Al-Ghazali – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership

so if there's been any unifying uh thread in this cook's tour of some very uh far-flung human corners of the history of this uh gigantic diverse ummah i guess it has been that this principle of leadership very modern really on islamic category is something that can be applied but only indirectly to certain people who from a secular optic would be regarded as leaders leaders of jihad leaders of thought leaders of ifta leaders of their own way within islam the kind of william williamson approach we've seen a number of stormy petrols is there a unifying principle well i think that as we began we should end by recognizing that the modern conception of leadership is incompatible with the islamic view simply because it excludes the possibility of tawfiq and divine agency the prophetic model itself is not a model of leadership in the sense that would make sense say to the judge business school or the palace of westminster because his leadership alaihis is a leadership that was thrust upon him when it began his recourse was to his wife and to sheltering beneath a cloth he didn't make a large inaugural address lapping up the flash photography and he was reluctant he did not wish for this responsibility and we saw the famous sound hadith in which he says do not ask for leadership isn't our life nowadays predicated on filling in forms and asking for promotion and nagging our boss and looking for a better job how does that cohere at all with that very absolute prophetic uh commandment and in their varied ways we've seen that the leadership paradigms that we have mapped out in the history of islam are people whose success consists in the fact that they weren't really interested in glory it just kind of happened as a side effect of their journey but it was not their destination hopefully that's been clear but of course so many others thousands thousands of other individual leaders in the history of this umber those whole centuries and whole cultural realms that we haven't yet uh broached um would make this clear that the one is a model of leadership to ego therionic leadership we might say the only paradigm recognized now and the other is the leadership that comes about when that is subjugated and the nafs is overcome as the false self which means really negating modern ideas of individualism and the true self which is the raw deeply buried beneath layers of rubbish in the hearts of most of us nowadays is activated and whether that person wills it or not carries that person up so it's a defiance of gravity it is the influence of heaven as it were melting the dew the dew doesn't get the choice but it moves upwards because of the power of what is happening and its own inherent uh nature so this of course presents us moderns those who are flying desks in a modern uh company or university or parliament with a real paradox what is uh the legitimacy of what we take to be our natural right wanting to see our hard work rewarded and to slither up the greasy pole competing with others this doesn't seem to be the islamic model at all ever this kind of darwinian paradigm which prevails in modern capitalism is not something that we respect it's not that there mustn't be people who lead because the hadith goes on to say because if you are given it without asking for it you will be given success in it but if you achieve it to asking for it it will be given authority over you in other words you'll be subject to its rules and its competitive dog eat dog mindset the spiritual hardening the kingship of the ego will inevitably eat you alive and you can see that as power corrupts not lost in politics but in any other aspect of life and we see it in the brexit negotiations a ridiculous circus of damaged naked egos squabbling with one another we see it with people who are swallowing their own political convictions for the sake of promises of cabinet positions under hunt or johnson and it's very unedifying it's the endless human zoo of the ego the animalistic it's kind of naked and obvious and unedifying and ominous of course because those are not people who are going to be given telephone from heaven so our paradigm is really different as we've seen and we need somehow at least to be aware of that as we move through the world that ours is a radical discordant dissident perspective as it has to be because we believe strongly in the divine omnipotence something which doesn't occur to most authors of cvs or readers of cvs it's it's that alien principle that nonetheless looking at the history of the umma is that which makes things happen so we began with that uh disorienting thought maybe even that humbling thought maybe it even coincides with our sense that however well-laid our plans may be they tend to go astray perhaps we have the wisdom to recognize that it is allah's plans alone which are an accurate map of the future and our own are just vain and incompetent usually egotistic dreamings maybe as we go through life we have the humility and the wisdom to witness that maybe through painful setbacks but uh in the context of our own sense of how we do things in this current social matrix where everything is darwinian dog eat dog devil take the hindmost the american dream means that there are some people who don't make it to the top and deliver a nightmare end up in prison or as members of a despised ghetto community for whom there is very little mobility there isn't a dream without the nightmare and with the growth of what they call the precariat in modern britain we're seeing that as well lots of people for whom this hugely competitive and heartless animalistic law of the jungle view of how leadership is achieved are the left behind and end up in situations of considerable personal and familial and economic distress and that uh gulf is widening all the time partly because of this deficient and darwinian and ultimately heartless vision of how to get to the top how to assume positions of a mana and responsibility it's an ugly process but because it releases our lowest most uh avid energies uh has created a civilization that is of enormous perhaps unprecedented power that is energy sources the lower part of us not the higher and we will see what its long-term outcomes might be in any case what i want to do today is to look at somebody who is kind of a paradigm for somebody who actually abandoned the slippery pole seeing it for what it is and decided to turn within and of course this has happened to very many people in the history of the umma but in a sense in his life it becomes the defining act of his resume this of course is hojita islam al-ghazali of whose life we remember particularly his crisis his disillusionment uh and his climbing down from the pole it already reached the top in order to go off in uh humble dervish-like poverty um taking the hippie trail wandering off looking for truth doing all of those prophetic but uh not lead ship like things so i want to close this series who knows if there's good feedback we might look at some more people next year because it's quite a good way of getting into certain principles in religion by seeing how they have interacted with and been bodied forth in actual human bio data it's an accessible way of looking at principles but in the case of imam gazelli what i want to do is not just go over the details of his life again because you've seen the movie and no doubt this is uh familiar already but rather to see what we might learn if we are to address this uh apparent crisis that afflicts the soul whenever we seek to better ourselves whenever we write that cv i'm a great team player and i really enjoy new challenges and these are my hobbies and all the same because the system tends to produce what sociologists call the monoculture because it's a mass culture everything ends up being the same and you can download a standard cv from the internet with all of those stupid phrases and in a sense you have to do that you can't say actually i'm not a good team player and i get tired easily and i have unusual ideas and i rock the boats and a lot of people don't like me you can't do that there's no way in which ichla sincerity a genuine self-portrayal required religiously remember you're not allowed to sell a house in islam unless you indicate all of its defects to the buyer we're quite quite narrow in our moralism so this economic leadership model which of course infects and corrupts politics as well um of people just making things up and making promises and flattering themselves is something which we view with very considerable disquiet and distaste but then hey how do you write a cv if you need a job there are certain practical considerations we know what our ideals are they are the traditional ideals of sacred humanity shared by people in other traditions as well but how do we live by them in a world that is fanatically materialistic well let's uh try and address this by taking a step back and looking at what and where we are as believers as people who are still interested in what is behind the surface of things uh at this particular in many ways unsettled and extreme point of human history just about everything is unsettled even the natural world is unsettled which is really new for human beings uh it's interesting uh for those who are considering their identity as minorities in the middle of this sort of mammon civilization to reflect on what has been done to them to what extent are we actually in continuity with the sacred past and to what extent are we just a kind of mildly islamic or eccentric version of the mainstream western machine we're thinking about that what where really are our roots well recently i went for the first time to the new bukhari galleries at the british museum and this is the heart of the islamic art displays at the british museum to big rooms which thanks to a malaysian donor family have been handed over to the presentation of some of islam's great treasures and of course it's all incomparable and it's about the busiest gallery next door there's the amazing anglo-saxon and celtic stuff which is also pretty astonishing when you think of the dark ages or pretty pretty shining some of those things but the islamic gallery even though islam is kind of the paradigm of that which makes everybody kind of anxious is it safe to go in the islamic oh my god where is that adjective normally used in the media 99 times out of 100 or 100 times out of 100 it's attached to something scary but they go in and they go in because it is the luminous heart of the museum the ancient egyptian stuff is fun and children look at the mummies and all of that the elgin marbles there's some people in there but all right i guess lumps of the parthenon all right more uh a kind of status experience to look at those like going to a particularly difficult experimental modern opera something to talk about the dinner party in islington but after two hours of serialist evocations of sonic chaos the kind of enjoyment factor might diminish but hey it's something to talk about i went to the new philip glass opera oh yeah i had got really good reviews didn't it it's it's all about you know it's like bird song you just produce this chatter that demonstrates your place in the social matrix but um intrinsically it may not uh do much for you but when you go to those islamic galleries okay so the world's great city has its great museum and at the center of the great museum there's these galleries and there you see the qurans and the carpets and the manuscripts and the glassware and everybody is crowding you have to wait to get to see some of the stuff because it's so busy that's an interesting question what is it about the artifacts of our civilization which presumably body forth the worldview and the spiritual states of the craftsmen who are producing that stuff that everybody nowadays in 21st century individualistic mammon land finds so delightful an interesting question even though it's islamic isn't that like islamist we're brought up to have certain reflexes about that but people can't get enough of that but what you don't see that and this is perhaps the most interesting thing in the bukhari galleries is many muslims that's really also an interesting cultural statement lots of japanese and chinese and american tourists and europeans and dutch and english kind of lapping up all of this stuff and looking at the qurans and the woodwork and the frit wear and the mamluk glass and it's all astounding but even though one in seven londoners is a muslim maybe one in a hundred visitors to the buhari gallery is muslim they don't always seem to be the most religious one so that's a kind of interesting reflection on our state where do we really belong are we actually more comfortable in starbucks or watching wimbledon or doing some sort of purely western thing and when we see the extraordinary cultural summit achieved by the ancestors of most muslims in london were kind of a bit uncomfortable the world's greatest fruit wear fritwear is that islamic brotherhood is this haram we really don't know even though your average kind of chattering class is island person probably has some in his home and he can tell you the difference about or islamic carpets on his floor but we aren't in that space that's an interesting uh condemnation i guess that we complain so much about hostility to the east and to our heritage but we're not really inhabiting our heritage we don't know it we don't seem to be interested and it's the same as the victoria and albert museum where they have some equivalently amazing things you don't see many london muslims there even the kind of high-flying city types who maybe rub shoulders with people who do go to galways but no it's not not what we do so we begin with this interesting sense of a consensual divorce that probably the the default demography of london muslims is only 60 percent of cases subcontinental and you could say that the deep culture of islam in the subcontinent may be the greatest summit of human civilization how do you measure these things in terms of the music the food the textiles the architecture taj mahal is the world's number one tourist destination that culture their ancestral culture certainly beats anything that uh the british did in india for heaven's sake no comparison at all but the new generation do not inhabit that don't respond to it find it all a bit kind of um disquieting they leave it to the white folks to get have islamic art in their homes whatever it is odd that's an interesting circumstance that despite the religiosity of much of subcontinental london islam there doesn't seem to be much interest in pride in that staggering north indian mogul khaljid whatever it is heritage they just don't much respond to it or want to know much about and talk to the young people and they can't name any of those rulers and it's just some kind of odd arabian nights exotic thing that nobody ever tells them about because their culture is just the modern culture of the biryani the khatam the antis that world but the greatness of that civilization which could be a very good way of vindicating their culture it's something that they choose not to know about or they've never been exposed to it one great way of dealing with islamophobia is pointing out the popularity of islamic art but because it's not popular amongst ourselves that becomes slightly problematic argument we don't respond to it much now and oddity i remember once walking with my late father through uh bengal khazren street in cairo cairo has the world's highest density of medieval monuments astonishing and there on all sides are these staggering sort of mamluk cathedral scale miracles and he's blown away and then he says where did these people go this is amazing where did they all go good question they're not doing those things in egypt any longer or anything like they build a few shopping malls maybe and hotels for tourists but that no even when they build a mosque it's not that it's a kind of embarrassed uh pastiche with a few half remembered uh stereotypical motifs they don't relate to that so that's an interesting if rather dispiriting realization the religion goes on the civilization is defunct the elites particularly in muslim lands are not in any way in continuity with the world view and the cultural forms of the historic elites sometimes the working classes are in continuity the valleys that you might have seen 500 years ago in cairo lucknow or wherever but the elites look neither do they particularly wish to re-engage with that stuff which is a shame because they need um a pr break but they're not really going to use that stuff because it no longer speaks to them so that's one rather sobering realization about the precarity the oddness of our situation that we no longer represent a civilization really uh but there's lots of piety around but generally our lives tend to be well we pray and we fast and we have a kind of asian style colorful tinsely nikach but basically the substance of our lives is a kind of western thing and that dissonance produces many of the discomforts in the contemporary muslim soul and on the modern the real side of it this uh aspirational model of leadership is corrosive to the soul because it's not natural for the believer to get to the top by trampling others under foot and by boasting about his or her real or imagined skills so we recognize this but then we also recognize that the elites and those muslim diasporas in the west that should be proud of their ancestors but in practice don't seem interested at all um have been dislocated through colonial experiences postcolonial inferiority complexes in favor of a narrative that seemed certainly the 19th early 20th century to be absolutely insuperable the traditional munchie goes to the new railway station in lucknow for the first time and there is this enormous black dragon of a steam engine and he feels will never compete with this civilization and that complex begins and the bifurcation between religion and civilization becomes a kind of sting in the soul of very many perhaps most muslims very few people are serenely and uncomplicatedly just a part of the narrative of muslim civilization any longer they're all kind of discontinuities and compromises and tensions that agitate people's souls inevitably cognitive dissonance so that was the white man has this enormous steaming machine i just got my old horse at home we're done for uh that narrative of progress with it's shall we say fatalism in other words this is inevitable uh a social darwinism just as darwin said that we begin with primordial sludge and then we produce well people like himself wearing a top hat and playing bridge obviously the climax of a billion years who could deny that this idea of despite the meaninglessness of stuff and the fact that stuff is taken to be all that exists there is this ordering principle becomes a kind of surrogate religion so people think well eschatology heaven and hell that's difficult but hey things are getting better this quasi-religious miracle of order emerging from natural chaos is really exciting and we're going to base our music and our art and our sense of ourselves our optimism on this the strange collaboration of atheism and materialism on the one hand with the kind of optimism about the human future is an interesting sign of our times and sometimes accelerated when 20th century man wanted to step on the gas he tended to go for something like nazism or communism which were just attempts to speed up natural selection and make us better at high speed it didn't really work too well but we still believe in the underlying teleology of getting better progressism what renegade calls the fatalism of progress you can't do anything about it things just are going to get better and go along with it and perhaps retain a few fragmentary nice things from your grandmother's pieties but basically the future is is is the reality so that was the counter narrative to the islamic civilizational narrative really until very very very recently and even a generation ago of people like francis fukuyama the idea of the end of history the west has actually cracked it we understand uh the meaning of life life universe and everything and things are going to get better liberal democracy science secularism will prevail everywhere as the iron curtain came down that seemed to be inexorable but now they tend to look a little bit uh doubtful about all of this and this is what makes being muslim in our time particularly intriguing if not particularly comfortable so in the 19th century the old narrative of the mughals and the ottomans the great climaxes of everything collapsing and people starting to say well the white man has better cannons and representative government and human rights and we're feeling really put upon by all of this and we have to redefine islamists we invented human rights or the quran very scientific and that kind of apologetic uh manipulation which doesn't really convince anybody um or the sort of mad fundamentalist luddite reaction which is causing the the complete systemic implosion of an increasing number of muslim societies and countries now instead of that we now have the other narrative the narrative that said that it had the answers itself imploding not just because of the philosophical collapse of the enviro of the enlightenment idea of how to get ethics into the post-modern relativisation of everything which very simply very easily becomes a kind of nihilism or uh relativism uh but because of what science which is the kind of the dominant jewel in the crown of the western alternative to the sacred paradigms um is now presenting so yesterday you might have seen possibly on the bbc michelle hussein who comes to cnc sometimes she's a kind of cmc supporter a serious person interviewing james lovelock that's an interesting encounter not just because he's like five times older than her he's having his 100th birthday this year but still really coherent you know you wouldn't want to cross mental sorts with him on a dark knight he's a very bright man he's the one who a couple of generations ago came up with this gaia hypothesis which is popular in some sustainability green circles which is the scientific reasons for regarding us as part of a planetary organism a lot of people thought this was a kind of interesting idea even though it's kind of obvious that the ecosystem is one unitary thing but it was a helpful breakthrough at the time when people still thought of human beings as somehow categorically exceptional and he's been a leading campaigner for nuclear energy and uh for what he calls rational displacement it's worth thinking about if you have relatives in a muslim country global warming is going to hit the muslim world much harder than it will uh these frozen latitudes and he says it's not going to be stopped by technology or by anything and therefore we need to adopt what he calls a process of rational displacement if evacuate countries like bangladesh and find other places to put all of those people because you can't save those low-lying places new orleans don't bother pakistan is going to be destroyed by global warming because the himalayan ice cap is coming to an end it'll be uninhabitable 20 30 years don't even think about science coming up with the solution these places are toast so rather dismal but he sees things very much as a futurist with sufficient international cooperation we can relocate to those populations countries will be guarded but the populations will be i don't know somewhere near omsk in siberia where they can go oranges this is the kind of prospect that he is holding out the optimism of some scientist is quite encouraging perhaps in any case what he was talking about with michelle was saying yesterday and she was kind of a little bit gobsmacked by this is artificial intelligence he says the real solution to the wipeout of homo sapiens by climate change which he sees is inevitable is going to be that there's nothing special about us we're just one species amongst 10 million will come to an end but what's important is consciousness that's the only thing that's interesting about us and we're going to produce consciousness through artificial intelligence that he says will be 10 000 times as quick as the pathetic meat machine that is the human brain and this new cybernetic consciousness which will replace ourselves will go on forever because it won't be particularly dependent on any biological uh infrastructure so the age of 100 is still looking to the future and michelle was kind of nodding not wishing to be too impolite but of course it's a shockingly outrageous idea but my point is that the old sort of victorian herbert spencer idea of social darwinism and progress instead of these funny little sacred traditions and your mogul design and your meditative music your contemplative civilization get on board this train which is going to the real paradise which is the great future land and milk of milk and honey which science and reason and liberal democracy are opening up to a hitherto benighted human race no longer the case now if the science itself is saying well actually we've erased our future but something else is going to take over so it doesn't really matter there's nothing special about us anyway then that whole narrative of progress is no longer the irresistible seductress that it was for indians and egyptians 100 years ago but it's looking as if it's run into the buffers and is far more threatening and inhuman than anything that even the most aberrant traditional sacred civilization dreamt up it is genuinely biocidal threatening not just ourselves but most other life forms um outrageous what lovelock said was outrageous so that's the kind of dialogue that we're having now not the dialogue that say that jamaladin afghani had a hundred years ago with reynolds at the college the force where it was enlightenment steam engines the national republic uh the imperial vision of uplifting the colonies against trying to justify islamic civilization and not really making a very good fist of it now the dialogue is different the dialogue is now between the completely crazy futurist uh with his predictions of a utopia but not for us and on the other hand michelle hussein with her islamic thing which is real and her work at the bbc and her desire for career projection progression which is entirely legitimate she's good at her children that conversation is is very different to the conversation we were having 100 years ago it is more disquieting and from the materialistic point of view is not nearly so triumphalistic so my point is the simple one which is that we find ourselves in a new situation it's not just tradition and modernity progress and conservatism it is a model of life that for all of its failings produced sustainable civilizations that believed in a higher reality and produced a staggering cornucopia of art music and other things that indicate the profound serenity and happiness of the souls that generated those artifacts against global catastrophe climate emergency not to mention all of the other potential threats that science represents you should all go and watch dr strangelove which is kubrick's greatest film which is this kind of prophetic vision of human cleverness outsmarting [Music] human wisdom if you don't know the story it's the head of an american nuclear bomber air base who decides that the virility of the american man is being compromised by the addition of fluoride to drinking water and because of this evil conspiracy he is going to bring down the establishment by launching his nuclear bombers against russia they're going to launch a counter-strike the whole world will go up but there won't be any more fluoride in our water and the virility of the american man is going to be restored it's kind of amusing but it also is indicative of the kind of wonky paranoia that exists particularly on the other side of the atlantic as its finger drifts somewhere egotistically near uh the red button um it's quite a prophetic although it's a black comedy right we should all watch it as an example of a secular critique of of the catastrophic risks that modernity and science can present to us so the point is the old progress and science and reason and human happiness against reaction religion sexism conservatism the family uh primitivism that dialectic isn't really in place any longer and things were a lot more complex which means that religiosity of the islamic option is about not a kind of nostalgic retreat into grand mars pieties but in the real world of work or whatever you go along with the the world view of the dominant civilization that has to involve us in a a more radical and existential dissident not the kind of blow yourself up in the street mad al qaeda aberration but something rooted in the spiritual depths of our civilization rather than just in our capacity to get really angry so imam al-ghazali comes in and as i said i don't want to go through the bio data it's um pleasantly familiar but the the key uh tension in his life of course is the mind and the heart even when he was a teenager in central asia uh during the day he would attend the majlis the greatest philosophical theologian in the world at the time with the crack students of the age who'd come to sit at his feet from and it was the forms of the syllogism the construction of arguments analogy very refined uh elaborate mental gymnastics which have their place in our civilization we like to construct good arguments we've always emphasized logic and then the classes were over by the zohar prayer and he'd get on his donkey or his mule and trot off to the suburbs of the city in order to sit with a sufi abu ali al-farmadi where a different sort of journey was being celebrated not the way of the mind but the way of the heart not the way of logic chopping and demonstration apodictic proofs but instead the affective possibly that which is closer to what makes us most paradigmatically human taught in a rose garden this is persia after all it's mostly poetry it's ecstatic people are sitting in a circle and as it were the metaphorical flagons of love are being passed around you don't get that kind of intoxication in a logic class um it's dry and it has to be dry you have to exclude your humanity and your emotions from the rigorous intellectual construction of arguments in law and in metaphysics but in foreign it's the sufi thing and the persian sufi thing which is the climax of that civilization certainly in terms of its literature and that bifurcation was of course on everybody's mind and leads to his famous crisis am i sincere why do i enjoy sitting in front of the best students in the islamic world why am i accepting the patronage of nizamil walk the most powerful man in the world probably why am i hobnobbing walking the corridors of power taking the state's dinars um uh when quite possibly i'm just digging my own spiritual and moral grave i really enjoy my professorial chair and the odium academicum that goes with it and famously in the middle of a lecture he's kind of thunderstruck by this experiences what we would probably call a breakdown and just leaves to the consternation of his students who want him to finish the argument but he leaves and he goes uh well not back to the rose garden but god's rose garden the wider world which is where the believer finds his spiritual nourishment because this is in the quran the quran tells us that faith is gifted by heaven to those who humbly open their hearts to the signs of of god in the natural world and in human beings that's the quran argument argument from design but not really philosophical but rather existential shaking us and saying leave aside all of your clever syllogisms look at all of this does it look as if it just emerged from some primordial nothing not very likely is it that's a kind of argument that's deeper than arguments it appeals to that which is most common sensical and real about human beings and incidentally is another thing for us to think about in our world part of whose ethos has been human mastery of nature we want to control nature we queue up to get to the top of mount everest at vast expense and personal risk why should we want to do that because we want to stand on top of the world and this makes us feel that we've dominated nature and part of our civilization has said that's how we will achieve happiness because nature is threatening it's got tigers in it and but there is of course in nature in its threateningness as well as in its sort of soft rabbit aspects uh a lesson for the soul during ramadan i was in the malay world and somebody in this gathering said look what i saw when i was driving had his phone been sitting behind the dashboard in the car and the car stopped and there was a tiger in front of his car and the tiger had her cubs by the side of the road and people had stopped us to look at this thing what was interesting is you could immediately see the kind of uh what he said the majesty of this animal and its complete existential indifference to our own egotistic cleverness the the majesty of it just being a tiger and challenging us and making us realize our smallness it was a sacred moment and this is what the quran is telling us even in something that could eat you there is something that is going to spiritually bring you to life and so the believers have always enjoyed nature muslims have always loved gardens and we have always tried to bring the indicativity of nature into our homes and our sacred spaces the mosque doesn't have pictures but the mosque has indications of the geometric indicativity of nature decorative art which is the essence really of our architectural civilization is about stylized vegetal motifs tessellations arabesques the exploration of the strange platonic mystery of symmetry and geometry brought to the surface that's what our art does it says an infinitesimal distance behind the surface of things which seem to be kind of messy there is order symmetry perfection there is a kind of platonic space where everything is ordered and geometry prevails not just the snowflake but the atom and muslim art has always sought to remind us of the orderliness of god's creation and it's very effective and that's one reason why people like to crowd out those galleries at the british museum because on some level they're being told there's something really interesting about the fact that creation is orderly rather than just what you'd expect from a world without an order which is either nothingness which is the only logical thing to expect but some kind of radical fractal chaos but no there is order there are physical constants there's a speed of light there is gravity there are triangles there are eight-pointed stars there is real order is part of the fabric of things and that's what the quran is saying signs for people of lump the deeper part of ourselves which is activated through contemplation not through cleverness it's not really a function of iq it's a function of whether you can overcome the jumping thoughts and the distractions of the lower self and allow the loop the real self to ponder these things and to be nourished by them so another question in our contemporary reality since that seems to be the the puzzle that we set for ourselves today is if modern man has ransacked nature and intimidated it and terrorized it so that probably that tiger has now been killed or something because it's on a public highway if we are the terroristical enemies of just about every other species apart from those that we can enslave because we like chicken nuggets or something if this is our function on the planet not to be cholapha and stewards but to be uh rapists and mass murderers because the quran says the other species are umamon and nations like yourselves which when you think about it it's a pretty radical statement the world of rabbits has its own integrity and its right to have a global distribution just like the world of human beings they have their own logic their own consciousness their own integrity their own right to be here and they're not just there for us autonomously as another way in which creation testifies to the majesty of its author but we don't see that so we just run them over on the a14 or maybe eat them or shoot them because whatever it is we do but we we can't just let them be because modern civilization doesn't see the point of letting anything be make money out of it enjoy it treat it as some kind of leisure activity go hunting for elephants in botswana but just capitalize everything what's its monetary value and the consequences for the poor old vandalized natural world are something that even the most uh sort of crazy atheistic scientists like lovelock have to acknowledge but they just say oh we'll come to an end because of all this cleverness but there'll be something even smarter so that's the optimistic it's a kind of weird eschatology so the question is if humanity treats nature as an enemy rather than as just something that we are part of and are spiritually nourished by how do we find our way to that contemplative which the quran says is how you absorb faith how do you get a natural belief if you're in terminal 5 at heathrow for instance maybe if you look out of the window you can see beyond the smoking runway there's a few trees out there otherwise nature is decisively abolished even the food is kind of god knows how many additives and things have been added and part of the weirdness of the modern food industry is that the more they manipulate the food and the more they add to it the cheaper it gets should be the other way around when you think about it but this is the inversion that we're living so how do you remember your lord in these modern spaces that are the consequence of the radical ransacking and disenchantment of the world well you do it through uh the quranic verse that says we shall show them our signs on the horizons and in themselves i was talking to the prison chaplains a few days ago in prison you really are detached from nature you don't have a spouse you don't have children maybe you can see a bird occasionally through the window in a high security prison that might not happen very often you don't breathe fresh air if you've been to a prison you'll see how at least the white folks are whiter than ever before because they just don't go outdoors how can they enjoy this quranic uh celebration this feasting on the signs of nature an interesting question pastorally for them i was putting it together ah it's in other human beings that is where the real sign is to be found the inward universe is even more interesting than the outward universe and this is the meaning of an imam al-ghazali says this it's one of the key points of his deen there's a whole section on muammar and he talks about the preference of being with others over being on one's own other people are a pain aren't they i mean most of our grumbles are about other people and uh what they say about us or what they've done to us why not just be on your own like this new novel individual which is doing quite well at the moment which is about a future in which nobody ever talks to each other in the shop in the bank whatever everybody is an individual on their phones there's no human isn't that better other people are just a pain no well in the in imam ghazali's vision it is nature and of course he spends 10 years in the wilderness the restores are contemplative functionality but also the inward horizon so there's the outward horizon a few beech trees that you can see the other side of the runway at heathrow about the inward horizon which by definition is what you are and you can't get away from it so inwardly there is a thicker just as outwardly there is thicker but also inwardly in our transaction with others we intuit transcendence and this is really important in our civilization which emphasizes software and engagement with others what is interesting about the external world well i guess mountains and trees and those things are pretty interesting but what is really interesting is the existence of other little points of light other consciousnesses other phenomena miracles are that also have self-awareness and to which you have moral obligations that's why the ethical is so inextricable from the spiritual in islam because the whole process of sulak azalea makes this very clear is about recognizing your own inward weaknesses and failings and needs by engaging with the mirror of the heart of somebody else and this is the famous hadith the believer is the mirror to the believer that when you're with other people you are challenged and brought out of yourself far more reliably than if you're just on your own or looking in a mirror or taking a selfie which is what we nowadays seem to do is very characteristically modern sort of narcissism center of cambridge yesterday everybody's taking photographs i would say 90 percent of them are taking photographs of themselves because it's the me generation and the self is the center of our concerns but actually the other is more interesting and immunity puts all of those chapters in the adab of travelling sounds like a rather kind of pedestrian thing but a whole book on it the adapt of eating really this is the greatest spiritual text of the greatest monotheistics of allah he's got a whole chapter just on eating marriage casp what we call business ethics i guess these are important not just because god is testing us to see whether we follow the rules when we're with annoying other people but because in the human intuition of the inalienable integrity of the other's spirit there is a reminder of the unseen world this is important in ghazal's sufi sufism and generally into sarwar there are reminders in the geometry of nature and it can be a philosophical argument it's also a spiritual nourishment but the great sign of transcendence in the world is that to which the angels bow down human beings seems improbable you created him of clay but the angels bow down to any adam or to that which is within us so it's the the and ignore he says that's what it's all about but he's not going to talk about it because it's something that cannot be in capture encapsulated in the net of words but really the whole of the here is moving towards a position in which we have sufficient self-awareness mindfulness you might say nowadays and sufficient compliance with the outward forms of the prophetic perfection for the contemplative mechanisms within ourselves to operate properly and for us to see transcendence in and through and with other people god's hand is with the congregation and this is a collectivist movement the holy prophet there's not a hermit he comes down from the mountain comes down from the main and his greatness is with his people not because that's a kind of necessary nuisance but because it's in the intuition of the miracle of the other consciousness that you most reliably grasp transcendence beauty of the world beauty of other people that's all abundantly celebrated in ghazalis and subsequent sufi tradition the idea of the shahid beautiful human being who bears witness to the beauty of his or her creator for sure so in the airport you can look at babies and so forth and that's a very islamic thing to do because the miracle of beauty and the purity of the young is certainly a shahid but the engagement with the proximity with the human other which is only ever possible if the ego is mastered because the ego is the veil that shuts you off from seeing the integrity and the need of the human other really to see the miracle of somebody else's existence to be close to that person your teacher your grandfather your child your lover your colleague your fellow tariq number whatever it might be and thereby really to experience the perfume of transcendence in your quite ordinary human activities the ego has to go away because it just gets in the way it is the rust over the heart that's the quran the hadith puts it that's what it does the heart is the eye which perceives and that which is a kind of cataract over it surfaces our egotistic interest in doing our own thing and when we engage with somebody else the ego is activated the spirit is activated and he talks about this in the kitab two think two parts of us are engaged naturally when we meet another human being when we meet another element of creation a dog or something certain reflexes are triggered but when we meet another human being there's an instinctive human consciousnesses which come to the surface attraction might be one of them fight or flight might be another these are obvious things but there is also a spiritual osmosis and that's twofold firstly the ego thinks is this person a threat am i better than this person can i emerge from this encounter with my status intact is he earning more than the blah blah blah all of those things which are normal a lot of natural humanity it's the uh the the darwinian aspect within us but also the law which is interested because of its nature in seeing the beauty and the integrity of the other and that's the difference between the profane regard and the sacred regard the eye of the heart is what brings us uh the happiness which imam khazali says this is the path of sa'ada to the extent that you're happy in this world spiritually happy the abode of saada happiness is necessarily yours in the next world and this is what you've kind of established as your priority so the nafs wants to see the faults in others and all of the seven deadly sins and vices and pride and envy and all of that activated and triggered by that whenever we meet another human being we feel insecure and all of that stuff which we often spend most of our lives um trapped by and made stressed by but the raw to the extent that it can still see anything at all is looking to see the other rook and to see the beauty because the rooh is from the divine realm and its natural habitat is beauty it's in a space where there is only beauty and its natural gravitation in this world is to see other tokens of beauty so remember in which is maybe the heart of the he calls it the exposition of the wonders of the heart asks us how we would be if that was our automatic way of dealing with human transactions if in all of these muammar we engage with another human being somebody who's reading my passport or somebody who stops me for speeding or whatever other profane thing it might be and instead of the ego being activated the roar is activated and there are so there's another miracle of a rock to which the angels bow down etc with me at the day of allah become interesting in other words an experience of solidarity and of beauty and of inter-subjectivity which is necessarily the case even if that person is poking you in the eye a person still has a rule somewhere and there's always spiritual interest in that situation whether it's jamal or jalal and the nourishment that we would experience this is what i was saying to the chaplains even in a prison situation where the external horizon signs are really abolished but the human engagement the engagement between souls is still something that the believer is interested in and if you spend time with people who are spiritually trained and refined you will notice how much they seem to enjoy learning about human beings they really smile when a new person joins their majorless and they want to know who they are what is this person really about and you ask them questions about job and children and so forth and these are the kind of standard ritual uh formulas particularly in eastern cultures that are exchanged but it's not really about that it's let me see what this person is and what god means by this unique human being and how i can be nourished spiritually how this person can contribute to the mergeless is pouring out of the wine of divine recollection because that's the only thing worth drinking and this uh actually is the way to read that here and you get a sense of what happened to imam ghazali on those 10 years many of which were spent it seems kind of in a state of seclusion that he understands uh that we are ourselves when we are in accordance with our fitter which is naturally god inhaling nourished human beings we're not designed to be rocks or stones we're praises uh i bad slaves of god is what we should be and what makes us most healthy spiritually even physically it's just good for us it's our natural way it's our the uh the air the mixture of gases in the air that we are designed to breathe unlike the unpleasant mixture that modernity gives us it's uh it's it's right for us and that in this environment life is endlessly interesting because of these muammar that you can turn your evening in a dusty caravan sarai with a bunch of merchants from who knows where and their noisy camels whatever that experience is you can turn it into an integrated part of your uh experience of god not just your search for god through keeping moral boundaries and courtesy but your experience of god because human beings are yet are signs stronger than anything else in the physical world and this goes for all of the other muammar all of the other kinds of transactions that he indicates that and it happens of course in relationships particularly nowadays relationships not working particularly well even though it should really be the easiest thing for us the male and the female naturally belong together there is a kind of magnetism there that should make that the easiest thing but often it's one of the most hard things usually because the ego is activated does she look like this does he have this job will he buy me a car it's all about what can i get out of this rather than what is really interesting which is seeing a miracle of another soul with its needs that's more interesting than the other stuff nafs is an animalistic thing ultimately and it's no more interesting than just watching a dog or a cat it gets very predictable after a while but the roar is of course reflecting eternity uh so he says that uh we need to shift our optic and in our engagement with others including engagement with with spouses figure out uh what that person really is and enjoying the miracle of closeness to another sort of paradox of consciousness which is the deepest mystery in the physical world and imam zabidi who has the great commentary on the here talks about this where he talks about the nikah and the rules of nicaragua and what what is really going on in this this mystery and it's also the case i think that imam al-ghazali in his understanding of the and there are quite a lot of things in it here insists that you can only really understand the sharia or begin to understand it when you see it as a form of life which is there to represent human beings who try to be egoless and are trying to look for ways of improving things and others rather than looking at the world as the kind of endless supermarket from which they can take things for themselves you can't understand the sharia if you are in a frame that says well what about what about me it is a way of service it is a way of sacrifice and sometimes privileges are granted but those privileges are there in order to convey certain onerous responsibilities and nothing really in the sacred law of islam can be understood outside that and henry behmann in his book the secret of islam talks a lot about this the shady is just there as an expression of god's love for human beings through the holy prophet every one of these rulings is based on the divine compassion and love but to understand that we have to get into the space that allah wishes us to be in which is the space of finding our true happiness through service and the noticing of other people and their needs if we treat them as just more phenomena out there that we observe with our senses you're not going to figure out the way the sharia is at all it's not designed to be that it's not designed to be judged like that and that's a very important aspect of the kazalian perspective so we're beginning to see that the story that the imam sort of enacts for us and there's something quite iconic about it turning away from esoteric learning in favor of contemplative knowledge and then a return to the esoteric armed with the awareness that it's only the esoteric that gives the outward meaning uh is really the key uh contribution of his life and of course so many other things he is a warrior he is passionate for truth in a prophetic kind of way he writes a book in which he corrects the christians on the basis of the text of the new testament he writes a book which corrects the philosophy of ivan cena based on the philosophy of ben cena he writes books that correct the ismailis and all of these other paths to knowledge that he thinks are not worthy of human beings all of this is done through the spirit of of compassion and towards the end of his greatest work which is the which is also kind of polemical work and the target of this book is not the ismailis or the philosophers or whoever the target of this book is muslims who underestimate what islam is giving them by just going through the motions as if islam is just a list of ten thousand sort of disconnected sometimes difficult sometimes familiar things which we do in order to get treats in the next life well there is a next life in god's mercy and that is an important part of the yeah and the way in which he incentivizes us but it's very much about how we live an anticipation of the dharasada the paradisal world of happiness in this world how can there be a garden in our hearts in our relationships in our tariqas in our circles of knowledge in our government even how can we make things come to life so that there is verdia in these uh earthly transactions and of course the duty to do that to plant these gardens as it were to create an easy indicativity of the creator's presence in apparently profane things in this world is something that continues even today this is one of the meanings of the hadith that says if the hour comes upon you when you are planting a tree finish planting it planting of trees is an important thing in the sunnah and if you look at the idea of the tree in sort of a dictionary of hadith you'll see there's a lot about trees in islam but the point of this hadith is that even at the end of time you continue to work for the greening and the repristination of creation because it's just what human beings should do but to trigger for environmental action against global warming i guess you have to do this thing planting trees is actually much more effective than any uh more spiffy scientific high-tech remedy for climate change because trees capture so much carbon and this is prophetically mandated in the end times but that's an indication of the larger pursuit that the believer has to have that remembrance of god creates a garden of paradise according to the famous hadith in the reality jannah the circles of remembrance of god are gardens of the gardens of paradise in the place where god is remembered even if his name is not spoken but where people are remembering god through a due courteous engagement with each other and are in tune with their hearts and their inner nature that's a garden of paradise and that's a a tiny anticipation a waft from the fragrance of the of the phildas and this is part of the joy of the believer and the sweetness that the believers should find when present with other people who have this higher aspiration so that essentially and i could talk about kazali for a very long time is what i believe to be the deeper message of the and this is a kind of leadership that is about the renewal of the whole of the religion through a recapturing of its holistic ambitious universal purport it's not just about what you do in the mosque and it's not really relevant to what you do in other aspects of your life you'll be uncomfortable and stressed if that's your reality instead it is the determination of a sacred purpose behind everything which is ethical which is for the human other which is about which is living in compliance with the prophetic boundaries which show the best form of human dignity and human flourishing and is also based on the activation the liberation of the raw the spirit because the nafs by its nature looks for ugly things and the raw by its nature wishes to see what's beautiful and the modern world is increasingly generating a mass culture which makes money for an oligarchy from the lower self's desire to look at ugly things and to look at manifestations of the ugliest most impure uh most perverse most private aspects of human beings the naturally wishes to see stuff like that and increasingly that's what the entertainment industry fashion industry so much of our culture is about lyrics of so many popular songs because it's easy and the lower self finds it sweet but the higher self the roar looking for archetypes looking for order looking for contemplation is actually the self that we should inhabit if we're going to find sahada so the talba is turning away from that which makes us miserable and distracted in a zillion different directions because there's no unifying principle to appetite and which turns us back to the one the true source of beauty and love as imam ghazali says in the book of mahabhara we're going to do so much reading today but haven't even started everything that is loved in the world is love because it's a kind of metaphor for the divine beauty and therefore it is a sacred thing even if you love your cat um there's an aspect there of love for that aspect of whatever it is about catishness or what the cat does which ultimately speaks of its divine source it may be a zillionth of a percentage point of the real thing but it's still there so we need to turn away from the ego which wants to dislike and to be envious and to be superior and to turn towards the spirit which is about love and which is about beauty as he says love longing intimacy and contentment if we have some share of those four things we'll get some sense of what the imam achieved or was given during those 10 years of his peregrination and his return to human beings and to society just as the holy prophet alaihis came back from the mountain and came back from the mir because it is with human beings that we find not just our greatest challenges but also potentially our our greatest uh consolation and our paths to god so that's maybe one percent of what imam khazali is saying in his absolutely gigantic and colossal almost miraculous output of books that that changed that were game changers for the alma a leader yes but somebody who specifically renounced leadership in the academic world where egos tend to be more tender and big than in most other areas and it was painful for him but he specifically renounced that and by saying no to the leadership of nafs by tearing up his cv he became de facto a leader under god and he was given this tawfiq that the hadith indicates and if it's not hajjit in islam then i don't know who is and he has led countless souls from ego to roh from ignorance to truth from jahilia to islam and that the power of that transformation continues to spread out in the wider ummah so i wanted to finish with mammal gazali partly because he as it were encompasses uh so many other ways of having a human story a public human story and of course he is our wou did and uh so it's the end of this year's courses thank you for your patience for staying with us insha'allah there has been benefit just by rehearsing the stories of the the great souls that the prophetic uh moment made possible in in this world and inshallah there will be many more to come and may allah inshaallah grant us uh peace uh serenity with our families with our neighbors with the world and these troubling times in the summer months and in the future inshallah cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

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Length: 78min 28sec (4708 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021