Are We Heading Towards Extinction? – Abdal Hakim Murad

we have the right now on the terms of the dominant civilization to express our desire to be dissidents awkward cross-grained critics not compliant they will continuously blow the whistle and ask us to run faster to catch up with them but we don't really have to if where they are going is biocidal planetary annihilation we want the right to difference uh picking up on our discussions of yesterday let's see if we can drill down a little bit further into what we mean by the idea of dinalfitra we had a kind of initial sketching of the ground yesterday but let's see if we can get any further into it not least because in our contemporary context we find that humanity is a promethean rebellion against nature the enlightenment in a certain sense man's mastery of nature rather than harmonious conviviality with it it was a rebellion against mata against stuff against beauty as much as it was against the church has now pitched us into a peculiar situation unprecedented we are in the anthropocene era where the principal geological and geomorphological influence on the surface of the planet is actually a species namely ourselves we are having the kind of impact that glaciers used to have we are fundamentally transforming things but in an infinitesimally smaller biological historical uh paleontological time frame this is what we are doing essentially from the perspective of the planet what we do is we dig up minerals in great big holes in some places in the world and we complexly turn them into things that we briefly use and then we bury the junk into other great big holes in the world so principle activity is a kind of geological model of what benny adam is up to at this point and it's clear that this is unsustainable and you don't have to belong to the zealots of extinction rebellion to see that infinite human desires finite planetary resources equals at some point either extinction or a paradigm shift as yet unimagined this puts us in an interesting situation because for so long first of all christian europe and then enlightenment europe uh and then communist europe and uh fascistic europe was bellowing at us telling us to change to comply to conform the dominant paradigm was that of the west and we had to jump on this bandwagon now however we have a materialistic not a spiritual or even a moral reason not to want to do that and it's very hard for our reason to be refuted why should we trade up to the structures the worldview the paradigms the economics of the system that is going to suffocate us all within a couple of generations it doesn't really sound very appealing the paradigm itself triumphalistically proclaimed as the final point of the evolution of human society and thought turns out to be so clever that we are running the risk of extinguishing ourselves so wise is homo sapiens that he can even bring about his own termination which no other species can quite do that's pretty smart so we have the right now on the terms of the dominant civilization to express our desire to be dissidents awkward cross-grained critics not compliant they will continuously blow the whistle and ask us to run faster to catch up with them but we don't really have to if where they are going is biocidal planetary annihilation we want the right to difference this is an interesting point that even the scientific paradigm turns out to be a kind of termination so in this context what do we mean when we say ah islam dino fitra is this the framing of our tradition that we need to be preferring in order to make this case for dissident non-compliance the religion of nature is this what we mean by fitra almost sort of not quite uh fatah means to burst out it's what seeds do but it means something emerging from something else one of the last names is he is the one who brings everything into being from the primal not even a void and nature therefore refers not just to what in arabic is called el hayat which is biological things growing and tweeting but rather stuff itself in its inherently improbable and miraculous and magical quality as moth death originated the strangest thing about it why is there stuff matched only by the paradox of our ability to ask that question the mysteries are hardwired into the whole system and no amount of philosophizing has really come up with a decisive argument uh existence the fact of manifestation is a puzzle looking for that gold particle for that uh universal theory but each time there's a particle there's another one and of course they can't get to that because that's the paradigm itself consciousness also not even a scientific term so this idea of fitra the father which is to do with creation and also to do with nature but also to do with the right reasonable in the proper sense human relationship to creation because when we say every child is born according to the fitrah we don't mean that he's part of the world of cats and dogs and that sort of fitra nor yet that he is part of the created world because that's kind of too obvious a thing to say but the fitra is within us as well it's in some odd way and clearly if today's discourse is about the danger of extinction and islam is saying something very indicative about our relationship to nature and consciousness is relationship to nature we need to try and get our heads around this one way of triangulating is to see what enlightenment thinkers themselves thought they were looking at when they looked at islam this is the generation that was pushing back not so much against belief in god even though it was often quite deistic and numinous but a kind of voltarian eczelan farmer anti-clericalism the catholic church is the source of all the evils of the world and when we saw that notre dame fire we forgot that for 20 years it was a temple of nature after the french revolution the priests were chased out and killed and they dressed up a young woman in a red dress and called her the spirit of nature and reason and people are supposed to go there in order to contemplate this and still in parts of france and i've encountered this hiking myself you come across a place that's called trump you're supposed to go in and somehow transcendentally experience the wonders of the natural environment around you it was a big thing as europe emerged with a crash from centuries of christian piety and became very modern actually very quickly so uh this idea of the enlightenment as being kind of not particularly against even kind of romantic ideas of nature as indicating the sublime major theme of 19th century music and poetry but really not in a christian mode goethe for instance really not very christian but really interested in nature interesting human beings and interested in islam as well is one of the interesting moments in the evolution of our continent where it's at points you start to get the scent among the european intellectuals that here is a theistic alternative uh that is not weighed down by what nietzsche would define as the the anti-dionysian uh traits of christianity and uh charles taylor in his new book a secular age where his musing about the reasons why christianity doesn't really hold the attention of young people in the west says well that's because it doesn't affirm the dionysian this is the nietzschean idea the apollonian which is about sort of the ascetical transcendence and the illumination of the mind to leaving the flesh behind and the dionysian which is more like the mystery religions of ancient greece where people are wearing garden garlands and dancing with nymphs in forest clearings and engaging with imminent rather than transcendence and uh nietzsche's view is that christianity cannot deal with that and that's charles taylor's explanation for the draining away of faith amongst young christians because nowadays it's all about the body and sexuality and christianity doesn't go that so from that enlightenment perspective we find some very interesting hints and somebody called eric ormsby has a new book coming out later this year which is about goethe and his relationship to islam goethe famous for writing his west eastern devon vestor devon after he'd been inspired by reading some slightly dodgy german translations of persian mystics but he produces this great long book length a classic of german literature which is written in emulation of of hafiz basically and has a poem about fatima and the famous mohammed skesang which is his poem which is not basically his nat in praise of the holy prophet and in this we find something that is quite characteristic and almost teasing this out of a certain enlightenment romantic understanding of islam as first of all partaking in an oriental wisdom from the morgan land the land where the sun arises and not where the sun sets which is the end of things but wisdom light truth it's quite platonic and the kind of mystique of the orient the land of initiatic miracles and wonders and uh at the same time in goethe you get the idea of the holy prophet alaihis electro as a kind of personification of the dionysian enlightenment spirit and this short poem that he has the the mohammed sang which schubert said to music and has been set to music by others of over the years is a very interesting image in which the holy prophet ali is compared to a mountain stream vigorous virile sort of running through the rocks and the high mountains and of course the stream's origin is precipitation and hence heaven but it's definitely in the earth and of the earth and then as it reaches the valley it spreads out and becomes the basis for great cities and civilizations and that's his understanding of the second dating hand of the prophetic intervention a very interesting uh moment in european literature and it's become some caught as a kind of anthem for uh european islam but what he seems to be indicating is that here you have clearly a sacred prophetic figure because uh alton vata his sort of father is the one from whom he comes and to whom he returns that's not an islamic term we don't speak in terms of affiliation or fatherhood you know ideas of the human divine relation but that's not really important gerter is not trying to be uh writing an akrita he's just singing as a as a poet and uh here you have the idea of the human as being of divine origin the human also as engaging with and being in some sense part of the natural world and enhancing the natural world so that it's a second dating principle and the yingling the young prophet is one who is really the spirit of youthful masculinity it's a kind of fatal idea but very much could almost refer to one of the bacic or the eleusinian mysteries of ancient ancient greece uh and this is probably why the philosopher herder who's more or less the same period a little bit later sort of romantic hegelian says that islam is a form of shamanism normally we would regard that as peculiar because after all the quraysh and islam is the monotheistic thing that is daggers drawn with shamanism and the fetishism of or what does he mean by shamanism well what they're looking at particularly in that they have access to the quran and access to not really much islamic theology or law but they certainly have rumi and hafiz and saudi at their disposal is the idea of a kind of religion of celebration a religion of carnival a religion of the affirmation of life so it's kind of like bergson it's the life spirit it's the quintessential hegelian geist it's represented in this dionysian tradition that uh seems almost providentially to be the alternative the abrogator of the christian impulse with its apollonian aesthetical anti-flesh celibate tendencies which is one of the things that the enlightenment was uh most appalled by so that's an interesting moment uh and the idea of islam as not just something that's interesting and exotic and mystical because it comes from the east and the idea that you get a little bit in this country maybe with the arabian knights and fitzgerald's translation of omar khayyam but it was a lot bigger in germany but also something that's connected to nature uh that combination becomes uh very uh significant and that seems to be why herder is saying islam is full of shamanism shamanism that the worship of islam is a form of incantation through nature reflecting not the presence of transcendence to a eucharist matter that isn't matter a piece of god god himself has to come into the world in order to make anything good of the world but rather the sense that god is already present present and therefore there doesn't need to be a cosmic sacrifice which is another of the better wows of the enlightenment the dying god the world so evil and human nature so corrupted that only an infinite sacrifice by god himself can sort us out this this ontological pessimism about human nature uh which was another things that the enlightenment detested about certainly a sort of jensonistic augustinian type of catholic christianity they wanted to be optimistic about human nature and that reaches nowadays a certain sort of crazy apotheosis with the idea that whatever you desire is something that the world should be recognizing and affirming that wasn't the original plan so you have this as it were independent non-denominational but generally anti-christian perception of islam but it becomes a nature as well nietzsche says if islam despises christianity it is a thousand times right to do so because islam presupposes men in other words he likes the virility of the prophetic islamic model he doesn't like the anemic idea of christianity which denies eros and thanatos desire and warrior hood which for nietzsche are the life principle itself what makes us truly human within the natural world but capable of transformation so another thinker phobic about christianity but interested in islam islam is generating a kind of superman that's genuinely inhabiting the flesh and political responsibilities ian albans written about this he has a book about islam in 19th century german philosophical thought very interesting evolution so without trying to make too much of that we might make it a starting point for our reflection on what the fitra is all about if outsiders look at us and they say hmm not the religion of uh flagellation not the religion of ontological pessimism but a religion essentially that is life affirming but still very much a religion and not not hedonistic in the kind of alternative marquis de sade enlightenment sense but something that has a discipline to it we find that islam seems to play a rather interesting role potentially not really actually because most muslims don't really think in these terms we're too moralistic nowadays too focused on halal and haram and we don't think about the deep nature of the religion and what it's doing in history and what what it's for which is unfortunate but it's as we know how we are we're not really intellectuals we muslims nowadays we deal with crisis issues all the time so this idea of the religion of the fitra the not just creation but the natural world which is a part of creation and also a created ingrained innate human disposition to understanding the world in a natural and correct way is part of what we mean really by islam as abrahamic religion and also as primordial with which he was sent ali the kind of generous tolerant abrahamic monotheism that's what he's describing his religion as to us i've been sent with the tolerant generous noble abrahamic monotheistic way two words in arabic becomes rather a lot in english but that's the kind of kind of concept so there's something abrahamic about it but also something primordial and pre-abrahamic and this is related to islam's understanding as the culmination of two great cycles in the history of the divine human engagement the smaller cycle which is not so small is the cycle initiated by ismail alaihissalam and whose basic themes we reenact as part of the hajj part of whose significance is to return to the center in an abrahamic mode so uh abraham becomes the patriarch uh through isaac but also through ishmael and through isaac you have most of the prophets abraham jacob not later jacob uh joseph moses that's the line of of of of ishaq on the line of ismail kind of it's a stream like zamzam that gets buried and then symbolically it's unearthed again and the ishmaelite hadrian well is once again reestablished the significance of that being of course ishmael's half gentile blood because his mother is egyptian and therefore this is to be the cycle within abrahamic monotheism that isn't just for the chosen people but for everybody boy told him nessie kether i'm sent to all mankind as one of his artists one of his unique features the universal prophet who is sent providentially precisely at that point where the ancient world comes to an end in the medieval world and the beginnings of the global world uh begin so that's the closure of the lesser cycle the ishmaelite cycle and there is if you read charles andrei jillis's book about the symbolism of the hajj which is largely drawn from ibn arabi uh a lot of geometrical and natural symbolism in the basic forms of the hajj and the proportions of the kaaba and that's a whole whole world the the existence of the basic geometrical forms the point the circle the square the cube the straight line it's all primordially there and inhabited and re-enacted by those who are alchemically transformed by going through those those archaic motions but the larger cycle is the one the the biggest cycle of all the one that begins with adam and alastair become and the holy prophet again through his connection to the meccan sanctuary the jerusalem sanctuary doesn't have a adamic resonance but the meccan sanctuary does when the kaaba is just historian say just a little red mound the kaaba itself built of course by abraham and his son much later but still the axis mundi the center of the world and whose starting point for the rituals the circles the straight lines all of those enactments which have such a profound effect on the soul is the black stone the black stone is the symbol of the day of allah that satan ali in the famous khabar says to say no omar who is weeping saying omar kisses the stone and then he wept until his sobbing was audible and then he says omar says to the black stone in allah you can't hurt me and but for the fact that i'd seen the holy prophet kiss you i wouldn't kiss you [Music] it does help and it does harm truly allah when he took the covenant from all of the descendants those who were to be the descendants the future generations he took this this covenant [Music] and then he fed it everybody's baler shahidna yes we bear witness to the stone so it bears witness to the faithfulness of the believer and the rebellion of the unbeliever now there's kind of mystery there what could it mean for all of these ballast nurses to be fed to the blackstone this is metaphysical not physical but that's the le bake and that's the meaning of the kaaba which is the symbol of the the mysterious center of the world and albeit more and the origin of things and we go around it our experience there of worship is in circles everywhere else at straight lines but there we're in a different modality there is as it were presence more than there is absence and so the kaaba represents and that dimension of the hajj because the hajjar is not part of the abrahamic story particularly that represents the adamic origin the primal kaaba the original the ancient house so that's the really big cycle and say that muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam one of the aspects of his being khatam and that being seal of the prophets is that he seals this abrahamic story which includes the jewish christian thing uh beautifully by including jerusalem and by including isaac it's a way of inclusion and he leads all the prophets in prayer learning but also this bigger cycle is the cycle that is everything and of course finally there is the his the final prayer offered by anybody on earth which is his shepherd for his ummah so a cosmic function indeed but if we look at these ancient rituals and we see islam's deliberate understanding of itself as something very old and primordial from a time before time before the bronze age who knows when these things originate and then we look at the basic patterns of the muslim life we do find that they are you might say fatoria that is to say they require no paraphernalia they require no mediation and they are intensely embodied and they embed us in the physical world insofar as when you are in the mosque you faced the qibla that immediately gave gives you a grounding in terms of the points of the compass and where you are and you have a sense of direction it's a spiritual gps like there's a mauritanian sheikhs who they say have a kind of ability to know the qibla even if they close to close their eyes it's i've never seen that but people say that some people can do that but that determines the muslim life in so many ways and we wish to be buried facing the qibla that's the way we wish to face that is again a very ancient kind of thing that doesn't really have a it's a christian equivalent christian churches used to be built towards the east because the rising sun is the symbol of the risen christ but it's not really indispensable so there is that but there is also as we mentioned yesterday the very striking fact of the solar and the lunar determination of the muslim life through our sacred acts that we believe in luna months and the quran speaks strongly against those who introduce intercalatory months to try and make things seem easier to deal with independence yeah that kind of declination the intercalatory month that will give you 365 days rather than 100 days less is an excess of unbelief and the reason for that is that if you do that then you are abolishing sacred time cyclical time and taking you into the artificiality the convenient calendar of linear time and islam is exactly not about doing that and the basic uh as it were ontological question behind all of these endless moon-citing controversies and i got yet another email this morning about some new conference that was going to solve that finally and the ontology of that is that uh it is ultimately indeterminate because the moon is a mysterious thing the sun is pretty reliable you can always tell what the sun will do the moon astronomers will tell you it depends on all kinds of variations about altitude and it's predicting where the moon will be seen depends not just on where you are and whether there's clouds but on a lot of other variables as well it's unpredictable which is um don't quote me perhaps one reason why most languages sun is masculine and moon is feminine but i'll leave that one hanging in most languages this is the case but the the subtlety of it is uh that it determines our lives and there is a deep wisdom in those traditional muslim communities where they pay no attention to the mufti on the radio but they go up the nearest hillside and drink tea and sing songs until they've actually seen the moon that is something that could have happened a hundred thousand years ago when paleolithic man used lunar calendars and we know because we've dug up the tally sticks that have exactly that number of days on them it's something very very very old and although it's insufficiently understood a lot of biologists are upset by it uh human biorhythms and not just female biorhythms seem to be geared quite closely to the the phases of the moon and the secretion of certain enzymes and hormones is said by many researchers to have something to do with that and it's some ancient biological thing and uh insomnia in the middle of the month people tend to sleep less well when the moon is full even if the curtains are drawn and they've done experiments with people sleeping underground in mines and they find even if they don't know what the phase of the moon is still when the moon is full they find it harder to sleep these are deep mysteries to do with a very basic level of human consciousness and and the brain and our metabolism but the sharia connects us to all of that these are little beards the white nights and those fast those days particular kinds of devotion ways in which in your conscious life you can reflect something that's actually very subconscious and and primordial so yeah islam is very ancient in that it insists on taking us back into sacred time the time of our remote paleolithic ancestors and is the religion of fitra in that sense and the prayer of course the prayer has more to do with the sun than with the moon but again reconnects us to a time when the human body metabolism activities sacred life was determined by the unavoidable fact of the rising and the setting of the sun these circadian rhythms again fundamental to whom we are i once talked late at night to an ambulance driver who was complaining that he was always working at night and he said i know that my life expectancy is about five years less than everybody else because i'm working at night and the human body really is not designed for that so the awareness of the rising and setting of the sun again something fundamental to what we are the use of water very very ancient the symbolism of it it comes from heaven so it's pure and we want to keep it pure particularly for ritual purposes and it outwardly touches those parts of us that are most associated with sinfulness and we feel somehow in a very primal way that that helps us to be cleansed of the things that those limbs have been doing and this is what a psychologist sometimes refer to as the macbeth effect you remember out vile spot she tries to get rid of it after the murder and it doesn't come and very often people who have suffered personal injury uh find that it's therapeutically helpful to take a shower or to take a bath afterwards deep in the human psyche this need for cleansing assisted by water we have that and so many other things could be could be add used so the point of historical origin of these practices is basically the meccan sanctuary in other words the abrahamic but also the adamic sanctuary and so they carry within themselves these qualities of the fitra the primordial disposition and there is something ancient about them the simplicity of our worship we don't use organs ever we don't um adorn our worship through historically evolved forms we don't change the liturgy it is that ancient uh primeval thing that was shown by the angel on the night of the mirage it remains that angelic representation of the cyclical nature of human life and the evolution of of the spirit and its it's climaxes pressing the forehead to the earth as i mean the ground i mean from it we created you to it we shall return you from it we will raise you up one more time this earthiness of islam is a fundamental idea adam they say his name adam because he was created from the earth arabic means kind of earth clay surface of the ground he was he was clay so we are connected again to the adamic origins of the great cycle through these forms of alberta and other cases could be adduced the hajj we've already referred to as our representation of something that is present in all sacred cultures of a journey that outwardly sacramentally enacts the inward journey back to the center we spiral in back to the presence of the one who has no place but whose house this is and as we turn the points of the compass become less clear and the outside world we don't remember even which way the hotel is or where we left our slippers because we've been going round and round we've all had that experience and that's precisely to take you out of linearity and geography and into the into the the focus the moth around the flame of the divine presence nowadays of course you've got no hotel and a giant clock and all of those things sort of saying look at me look at me but we shouldn't look at them because they've precisely misunderstood the nature of tawaf take you into a circularity which is the which is about love the kind of wandering in love the intoxication of proximity with with the divine in that extraordinary place so the hajj and julius's book talks about this a lot ibn arabi has this amazing chapter on the hajj which is kind of so full of insights and speculations and calculations it's worth getting some sense of that tradition just to increase your sense of awe and trepidation and respect when you go to the holy city that's really important because the gifts there are inconceivable allah is you know that's his house those who are there are his guests so don't mess around with looking at the clock or you've got to watch you don't you look at the clock if the saudis realize everybody nowadays has a watch and there's a nigerian lady outside the berber sofa who sells them for just five reals so you don't need to spend a billion producing the world's biggest clog but anyway it's easy to get distracted by by all of that but yeah approaching the house with due reverence and imam razali is very good at this in the uh yeah it's a place of majesty jalal makkah the jamal medina more so watch out and have a sense that all of these practices are ancient and unchanged and have a very deep effect how well we can understand that as well as we understand how the sub-basement of our prehistoric inherited mind might work you don't really understand what's this arafat and the throwing of stones deep psychology and all of those things but to try and rationalize it out you get this is what herder is talking about and he says shamanism he's not saying muslims have lots of interesting statues and go into trances and it's to do with almost uh uh a very ancient primeval um prehistoric type of religion that is nonetheless uncompromisingly monotheistic so adamic and abrahamic at the same time and hajj is the representation of that and then the prayer we referred to and of course ramadan sacred communities always have forms of fast fasting is for you as it was for those who came before you as a an important way of reminding you of your interrelated connection to the natural world because generally the more absently you eat and drink the less you are aware of your dependence on those things and the miraculous nature of those things and therefore in primordial societies there was always just that there were sacred places there were also sacred times and fasting was one of the ways in which that could be marked off so the fast also reconnects us to a very distant time without being shamanistic obviously and one could continue with the other basic practices of islam and some of its most characteristic features um like its understanding of gender for instance is very very uh primal and essentializing uh lesa de caro cal unter the male is not like the female the female has her form of incomparable perfection the angels bowed down to her as well the male has his form of incomparable perfection we have maybe in ourselves in our realities one percent of either of those things but that which we are invited into is the dignity of rasulullah fatima or immense people giants with certain qualities that are very difficult to express in the mere net of words but uh are particularly emphasized in the in the islamic context so one could go through the entirety of the religion i think and reflect on the fact that it comes from that very ancient unchanged arabian place and is specifically in its recapitulation of revelatory history uh that which takes us back in certain of its key respects to an ancient time of sacred places sacred times of incantations of an extraordinary reverence for the for the sanctity of the word plato thought that human civilization started to go downhill as soon as writing was invented uh but the orality of the prayer and the orality of hefs specifically respected in this ummah are from that that original fact that he islam so he's pre-platonic he doesn't contaminate the word and it's not contaminated by scratching it on parchment but it is a breath within him it is the word rather than just words on on paper and that's another really important part of how we engage with the divine that this speech this ancient phenomenon the origin of human culture is speech it's not visual arts or architecture or anything it's speech that's when we recognizably you know in our adamic sense are human that that is the modality through which we which we face the creator through speech the miracle of speech from the that is our that is our form but speech that is not just any old talk but god's speech and very quickly we have the doctrines against the mortazalites that affirm the real logical implication of the quran self-understanding as that it is uh god's uncreated speech and therefore as we resonate with the word we breathe something of the sanctity of the divine because this is not like any other set of sounds this is god's own breath that is within us that when we hear the quran recited or when the quran is as it were recited through us that's the holy prophet's speech and it's the speech of our quran teaches in the speech of gibril but in this very mysterious as it were also unlettered way the divine speech and that's our principal contact with the with the divine so there's something of the soothsayer here something of the one who is simply the passive recipient of a message of transcendence it's been heard before the quran is the quran but there's something very ancient about what the imam is doing for his congregation he's not dishing out little wafers or holding things up he is breathing with the with the the divine spirit it's a very uh paired down nomadic semitic primal idea of how the sacred is made present the breath because raw it's related to reach which is wind it's an insufflation so through all of these things it seems to me we can start to understand this characterization that we have of islam as the religion of the fitra the primordial natural disposition is perhaps so unchristian and unwest no concept that we don't have a single word that begins to do it justice but sometimes we say primordial natural dispositions too many syllables but it's the best that our language can do and if that is what we are you know despite the coping of the molvisarbs and the crazy stuff that's happening that's essentially what the gift of islam is in the midst of our high-tech crazy demented biocidal modernity a package from a really ancient time a normative human response to transcendence not pagan at all emphatically monotheistic but not from the complexities of civilization but something very simple [Music] this makes islam look really relevant and significant like the key to open the lock that has closed modern man off from the sacred because the church is complex and judaism is seems to be for a particular people and buddhism the west will only have if they cherry-pick as we saw earlier today the bits that they like yesterday i was talking to one of my colleagues in the divinity faculty who was telling me as according to traditional buddhism a woman cannot achieve enlightenment but when she reaches a particularly high degree she is compassionately turned into a man and then she can become arahat to achieve enlightenment and then i said how many western buddhists actually have taken on that aspect of buddhism and kind of smiled westerners just sort of a bespoke buddhism but with islam nobody allows you to do that yeah islam is the muhammadan way with all of the ichti had in the us all and all of that because it's an intelligent way but it is in essence this uh ship of salvation from a distant past that gives us a normatively human way of being when everything else seems to be inhuman as we move into an age of genetic manipulation and artificial intelligence and climate breakdown and god knows what other wonderful things the scientists have in store for us we have these practices that nobody seriously is trying to fiddle with you go into a place of worship of other religions you don't really know what to expect except for one thing what you won't see there is how the founder of that religion used to worship anything else anything goes in islam you know the miracle of the divine hefts of this almighty go into any mosque just about in the umma maybe 20 million mosques and you're going to see people following prayers you've seen me prayed this power of the idea of the sunnah and this disgust at the idea that anybody might want to do something else thinking that it's better the true understanding of bidder and bidder is a genuinely appalling thing because it means you're putting your own sense of what's right above the prophetic perfection that's not a little thing has kept these forms intact and ramadan is still there and the zakat rules are still there and it's uh something for which we need to give thanks and something which we need to hold on to the firmest hand hold specifically designed to give us a form of fitri way the sunnah in an age where nobody seems to have any anchorage any longer and humanity is moving in the direction of different genders and different sexualities and having race changes and redefining their age and it's all come come adrift and a lot of people are suffering because human beings need need landmarks we're creatures of habit so we need to be giving thanks for this says praise be to allah for the blessing of islam it is a sufficient blessing whatever else might be going on we have this we have a way of dealing with with nature with spouses with uh with god everything that's fundamental is still there and reconnects us quintessentially through nature so that's my my thought about what this claim that we have that our religion is the religion of nature dino fitra might possibly mean cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

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Keywords: cambridge muslim college, abdal hakim murad, abdul hakim murad, abdulhakim, murad, islam, cambridge, muslim, uk, eco mosque

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Length: 52min 20sec (3140 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021