Karen Armstrong | Special Lecture Series

uh you have no place to go he's thank you [Music] university and as convener of this special lecture series i have some tasks to do the first task is to ask all of you to kindly take out your mobile phones and either switch them off or turn them to vibration mode so we're going to take 20 seconds just to do that thank you i will now request the president of the afghan university mr farold rasool to come up to the podium and introduce the speaker [Applause] bishmi rahmani rahim the chairman and members of the board of trustees ms karen armstrong our distinguished speaker for today's lecture dr david taylor acting provost dr another lisa the convener of the aku special lecture series representatives of the diplomatic community members of the media the faculty staff students and alumni of the university distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen assalamu alaikum i would like to welcome you today to the yaga khan university special lecture series and i also include in my welcome members of the audience who are joining us today by video links from other parts of this university as you can see this is a very popular event and unfortunately we could not accommodate everybody in this particular auditorium and there are people in various halls and lecture theaters who are joining us today and i hope that they feel equally part of this as we do the agriculture university special lecture series was started six years ago to create a broad-based learning experience for our students this series has developed into an intellectual forum that attracts wide interest and helps bring to this city contemporary thinking and pluralist views we have been fortunate to have had several prominent speakers address us on a diverse range of subjects and the speakers have included his royal highness prince hassan of jordan professor stanley walport the historian and author of gina of pakistan sir john tusa the director of the barbican center in london dr haroon ahmad president master of corpus christi college cambridge university the right honourable donald mckinnon secretary general of the commonwealth to name a few our speaker for today's presentation is an internationally acclaimed and renowned intellectual force we are deeply honored and privileged to have karen armstrong at the aku her presentation comes at an important time as there is a dire need for greater understanding of the rich diversity of peoples and their beliefs histories traditions and customs in today's interconnected and interdependent world as a university we have a responsibility to contribute to the thinking and the actions that help foster understanding between religions civilizations and cultures karen armstrong is a prolific writer and a much sought-after commentator on religions and the impact of history and geography on people's beliefs and practices she has through her television work interviews and books strived to look at the intricacies of world religions rather than painting them with a broad brush she has described the richness and complexity of religions such as islam and has forced individuals to rethink one-dimensional views that can lead to mistrust and misunderstanding she has voiced the importance of tolerance and has challenged misinformed viewpoints that have the potential to fuel misunderstandings between religions and peoples and that add to the degradation of relationships the chancellor of this university his highness tiago khan has referred to the current dynamics between the west and the muslim world as a clash of ignorance and rather than a clash of civilizations outlining carol karen armstrong's accomplishments would take more than the time we have allocated to her for her speech so while i will not go through all her achievements i believe it would be important to mention that ms armstrong has been invited to address members of the united of the united states congress on three occasions has participated in the world economic forum in new york and davos and was one of the three scholars invited to speak at the united nations in the first session ever devoted to religion she has been recently appointed to the united nations initiative of the alliance of civilizations and karen armstrong provides a more pluralistic view of religions and creates the opportunity for a constructive interfaith dialogue which is much needed today in our world ladies and gentlemen it is with immense delight that i invite karen armstrong to deliver her presentation in our special lecture series mr president your excellencies ladies and gentlemen it's a great honor and a delight to be here um i'm amazed by your beautiful campus and still more astonished by your very warm welcome and generous welcome and hospitality to me um and it's of course uh very important to me to be here with you in pakistan which is so much at the center of so much turbulence and trouble and distress in the world today we are in i wanted to talk today about what religion is because sadly religion has been implicated in some of the recent catastrophes of our time and i've lost count of the number of taxi drivers in london who when i jump into their cab and they ask me what i do for a living tell me that religion has been the major cause of every single war in history and i have the choice of sighing wearily and retreating into myself or else trying to explain that that is not so i don't think it's so today i think a lot of the of what we're seeing uh that is is so dustedly in the abuse of religion is politically rather than religiously based but we need to understand what religion is and often in the western world islam for example is said to be not a good religion a bad religion from people who know absolutely nothing about it i may say so i wanted to talk today about the beginnings of religion uh and i wanted to show how islam is absolutely there in the center of these major religious concerns i'm going back to a period that that's known as the axial age it the term was coined by the german philosopher carl jaspers in the middle of the 20th century uh because he said this period from 900 to 200 bce was the axis or the pivot around which the whole spiritual history of humanity uh has continued to revolve uh we've never gone beyond these seminal insights this was the period of the sages of the upanishads of the buddha of confucius of lousy of socrates the great greek tragedians and the prophets of israel in four distinct regions of the world in china india israel and in greece the traditions that have continued to nourish humanity either came into being or had their roots so later rabbinic judaism christianity and islam uh both brought to fruition the axial age that had developed in monotheistic israel at uh but which got truncated early and these later traditions uh rabbinic judaism christianity and islam completed this this process and what was is astonishing is the profound similarity of these extraordinary traditions even though they were working in isolation from one another and had until the end of the period this period no contact they all came up with remarkably similar ideas which showed that they were um they tapped into something very important about the structure of our humanity this is the way uh human beings work and these sages were were very very pragmatic uh in their view if if a religious idea that they were promoting uh didn't work for them if it didn't bring them a sense of insight and enlightenment that they weren't interested in it uh no matter how ideologically sound it might it might have been but this uh is not to be a purely antiquarian pursuit when i was researching uh this uh the this period i was astonished by how contemporary these thinkers were sometimes they seemed to be talking directly to us in our situation because as i hope up to be able to show they were living in a world and facing problems not dissimilar to our own they were all for example all these regions engulfed in violence as never before and of course the violence was pitiful compared with what we're facing at present but nevertheless in the context of that time it was a shocking advance iron weaponry had been uh introduced for example and that made wars far more deadly centralized large states and empires were developing which depended upon coercion and military power in a way that had not been possible before market economies were developing in all these regions trade and industry was developing again on a minor scale compared with what we have today uh but uh but still uh and it's important to be clear about this religion did not develop in lonely hillsides on mountaintops or mountain caves or in the depths of the desert these religions developed in the cities uh in a sp in a context of cutthroat capitalism albeit infantile primitive primitive market economies but nevertheless a more aggressive economy was developing with merchants in the marketplace praying uh this you know greedily upon one another and uh as we as i hope to show the sages of the axial age uh tried to find a cure uh we uh because as the world was changing the older traditions no longer worked uh for and people had to find a new and different way of being religious now first of all uh i they often the axial age stages seem to say things that would be shocking to some people today to some religious people today the first one would be more likely to shock a western audience i think than an audience largely composed of muslims um that religion is not about believing doctrines it's not about accepting certain propositions of the creed this has been a peculiar uh preoccupation of western christianity in particular especially since the enlightenment but the sages of the axial age were not any of them interested in dogma or belief or metaphysics at least not in defining it this doesn't mean they weren't interested in the reality that we call god or the sacred or brahma or nirvana or the dao uh they were this was the center of their lives it was the the goal to which they were aspiring but they were insistent that this was transcendent that meant it goes beyond the reach of concepts and words now very often people religious people i'm sure no one here but often religious people say yes we know god is transcendent but we know what he's like that was not good enough for the axial age sages i remember as a young girl eight years old i was given a catechism answer to learn by heart on the question what is god and uh what is god god is the supreme spirit who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections i parroted i have to say that at eight years old that definition didn't mean much to me um and i'm bound to say that it still leaves me cold like but i've also come to say because of my studies that it is incorrect because it takes it for granted that it is possible simply to draw breath and define a word that literally means to set limits upon a reality that must go beyond any definition that is possible once you think you've defined god you've cut god down to a human system of thought and lost that sense of transcendence so um they the the axial sages recommended silence oh said confucius to his disciples one day i wish i did not have to speak oh but master said the disciples what would we say to our students if you didn't speak to us if you didn't teach us and confucius replied heaven does not speak and by heaven he referred to the high god but he said look how effective heaven is because of heaven these stars wheel on their constellations the seasons succeed one another in due order uh the people live and die and yet heaven does no speaking and what confucius was implying that if we desisted from a lot of theological chatter and argument we might become as effective as heaven ourselves the buddha had a monk who was continually pestering him about uh who had created the world and was the world created in time and or had it always been there was there a god and he wasn't getting on with his yoga and his ethical practice and the buddha told him he was like a a man who'd been shot with a poisoned arrow but who refused to have any medical treatment until he found out the name of the person who shot him and what village he came from you'll die the buddha said before you get this perfectly pointless information we could oh monks he said and here i paraphrase of course while away many happy hours discussing these perfectly fascinating topics but what good will it do you even if we found out who created the world and how exactly how he did it and when uh cruelty pain despair uh sorrow illness sickness old age death would still exist uh i'm teaching you truths that will help you to live in peace with these realities and discover nirvana within yourselves but you won't get that by theological chatter the greek orthodox christians developed a very important principle that they said should govern every single theological statement they said any statement about god should have two characteristics one it should be paradoxical to remind you that god couldn't fit neatly into a human system of thought and second it should lead to silence um instead of uh instead of chattering away or reeling off a definition like the one i gave you in the my catholic catechism uh every theological statement should be like a great poem uh you know at the end of a great when you listen to the a reading of a great poem or you're present at a symphony sometimes before the applause breaks out there's a beat of silence in the hall where you feel that there's there's nothing to say and that is what every theological statement should be it should be a poetic poetic act carefully made designed to lead to silent awe and a realization that when we're speaking of god or the divine we've gone beyond the reach of what words and thoughts can do and i think you have this tradition very much in islam certainly in this smiley tradition because the ismailis were very strong on this saying that you could not imagine that the idea god you had in your head bore any relation to uh the the ineffable indescribable reality itself and i haven't got time uh now to explain to you that the trinity uh i'm not surprised that muslims sometimes find this a puzzling doctrine because western christians are often dismayed by it because it was formulated by greeks but the the trinity trinitarian theology understood allah is really uh designed to lead you to that sense of the unknowingness of god and i if anyone wants to ask me at question time i'll be happy to expand that point now the quran calls that didn't grant it obviously was puzzled by uh trinity as it was just as it was probably uh it was probably very confusing when it was described by met some contemporary christians but the quran calls um theological chatter or theological dogma or obligatory doctrines zana self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be sure of one way or the other but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian oh people at the book are you are you mad abraham was neither a jew nor nor was he a christian why how can you who can can say that god sired a son again these are ineffable matters and once you start being doctrinaire about it then you are you're losing the plot religiously religion is is is about silence now the um the daoists in china said that really the problem with dogma was that it made people uh dogmatic uh that it made people sort of thump tables and say i'm right you're wrong uh this is right this is wrong i believe this you believe that you're wrong and this is all an endorsement of ego the the daoists were saying look uh there's a quarrel here in china some people say the confusions are right some people say the followers of mozi are right but why can't they both be right these are indescribable matters and in china they developed at the end of the axial age a uh a syncretism whereby they realized the these the the good points and strong points of all the schools and seeing them all as valid because nobody could have the last word on something that exceeds words but ego is the great um the great enemy of the spiritual life and this is what was beca they they all discovered uh so and often when people are thumping their opinions they are really saying i i i think that and uh and there's a sort of puffed up sense leave it let it go uh they would say and remember that you are in the presence of the ineffable and the indescribable now yoga i'm sure this is not i i was told uh that because of various political uh developments yoga and indian hindu uh spirituality is not exactly popular in pakistan nevertheless um it has been it was an important spiritual technology the axial age so bear with me a little while um it's very popular in the west today all kinds of people are rushing to have yoga classes in gyms and meditation halls etc but um it would be uh very it would be a surprising thing um to the the way yoga is taught now uh originally in the axial age the purpose of yoga was not and it was not to be an aerobic exercise it was not designed to help you to lose weight nor was it designed to help you to feel more peaceful about yourself and sort of more satisfied and all it was designed to dismantle the ego to take the eye out of our thinking by a series of exercises in concentration that would certainly be beyond me um and i i and uh would would was really possible for very skilled people and was a full-time job no chance of just bopping in for a yoga class twice a week uh this was this was a lifetime's work a steady dismantling of ego and once you started to look at reality the successful yogins found without that film of ego that constantly gets in the way of our perception you saw the world without that the distorting filter because we all do it we are biologically programmed to put number one first so when we hear a piece of news instinctively we say how is that going to affect me or if we look at something we say do i like this am i attracted to that do i want this is this going to threaten my position now if you take that ego out then you start seeing and experiencing the world differently then it's the ego principle that this and by that uh they were really talking about selfishness uh of course you of course you have a self uh and the buddha said uh you know he developed a doctrine called anata no self but uh he didn't mean really that there was no such thing as the self as some postmodern uh literary critics have suggested he was saying behave as though the self did not exist and you'll be happier and i'm sure that he's right i don't know uh if any of you wake up at three in the morning and the thoughts that go through one's head in those dark moments are very much on the line why did this happen to me uh why don't i have what x has uh at this kind of preoccupation with self and our self success so that it's hard to rejoice at the success of others and uh we like to gloat over the wrong doings of others all this enhances ego and it doesn't make us happy and if you step outside that you have um a a different perspective now the first thing as far as we know that the prophet muhammad peace be upon him made his converts do in mecca when he started to preach to them was to pray prostrate themselves in prayer uh several times a day and this was very difficult for the arabs who didn't approve of kingship and found it extremely degrading to grovel on the ground like a slave but the posture of the body was designed to teach them at a level that was deeper than the rational what was involved in the act of islam the surrender of the ego the surrender of that prancing uh self posturing self that is continually uh you know uh post uh posturing around drawing attention to itself look bustling around self-importantly to let that go and to bow your head to the dust now um we all human beings we seek out ecstasy uh the a greek derived word ecstasis it means stepping outside um and we seek ex that sense when we feel deeply touched within sometimes and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves we seek it in our lives we feel we inhabit our humanity more fully than ever at such moments and uh the religious use ecstasis to bring them into the presence of the divine and x-star seas it means stepping outside the ego stepping outside the self and we are so programmed that if we can't consistently try to get beyond selfishness and greed and self-centeredness and dreary self-preoccupation which imprisons of us in a very limited view of the world then we do achieve an enhancement of being ecstasy and many people in the west are not finding ecstasy in religion anymore so they're seeking it out in music and uh dance and uh sex and drugs and oth and some misconceived uh places but ecstasy is something we seek out in our lives the trick is to use it to come into the divine not into just a self-inflated cloud9 which is simply an enhancement of ego um now i spent a great deal of my youth as a nun and we indulged in certain uh practices that were designed to get rid of ego we had to sort of crawl around on the ground and kiss people's feet and beat our breasts and to confess our faults in public and it was all i can tell you a complete waste of time we spent so much time examining our consciences and you know mulling over our faults and failings that we were actually imprisoned in the ego that we were supposed to transcend so i'm not talking about that kind of ego bashing the sages of the axial age found that the best way of getting rid of ego was by the practice of compassion and this was the bedrock of their spirituality as it is the bedrock of the principle of islam you you begin every reading of the quran uh by invoking uh the compassion and the mercy of allah and are told to imitate his compassion and benevolence in that we see in the signs of nature in our dealings with other people compassion to feel with the other compete and agree to feel with the other compassion demands that consistently you dethrone yourself from the center of your world and put another there and you learn to see the other as sacred um now the many of these traditions uh devoted the uh expressed this by the what's been become known as the golden rule don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you and uh this sounds um easy but it's not easy uh confucius as far as we know was the first person to formulate the golden rule he was asked by his disciples master what is the single thread that runs through all your teachings what's the single thread that pulls everything together and confucius said shu likening to the self look into your own heart discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse under any circumstances whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else do not do to others as you would not have done unto you and that confucius said was religion and this was one of the central messages of the axial age if you believe babe with absolute compassion to others feeling with the other day by day hour by hour uh then you achieve constant ecstasies you're constantly stepping outside the self and they say coming into the presence of what the the the confucian school and the chinese called the dao the ultimate reality um and this this was a common thread buddha said that it was the practice of compassion that brought you in to the present into nirvana that sacred peace uh that enables you to live without pain um that so uh the great my favorite golden rule story however is that of course associated with rabbi hillel the older contemporary of jesus who was approached one day by a pagan who promised to convert to judaism on condition that hillel could recite the whole of jewish teaching while he stood on one leg and hillel stood on one leg and said that which is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor that is the torah the rest is commentary go and study it and that's a remarkable statement because there is no mention of god or the creation of the world in six days no mention of the 613 commandments no mention of mount sinai the exodus from egypt or the promised land all things that we think are essential to judaism but it was all there in the golden rule endlessly putting yourself out for the other you will come into the presence of god the whole of the torah was designed hillel claimed to introduce that spirit of loving kindness of compassion to others and can this was to be not just a one-off thing that you you did once a week or something you were supposed to do it as confucius said all day and every day master which of your teachings can we put into practice all day and every day do not do to others as you would not have done to use at confucius uh one of his disciples said oh master i never do to other people what i wouldn't like done to myself and confucius laughed and he said you know you're not there yet if we did this day by day hour by hour if every time we felt tempted to say something unpleasant about an annoying colleague um or an ex-wife or a country with whom we're at war and then said how would we like this said about us and desisted in that moment we would have gone beyond the self and have achieved an ecstasis and come into the presence of the divine jesus certainly certainly made that point um and the essence of the essence of um uh of of the quran is not a doctrine but an impera command to to sit constantly behave to others as we would like to be behaved to ourselves at the last day you'll be asked how did you treat your fellow people did you hoard your wealth selfishly or did you distribute it fairly did you share with others and there is a lovely story in the torah about abraham father of jews christians and muslims one day abraham was sitting outside his tent at monreal near hebron now unfortunately a site of extreme violence and tension and hatred but abraham saw three strangers walk on the horizon now strangers uh in the ancient world as in our own day were very threatening and frightening people um because uh they uh they weren't bound by the laws of vendetta and indeed very few of us today would bring three total strangers off the street into our own house but that's what abraham did he ran out in the hottest part of the day and prostrated himself on the ground before these strangers as though they were kings or gods and brought them back to his encampment and gave them not just a glass of water and a sandwich but an elaborate meal pouring out on these three total strangers all the refreshment that he could for their journey and in the ensuing conversation it transpired quite naturally without any great fanfare that one of those strangers is abraham's god the act of compassion has led to a divine encounter it has led brought abraham into the presence of the divine and that point about the stranger is very important because the axial age sages all insisted all insisted that uh you could not confine your compassion to your own group you had to it had to be you had to practice what one well mozi chinese sage called jan eye concern for everybody because if you confine your uh compassion just to your own congenial little friends this is just group egotism you've got somehow to go beyond to take to take that and this is the spirit that we need today in our increasingly polarized world where we're getting split up into tribes and nations and and at war with one another um now the um you in leviticus for example in the in the jewish torah you're told to love the stranger and the word love uh did not mean that we were supposed to be filled with warm tender affection for the stranger the word this was a legal text and this was a legal term used in international treaties which said that you must uh support them give peop be loyal to them give them practical support and help and look out for their interests this is something we can all do if a stranger lives with you in your land says the torah do not molest him you must treat him as one of your own people and love him as yourself for you were strangers in egypt again empathy compassion to feel with the other look into your own heart discover what it was that gave you pain in the past when you were strangers and marginalized and therefore refused to inflict this on anybody else not even the stranger jesus is supposed to have told his followers to love your enemies um and uh by that he didn't mean that we would again to be filled with soggy affection for enemies but to look out for them and to give your benevolence where there's no hope of any return where there's no hope of an egotistic self-interested return now i haven't spoken much about the greeks because the greeks didn't really have a religious axial age they were westerners they weren't so good at religion they were better at science and philosophy more interested in and ultimately they didn't have a religious axial age but they made one very important contribution in their tragic drama which was a religious festival every year on the festival of dionysus all athenians had to congregate in the specially built theater on the acropolis to watch a tragic plays uh that are usually considered some of the problems that athens was facing at that in that year but set back in a mythical guys uh so that and it was a communal meditation uh it was not a choice to go everybody was obliged to go all citizens were obliged to attend the place uh it wasn't a question of have you caught the latest aeschylus yet you had to go and watch it eve they even let prisoners out of prison out of jail in order to participate in this communal meditation and during the course of these dramas the leader of the chorus would uh ask the audience to weep and to weep for men uh or women uh who in real life we wouldn't give a room to to edit us a man who albeit unwittingly had killed his father and married his mother uh to heracles who was driven mad by the goddess hera and killed his wife and children and they were told weep feel with this man and the greeks did weep uh they weren't like a lot of western men today who uh were in front confronted with something sad just gulp heart and wipe an embarrassed tear from the corner of their eyes they wept aloud because they believed that weeping together created a bond between human beings um the first of these plays come to come down to us is the persians by aeschylus it was written five years after the battle of salamis when the greeks had actually won that battle they will battle eventually but before they won the persians had rampaged through athens absolutely vandalized and looted the city and knocked to the ground and destroyed all the beautiful new temples that had been built on the acropolis and now five years after the battle of salamis aeschylus asks the greek athenian audience to weep for the persians this it he tells the story from the persians point of view um and he tells them that um to uh that the persians are treated with great respect there's no triumphalism no jeering xerxes the defeated leader is led it with great respect and honor into his house um and there the persians are said to be the sister race of the of of the athenians guilty like the athenians themselves of hubris of overweening pride in going beyond what they should now i think we have to ask ourselves i often ask a western audience five years after september the 11th would we be ready to put on such a play on in broadway or in the west end in london that considered that atrocity from the point of view of the other side and that is what uh the axial sages said you must do there's a lovely story in homer and homer wasn't an axial age sage at all but this this incident from the iliad is is in the essence of axial age spirituality the iliad as you know describes the 10-year war between troy and greece and it describes just one tiny incident in it concerned with achilles the leading warrior in the greek camp who withdraws from the fight in a matter of pure egotistic pride and as a result of his withdrawal his best friend petroclus is slain uh by the great trojan prince hector and so achilles challenge is hector to a duel he's driven mad by grief he was before this he was a loving tenderhearted man but he's become inhuman and he kills hector and he mutilates the body and he he's lost his humanity the gods look odd and say this man has lost his humanity he drags hector's body round and round the stadium and then refuses to give it to the family for burial uh and then uh one night into the greek camp incognito comes priam king of troy the old king of troy it comes to the tent of achilles achilles has killed nearly all his sons and he comes humbly to him to ask for the body of hector and everybody's astonished and tense and achilles looks at the old man who suddenly reminds him of his own father and he starts to weep and priam also starts to weep and the sound of their weeping fills the tent and all the encampment around and then when the silence ensues the two men look at each other and each sees the other as divine that when you've made the effort to put yourself into the place of the enemy uh you are beginning uh the to uh to to knock down that egotism and see your your enemy just like any other human being as sacred and you're in the presence of god now um muhammad i will just uh at the when he conquered mecca it's one of my one of the most inspiring moments to me in the life of the prophet uh when he invites stands by the kaaba and invites the quraish his tribe to enter islam and says to them o quresh god is calling you from the chauvinism of jahiliyyah with its pride in ancestors all this puffed up pride in your own tradition but remember all men come from adam and adam came from dust and then he quotes from the quran where god says to humanity o people we have created you from a male and a female and have formed you into tribes and nations so that you may know one another uh not so that you may uh kill or dominate or colonize or exploit or conquer but so that you may know one another because the experience of living in your own tribe means that you're endlessly uh rubbing up against people who you don't get on with even in your own family there are people sometimes you don't get on with and this is a dress rehearsal for uh experiencing the other uh that is even more far away always constantly in the quran and i think in the life of the prophet and indeed in islam with its pluralistic outreach you have a sense of of reconciliation bringing uh bringing an end to enmity and reaching out to the other now one thing that absolutely astonished me in my researches was that in every single case the catalyst for major religious change during the axial age was a a retreat from violence the sages looked around the horror that was imploding in their own societies and were and were so horrified that they started uh to find other ways compassion was the was the uh ideology that would counter the the destructive power of violence but they but in every single case they withdrew from violence the greeks didn't do this the greeks actually spread violence around and uh and and so everybody in athens became a fighting man and they didn't have a religious axial age non-violence became absolutely key now in the bible you have because it's a very very long and complex work it's different from the quran which is uh which it comes came down to the prophet in 23 years they were talking about a thousand years of uh of of revelation um and here you have i think very very honest tussle in the bible uh you have the uh the axial age spirit of reconciliation like the uh one the spirit the one-sided quotations about loving the stranger but you also have people who don't want to be um non-violent at all and so you have here a continual tussle and i think both jews and christians need to study their scriptures and have a look at how these uh these uh contrasting spiritualities uh uh deal with one another but um in yoga for example uh non-violence was the basis of the yogic quest before you were allowed to start your yoga discipline you had to spend some time with the guru who introduced you to a five-point plan of ethical and ethical program and top of the list was ahimsa non-violence uh and that didn't and it you know it said you shan't kill anybody now that didn't just mean that you couldn't go on a raid anymore or rustle your neighbor's cattle which the aryan tribes had done before that's how they made their living uh but it they went further than this they said that that you must not even show violence in impatient speech uh an irritable gesture raising your eyebrows to the uh the heavens in disgust uh you had to express in every move serenity and peace and friendliness to all and until and unless your guru was satisfied that this had become second nature to you you weren't even allowed to sit in the yogic position um and the texts tell us that when they had mastered this uh the the apprentice the yogic apprentice would experience great joy because i think we're probably programmed for violence i mean uh when we came out of the caves there were bigger predators than ourselves we have to look after our family and even today i'm uh even perhaps in the agar khan university the colleagues are sort of uh loggerheads with each other and fighting for their own corners and even even if we're not coming to blows we are uh very much looking after ourselves uh it's very rare to apologize for anything without pointing out clearly that the other person is also at fault uh we're always guarding our corner now if we let that go we probably would enter an alternative state of consciousness it would be the beginning of of transformation for us um jesus uh was a man of non-violence he said uh to his disciples in in one of the gospels uh to turn the other cheek when attacked to love your enemies not to retaliate um eve but though there are other parts of the new testament i agree which don't live up to that ahimsa but muhammad too i mean i want to spend a little time on this who's often portrayed in the west as a man of war his wars were reluctant he was being attacked by mecca and in war as we know dreadful things happen on all sides we've seen that uh recently but when muhammad was able to felt that the time was right he initiated a non-violent campaign uh he announced of course that he was going to make the hajj pilgrimage to mecca and on the house you couldn't carry any weapons to defend yourself and um he was going unarmed into the lion's den and there um omar said no no you can't do this what are you talking about don't be ridiculous and muhammad said no this is what we're going to do and a thousand muslims took this risk they were the americans sent the cavalry out to kill them all muhammad managed to get round into the sanctuary of mecca where all violence was forbidden and there he sat down and waited for the quraish to negotiate with him and when they came to negotiate muhammad accepted terms which disgusted his followers because he seemed to have given away too much but when he was on his way home uh he had a revelation which said that this apparent defeat had been a great victory a manifest victory and that it was this spirit of peace the sachina which had descended upon the muslims whereas the the meccans had been filled with the old violence of jahiliyyah uh and it was this that put them in the this spirit of peace that put them in the same spirit uh as the people of the torah the people of the gospel and the the muslim historians say that indeed the peace that hudaibir was the beginning of the end of the war it was the turning point the watershed after that where there was a chance for people there was a chance where they hadn't been before for people to sit down and consider islam in a in a rational way and more people started to convert to islam so what have we learned what uh what is religion it religion is not doctrine religion is not obligatory belief religion is not violent i mean it is not compatible with religion to be violent uh and um but it is about uh compassion it is about the golden rule and it is about the stranger about reaching out beyond your own community so what went wrong well religion is very hard to do and uh often i fear religious people prefer to be right rather than compassionate um you know it i not everybody wants to be compassionate and not everybody wants to be utterly transformed by religion they often want religion to sort of give them a bit of extra pizzazz so that they're even more themselves or to give them a little uplift once a week so they can return to their normal lives but religion as it should be if you want to enter the presence of the divine means to divest yourself of self and reach out with compassion religion is altruism and religion does not know the boundaries of tribe and nation um as as as the quran makes so clear and what um we need now in this world is this spirit we're seeing religion used for all kinds of nefarious selfish ends and uh what we need now is a compassionate offensive made by every single religious person whatever his or her creed we need to apply now the golden rule globally to treat realize that others even who are far away and distant from us are as important as ourselves not to treat others as we would not wish to be treated ourselves the west has a huge lesson to learn here uh but we all have to learn it together because uh unless uh we are going to turn to to turn away from this uh sort of quick antagonism and from the defensiveness that religious people are in now especially muslims you're in a very difficult position you're constantly having to defend islam and that puts you on this on you know in in in a slightly uh uneasy antagonistic position it's very hard uh but we need to see the world needs to see uh the spirit of islam the the spirit of hudaibir the spirit of of compassion of salat of of zakat of sharing with others uh of surrendering the ego and christians need to do it too because so do so do the jewish people um we we nee do to treat others as we would not we would wish to be treated ourselves uh and very often some what happens sometimes is that compassion is such a difficult discipline and so demanding demanding constant effort day by day hour by hour that we erect secondary goals um in the christian world which is where i come from originally uh it's you know it's what kind of contraception a woman is allowed to use is discussed endlessly and the in and uh is such and such a statement uh does it cohere with the council of calcium or something now this is or this is a distraction because what the world needs now is compassion the dedicated spirit of compassion uh that is at the heart of all these traditions so we don't need a new prophet or a new sage because in all our traditions we need simply to go back to the core and discover that lost heart of empathy which was the inspiration of every single one of our of our wonderful traditions thank you very much we now have time for some questions and answers uh we have this lecture being telecast live to five other uh lecture halls so there may be questions coming in from these other venues as well i will ask the conference secretary of staff to collect on the pieces of paper the questions being asked at the other venues here if you have a question i would ask you to raise your hand and and someone will bring a cordless mic to you can i see the accomplishments there's one here and one there now please identify yourself before you ask a question professor amma there's a mic behind you can i ask you wait and the antithesis what christ said of course the compassion is one side but he also talked about health and health fire and violence so how these two things are contractual my second question is if you see a loop between creator and creation so that is it on one side there is on the other side there is a evolution so how this loop would function and and if there is no violence then i think which means right but two good questions um jesus yes indeed as i said uh both the new testaments have a disturbing mingling of violence uh with the command to love just as the jewish scriptures do i have to say we don't know much about what jesus actually said um the the these were written down these traditions were written it's not like the quran the traditions were written down a long time afterwards the new testament's more like the hadith where you have some hadith that are um i think jesus i think one of the problems about christianity as a religion is has been that it was from the beginning an apocalyptic faith was looking forward to an imminent end of history right here episode paul thought it would come in his own lifetime and that means that there is i quite agree with you there is this strong uh compulsion to uh to to say you know those of you who don't come are going to be cast out into hellfire actually the full-blown doctrine of hell was a later dastardly creation um and uh you know there's this is just um we're not quite sure what jesus meant by hell or indeed by the kingdom of heaven whether this was a celestial thing or whether it was going to be an earthly kingdom uh on earth but certainly the apocalypse is difficult and apocalypse is what is fueling uh the uh christianity of the christian right in the united states who are expecting again an imminent end of days and that leads them to all kinds of very um very violent kinds of theologies and there has always been that tension uh in christianity um just as there's attention you know people are always quoting those bits about in from the quran about holy war and you know uh jihad etc longs and there are also those ones which are switched where the quran speaks definitely about the importance of reconciliation forgiveness and peace so i think uh and as for yes i mean art the the the people of india especially the jains and the buddhists went into non-violence in a major way muhammad was more realistic he knew that they would sometimes it would sometimes perhaps be essential to fight and indeed the bhagavad-gita comes to the same conclusion at the end of the axial age the bhagavad-gita will which says yes that sometimes you have to fight as you pointed out nature red in tooth and claw we but it's precisely because violence is so bound up in our survival for existence that if we can as far as we are able step outside it then we achieve a different phase of consciousness uh i think that that i think that is what they were under they didn't know about evolution or darwin or anything but clearly they understood that um that that that some that that that violence was deeply embedded in our psyche and that if we could get beyond it then we would experience a different kind of humanity they were very ambitious uh some of us are less ambitious um and um and our scriptures are um are are filled with these kind of contradictions as we struggle for an ideal that is often beyond us uh we we're reaching out for something and some people just flop by the wayside and then you have a uh just as you have in the jewish scriptures a resurgence of but i do think apocalypse imminent apocalypse imminent end of days uh does lead into this uh division of the world into good two camps one good one evil we're hearing a lot of that talk today um and uh and an enemy who is an absolute enemy and um and of a coming final conflagration when the enemy will be utterly destroyed this uh is i think what the buddha would call unskillful religion it won't help you trinity all right now the in the new testament uh the uh the the writers were jewish and they used jewish ideas they used jewish ideas called the holy spirit which was god present as we've experienced god within us uh or the presence of god the word of god which was not like my words are mine but they're not the whole of me i am speaking my words and they are uniquely mine but they never express the whole of me there's always something that's left there's always something that's left unsaid um and so but then the uh bible went into the christian gentile world and by the third or fourth century people no longer understood these jewish concepts and they were very confused who was the holy spirit and if jesus was divine in some way was he were there two gods or were there three um now um the cappadocian fathers they were they were three wonderful bishops who lived in what's now turkey took time out from their diocese in the late fourth century they were men of great prayer this was not just a clever dick uh superficial syndrome it was uh something to to pray about uh that uh that god as god is in god's self the essence of god what they called in greek god's lucia this is something unknown to us and absolutely transcendent we never experience god's user god is beyond us and when when we talk about god we're not talking about god's lucia but god in god's mercy has reached out kindly towards us to make to adapt himself to uh in into concepts and ways that we can understand and christians have experienced god in the world as a father um as a sense of where we as the father of us as where we come from the source of our being a benevolent spirit watching over us as as word jesus is the word of god uh as i said our words are us but not the whole of us uh our work my words are mine and mine only but there's my own lucia still mysterious both to you and even to me from time to time i'm off often surprising myself lucia so the word of god and the spirit is god within us the god we encounter in our hearts these are not three gods but they are god as god trying to communicate with us uh they called uh god's ucia was on one side what what they also said was god had hypotheses uh and we have that is the outward manifestations of our personality where we try to express the deep mystery of our inner nature and we do it in all kinds of ways by our facial expressions uh by our um the clothes we choose uh by uh the words we choose uh by uh actions in the world we try to express what we what the mystery of ourselves and to make ourselves known to other people and these father son and spirit are god's hypotheses they're not god himself but they're the ways in which god has spoken to tried to communicate with us and one of the cappadocian fathers said look don't think father son and spirit are three ontological realities as sometimes depicted in christian art with a father of the beard and a jesus and a dove flapping around these are this is infantile these terms father son and spirit are simply and here i quote terms that we use to describe the way in which the invisible and indescribable god makes himself known to us now well i used to teach at a jewish college uh in rabbinic college in london and i always enjoyed teaching the trinity because i'd be doing i had a blackboard there and i could do things on the blackboard and i always enjoyed the moment when i turned around and saw the class with their mouths open because they were saying oh but this is exactly like our kabbalah ah we have you have three hypotheses we have ten but god's user we call god einsoft god without end that we never know um and what the cappadocians were trying to do was to say uh to remind christians that we could never think about god as a simple personality uh because a lot of problems come when we think of god as simply a being like ourselves writ large with likes and dislikes similar to our own this can be an idolatry something we create in our own image and likeness and um and some great atrocities are committed the crusaders went into battle crying god wills it when they kill jews and muslims obviously god willed no such thing they were projecting their own hatred onto a being that they've created in their own image and so these trinity like kabbalah was a way and you have your own uh ways the ismailis certainly uh developed all kinds of spiritual ways of thinking about this but you don't it's not a rational thing it's something that you pray unless you're praying it uh you don't really understand it it's a method of meditation to and and uh one of the cappadocian fathers said uh put it was meant to be highly emotional and to lead to silence as i said earlier it was meant to be said beautifully one of them said when i think of the three my thoughts go to the one to the usia and when i think of the one because i the one is beyond me then i immediately think of the three that makes the one known and my eyes fill with tears and i lose all sense of where i am so that it's a sense that when you contemplate in this way to remind you that what you experience of god is not god itself but you are allahu akbar god is always greater that's what trinity is trying to say it's the king pin of uh greek orthodox spirituality it's never translated well into the west the west the west at this time was not was was still quite a backward region uh in theological terms and it didn't understand words like usia and hypostasis uh and thought that there were three human three personalities involved and this this was not what they meant at all i hope that's clear uh but um it because these things are not e we are talking about the ineffable here uh but remember that that that is an attempt to express the indescribability and transcendence of god thank you then why every religious well as as i said as i said that people don't want to be compassionate they don't want to keep the golden rule they want to sing a few hymns or something and feel good about themselves because uh the the religious quest is difficult and not everybody is prepared to be transformed um and um you know and it's not only the uh the the the people rank and file even some of our religious leaders uh god help us are filled with ego some are politicians and and and politicians are not known for their lack of ego um and it is a it is a constant struggle uh and also uh because it's such a struggle there we re because it's so hard to keep the golden rule we as i said we erect all these other goals um and dilute the message uh to make it more comfortable for ourselves and so that we're not so deeply challenged this is our failure not the failure of the religions uh you just explained the concept of trinity as a way of reaching god now in the quran often it's when god is directly talking to us as it is assumed uh the tenses um sorry the tenses sort of change you know when it goes from i to u to v to again back to i so do you think there's a similarity between that and the concept of trinity that you explained because i think um the change of from i to you to e that is just a way of saying that god is something that you cannot comprehend and it's a being it's not somebody like you and me so similarly the trinity like you said it's something similar to that so is there a comparison that can be drawn there i think certainly i think the quran is constantly reminding people that we are not with the god is transcendent that god is is other at the same time as we experience god in the great ayah the great signs of his k and in the quran but as you say the constant shifting uh between i and god or your lord or we is kant so you're constantly in a different as you listen to the quran in a different relationship with the divine and similarly the 99 names of god is a reminder because some of these names clash god is all forgiving and god is one who takes a reprisal and because of these um of these clashes again it's meant to remind you that god goes beyond our neat little concepts of what we think god might be and throughout muslim history too just as throughout jewish and christian history uh the most adventurous and and still most central theologians too were constantly reminding people not to think about god in a simplistic way i think the quran uh in the quran is easier for for that in that reason because god is less of a personality in the way that you've mentioned in the early books of the bible uh however which is a bit which is very very old some of it it's a very primitive theology you've got god behaving like a a very unpleasant human being sometimes uh and a god you know people and a lot of people have certainly in my country who read these early uh stories uh in as they're told in the bible and some of these stories are told very differently in the quran uh a retreat from such a god because god is too personalized um and too much like ourselves uh so um and and and sometimes we learn about god for the first time when we're little children at the same time as we learn about santa claus i'm sure you've heard of santa claus here um and um uh you know but but we outgrow the concept of santa claus but some people's idea of god remains in an infantile state and they don't have the chance to expand it here at different at the agar khan university i'm sure but that is right the quran is constantly pushing you uh to sh and and and his 99 names and the is to say that god is greater than what we can speak or say and constantly in muslim spirituality sophie's spirituality smiley spirituality sheer spirituality that is the point that is being made by the great by all the great spiritual leaders and sages thank you for this enlightened time my question is directed more to you as a historian which is that assuming that there is a cyclical theory of history where would you put this period of the muslim world hacking back to the past and as a colorado league to that how far do we have to go before we get to the enlightened golden edge again oh dear i don't like these kind of correlations you know why can't the muslims catch up with the west for example when for example are the west going to have a reformation this is constantly said uh in in in the west and i get really annoyed because it shows a misunderstanding of islam which has had constant reform movements constant reform movements and the reformation in many ways was a complete disaster in europe it was uh filled with violence a lot of people were killed uh catholics killed protestants protestants killed catholics it inspired hideous wars of religion and split religion uh europe into warring camps and the reformation was also part of our modernization process it was part because we were beginning to modernize in the 16th century we could no longer be um a sort of christian in the way we had been in the middle ages so things had to change and modernization is a violent difficult time like any period of social change so um and i'm not sure we've ever reached the golden age of enlightenment to be to be frank uh we thought we had in europe in the 18th century and in the west but then look what happened uh in the 20th century many people have said that the ideals of the enlightenment died in auschwitz where it was found that a great university could exist in the same neighborhood as a concentration camp and that education and rationality didn't solve all our problems and so we're all struggling now and uh muslims have uh have had many of you most of you certainly here have had the difficulty of of colonialism of coming to modernity uh and getting enlightened ideas from the west in a spirit of subjugation um and that has the modern spirit has two essential elements uh one is independence uh modernization preceded by declarations of independence on all fronts intellectual people demanded freedom to think and invent as they chose uh in uh political uh social economic uh religious luther declared independence of the catholic church and the second one was innovation we're constantly doing something new now unless you have these two spirits you don't really have a modern country however many skyscrapers and masts and computers you have because and it's very difficult with the muslim world modernization did not come with independence but with dependence with colonial subjugation and it wasn't innovation because it was imitation so things have got skewed and things have been difficult and it's difficult for us in europe too because we are now coming to terms with the iniquities of our colonial past uh there's bet there's uh you know we are aware that uh great ideas uh you know when we colonize these countries and did not come to fruition we've created awful mess um and you in even and in the united states even so you know it's not all like the administration there are there is a lot of self-questioning about what's been going on recently so we're all in a difficult impulse and and it's it's really very difficult to see how we're going to cut because it's always difficult to forgive people you've harmed in some way so there's there's that we're all fighting now an unknown future we're in the same world um and i when we're going to find i hope similar solutions but we're coming to it from very different positions um and so i i don't subscribe to the idea that uh the muslims world has got to progress and go through all the stages that we have and finally we'll arrive at a golden age we've never achieved a golden age uh but at the moment our um our problems are such that we need all of us to make a concerted spiritual effort because we are now one world uh and what happens in one part of the world now has repercussions immediately economically and politically uh in another uh we we can't any longer sort of cut ourselves off and i think we've got to make a more concerted effort instead of saying this is how you are this is how you develop this is how we developed and you can try and catch us up etc we've got now to look at our common predicament our shared predicament and share our solutions and coming from our different perspectives aside you're the first person in human history who has intelligently and compassionately analyzed human struggle sometimes wonderful and sometimes horrific to find sense and purpose to their existence no one has intellectually stood where you are standing today objective and independent question your most useful book that i uh in my opinion is battle for god i think this is an amazing analysis but i think you are the only person in the world who can take this thesis order to the future on the basis of one what should happen in the future and two what might happen in the future we all love you thank you well thank you very much indeed but what a question um now what will happen in the future what might happen in the future what can we do i mean this is what we ask if i knew the answer to this maybe i would be killed or maybe i would become the president of uh the prime minister of the uk um i don't doubt it uh i think uh what may happen is catastrophic i think we are because we we have we are weak people and our violence which the gentleman up there mentioned being endemic to our nature and our evolution has always depended upon our creating technology that compensates for our inferior size and as soon as we learn to bows and arrows and spears to extend our reach now unfortunately we've created a technology that has outrun our ability almost to control it and increasingly small groups are going to have the powers of destruction that were previously uh that preserve only of the nation state and this is a very bleak scenario um a very bleak scenario indeed and and and you don't need me to tell you uh what what might have what the catastrophic effect this might have for our children and let alone there's the problem too of the environment uh what we're doing to the planet which uh damaging it uh every year uh leading to an unimaginable catastrophe and i've spoken to my own generation and they say oh don't worry carl we'll all be dead by then uh but this is not a riskable act attitude of a religious steward holding the world in trust for the next generation think of we have to think of our children our grandchildren so the future looks bleak but one can never lose hope one must not lose hope because hopefully hopelessness leads to the kind of despair that we see in the atrocities when people feel they've got nothing to lose then you have suicide bombing and suicide attacks and the kind of horror that we've seen um so what so we must not lose hope and religion is about trying to find hope because we are beings that fall very easily into despair uh we are so programmed that unlike other other animals like cats and dogs we agonize about our condition our mortality about the state of the world and it's usually bad and we all we fall into despair now what i think uh what's characterized the people i was talking about uh in the axial age buddha uh muhammad say later jesus uh the hebrew prophets the rabbis the uh the sages of the upanishads uh the confucians they worked at religion they really worked at it they worked as hard at finding a cure for the spiritual welfare of humanity as we today are working to find a cure for cancer uh we need and often we see religion as something we inherit and we pass on intact not at all they didn't they said we'll change things we've got to make these the traditions we've inherited speak to now to our perilous situation now muhammad did this in you know of course that when he received his revelations he would be sweating with the effort be pale almost fainting with the effort of trying to find a solution for his people and this is what we must do today we must try and work with our traditions which tell us what to do they tell us to be compassionate they tell us to be less egotistical to be not violent and we need to get that voice out there to reclaim religion from the extremists and from the hardliners who who want to hold righteousness to themselves but we need to work hard be inventive and creative not fearing they were iconoclasts sometimes and not fearing to shock people but to think seriously together we need to pull our resources i think if religious people got together never mind the leaders uh but if religious people got together more instead of sitting there saying you know like i believe in the trinity you don't believe in the trinity we don't believe in the divinity of christ some of these interfaith groups do you sit around and well we believe in the divinity of christ or well we don't and that's the end of the story but the but if you work together uh side by side looking in the same direction then i think you discover the commonalty and i think we've got enough in common we need uh muslims christians jews and don't forget secularists uh in in europe who are deeply concerned about what's going on and and and are not without spirituality certainly or deep morality and commitment to uh justice for all unless there is most of our problems are political i'm convinced of that they're not it's not that uh islam is violent or christianity is made the west this way these are political problems there is a big imbalance in the world uh an imbalance of power and imbalance of resources somehow these have to be addressed uh i think a crucial crucial crucial will be finding a solution to the arab-israeli conflict which has become symbolic to on all sides uh it means now more than itself a simple solution uh a simple and originally secular conflict about a land that has has escalated on all sides and become religious you've got christian zionists in the united states who have are pushing the their government to go one way all this is not helpful we need to find a just solution for everybody there that's that's that's amazing that's not something that you and i can do ourselves obviously but we can push our rulers for for this in in our voting and in our writing and in our thinking in our speaking and to address the inequalities to look let's try to learn to look at the other side we i have most spent most of my time trying to help people in the west to understand what islam is and what it isn't but you need to understand the west of it too uh we're not all ogres uh though and uh we and there's a difference say between europe and united states too so an effort to understand there's the political effort but also i think a concert concerted religious effort instead of endlessly finding out how our tradition is different from everybody else isn't the best to start working with across the board with other religious people to bring peace and to bring these ideals of peace and non-violence and respect for this all uh into the forefront of the of the conversation so we're not always just defending our tradition against its [Music] to successes ecstasy and you describe that religion must be about compassion and non-violence what do you have to say about rituals of corporal mortification that are practiced in a lot of uh well i think we need to understand these as i told you i mean we practice rituals of corporal mortification in my convent um you know kissing the floor confessing our faults we beat ourselves over the back of the neck and i told you it was a complete waste of time i did not find it at all spiritually helpful and this continual thrashing of my unworthy self and telling myself how dreadful i was just stuck got me stuck in ego um now um and so it's kind of group group uh this can lead to all this in history there's been a lot of uh un um unhealthy practices of group water i don't think we need endlessly to wallow in our sins i really don't um i think certainly we should have extreme regret for our wrongdoings but i think guilt and endlessly punishing ourselves and thrashing ourselves uh is is simply as the buddhist would say unskillful it just will not help you um and it leads to all kinds of unhealthy things um now some things however i think for example if you think of the shia rituals in in places like iran these have gone through various transmutations in the course of time they were at one point a demonstration against injustice that once a year people remembered the huge injustice of the martyrdom of of hussein and cried out against the injustice in muslim society and you know i don't see that's a bad thing they became slightly unhealthy later as the shahs naturally tried to diffuse that uh element from them and tried to say you know get in get use these rituals to get uh fit the favor of hussein or or to or to express your sorrow for your guilt and sins uh but i think to occasionally to express in a disciplined way your anger about what is going on but then not run amok uh the rituals must must be very carefully orchestrated to take you through the situation safely to the other side so that you release tension a lot of people who are stuck in hopeless ghastly situations can lose some of their frustration but then they must be brought to the other side it's a dangerous knife edge but basically i would say don't let's go in for these corporal mortifications uh let's instead it's plenty uh we get we get plenty of ecstasy by being helpful supportive and loyal to other people thank you uh i would like to thank you on three guns first or so beautifully and explicitly as giving us the notion of us and them which as which reminds me of an israeli scholar who said that it's in the face of the other that the almighty god shines and uh thank you for writing such a beautiful and balanced biography of the holy prophet and for your overall approach towards islam among so many hawks in the west that we see and thirdly for today's exposition that you've made however you've made me to put up this little comment and question to you that i've read in the economist recently that pope benedict in uh one of his meetings with his doctoral students have uh they have come to this conclusion or this assumption i would say that islam is a religion regarding the interfere dialogue islam as a religion puts overwhelming stress uh on revelation and its standards are fixed and so are not open to reinterpretation and therefore it would be more worthwhile to discuss particularities like curbing violence and ensuring religious freedom rather than discussing democracy or having a discussion on theocratic problems i would like to have your opinion on that and uh one last thing that when we are speaking about violence and perhaps you are also implying that religion somehow as it's misinterpreted and by various people today in the world is leading towards violence and statistics show that since the 17th century when the west has seen a demise of religion there has been more violence than in the entire history of mankind so capitalism has to be blamed for that as well and uh would you please uh just throw some light on the approach christianity has towards several questions there uh thank you for your questions uh no i don't think religion leads to violence uh what leads to violence is usually politics and and the human heart and greed and hatred and envy uh people not doing their religion properly uh so i don't think it's i don't think that at all now i'm i used to be a roman catholic i'm not a roman catholic anymore so i don't have to agree with pope benedict the 16th uh on on what he said and i think it's nonsense to say that muslims can't change if you look at islamic history and how uh it's developed and uh and it explored then i i that that puts paid to that i always i used to say when i was talking about my book history of god that uh the jewish people had um had um given birth to the note first had the notion of one god uh that the chris greek orthodox christians brought that monotheism to the gentile world and spread it and that islam uh presided over god in his heyday during the age of faith during the age of faith i found that the muslims were by far the most adventurous uh daring innovative theologians um and um and and pluralistic and uh saying really exciting things and then i'm afraid i said that in uh the west western christianity is presiding in some parts of the world over god's demise god's death because there's not uh there's there's a misunderstanding of religion what religion is uh in some quarters now i think so i think it's nonsense to say that because all these religions change they have to change if you cannot be muslims as the prophet was in the seventh century you're living in a different world you can translate these ideals into you and incarnate them in your own world but that will demand what in arabic called imagination uh the ability the imagination which ibn arabi said was at the heart of the religious quest um so so i don't agree with pope benedict there i i agree that it's not much point talking about theology especially if you're going to tell other people what they think i really think that a dialogue means not saying what muslims think and then answering them it really means really listening to what people are actually saying um and coming without preconceived ideas so uh i forget what some of the other questions i'm afraid but um but no religion doesn't lead to capitalism well i think this is an example of religious change if you think that the founder of christianity supposedly said give everything you have to the poor do not build up wealth for yourselves on here on earth where moss and rust will break in and consume it uh but give it all away give it all away to the poor don't have a job live like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air now if this religion can nourish and uh encourage capitalism then uh then anything is possible it seems to me any kind of religious development is possible um people are often saying that it's impossible for islam at least they're saying that in the west to uh to sort of accommodate democracy i always say if christianity has been able to to accommodate capitalism for islam to to embrace democracy will be child's play and i think we that you can religions are not great monolithic blocks uh you you uh work with them you respond to given situations you're creative with them um i'm not sure that the endorsement of capitalism was a great religious achievement and i agree with you that the uh that uh the secularism has in its very short history has as many atrocities to its credit as religious bigotry uh but uh but that's the way we are we are flawed beings we are greedy beings we are selfish uh beings and we constantly need to make the best of ourselves transcend our selfishness and i th and our religions properly understood help us to do that thank you thank heavy that we have you gone over time it is uh now a tradition at the arsenal university for the special lecture series speaker to be presented with a token of appreciation of the token of the university's appreciation a student is selected for every special lecture to make this presentation and the student selected for this particular lecture is miss anissa barkat ali veerji she is a student of bscn year three in her own words she belongs to karachi she did her intermediate from [Music] higher secondary school karachi she completed her higher religious education in 2000 from al-haq religious education center and since then has been serving as a teacher in the same institution according to her serving humanity is a core religious belief and the nursing profession is an extension of that belief i will request [Applause] which signifies your entry into the aku family thank you thank you thank you thank you i also need to acknowledge the assistance of certain other key contributors to this lecture including audio visual electronics communication and conference secretariat i need to acknowledge the key role of dr david taylor in enabling this particular special lecture thank you very much and lastly i would like to announce a special reflective practice workshop which is scheduled from nine o'clock in the morning to noon tomorrow morning this requires pre-registration and those interested can register right outside mr karen armstrong will be heading that particular workshop thank you very much refreshments are right outside huh you

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Length: 122min 12sec (7332 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021