Ivan Aguéli – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership

so welcome to what i think is the 21st episode in our ongoing series entitled paradigms of leadership in which we look at various strategies by which muslim men and women across the continents and down the muslim centuries have been exemplary and you may have noticed that i've also been focusing quite a bit on our european and british muslim stories which in the nature of things compared to the larger history of the umma might seem a little bit on the edge so last time we were looking at sheikh ahmed bullock i do think there are important actual lessons for our reality to deal with some up-to-date people who are part of the islam known as groundwater islam you can divide muslims in europe into groundwater muslims and rainwater muslims rainwater muslims are those who like the pure rain come from overseas which is the majority in western europe in eastern europe most muslims have been there for a thousand years in fact islam came to russia before christianity did the rhetoric there is quite different and then the groundwater muslims are the muslims who are simply brought out of the earth simply by the beauty of islam and the attractions of tawheed and these two different stories in our communities in western europe are now as would be expected interacting intermarrying becoming a single western muslim reality so uh if we look at the story of british islam we find if we look at groundwater islam it goes way back and it's an important thing to tell our children certainly british schools are not going to teach the history of islam in britain when they do history you're lucky if you get the holocaust and the causes of the first world war and that's it but it's a very interesting history and it's important to ground ourselves here in that history going back at least as far as robert of saint albans who died in 1187 who was the famous english crusader knight he was one of the knights templars who converted to islam and critically played a role as a squadron leader during salahaddin's battle of hattin one of the most important battles in islamic history and also in world history it's nice to think that british muslim history begins with that act of heroism that amazing battle when the muslims set fire to the dry grass around the crusaders who were already thirsty and behind the smoke and the flames the thirsty crusaders could hear the thicker of the muslim armies and then the extraordinary battle that was such a blow to uh crusaders uh that when the pope urban iii heard the news he actually died of shock had a heart attack or something it was pope urban iii was a keen advocate of the crusading principle so our history goes back at least as far as that um but we also think of people like jack ward dies in 1622 one of many muslims who end up with the ottomans or sort of with muslim principalities in north africa known in europe as a as a pirate he became use of race and a lot of muslims a lot of non-muslims especially quite surprised when bbc history did a documentary at the time of the pirates of the caribbean craze and discover that actually the original jack sparrow was actually jack ward and was a muslim so it's important we know these things and tell our kids so that they have a sense of ownership of the muslim history and western muslim identity and then another of my famous characters and really i could do a paradigm to lecture about all of these they all have extraordinary stories it is such a great history um thomas keith dies in 1815 he is from scotland after various adventures ends up converting to islam and becoming a member of the ottoman military and under tusun pasha this is the battle between the ottoman khilafah and the first wahhabi rebellion and uh thomas keith converts to islam and actually becomes the governor the wally of medina of course of great honor um possibly the only british person ever to be a governor of either of the holy cities and plays a significant role in in dealing with the wahhabi rebellion and eventually unfortunately he's caught in an ambush and the wahabis kill him and so i guess he becomes a shaheed so such an amazing history the history of groundwater islam and i don't think we need to make any apologies for dealing with some of those characters and in england of course abdullah quilliam whom we take to be the founder of british islam as it is today founder of the first active mosque in the uk etc born 1856 and insha'allah will do an episode about him his story again is another extraordinary story almost uh by definition these are unusual strong non-conformist personalities but the uh the personality i want to focus on today as an example of a sort of leadership which you might say is cultural and spiritual a kind of sapiential or wisdom-based leadership although he was never in charge of anything and had no books published in his lifetime is somebody called ivan agueli 1869 to 1917 even agueli until recently wasn't known very much uh at least outside sweden in sweden he's famous as an artist and the swedish post office puts his face on his paintings on postage stamps and there's an aguili museum in salah which is the town where he was born in central sweden so known as one of 19th century early 20th century sweden's four or five major artists post impressionist artists and there's been a dim recollection of the fact that he was also an active muslim but that side of his personality has always been a little bit marginalized but really a very interesting individual and one whom i wish to spend some time on today not least because uh the 150th anniversary of his birth recently triggered a revival of academic interest in agueli so this seems to be a good time to kind of try and make him a little bit better known and a little bit uh less in in the shadows so those who have written to try and flag up the muslimness of the man and to dig his often quite obscure story sort of letters stuck in the bibliotech national in paris and the swedish national library and not really touched for a hundred years and that was really the way he wanted it because he was very much somebody who hated the limelight but in 1981 a novel was written about him which kind of made him a little bit more of a real-life character rather than just a name attached to some some nice pictures and this is a novel by somebody called torbjorn suffer who is quite a well-known swedish cultural figure he was head of the swedish national film school for a while has written a number of books about boxing studied philosophy and so forth and during the course of writing this book and the book is entitled ivan agueli a novel about freedom and that's going to be an important principle the idea of freedom suffer who had for long been involved with the anarchist movement in sweden actually converted to islam and since then has been one of the recognized figures in swedish islam using the name ali torba he writes in minaret which is the journal of the swedish islamic academy in in stockholm and is author of some some reputable books but coming into islam from this rather startling anarchist direction so uh that triggers an interest even though it's a kind of romanticized and novel type version of his life and then as i say following the anniversary in 2019 some academic con conventions and publications the one in the middle here edited by mark sedwick who is the expert really on lineages of certain european esoterisms in the early 20th century in in particular uh many of which claim or tacitly acknowledge that aguerli stands as one of the founding figures held a conference uh in which a number of scholars have written and it's been published under the title anarchist artist sufi the politics painting and is satiricism of ivan aguerli edited by mark sedgwick and alas it's one of those tiresome academic tomes which cost about 70 pounds so even though it's a really amazing story not many people are going to learn about it great example of something being buried academic publishers tend not to know a good thing when they see it and the third thing which is much more accessible uh is this book ivan aguerli sensation of eternity selected writings translated and edited by oliver fotros is one of two books that is written in order to try and disinter the aguali legacy for people in europe and essentially what he has done has been to look up old letters articles and now really very hard to find obscure esoteric martinis freemason journals and odd things as we'll see as we go through today's journey in order to produce what agele in his lifetime never produced which is a book and this is actually inexpensive and i would recommend um that uh that people buy this book because even though he's writing so long ago there's like 130 years ago when european islam was kind of unimaginable he's really one of the pioneers that there are some things that he really gets right that are immediately relevant to our situation and haven't really aged at all and as we'll see he is the first to come to some of the terms and the concepts which are now are bread and butter so yeah sensation of eternity uh worth investing in so the bio data he was born in this little town salah central sweden 24th of may 1869 [Music] and his father is a vet johann and his mother ann is from a farming family the father is super strict a kind of tiger father highly aspirational for his son who seemed very disappointing he didn't really do very well at school also the kind of father who wants his son to do well economically disapproves of the young aguelis interest in art i've ever made money out of art this is something that that continues today so he sent his son to a technical college in stockholm okay he can't get his exams right but at least he can study something and make something of himself in stockholm he reads very very very extensively including some other sort of fashionable thinkers of the late 19th century particularly those who express a disillusion with the progress of post-enlightenment and industrial western society its anomie its urban blight its industrialism its distance from nature its distance from the spirit nature ibsen strindberg he's in that kind of world but his key inspiration in the early period really important to understand this is swedenborg one of the strangest and in many ways crankiest inspired protestants of the 18th century dies in 1772 known uh in some circles today primarily as a scientist it seems that he was the first one to come up with the concept of the neuron he was interested in the brain at its functions and did some serious work but mainly experience various what he took to the inspirational moments in his life that led him on from a kind of lutheran lutheranism into a sort of reformed lutheranism following a series of dreams and strange visitations part of which was that there is a complex set of symbiotic correspondences between the form of things and the meaning of things in other words between the material and the spiritual worlds this is a common theme amongst some of the late protestant mystics that they don't like the fair the cartesian separation between mind and stuff and they don't like similarly the idea that the world is somehow fallen and dreadful and you can only see vague sparks of the divine in it whereas god is some kind of transcendent being in another in another environment he rejects the orthodox doctrine of the trinity which he points out isn't there amongst the earliest christians it's not in the apostles creed but it is present in the nicene creed so he believes in what we call taharif christianity represents a distortion of its original teachings he denies the atonement because he doesn't think that a perfect god is incapable of forgiving human beings without a price being paid so really very marginal this is kind of the radical wing of protestantism is influenced by some people who were involved in complex ways and it's hard to trace this by some sub-islamic currents in the radical english reformation john toland spoke christianity not mysterious and he was also in london during the trial of somebody called william wiston who was professor lucasian professor of mathematics in cambridge was isaac newton's successor newton himself had been convinced of the falsity of the trinity and whiston similarly denied it but made the mistake of actually talking about it so he was sacked from his professorship in cambridge and faced a heresy trial and swedenborg was in london during that period and there is an interesting question that probably can't be answered as to the extent to which this kind of strongly unitarian spiritualization of christianity that happens in these uh late reformation circles oh some kind of triggering to sufi influences we know that western red haib and yakuzan which have been translated here in cambridge and there is something going on there um quakers as well but in any case this kind of unity view of existence and this benign idea of a creator who couldn't possibly want a blood atonement a god of compassion and mercy who transcended any triune or any other differentiation has attracted the attention of quite a number of people in islamic studies have pointed to convergences between swedenborg and ibn arabi orei certainly noted that so did anne marie schimmel in any case this is you know swedenborg is from sweden and buried in uppsala cathedral and this is the kind of spiritual nourishment which the young aguali is receiving and indeed his mother is very distantly related to to swedenborg so when he goes to stockholm to do this dreary technical college thing agueli goes to the house of a lutheran pastor friend who has become a swedenborgian and there is even today a separate church the swedenborgian church which is quite small but mainly what he wants to do is to paint now the painting world in stockholm at the time as in england is divided between traditional academicians with a formal tableau and their set piece allegorical statements of mythological or christian scenes and avant-garde painters and even when he's still a teenager there's a number of of senior artists in stockholm who really think that he has talent and they like his work so finally when his father sees that he's just intoxicated by this painting thing his father gives him permission to stop his technical training and to go to paris the center of this modern movement in order to study painting so in 1890 he goes to paris and this is going to be one of the key events of his life and in paris he studies not at the kind of official academy with its the traditional other pompous posed type of art but another place called the academy julian interestingly that's the place where 20 years earlier etienne dine had studied for those muslims were interested in those things also converted to islam becomes nasiruddin and did some famous paintings of the hajj which are interesting documentaries of of their time he moved to algeria lived in busan but quite quite different so the academy julia is more modern they accept female students they don't have exams or prizes it's more creative more organic more of a commune really now at this stage 1890s painting has already moved beyond the sort of impressionist uh stage this is the age of the post-impressionist at the age of goga and interestingly quite a lot of the painters are really interested in matters of the spirit it's important to understand this because there's a certain secular bias in modernity's history of itself that assumes that all these great artists like matisse and suzanne all kind of happy atheists deconstructing everything it's not the case at all most of them were actively involved in some kind of spiritual search but not for church christianity but for something which they took to be more spiritual sometimes near platonic and much of the art of the impressionist and the post-depressionist can be understood as an attempt to bring to the surface certain patterns of form color light which impinge directly upon the soul without the destruction of put it taswi almost photographically to make an image of the surface of what is there they're trying to look at the bottom of what is there so we find in aguero saying things like this you must cultivate the more exalted aspects of the soul it's necessary again to become a mystic learning that love is the origin of all understanding this is the kind of thing that most of the post impressionists would have regarded as normal so here's cezanne who is agueli's friend when i judge art i take my painting and set it beside a god-made object like a tree or a flower if there is a clash it is not art and again he's not trying to produce a photographic replica of the surface of things he's talking about what god intends by those things the barten the esoteric of those things so this is to do with a certain reaction in france certainly against uh the sternness of um [Music] of catholicism the rededication of the country to their sacred heart following the defeat at the hands of the prussians the trauma of the commune a kind of really conservative monarchical revenges catholicism that is hard on the body if you're going to be part of the serious spiritual elite you have to be celibate uh and that also regards nature in an almost jansenist way as a kind of fallen thing that one has to transcend and these artists were reacting very strongly against that and were looking for the securality that was in things rather than the sequality that is on the other side of things so many people at the same time thought in order to find this we have to avoid the cold industrialized despiritualized environment of the north and go to brighter warmer more colorful places where body mind and spirit are still in harmony this is why matisse goes to morocco does some of his most luminous and amazing paintings including some of the mosques and islamic scenes in morocco which he really loved gogan of course goes to tahiti even further looking for this kind of almost neolithic eden where body mind and spirit are still not alienated from each other and there is the tradition of orientalist art but that is for the most part even in the spirit quite classicizing and not really part of this this new movement so aguero is is knows gogan and he knows cezanne and these people but his particular friend is somebody called emil bernard who is one of the leading post impressionists is also based mainly at the academy julian and verna made a visit to egypt which really changed him in egypt he saw a land of spirit a land of sensual spirituality a land of bright light a land of limitless horizons and also a land which compared to the highly legislative societies of europe seemed to be a land of freedom and he invents the famous class on a technique which is you see in some paintings of that period the color blobs are separated by black lines that essentially is from from him and he seeks his primordial simplicity actually in france and with the breton peasantry that becomes his major focus this is where we can seek some kind of reintegration of spirit and nature and and matter and mortality better now very definitely a christian well a believer in god sort of a christian but like a lot of these people really interested in eastern wisdom and used to go to a theosophical lodge called the ananta which was in paris theosophy had already been popular amongst the swedish intelligencia aguery certainly knew about it strindberg had been interested in it members of the swedish royal family often seen though as a kind of middle class upper middle class aristocratic sort of elitist club for esoteric dabblers but certainly influential on modern art so people like malevich mondrian kandinsky explicitly or implicitly influenced by theosophy now aguero goes to this lodge but the main subject of his interest in the conversations which go on there seemed to be swedenborg but also islam hard to figure out when that interest in islam begins but you have to remember in those times the colonial times the racist times they're strongly social darwinian times but there isn't sort of 911 taliban and the popular idea of islam as necessarily a barbarian other it's a islamophobic environment but somewhat different particularly amongst these avant-garde slightly hippie-ish people drinking absinthe and looking for alternatives to official discourse discourses so goga is part of the same circle um and it was actually baal now who introduces agueli to to to gogo um goku are quite characteristic and in some ways the kin kindred spirits even though gorgan made various odd claims about himself he thought that he was originally from south america and was actually an inca savage he had nothing to do with the flatness of modernity um and of course a dissolute person who ends up dying of the uh consequences of tertiary syphilis um strongly anti-clerical he hates the priests and his great painting which she finished you know just before his sort of death sort of suicide has the words in it where do we come from what are we where are we going and gorgan puts a kind of blue eyed law statue in it which he thought signifies the beyond well it doesn't actually tell us an awful lot um [Music] he seems to have been interested like many by indic imagery but um for him and for those who are interested in indict traditions there isn't a final resolution of the questions because everything is about rebirth the decisive is indefinitely deferred so there's one of gogan's images of tahiti supposed polynesian paradise so aguero says gogan went to tahiti mainly to reimmerse himself in the primitive world of simple feelings parisian critics failed to understand that his journey was more shift in time than in space in other words what he was looking for was not a far place where there was still eden but was a kind of journey in time looking for a togetherness an intactness of human life which had been torn us under by the enlightenment by catholicism and by by modernity by industrialization so who's kind of a time traveler looking for some pre-lapserian utopia and as we'll see aguelis movement is really quite different anyway aguero goes back to sweden and he has his first productive season of painting the summers of 1891 and 1892 when he's in gotland which is this big island off the coast of sweden very picturesque borough's books from the swedish national library we have some indication of what he was reading um he borrowed the quran but also borrowed the mal the famous poems of baudelaire which are i suppose a lyrical slightly pessimistic uh declaration of the idea that body and soul cannot be separated and that spirituality comes through the body rather than throwing to trying to transcend it and of course part of that world malaga also seems to convert it to islam very much in the same same vein now if you want some kind of generalization as to what his paintings are saying about his spiritual journey at this time you can always read too much into a painting i think and it's best not to over analyze them but if you look at these fairly typical images from cezanne [Music] uh critics often point out that cezanne likes to have something in the foreground that indicates our apartments from the nature that he is quite sumptuously but with these quite earthy colors depicting so here you can see that of course human instinct is to want to walk into a landscape but you can't easily in these cases because there's something in the way so suzanne here is saying that we are somehow detached from the world from nature and there's a sky above it with some fluffy provincial clouds but it's clearly not what the subject is about the big contrast between cezanne and his contemporary agueli if we start to look at aguero's pictures now is really quite different this is from his first you know productive period in gotland what's going on here well you notice immediately that the human instinct when confronted with the landscape to see how one could get into it is facilitated by the fact that well it's deliberately painted to show that yes you could walk well into it there's nothing to obstruct your reaching really the far horizon the world nature is inviting you to come into it now normally in scandinavian painting it's the the nordic light the famous rather pagan perhaps luminosity of a sky where the light is made diffuse but also quite enchanted by the nature of the sky the horizon the mist uh the uh the frequent darkness often that nordic light makes us want to look at what is close to us but aguero very often gives us blue skies and a far horizon and this is what he comes to describe as a monotheist landscape what does he mean by that monotheist art really it is the sky that determines things it'll be a symbol of transcendence and where you see the sky you see something that unlike the living earth is not in a state of cycles that will come and go but you see something that is of the eternal and this again is the kind of perspective that makes people like origaba want to draw parallels between swedenborg and ibn arabi that there is in our contemplation of the world an intuition of a transcendence that is unitary and unchanging the colors often do seem to come from from swedenborg gold yellow white signifying god virtue and so forth but these layered skies are important because if you look at that picture and you look at the sky and you're not quite sure whether it's the landscape or the sky that is really being depicted that big yellow thing doesn't actually look like anything you might see in the real world it's a huge yellow blob what is it it couldn't really be a cloud it couldn't be a mountain it's an oddity so there's a strong principle of abstraction here which is about the divine eternity i think and the divine imminence and where the layers are no longer as with cezanne kind of on the earth but the layers are as the sufis would say marathi degrees of being the idea of the heavens as being stratified there's also something in these pictures that is you might call it an eternal seduction there is an invitation to enter the world that the beauty of the world is there to be it's a kind of endemic idea you can imagine fruits on those trees um again buddha seems to come into it so um here are some more cases uh this is uh another landscape in sweden and again really it's called landscape but it's the sky that is really significant here and you can see these layers that somehow parallel layers on earth you can see there's a horizon and presumably some trees in the backdrop but everything is is maratip and then this famous image of i think this is in the uh museum of modern art in stockholm one of his most famous paintings on postage stamps and so forth view of stockholm 1892 seems quite advanced do you think almost of the surrealists it's a kind of one of those dark dakirico urban landscapes no human beings though and hardly any windows but it invites you into it there's the pavement it says come maybe over the horizon there'll be something a little less depressing waiting for you so it's a kind of strinberg ibsen urban anime something is wrong but then look at the sky again what on earth are those blobs like great big whales in the sky is that mountains well not if you're in stockholm clouds but very strangely colored and shaped clouds so again the idea is there is a mystery whose emblem is the physical sky um here again you can see these extraordinarily unlikely images of landscapes here made sort of much more abstracted slightly well very very active there's a lot of movement in them you could imagine there's a storm going on perhaps but above you have these again very unrealistic and improbable strange gradations of the gold with the blue above them when you probably expect something a bit different here again another painting from this period 1892. again you can see how easy it would be just to wander into that landscape but then what is that weird golden thing behind it it couldn't possibly be painted from nature it's some other thing so here is how aguero later described his inspiration from cezanne and he became quite a prolific writer on artistic criticism one cannot copy cezanne only follow his path this involves firstly telling the truth and the truth alone in other words don't paint just the boring mechanical image that is the surface of things but the reality of things the truth secondly disciplining oneself so that one cannot tell a single lie this discipline is simplism namely the desire to express the subtlest emotions with the most unprocessed and compact material and one can see how this can converge with islamic conceptions of art which are about nature but are about what lies behind the surface of nature not simple pictures of men and women doing stuff that's what children do at school but something more profound which is in the case of islam which is largely a geographic a largely geometrical art to see the structures the symmetries the mathematics the geometry that underlies the apparent chaos of the rough surface of things now aguero in paris continued an interest that had been triggered already in radical circles in stockholm which is that he's associating quite consistently with people who want political change so he becomes an out and out anarchist he's one of the most famous paintings of agueli by his his friend olive sagan nelson i think this is also the swedish national gallery and probably the best known picture of him now you look at this picture well what is being said about his personality by his friend at this period quite a lot you can see there's an odd arch in the backdrop which suggests almost that it's part of a triptych suggesting that here we're looking at a saint perhaps pre-raphaelites might have done something like that you have the post-impressionist parallel brush strokes everything leading really to that face which looks really gaunt and obsessively thoughtful but the center of the painting really is the hand isn't it it's a painting about the hand indicating presumably that aguali is here being presented as a man of action not just a thinker but a man of action and in his hand you have that very extraordinary thing a kind of orange rectangle which probably represents his tie but looks more like a kind of dagger that is drawing or some fiery thing with which is proposing to change the world and it becomes quite prominent in anarchist circles he did go to london it seems and he met kropotkin who was the famous russian prince who escaped dramatically and becomes uh after bakunin the the leader of anarchism worldwide um and we can easily deconstruct this i suppose as an urge for freedom caused by his strict upbringing that would be the first place to go if we want to understand this plus the strongly anti-clerical dimension of swedenborg who really rather like the quakers believed in personal inspiration and hated religious hierarchies or the imposition of a centralized control on people particularly in their spiritual life so he does hobnob with all the leading anarchists in paris including charles chatel who's the editor of the leading anarchist journal he even shares a flat with charles chatel they seem to have been close friends and paris at this time is really quite unstable and had been since the time of the paris commune the catastrophe of the 1870s um really a hotbed of radicals and so aguero looking at this increasingly regulated and statist world with its religion that was intensely hierarchical leading to its infallible but obviously human pope calls anarchism the most beautiful thing in our fetid age so what kind of anarchist is he well he obviously recognizes the need for some boundaries and structures so you might call him an anarcho-syndicalist if you want to become technical in other words there can be free associations of workers santika is a trade union workers should freely organize and supplant the state wherever possible there should be a subsidiarity people's loyalties and affiliation and acceptance of a communal duty should be based on family on local neighborhoods on trade unions on groups that are local rather than depending on a probably corrupt state that doesn't know the individual at the same time we find that unlike some of the other anarchists agueli is always quite strongly determinist not much of a believer in the sort of attractive but philosophically and scientifically very problematic idea of free will and this again seems to be something that leads him towards islam in the longer term and this has always been a problem for anarchists and socialist thinkers george sorel tried very hard to reconcile the science which seemed to suggest there's no free will everything is just physical natural processes with the human capacity to act marx had tried to do something similar but it was always a problem for these radicals we know that science says that there's no free will but on the other hand we want to change the world it becomes one of the kind of agonistic moments in in radical thought at the time and still is to some extent so anarchism and islam sound like strange bedfellows but there have been some um depending on one's definition so here are four um taken from an interesting assortment that one could cite mostly from groundwater muslims to use that term isabel eberhardt well many of these people it should be added like uh bernard like aguero like golga saw out places outside europe as being places of spontaneity and authenticity that there was a possibility of freedom there which meant also north africa egypt the middle east it's a semi-romantic idea byron also seems to have taken the same view the east was a place where you could be free where the state wouldn't be breathing down your neck so eberhard best known example one of the best writers really of the beginning of the 20th century some of you might remember about 30 years ago there was a film about her life with peter o'toole and she's a recognized figure died tragically young and then the enigmatic shall we say figure of hakeem bay peter lambon wilson a scholar of iranian sufism who certainly self-identifies as an anarchist and is regarded as one of america's leading anarchist gurus uh although i'm sure he'd be the last person in the world to consider himself sharia compliant but he produced this interesting book pirate utopias moorish corsairs and european renegados second edition which is about uh the converts of the type of ward who uh populated and prevailed in many atlantic and north african corsair towns in the 16th and 17th century um sometimes like algiers maybe the majority of the population at certain periods might have been converts to islam and according to lamborn wilson these are the first some of them look like being the first kind of anarchist communes no aristocracy no clerical hierarchy local groups uh you can take it or leave it but um here's a figure who has some bridging capacity because anarchists very often tend to be against religion and against spirituality leader rafaeli who i've spoken about before uh came out of not just anarchism um she converted to islam in egypt having met various italian anarchists there and became sort of best-selling novelist also said to have been mussolini's mistress for a while one of the key figures of islam in milan until the 1970s again somebody who saw islam as being a place where you go in not not to be constrained and then abden nor prado who is writing today and there's others just to get a sense of how on earth this works how can you combine anarchism with something coming from the religion of the sharia the religion of khilafah which emphasizes you know that there is an authority that is read in the name of the khalifa how do you fit anarchism into that does this work at all well we don't need to come to a judgment ourselves necessarily except to reflect on the fact that these 19th century people did experience europe as very very dirigist the state increasingly legislated and controlled people you needed a passport in order to travel the state had a file on everybody the state was interested in your health in your education doing a lot of things that the traditional state never did and it's one of the paradoxes of modernity and the enlightenment that on the one hand there's this discourse of liberty freedom equality on the other hand there is more and more regulation of our lives and for many of these people the islamic world looked like an alternative nowadays it doesn't look like an alternative because of as pointed out you have the attempt to turn the sharia into statutory law something that the state imposes which is not something that classical islamic law recognizes at all god legislates the guardian interprets and applies and it's done locally but just to see that this is indeed an inference that in the pre-modern islamic world which didn't have a pope or an infallible hierarchy and which didn't have a state that legislated in many ways the classical islamic vision seems to look a little bit like what the anako syndicalists are saying and it's socially conservative for sure but that's not to be imposed centrally so here's abdel prado's book published in 2010 islam as mystical anarchism it's only in spanish at the moment unfortunately but it it's a mature book and and worth worth serious consideration so here's some quotes from him uh just to give you a taste of what modern muslim he's not he says quite explicitly he's not saying that islam is anarchical he's saying what if you look at islam as a mystical anarchism what happens so this is what he says we are saying that islamic anarchism is different from anarchism as a characteristic ideology of the european political tradition we are saying that it has a dimension of openness to the origin capital o which anarchism often denies islam is not an ideology does not have its final goal in the terrain of human relations it is an integrated mode of life which orients us towards allah and the next life another quote mysticism contains within itself the idea of a spirituality liberated from forms from the tyranny of institutions not an individualistic or egotistic spirituality the kind of new age thing i'm liberating myself i'm discovering myself no something which would be a contradiction in terms but a spirituality centered in experience as such it is corporeal material and earthly spirituality so for prado this also links to things like animal rights eco-theologies and the like side by side with the vagabond dervish who despises political power and recognizes no earthly authority we encounter the totalitarian sheikh dressed in pompous robes and sublime titles sufism is a complex phenomenon and cannot be reduced into being presented as islam's mysticism so here he's saying he's not meaning sufism in the straightforward way by mysticism he's talking about those aspects of religion that are due with the direct experience of the divine which are often subsumed under the large category of sufism but he doesn't like the very authoritarian types of sufism which he sometimes encounters at the present time in the early 21st century when the great corporations and media agencies possess almost unlimited power and a capacity for control the forms of resistance cannot take the form of great ideals or projects of a totalizing nature so he's saying what does it mean to be an anarchist to have this insistence on freedom from hierarchies in today's world where everything is so intensely hyper-regulated he says realistically you can't engage in what is great ideals or projects of a totalizing nature but must instead be small individual and communitarian acts of resistance to live as an anarchist amidst the society of control and spectacle is to live side by side with other free men and women who repudiate tyranny and turn their backs on all the neon garbage by which they hypnotize us and to create liberated spaces in the middle of the society which has been swept away okay so modernity with its doctrine of freedom actually alienates us because that freedom is secured through massive endless legislation and restrictions and by the limitation of human choices by the predetermination of our preferences and choices by the increasingly pervasive messages of mass consumerism and mass entertainment we are not free even though we're told that we're free so he's talking about small group small sort of communities rather than some kind of state exercise so anyway it's it's an interesting latter-day example of this genre islamic anarchism and it should be said that this has repercussions in today's world these people are attracted to the traditional islamic model of non-hierarchical religion agueli notes that sufism can entail the direction of authority from the sheikh to the pupil but it's a voluntary thing to join the tariqah it's not an inevitable package within the religion you can move to another tariqah there's no authority above you of an ecclesial nature to tell you otherwise so it's still a free decision to choose your preceptor but in terms of the exeteric authority of the authority of fatwa in islam there is no binding authority there really isn't the most that you could find is the khalifa when he declares jihad to protect the abode of islam but otherwise there is no institutional authority the mosques are not parishes they're not answerable to a bishop who is answerable to an archbishop to a cardinal to that model it's more like the three churches individual chapels that are governed congregationally rather than ecclesially this again pushes us into the kind of libertarian swedenborg again direction that spirituality is best secured when individual inspired communities do their own thing rather than submit to a hierarchy or a bureaucracy but nowadays in the islamic world we find increasingly islam is nationalized do we not jose and others have written about this that each arab country has its grand mufti who is appointed by the state by the general or by the king or by the amir or whoever and he's the one who determines right religion and wrong religion so that's much more like a traditional christian model or a caesar a papist model the byzantines used to do that uh certainly the russian tsars from the time of ivan the terrible did that and in england the english reformation henry viii appointed himself as the supreme governor of the church of england and to this day all of those british politicians who moralize at muslims and say you ought to separate religion from politics need to remember that the supreme governor of the church of england is also the head of state in england and that the prayer book is changed by act of parliament in english law and that there are bishops in the house of lords it's a caesar a papist set up and this is the model that's being adopted in a lot of muslim countries where the state wants to control religion for reasons of security usually but fortunately us in the west we're not subject to the authority of any of those national churches and if they create an islamic cultural center in berlin or somewhere supported by muslim members has no authority over us we can just say no so this is part of the argument for an anarch anarchist interpretation of islam that it it doesn't recognize centralized religious or clerical authority anyway so back to aguery he's in paris he's hobnobbing with these dangerous anarchists he's living with one of their leaders and in 1894 he is arrested the police have swept paris in order to arrest the leading anarchist troublemakers and he hasn't done anything directly but he's certainly been associating with chatel and some of these other people so one of the famous trials in france in the 19th century was the so-called process de trante the lawsuit of the thirty thirty leading anarchist radicals are tried with the possibility of the guillotine for some of them uh and many of them are sentenced to very long sentences so during the trial he is sent off to mazass prison which is a nasty prison in paris and this is a kind of papillon environment if you've seen that film steve mcqueen not a pleasant environment the conditions are harsh but he does say at least it's not as boring as sweden he said that after he was released anyway he puts the time in prison to good use learning languages including hebrew and arabic and we know which books he asked his friends outside to supply swedenborg's texts the quran works of grammar and it seems that his way of learning arabic was that he asked for saint john's gospel in arabic because he knew the gospel so well that if you read it in arabic you could kind of figure out what the language was saying very unusual uh way of learning arabic 12th of august his case comes to trial the jury can't agree and he's actually acquitted he gets off so his mother then sends him some money goes off to egypt to join his friend bernard and it's in egypt that he encounters islam look at these things that he is saying belief in a supreme being which is above all others allah is not muslim at this stage monotheism is the essence of christ's teachings so important that the faithful muslim is more christian than most christians no trinity this is how i conceive a modern monotheist in terms of outward morality fanatical towards himself tolerant towards others an intense thirst for the infinite so as in egypt there's plenty of anarchist activity in egypt as we saw in 1900 leader rafaeli converts to islam in alexandria alexandria is full of italian anarchists the anarchists have even organized a university in alexandria but it's not clear that agueroli had anything to do with that particular group but of course what he wants to do is some art so i'm including this if you can see it this is actually one of the sketches i did when i was in egypt before i became muslim not very good this is the mosque of babar russian which is near babashariya so i just wanted to include that just for reasons of ego really but this is uh agueli in egypt he calls this painting egyptian cupela again there is aguelis road into the image you even have a choice of roads you can take that road to the right or you can go up that slope and maybe go into one of those doors it's a very accessible place even though that wall seems to be blind and then you have the cupela really interested in the idea of squares cubes representing the earthly instantiation of a heavenly symmetry this is why with apolly now he becomes interested in cubism later on and then right at the top you can see a few blobs of white indicating the usual weird thing he does with his skies those aren't mountains or in cairo this is probably somewhere in the southern cemetery but he's doing this arrangement this gradation of the sky and he finds the desert light more monotheistically interesting as an artist than the nordic light and he does a lot of very bright tableau during this period and of course uh the light of the south that inspired cezanne and and van gogh and of course matisse goes to morocco it's really interesting and here he feels there's a kind of holism does these images he doesn't do many buildings when he's in paris but he does in cairo but not many figures in the buildings but it's about the totality of everything coming together under the desert sky so he says in paris you can usefully study analysis but in cairo you study synthesis not really about theorizing things out it's about seeing that everything forms part of a single totality uh that i take it is the gushi mosque which is on the mokotum hills um which is still there near the tekke of kaigo abdal again look at those strange clouds in the backdrop and how they seem to somehow reflect or even blend with lines in the foreground as if the horizon isn't the decisive boundary between here and there imminent transcendence down and up but is just another grade in the grades of being it's a bit more pizarro like perhaps and the cloud is not doing its usual thing not quite sure where that is but i suspect that is in the citadel one of the mosques in the citadel may be wrong and so on uh that is the southern cemetery now of course it's full of people but i guess back then it was like this and again you get the sense of earth and sky mirroring each other through gradations that clearly interact you can see how the foreground blends into a lighter colored sand and then above this horizon you get a lighter colored sky and then a darker colored sky as if there's a kind of strip across it anyway as i said we shouldn't over theorize these things but his ideas about heaven being made of degrees of being which is in swedenborg but certainly in sufism as well are becoming quite uh concrete here so everything is shimmering into a unity not through the kind of scandinavian mists but through the intensity of the the light so he writes this a landscape can reflect a state of mind the monotheistic landscape is sunlit illuminated by penetrating sunshine a light powerful enough to let the aerial perspective supersede the linear light is master of matter he leaves egypt and goes back to france where he stops painting and starts a career as an art critic where he writes rather well about art and continues his studies he really wants to study oriental languages more systematically so he goes to the best school in in france the best university which is the ecole partik desert etude where he does arabic and sanskrit and ancient egyptian hieroglyphics but he also reads for himself quite extensively on islam his early interest has definitely been intensified by his experience of egypt and by the fact that it's a country where religion is not centrally regulated unlike in france in 1898 he takes the plunge and he converts to islam in paris not in egypt slow process of course there's various elements of his life some of which we have already seen under evident in his art the unity of things for a kind of transcendent light integration of body and soul the value of eros the intactness of his arms practices something primordial about the prayer which nobody has interfered with it seems that he had some kind of literary contact with ibn arabi even in this early period but we don't really know how or where so in a sense he's looking to re-route himself he's intuited this spiritual reality behind the landscapes of sweden and cairo and he wants now a theology a kind of explanation in words of what's going on and islam provides this more explicitly clearly than swedenborg and is also represented in living societies he can actually see it when he goes to cairo and that's perhaps why he does incorporate human structures into his egyptian landscape something which as we saw he doesn't doesn't really do when he's painting in sweden so converts in france and then the next year goes back to egypt and then on to india and sri lanka he's muslim now he's sleeping rough in madrasas he just sleeps on the floor he's never been a man of dunya as we will see and this is where he starts writing his most significant articles on islam under his new muslim name abdulhadi so evan agueli becomes abdulhadi akhili in sri lanka he associates with the entourage of ahmed urabi who's the famous egyptian nationalist hero the azhari who the english have imprisoned and then deported to sri lanka with other pro-independence europeans obviously as an anarchist and a left-wing person argelia is always completely against imperialism uh there is also of course a sort of love interest but as you would expect by now from aguerli it's a bit strange this is marie who was his muse and the woman in his life she was 20 years older than him um he met her it seems in 1893 on this this trip to paris and she is married to one of aguel's publishers anatol who edits a left-wing publication called the encyclopedia contemporary illustrate and she's a very active smart woman she has her own literary salon [Music] and also another keen spiritualist and theosophist that's kind of her spiritual home in philosophy roy is about 20 years older than him 1846 1930 and it seems pretty unlikely that their relationship hadn't ever had an intimate dimension as we would say nowadays but still very deep she's a kind of muse their kindred spirits they immediately kind of recognize something in each other and she dedicates one of her poetry anthologies to him incidentally she's not the same as the mari or who is a modern french poet who is also good but quite different so she's an anarchist of course a symbolist radical avant-garde ahead of her time particularly an animal rights activist so she was known for having encountered a vivisectionist and physically attacking him she went to a lecture by pasteur the famous biologist and interrupted him heckled him during his lecture because he'd conducted experiments on dogs and agueli of course is the son of a vet had also been very committed to animal rights she has some other radical ideas she advocates the belly strike she thought that women should refuse to have children because the human race brings so much suffering to other humans and to the world technology is going to kill us as well as killing the animals so abortion and birth control she thought should be free so she writes a rather dark book called le malde vivre which advocates the voluntary extinction of the human race you can get some very radical green activists nowadays advocating this but this is really quite quite hardcore um so aguali is you know kropotkin also um seems to have discussed animal rights with with aguali but agueroli has that orientation anyway it's quite common in anarchist circles and so aguerli writes things like this it's more perfect and pure to donate to someone who seems weak or inferior than to donate to an equal or to someone more powerful kindness to an animal takes us even closer to god because our ego is less involved the animal doesn't care who you are isn't really going to express gratitude and therefore kindness done to animals is somehow spiritually and morally superior than kindness done to human beings where there might be a more ambiguous reaction and the possibility of a quid pro quo so this is aguelli's painting of one of the street cats he adopted when he was in sri lanka he called her mabroca and she was blind and pregnant so of course he took her in so he had that kind of romantic dimension mari or also really interested in islam and sufism and she even thought that she had some arab blood in her ancestry and therefore was naturally inclined towards nature towards the earth towards love towards the warmth of the south so he's back in the anarchist world he joins protests and even riots in paris and then that takes place an event in which she actually hits the headlines near 1900 spanish-style bull fighting is introduced in france they've always had a kind of bull fighting in the south of france and they still have it but the animal isn't killed it's not like the spanish thing where the spears and the sword and the animal actually usually dies uh and or and her boyfriend or friend agueli are outraged by this so agueroli goes to one of the first bullfights near paris putting on kind of extravagant fancy dress and takes a pistol with him a revolver and when the thing starts he jumps into the ring and opens fire at the matador misses him but wounds one of the matadors assistants one of the picadors or whatever they are so of course the gendarme immediately take him into custody he's in prison again this is more serious attempted murder uh it's outrageous it's in the newspapers um as it was intended to be he could have faced the guillotine quite quite easily and there you have his police mug shot on his arrest so this is what he says and he makes a number of impassioned speeches in front of the judge defending what he'd done if i'd permitted this evil act to take place before my eyes and had done nothing i would have to answer before god as the accomplice to a criminal but the success or failure of act is in the hands of god alone i've confirmed humanity's nobility and royalty by defending those lower than me from my equals so the case is heard public opinion throughout france is more or less entirely in favor of him particularly since there seems to have been a woman involved and this is france and it looks like some great quixotic romantic gesture and the judge comes to sentence him finds him guilty but it's not the guillotine he just gives him a tiny little fine to pay and is let off so marie the the woman is by now really impressed and says one thing alone have you done for love of me and of religion the gun shot and that actually seems to have been the end of serious bull fighting in france after that because public opinion has been so inflamed by this um it it dies away and is now of course confined to some parts of spain and even there it's under considerable pressure but uh he goes back to cairo and here he wants to continue his studies there's a picture of him in egypt not really looking very swedish at all now and he studies at al-azhar and he takes baya in the tariqah of asada to share the leah with somebody called abdul rahman al-ish and this is his great period of learning and spiritual progress 1902-1909 and he's very close to alicia as you can see from this quote which he pens just in a letter i think to all most of the information we have about his life really comes from the letters that thankfully have often been preserved you know the great affection sheikh alice has for me she was an intimate friend of the amir abdul qaddar of algiers the sheikh himself washed his body and buried him by the side of ibn arabi in damascus the sheikh called me deen which is one of ibn arabi's names even before he knew that i was his disciple agueli is confiding with or about these sort of inner transformations and affiliations that he is going through alicia is a very senior uh member of the maliki method in egypt and he'd been imprisoned by for by the british for supporting the arabi rebellion and aurabi himself had been a student of alicia's father muhammad ali who was the sheikh of the malikiah in egypt who's also shadoli and the elder alicia actually died in prison and the son went to damascus and associated with amir abdul qader al-jaza who is one of the really great figures of islamic resistance to colonialism in the 19th century the great hero of the jihad against the french cheated by the french so many times members of his family killed and eventually ends up in ottoman damascus where he famously intercedes to save the christians of damascus from a right by the druze um so very much a person who is not a person of revenge but a person of of adult and compassion and this uh emirates saw as being part of ibn arabi's tradition that everything in creation is precious and inviolable because it represents a particular pointer towards the divine there's nothing in the world that isn't a particular manifestation of the divine names jalal and jamal god is absolutely transcendent we say allahu akbar but everything in the world is directly not indirectly related to him the being of the world is from god so uh this kind of interpretation of ibn arabi uh has often been quite attractive to groundwater muslims in europe i would say because it makes sense of your being in a largely christian or non-muslim environment gives you a basis for toleration and compassion so there seems to be in a close irshad murid relationship with agele during these seven years and he went on a khalwa a seclusion or a retreat but as this quote seems to indicate he'd had a kind of connection with ibn arabi since 1993 he thought when he seems to have seen ibn arabi in a dream creating a kind of wastey affiliation of the kind that we referred to briefly in the lecture on ahmad bullock so in cairo he becomes good at arabic and writes in arabic and translates some of ibn arabi's shorter rasa'il or epistles into french he lives in a single room near the citadel and resumes work as a journalist columnist in a publication that is in italian and in arabic called annadi or ilconvito which becomes his main platform for his writing at the time where his main theme is the disaster of the westernizing of arab culture so there's an issue of a nerdy from the time and the editor or the co-editor was a strange italian by the name of enrico in sabato who was also an anarchist now in sabato was probably an italian spy of some kind freelance or official who uh produced this uh magazine to try and encourage the arabs into a pro-italian stance and thereby to undermine british and french imperialism and also ottoman imperialism because some of the articles were also written in in turkish but whatever in sabato's intentions might have been this is a platform for agueli and some of his key writings appear in this periodical and mario also sends some pieces from france which are published in cairo so this is where he makes his debut in some ways as a muslim writer as abdul hadi and it really is a debut in some quite notable ways so for instance in 1904 he writes an article on western feminism which seems to be the first analysis ever by a muslim of western feminism explaining what it is where it comes from and giving an islamic perspective on it specifically from not a utilitarian discourse but from the perspective of ben arabi's very exalted view of the the meaning and the symbolism of gender so that's important he is the first ever muslim to write on this major modern muslim movement from a islamic perspective 1904 also he is the first person in the world to use the word islamophobia it seems he invents it and he identifies its forms because he writes a lot about anti-muslim prejudice and how it's different in germany in france and russia and amongst religious christians and he attacks muslim governments for not fighting islamophobia why do they complain about this prejudice around the world well why don't they do something about it so if we actually allow him to speak just to give you an example of the kind of things that he's writing at the time you can see his he doesn't pull any punches remember he's this anarchist activist who's been rioting in paris latin thought is directed by a priesthood that has relapsed into paganism and does not wish to understand the east germanic thought cannot do so being to obtuse the german thinker like certain patients absorbs a great deal but digests nothing aryan pie excellence he thinks only with an inferior part of his being which is not amongst the superior human faculties protestant and vivisectionist unless he converts to some form of semitism you will always be a man of the winter sun with eyes of chilling frost it is by the anti-mystical priest and his two reckless auxiliaries the missionary and the levantine that germanic materialism impedes the union of east and west on the other hand the east is not without fault it has neglected the greater holy effort al-jihad al-aqbar and has done nothing to spread the teachings of islam amongst the europeans who in turn have been allowed to penetrate deep into the east for lucrative reasons but this is only a semblance in reality they are unconsciously drawn by an invisible force towards a semitic conversion this is something that many groundwater muslims have noted that there's always a deep level of so many european minds the attraction to the east the attraction to islam the kind of ironic idea that's more than just romanticism but the muslims in the east are doing nothing to support this he writes a lot in this ilcon vito on sufism as the essential key to maintaining muslim authenticity because it is the discipline of self-knowledge which is vital so he attacks what he calls the calvinist of islam by which he means mainly rasheed riddha and his followers because they obstruct the cultivation of beauty and they find it difficult to tolerate diversity so he says if sufism declines islam will collapse into crisis there's a thought let's voice it again if sufism declines islam will collapse into crisis the beta the initiation he says puts one in touch with one's naked self stripped away through the initiation now part of his agenda is very much because he's writing in european languages as well as writing in arabic by this stage he writes nice arabic he wants to deculturalize islam one of the veils that has kept europeans from islam is the sense that it's this exotic thing with camels and shishas so he presents islam as the universal religion and he says islam's promise is not to alienate europe but to return it to its authenticity this is really important for even for cmc's idea of islamization meaning the resuscitation of what's indigenously authentic which to a lot of kind of ukip types seems a contradiction in terms but this is what he says on this the most striking feature of islam is its vital intensity seen above all in its homogeneity all muslims recognize themselves according to a special trait all muslim works of art or literature bear an original imprint yet each does so according to his own land thus the arabs turks persians indians malays berbers sudanese etc all still differ from each other each one masterfully synthesizes his sky and the plot of earth on which he lives with the arabic formula no one is expatriated by the religion of the arabs yet they still stand united i shall take it even further i maintained that the persian became more persian after his islam than ever before and that the indian came to grasp indian nature far better than the hindu the muslim art of india despite its rigorous formulai reflects the country far more faithfully than hindu art thereby manifesting the great power of spirit over mata an equilibrium of well-established consciousness a greater cosmic charity and redemptory force thus islam is a discipline that emancipates at once both regional and universal it places the homeland within the heart of man enabling him to feel at home everywhere it's the only creed on earth that is stronger than any atavism or heredity i've seen hindus and buddhists transfigured after only a few years of practicing islam one could have said they had come to change their race so this is very kind of up-to-date stuff when we talk about islam in the west and islam in europe what he's saying is that islam is a repatriation that the groundwater muslim has become more of his land and his place than the one who is not muslim anyway these are important thoughts i think he also writes about the types of spirituality which work for him he says that the highest human type is the malamatia this is the traditional term of somebody who does not attract attention to himself through being spectacularly good or religious ordinary people of basic outward compliance they say their prayers but in whom god has hidden the light of william of sainthood and of courb he says islam is the religion of polycentrism and diversity this again fits in very well with his decentralizing anarchist instincts so he points in his writing to the very many tariqas in the different math hubs all he says god the makkah holy prophet is the exemplar of the middle way he combines the spiritual and the temporal unity and diversity the different social classes so he says sufism without which he says islam will collapse into crisis offers the west a way back to a balance between spirit and body this world and the next a pure monotheism that will also reconnect them in an authentic way to jesus the monotheist so in this magazine he gets some sheikhs to write like his own sheikh al-ish mohammed fareed who's quite a well-known author of a tafsir at the time also writes he translates the resala to malamatia of salami the marath ideas rooted of course in the ayat nor god is the light of the heavens and the earth he commends him in arabi also because he sees him as being the kind of author who is sober he doesn't think that the ecstatic type of spirituality with shatterhat and strange mysterious utterances the tearing of clothes is appropriate but it's still a love-based type of religion he translates in belliani's research um which has also been done more recently into french by the french muslim scholar michel chodkovic so when he's painting what he's trying to do is to paint not existence but being to put it in athbarian terms not the mao jord but itself that which is found in other words the world in divinis the world as it truly is and truly indicates so the presence of the divine again this is very different from the kind of augustinian idea of a gulf but there is the divine presence in the world through in actually context occasionalism the world is renewed in every instant god is not a kind of domestic figure that starts it off and then watches it go wrong god is there in every instance and in arabic system as aguero notes this is the taj deedle and verse the world is renewed made completely new again in each divine exhalation um so the end of dualism god is zahir and barton so he's really an ibn arabi fan he says ibn arabi is a leonardo in the form of philosophy he's also and this is interesting not the kind of stereotypical anti-western convert although he can be quite anti-christian but he's trying to build some kind of harmony between east and west the symbiosis so he thinks that the templars once had tried to do that with the incorporation of certain forms of eastern wisdom and that they were destroyed by the church and that the west hasn't really been able to integrate the higher spirituality of islam into itself since that time so he doesn't like it when muslims in france write fiercely anti-western polemic and condemn all westerners and this again seems to be a very kind of up-to-date perspective so here he says we have read in la review the open letter of sheikh abdullah to europe in the name of pan islamism okay which is a kind of anti-western screed the honorable sheikh is wrong to direct his hatred against all europeans in the free nations of italy france and england true democrats are doing their utmost to at first hinder the policies of colonial expansion and then they always in the name of justice take the side of the indigenous victims of their own compatriots there are those who for the sake of this cause not only risk their careers and their fortunes but also their lives and then to those who say well why don't they convert to islam the european how do you want him to pray he who has never heard the call of the wesin in his cold country sad and cursed by the abandonment of god he has lost his hierarchic sense therefore ritual and prayer remain closed to him the absence of sacred architecture decor and color make profound and religious emotions difficult as well as perceptions of the eternal and fixed world in spite of this it's rather rare to find a european who is hostile to the muslims for any other reason than ignorance he wants to learn from elsewhere but a sound education is difficult to obtain when it comes to the east know then that there are highly powerful parties in whose vital interest it is the east and west should hate each other they only exist due to this loathing and the day that east and west truly get to know each other the powers of darkness shall be vanquished many europeans have converted to islam the educated independent european almost always loves the east not only by fashion but by taste if muslims have been familiar with the spirit of the europeans there would have been conversions in droves i've known europeans who have been moved by the recitation of the sublime quran by the contemplation of beautiful and ancient mosques and by processions and religious gatherings a new convert was insidiously asked why he'd become a muslim replied i love minarets more than factory chimneys and i prefer the turban to the black hat the literary beauty of the quran is a proof of its celestial origin the beauty and architecture decor and life is not only the work of a faith that is intense and pure but it is also the foremost weapon and safeguard of that very faith so this is his great period in cairo when he's developing his ideas 1909 he returns to europe he seems to have had a break with mary but there the friendship is renewed the following year and he starts publishing again in marie's husband's kind of journal the encyclopedia writing as abdul hadi but he also writes in another periodical and new one lagnose which is edited by renegeeno there it is and you can see uh lots of languages at the top al-ishraq is there somewhere which is supposed to be something analogous to the idea of gnosis and then on the right is a later uh sort of epitome of some of his writings for lagunos in french published more recently and his most important essays on art from this period so he writes on the italian futurists uh interestingly futurists through marinetti have also been the ones who trigger the conversions of le de rafanelli um valentin de santa and a number of other creative peach people quite influential by this time as a critic pointing to what he saw as the key tension in artistic and literary modernism which is that there is a discord between modernism's love of movement and technology with marinetti and its awareness that we are alienated from the primordial how do you sort that so he writes on cubism which he likes as a geometry of enclosure and presence which points to transcendence and seems to have some sort of it's an attempt to do what islamic geometrical art does much better so he becomes friendly with apoliner who is a poet an advocate of cubism polyneil i think is the man who invents the word cubism so they are also looking for something transcendent for the order behind the chaos of things and that's one reason why he likes the square of islamic architecture the cube the domed mausoleum so on the left there is apollinar the crazy poet and on the right his other friend at this time his publisher renege who is releasing this journal lagnos and there is a really titanic meeting of an association that argeli tries to establish in paris called al-aqbaria in which he's trying to bring his egyptian ibn arabi wisdom and his shadowy initiation to these spiritual seekers in this very busy complex experimental world of uh paris uh and one evening uh the opening ceremony for this new akubaria takes place and a lot of intellectuals are there including and after expounding the teachings of the sheikh akbar and the beauty of islam renegade takes his shahada some others including somebody called neo champagne who's also significant in esoteric circles also become muslim but this is quite titanically important because genoa becomes out of all of these people by far the most widely read and he takes the name and it's from that time that genoa situates himself solidly in as he put it a form of tradition so to convert geno is a pretty important thing because guinness influences all over the place sometimes uh through various misunderstandings julius evolner and varys fascistoid mid 20th century thinkers like his critique of the modern world but orally his advocate to advocacy of religion steve bannon uh and other troublemakers um alexander dugan who was putin's rasputin for a while people who will not accept usually for ego eurocentric reasons i think geno's option for islam but really like his criticism of the modern world he's one of the significant thinkers of the 20th century i would think but he doesn't go to egypt cannot doesn't go to egypt until 1930 much much later so genoa is converted to islam and receives a bayer into the shaivilia because again seems to have been appointed to be the mukaddam of the shardalia by by his sheikh in cairo but they're always different agueli is really not what is sometimes colloquially described as a perennialist he doesn't believe that all of the religions in their pre-modern form are perfect instantiations and paths up a different mountain as we can see from his writing he doesn't think that aztec human sacrifice and so forth could possibly be right so if you look at some of agueli's writings you can see this quite clearly he can be quite polemical islam is the only religion in the world that can do without clergy or sacadoral institutions of any form as it firmly rests upon the basis of tradition the clerical concept is evidently anti-islamic which is why priests of all robes and sects harbor a fierce loathing of muslims that these in fact respect christian priests in accordance with the strict command of the quran is of no consequence to them thus imagine a belief that renders the entire anthropomorphic enterprise superfluous or even noxious two things necessitate the priest the idol and the conventionalism of sentiments referred to as sentimentalism etc idol priest and sentimentalism are three aspects of all anthropomorphic religions islam is not such a religion so this is um clearly not an idea of the equal sateriological value of all traditional religions but to deal with that would take us i think in a direction that we don't have time to explore 1911 goes back to sweden does more paintings there 1912 back to paris apollinaire has invited him to write a book about art unfortunately he never gets around to writing it his paintings now seem to be a little bit different there's a more obvious mysticism up slightly didactic in his paintings of this period clearly depicting the sovereignty of light painting with the eye of the heart that sees the divine in everything he sees art as being akin to worship exists to demonstrate existence it's an enactment of an ontological insight 1913 can't resist it goes back to egypt paints some more uh lives in very considerable poverty his only real source of income apart from a few pennies for his art criticism has been occasional small some sent by his mother from sweden now this is 1913 between the balkan wars when the ottoman empire lost its european provinces and the first world war is very political egypt is strategic there's the suez canal gaza just the other side really of sinai is in ottoman hands and the british suspect agueli of being some kind of ottoman spy he's a traditionalist muslim so he must be and the choice that faced muslims in the middle east at the time was pretty stark either the khalifa or british and french promises of prosperity and some kind of autonomy unspecified the evidence now suggests that the majority of people in the middle east supported the khalifa despite the kind of lawrence of arabia myth of the arabs somehow being liberated from their own people and and uh kissing the hands of their british and french liberators that's a kind of pos uh post hoc con reconstruction of what actually happened so he's being followed cairo is the center of the arab bureau and all kinds of spy machinations as it was during the second world war second world war those are famous i guess it was mi5 or military intelligence headquarters in garden city a big apartment building wasn't terribly well disguised because it was called secret house in egypt and even when i went to egypt and lived there you know you even the taxi drivers knew where secret house was secret house they would say not very well disguised um but uh yeah the first world war this is the center of all kinds of machinations after four ottoman centuries the europeans the christians are pushing in and they want to bring as many arabs as they can so the swedish embassy offered to pay him to go back to sweden neutral sweden but he can't afford to take his painting so he declines that um he doesn't want to leave them in cairo eventually the british kick him out they deport him to barcelona in neutral spain where he's completely destitute he's unable to rent even the simplest accommodation and even though it's a hotbed of anarcho-syndicalism he's regarded as an outsider a weird muslim probably a spy of some kind of the anarchist movement there reject him so he's literally a he's living on the streets and his hearing has really deteriorated so on the 1st of october 1917 wandering around somewhere near barcelona he's hit by a train and he dies so a sad end but a kind of maybe a sort of appropriate obscure surprising end to somebody who was a dervish wastey malamity kind of person so we should wind up pretty soon the theme of of holy poverty in his life is pretty salient one winter when he went to stockholm he would wear a kind of sheet thing and a blanket with newspapers tied front and back he really looked like a complete complete a really bohemian somebody said with his eccentric appearance combining socrates and zola he attracted attention wherever he went sometimes he would have to copy out books in libraries because he couldn't afford to buy them in egypt he lived on bread and figs and used to sleep on a pile of old books because he didn't have a bed really a zahid sick often so this is his own sense of that type of spirituality the spirituality of the outcast straightened conditions poverty and the hostility of enemies are nothing but a lesson and they lead to more boldness externally and a better closeness to god internally praises for allah forever after difficulty comes ease as the quran says in actuality constraint and liberation bring the same results to he who is blessed and also to he who is cursed so he sees this as faithfulness to the prophetic example holy prophet lived in a state of poverty the nobility of giving charity [Music] not blaming others this is all part for him of the malamity ethos um we could quote more from his quite amazing writings about that and he says that the decline of this malamity ethos caring for others caring for animals loving god seeing god in others the decline of that signals the decline of the muslim world again one of the points we've been trying to make is that it was a rooted journey remember his conversion was in paris he became convinced of islam ultimately for western reasons it's because of this particular journey that many dissident europeans had taken anarchist post-impressionist rather bohemian types sipping absinthe in dubious bars in montmartre it was that world that led on to the discovery of of islam so one of the contributors to sedgwick's volume puts it this way from the perspective he described of the malamatia he succeeded phenomenally in living without ever selling his soul without celebration of his merits and dying as humbly as those whose lives he defended so that's all i wanted to say about the extraordinary perhaps tragic but in many ways very energetic and sincere life of sheikha belhadi akhili who it can be said is a kind of founder of groundwater islam in europe and his particular reception of the way of amir abdulkadur with its traditional tolerance respect for difference respect for others respect for the diversity of religions respect for the diversity of the muslims is probably the best way that muslims will find to go as they try to find a space for them that is more than just a survival strategy as beleaguered and misunderstood communities in the europe of late modernity so may allah insha allah grant his rahma to his soul and give us benefit from remembering his story barakallahu cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

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Length: 107min 48sec (6468 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021