasn't necessarily saying we should view Islam
1:33:59
as a counter hegemony because I wouldn't use that word myself I don't I don't think we we we purport to be or aspire to be hegemonic in that sense yeah but what I but but absolutely
1:34:11
we offer an alternative that is a comprehensive view of existence it's also the framework in which
1:34:19
you accommodate diversity and you know we were second To None we are the gold standard in Islam
1:34:27
in terms of the historical record in terms of our civilizational principles for accommodating the
1:34:32
other in a real way that doesn't relativize that doesn't say you can have your own Silly private
1:34:38
belief in the wrong name and all that kind of stuff as long as you're exactly the same as us in every way yeah in you know in what matters which is contributing to the economy and so on having
1:34:47
you know working and um you know contributing in in you know academically and the arts and media
1:34:57
and whatever it happens to me you know the the the me hash of the world for example not saying
1:35:02
anything about him as a person because I don't know but I'm just saying you know he he he's he's attractive to the that mindset that he's he's he's just one of us but he's a Muslim and
1:35:14
and you know we can relate to him um not saying anything about obviously his personal level of
1:35:19
commitment which I think is very strong actually but just the way that he's perceived so this is
1:35:24
um I think a real issue for liberalism is the the extent to which it can it can it can tolerate real
1:35:34
diversity not just superficial diversity yeah remember on empiricism all that really exists
1:35:41
are empirical properties so that's what they can tolerate but when it comes to real conviction you
1:35:47
know would they have okay now they've managed to um tick that box of diversity because they've had
1:35:53
riches sunak as the Prime Minister but if he had been a Sufi shik and an Alim would they have let
1:36:00
him yeah no it's because he's more neoliberal than the neoliberals so all that diversity how is how
1:36:07
is that diversity what's diverse about him you can say he had to overcompensate and as you said
1:36:13
he was more thatcherite than most conservatives were at this stage exactly yeah exactly and you
1:36:18
know Barack Obama was more establishment than the establishment yeah um so I think that's always
1:36:23
um I think that kind of shows what I'm getting at when I say that liberalism is not really capable
1:36:30
of tolerating Islam on on any real level yeah now you know our our approach as Muslims look
1:36:40
I want us to have this knowledge of critique so that we can be empowered by it right not so
1:36:46
that we can be disempowered by it go into our ghettos and our bubbles and say oh they're bad and modernity is bad and you know the no there's much good in modernity there's good in everything
1:36:57
which Allah T has created and we there's much good in the non-muslim population of the West
1:37:07
many good human beings who have are on a good f a good original disposition many future Muslims
1:37:16
uh many people of good faith and Goodwill but I think it's also important to realize that
1:37:23
simply you know contributing to Modern liberal secular society it's always going
1:37:30
to be unsatisfying for us ultimately as Muslims if that's where the buck stops that's all there
1:37:37
is to it because there is a Telos there is a purpose just as in any social configuration and
1:37:46
political structure there is a there is a Telos to Modern liberal Society just is there is a Telos to
1:37:58
uh and I'm speaking in the very broadest sense to Islamic civilization and and to to Islamic
1:38:04
political systems and Islamic polies and every political system you can think of and the Telos of
1:38:12
modern liberal civilization is the facilitation of arbitrary self-determination I would say and there
1:38:21
are other ways of looking at it if you looking at it from an economic lens you'd say something else um and that may be more of an overarching Telos um and if you wanted to be cynical you could say all
1:38:33
of the stuff about freedom is just to distract you while you're being exploited economically and so on um and that what is really happening is that we're ruled by an aligar and there's
1:38:42
a lot of truth to all of that kind of thing but I I don't particularly want to go there now I just think that as Muslims we need to be empowered by this knowledge so that we can stop
1:38:53
being bound by The Narrative of contributing and we're British too and don't worry about us we're
1:39:00
just like you and so yes on the human level we're just like you but no on a on a on another level
1:39:06
we have something to offer you to help you to save you to open your mind to liberate you not
1:39:13
in your conception of world religions oh you're trying to force your religion on me no in the
1:39:19
sense that if you can deconstruct the assumptions that non-muslims hold about modernity which are
1:39:26
not true just like we hold them then you can say there's a completely different way of looking at
1:39:31
the world which is not a question of Blind Faith you becoming a Muslim it's you seeing
1:39:37
something about the world that you were veiled from previously by those assumptions and that's
1:39:42
where we we say look Islam is not a religion of Blind Faith and identity and in which case W Earth
1:39:50
would an English person want to become Muslim it it takes away all all of the familiarity and you
1:39:55
know intimacy they have with their own environment their own cultures their own their own culture their own history their own architecture their own lived built environments on but it's something
1:40:05
completely different to that and it is unifying reunifying what should be whole but which has
1:40:15
been severed systematically and ideologically in Western history and and those are the five bations
1:40:23
and those that what is most significant and I think this is really what we've been building up to is that what is severed in the Christian postchristian world has always been whole and
1:40:34
unified and indivisible and integral in the Muslim world there's no split between law and spirit
1:40:46
there's no split between temporal power and sacred power there's no split between faith and reason
1:40:54
there's no split between knowing subject and nature and there's no split between morality
1:40:59
and ontology and so what we need to do is on the community level our neighbors
1:41:09
Muslim and non-muslim but I'm thinking mostly about the Muslim as a starting point is on the level of our neighbors on the Nevel of level of families and friends
1:41:24
and the larger community that we enact on a community level we start to instantiate on a
1:41:32
community level what tashko brazada and the great ottoman theorists of Ethics like him call where
City of Love
1:41:43
the Telos the purpose of our human Association in societies is the cultivation of love love of God
1:41:53
God and love a fellow man and so we and it's essentially instantiating the prophetic model
1:42:04
making sure that there's no one left behind who do we know who is in trouble who do we know who is in
1:42:12
need who who do we know who is in poverty and on a level of devotion on a level of spirit uality
1:42:24
having Gatherings instantiating Gatherings within our communities where we have vior we have this
1:42:33
deep experiential appreciation of the dean and we make sure to cultivate that and we cultivate that
1:42:41
also with the social level and you know the the Underground Level the Grassroots level um there's
1:42:48
so many families there's so many individuals who are victims of this socially atomized Society we
1:42:54
have to stop leaving them behind yeah and leaving them on on their own and not allowing them to have
1:43:03
a place where they can be embraced and brought in that means bringing back zakat on a community and
1:43:10
local local level um and it means um putting in place all of the institutions well not all of the
1:43:21
institutions it has to be obviously to some degree compromised by it being on a community level
1:43:26
rather than a a state level but the institutions that in a traditional Islamic Society are put in
1:43:35
place like the AA for example which obviously you know very very wide- ranging um on the level of
1:43:44
patronage of intellectual activity and and on the level of looking after the poor um uh where and of
1:43:51
course on on the level of madress is and the good news is a lot of this is happening there's a kind of Renaissance of all of this kind of activity in our communities I just think that it needs to
1:44:01
be as we move forward more focused on classical ethical models more explicitly because I think
1:44:10
there's a lot there which can Inspire us um and uh so that we can become more organized the problem
1:44:18
with organization is it can start to happen on you know a kind of weberian rationalized level um and
1:44:27
that's not what we want we need a traditional understanding that our associations are for a
1:44:33
purpose which is and ultimately on the on the most fundamental level in Islam it's the vice jeny it's
1:44:40
the C custodianship it's the stewardship of the world and we need to show non-muslims not because
1:44:48
I to show them anything because but because this is the reality of our religion we're not we're not real realizing it that we our religion is holistic it encompasses everything unfortunately
1:44:59
the ghettos that we live in um that kind of ghettoization while very understandable and
1:45:05
not in any way to discredit the enormous huge contributions of the the communities that have
1:45:11
come here and established Islam who you know as they say in Arabica we have maximal respect for
1:45:18
them but moving forward we need to have an Islam which is holistic which Embraces every aspect of
1:45:25
life not this sense that somehow we're kind of you know almost like Orthodox Judaism we we we
1:45:31
know we're so concerned about being pure and pure of outside influences that we end up you know just
1:45:37
being in this in insular and and and so on and and I'm afraid that that I'm by I'm far from the
1:45:43
the the first person to have said this and um I appreciate obviously the challenges which have led
1:45:48
to that situation how much of what you're saying um is for a greater purpose um I'm I'm um when you
Strength of modernity
1:45:57
while you were speaking there until you you you caveated at the end um it sounded very similar to
1:46:04
Rod Dreer and his Benedict option the idea that modernity now is so overpowering and so strong
1:46:11
uh we can no longer defeat or critique modernity in a substantial way and so we need to hold on
1:46:18
to our Goods as best as possible like is is that is that the ultimate end of this this community
1:46:26
building project or do you feel that there can be a a a Resurgence Beyond um holding on to Islam and
1:46:36
and building these institutions uh in so much as you know in my introduction I mentioned the author
1:46:44
whose name I forget who wrote the book after defeat and yeah know almost like an acceptance that Islam like Catholicism has to accept that it's never going to return in a in an ottoman
1:46:54
esque way like do you believe that um the great days the great history of Islam is in the past and
1:47:01
now it's sort of we have to create a a uh a living which accepts begrudgingly uh the the precepts of
1:47:13
modernity well look we don't know where we are in the in the estr olical story um we don't know
1:47:20
precisely but what we do know is the Propet of said he said who you know if the hour comes upon
1:47:28
you and you have a Seedling her you have to plant it regardless of where you are regardless of how
1:47:36
dire things look yeah and so we are not we are not charged to know where we are um in the story
1:47:44
of the um is is is a a Resurgence possible is it impossible we don't know what we know is this is
1:47:54
Allah's plan this is his affair as it says even as it says in the Quran directed towards the prophet
1:48:06
Sall was you know you you have nothing in this affair this is God's Affair this is his decree
1:48:12
unfolding I've said and you know I was criticized widely for it that modernity didn't our present
1:48:22
situation Visa modernity and feeling defeated by it is not so much because of our failure to
1:48:28
progress as it is an ex an estr olical exigency this has to happen this has to happen it's part
1:48:37
of the uh what we're told has to happen um uh in in in the latter days now those latter days 300
1:48:46
years 400 years 500 years a thousand years I have no idea and I don't think anyone should bother
1:48:52
themselves with that that all we know is that if we have a Seedling we have to plant it right um
1:48:59
so we can't have a defeatist attitude we have the revealed truth we have the transformative truth we
1:49:09
have to reconnect with those individuals who are still carrying that and inheriting that and I'm
1:49:14
a firm believer in the reality of sainthood the reality of individuals who are true inheritors
1:49:21
of the Prophet on inward level and I think that's normative to our tradition and I think
1:49:27
another aspect of our weakness is the loss of that conception and there are a lot of frauds there's
1:49:33
a lot of fraudulent claims there are a lot of shatons but the existence of those should not um
1:49:41
should not blind us from the existence of willia I think that is something that we absolutely it's
1:49:47
part and parcel of Islam it goes right back to the original sources the the understanding of willia
1:49:53
and we we need to reconnect to that and you know separate the wheat from the chaff there are a lot of charlatans where there are criteria there are so we have to be very very careful but not to
1:50:02
the extent that it blinds us from the reality because that's our real connection Islam is a
1:50:08
transformative path like no other and that's what we need to communicate I think to non-muslims on
1:50:15
a DA level is that this is a Liberation and this is a comprehensive way of life which will get you
1:50:22
out of that route and enable you to um become a truly fulfilled person um and at the end of
Islam will save modernity
1:50:31
the day yes I believe that modernity can be saved um and it can be saved by Islam and I think that
1:50:39
that's what we should be doing here it's not a question that it's going to happen in the west or it's going to happen in the Muslim world or we have to make HRA or we have to stay here I
1:50:49
think in both both are are serious options and should remain serious options but I think what
1:50:54
has to be recognized is that the illusion of a universal neutral civilization has infected
1:51:01
the west and the Muslim World alike almost universally in the Muslim world but I think
1:51:06
Real Islam will overcome in both cases inshah tala H sping on that note thank you very much
1:51:14
for your your time today and how conversations is that could have here thank you very much it was a great pleasure where you please remember to subscribe to our social media and YouTube
1:51:25
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