Medical Benefits of the Sunnah – Abdal Hakim Murad

cambridge muslim college training the next generation of Muslim thinkers assalamu alaikum peace be upon you welcome to cambridge muslim college's second annual retreat and my name is davina and i'm the development officer at CMC we're delighted to have you here especially those who have come all the way just for this talk a special warm welcome to those who have joined us on Facebook live this is CMC's very first facebook live session we'd like to encourage you to please share the link with your friends make comments throughout the talk and we'll also be taking questions from facebook at the Q&A especially and also from the audience now just for the benefit of those men I've heard about Cambridge with some college before this night Cambridge Muslim colleges vision is to improve the quality of Muslim leadership in the UK and beyond since its establishment we've had a diploma in contextual Islamic studies which aims to Train men and women with a background in Islamic studies to more effectively implement their knowledge in today's world recently we've also launched a four year program in Islamic studies inshallah we hope that this will become a BA degree subject to a validation from an external body applications are now open for both programs so we encourage you to please go on our website Cambridge Muslim College dog for more information we're also in the process of developing more external programs courses both at CMC as well as online for our wider audience so please sign up to the mailing list through the website to stay updated as well as through social media tonight's talk is medical benefits from the Sun nur in recent years you may have read online on ask articles about research say for instance on the benefits of intermittent fasting on physical health so is an intrinsic link between acts of worship I bet such as prayers Salah fasting phone and physical health and has of in recent medical research that substantiates and sheds light on these links so without further delay I'd like to introduce tonight's speaker Sharon Murat he's the founder and dean of cambridge muslim college he was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and London universities and is currently the Schafer's I'd lecturer of Islamic studies and the Faculty of divinity at Brij University he has published and contributed to numerous academic works on Islam including as director the sudden a project and as a leading figure in interfaith activity notably is one of the signatories of the common word statement he is well known as a contributor to BBC Radio 4 thought for the day Cheryl poking me later Rahman you know him as the Friends of Cambridge was from college most of you will already be aware that one of our preoccupations is to maintain a research focus on the interface between science and religion our diploma and also our new four-year program which sister Davina's just mentioned incorporate very significant teaching modules on science and how this impacts on muslim doctrinal and legal thinking we're also the host institution for the center of islam and medicine and we also host thanks to a generous donation from the Templeton Foundation to full-time research fellows who specialized precisely in Islam and science and these are dr. Adam Islam and works on number set theory and cosmology you heard his fascinating lecture earlier today and we also have professor John Mabry who is a consultant gastroenterologist who is working on the medical outcomes of the regular habit of both Muslim prayer for as well as by sick persons both are organizing at what looked like very promising conferences at CMC later this year dr. awesomes has already been announced under the title of what is consciousness and why observers matter in quantum theory so CMT's determination really to be the world's leading hub for research into the science Islam interaction relates to our conviction that the modern world presents significant challenges to Muslims Boulton practice which need to be very accurately rather than emotive Lee understood and resolving however the science Islam relation cannot be treated as the occasion for the colocation of individual firefighting exercises as so often happens dealing with the challenges one by one Islam and natural selection Islam artificial intelligence Islam and organ transplantation and so on very often our approach tends to be quite a bit again atomized comment ready to all these theological ethical and filk puzzles is the much deeper theological issue of how Islam views matter and its processes and the nature of the divine agency in the world so it's one of our longer-term ambitious two ambitions to focus on the questions of cosmology and causation being as it were that underlying the scientific issue on the basis of which and the others rest drawing from the insights particularly of our Kalam heritage in challenging some very popular understandings orbits misunderstandings of the religion science relation which often in the Western context based on Christianity is very different view of matter and divine power and what we're looking for something distinctively Islamic so today this evening I want to offer a few thoughts on how our own Muslim theological understanding of nature might pertain not so much to these deeper questions of being and omnipotence there's really big questions but rather as it were to the the second Shahada if our theologians agree that the world of manifestation which we inhabit the created world the corner of time and space is not split into sacred and profane under the erratic guidance of a God who runs some aspect of the cosmic totality but not others in other words if we resolutely and completely reject any kind of dualism and say that he is Allah kulla shay'in qadir powerful over all things then the second chatter has to loyally follow the totalizing and uncompromising metaphysics of the first where many questions for instance see Jesus entering and redeeming a natural world which has been made dark and broken by Adam's sin Muslims of always developed a vision of the final prophet who reminds mankind of the world's complete surrender to God in a way which emphasizes man's for belongingness to it hence unlike the Christ of the Gospels are found that is part of his people's economic political and marital life his example the sauna is all-embracing now the centrality and importance of following the Sun laughs it hardly needs that of repeating or emphasizing to a Muslim audience because Allah has said laqad Canela confi rasool allah or sworn hassanein there has ever been for you in a lost messenger an excellent exemplar the husana here recalls the usual arabic combination of hassan the good and the beautiful so he is a worker of what is right but also of what is beautiful so in copying him in his emulation there is the restoration in the human order of beauty to the world so the meaning really as the hadith that says England waha ketab an F Thurnau eloquently shape God as prescribed yes an doing the beautiful in all things and the hadith then goes on to enjoin us to do certain specific things beautifully well either the hadouken failure Synod nib ha for instance when one of you slaughters an animal let him do so well and beautifully the commentators wondering why that particular example is given in Beart Hadi tells us that tell us that the holy prophet uses this this example apparently an earthly one rhetorically to show that beauty can appear in even the most mundane and even apparently disagreeable necessities if one can slit a sheep's throat in a way which in some way evinces Beauty doing it well how much more easy is it beautifully to design a building or illuminate a man is it or recite the Quran with a vanilla soy in our revelation the world is katraine for us as something surpassingly beautiful and to take our do place within it we are to act with a beauty that has to be commensurate considering the beauty of the stars and the Seas that is not a very easy commandment for us poor beings of Maude's to obey but man although he's proved a tyrant and a fool has taken distrust this a manner upon himself he is to be custodian of the same natural world of which he is fully a thought so our perfect man our insane cannon salallahu alayhi wasalam birth balances in his soul the balance needs an which we see in nature and just as nature contains the Jalal as well as the demand the divine qualities of rigor as well as a beauty his own nature necessarily manifests that combination as well in due and spectacular balance just as nature contains aspects of Rivia reflecting that aspect of the divine fullness so too does the heart of the holy prophet his son that in other words inwardly mirrors the Sun nur of God himself in the world and hence a human being who lives thus under inwardly and outwardly uniting and balancing these qualities these complementary properties of rigor and beauty justice and mercy inevitably recalls the closeness of the divine he or well so she is a human holy cousin now we all know that the Quran is a book which we are invited to read but it also invites us to read the other book the book of nature our religion calls itself the Dean of Hitler the religion of primordial human nature primordial natural state the term honey fear which is important in our Abrahamic understanding of our ancient primordial roots the term honey fear recalls this also as the revelation which purports to be for the end of time the Quran also recalls the sacred style of as it were that the beginning of time from the ancient times hence it's remarkable focus on nature and on the human need to read nature and to understand what it tells us about nature's author so recall this first for instance well uh quinoa chocolatini hanifa stay your face towards the religion as a Hanif God's nature fiddler upon which he created humanity there is no change in God's creation that is the upright religion so the sense is that by being Abrahamic we moved to a time before Judaism and Christianity and really before civilization as we know it back to a time of nature and the commentated toddler adds that this verse refers to our humanity back to the time of Adam himself truly ours is presented as the religion which were called the normality of ancient times which nowadays paleontologists archeologists would say represents 99% of the history of our species so the holy prophet points to nature as he himself reminds us of God human time began with a garden and ends further blessed with a God luxuriant exquisite nature is thus in this deep sense our natural abode it is where we are most profoundly at home in its presence the heart finds itself opening up and there's an evidence symbolism in his domicile in the Oasis of Medina far from the sophisticated urban forms of classical antiquity that surrounded by by Verdier indicated perhaps symbolically by the very greenness of his dome now here one could say so much about the holy prophet's engagement with nature specifically his respect for the trees in the mountains his defense of animals even in the hadith his apparent ability to communicate with them but given that our subject this evening is about the medical aspects of the Sun that that aspect of his perfection is relevant in a generic way insofar as we into it that we feel better when in the presence of nature or with animals or when we just look up at the sky something within us is uplifted few human souls ever can have failed to notice that upliftment and inner joy and that joy and sense of return of rightness and of peace is certainly health giving to see beauty and particularly the beauty of virgin nature nourishes the soul with spiritual and also measurable physiological consequences so that and the first point that I want to look at the the prophetic and up organic direction that we should look to nature as the first of the medical benefits of the Sun month some of this has been picked up in the work of somebody called Samir's ecchi who is a professor of neuro aesthetics neuro aesthetics at UCL most of his recent research has focused on demonstrating the brain's identification of and response to beauty both visual and musical beauty it turns out to be a gigantic lease on ttle process but the conclusion for our purposes seems to be clear beauty is not perceived primarily as the result of cultural conditioning it's not just cultures that decide what's beautiful and what's neuticle not beautiful but it's something that we are somehow designed to perceive it's within us and hence when we perceive ugliness instead human consciousness naturally instinctively recoils and reacts negatively to pick up on a point that I was making in my lecture yesterday scientists have been trying to discern what types of music correspond to which human behavioral types the biggest project I think at the moment is one that has been undertaken at heriot-watt University in Edinburgh which seems to indicate that those who listen to the blues apparently are creative and at ease with themselves whereas rock and heavy metal fans have low self-esteem and are generally not outgoing people you can look it up and that's the outcome of their research but let's set that aside and return to the one who we are proposing to describe as the prophet of nature the endtime messenger in who's who in this very timely and urgent way reminds us that we are part of the natural world despite our generations often by deliberate attack on nature the ecosystem and also natural human manners of behaving we could say that we find in him four dimensions which are in very many traditional societies and literature's seen as the four dimensions of human perfection in a specifically masculine mode so William Blake for instance writes this for mighty ones are in every man a perfect unity cannot exist but from the universal brotherhood of Eden the universal man to whom be glory evermore and Blake has a very long and often quite indigestible poem calls of Valor in which he is essentially talking about these four manly qualities which he feared already in his time the beginning of the Industrial Revolution were being eroded by a scientific and materialist dick world Hume so these are the four aspects of the perfect human being mind heart loins and the principle of the balance between them sounds a little bit like Plato but it's actually a different different set of principles now in our time with its confusions and anxieties about gender one of the Catholic books of the so called men's movement has been a book by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette which is called King warrior magician lover rediscovering the archetypes of the mature masculine the best teller amongst Americans who are anxious about and is also in this country I think anxious about what manhood can mean in a feminist world world of equality a world in which increasingly people choose and we define their gender identities what are we losing the authors actually spend some time on on Blake and his understanding of this Vala is fought for Bert uses forged archetypes and the writing really not as theologians butters as psychotherapists and as counselors dealing with the current crisis of manhood as they see it so they ask why so much male behavior nowadays dysfunctional so many men in gangs prison failing to do families or to support their wives and children they believe that it's because of our detachment from nature from our ancient and primordial salford and in particular we lack the capacity to reconnect with those ancient human archetypes now Blake had rejected Orthodox Christianity really the dark satanic Mills and his famous song is actually talking about the church she's not talking about the factories he never went to church instead he believed in a kind of platonism in human perfectibility through the rediscovery of ancient intrinsic archetypes discovered through primordial virtues and this Platonism allowed him to reject the Christian idea of original sin the intrinsic broken this of our fallen human nature for Blake as in Islam nature is fully indicative that's very platonic and the body and its tendency towards life natural teleology towards living towards flourishing is to be affirmed and not fought yet nowadays as these authors more into that affirm we are a long way from that nowadays for example boys are no longer initiated into manhood and they may often lack male mentors particularly in a school environment where teachers very often are mainly female and all the teachers are really busy with with paperwork and the result they say can be immature behavior or tyranny in other words transplanted into our language we say we have deprived them of they are and of naseeha and if any kind of socially recognized transition from boyhood into manhood were mind heart eros and completeness these four things in balla mind heart eros completeness are held in discipline balance we just don't have a generation that can initiate the young male into that any longer and hence the dysfunction and this is one course they say that the frequently heard female complaint there are no men anymore men including we should say many Muslim men seem to be nowadays rather disconsolate weeding introverted unwilling to lead to love and to show the traditional there are virtues and we often hear that women are in this context somewhat less damaged it's true that there is a steady increase in rates of female depression suicide self-harm darting disorders and so forth so one in four American women has struggled with mental health issues one in four British women now has actually self harmed at some point and the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder amongst women has apparently trebled in 10 years so it in a very quick acceleration of the process of some kind of deep spiritual systemic former still women are not filling the prisons and only a minority of fundamentalists are women the extreme aberrations tend to be male aberrations and the reason seems to be clear enough in former times men including Muslim men were initiated into their manhood through they are also joining the guild EOS knife or a tariqa while now these ancient processes is rites of passage discipline Calbre hardly exists enough of course to some ritual for joining a gang which is kind of perverse indication of something that should be there that support society is not not supplying women however initiated spontaneously by the onset of the menstrual cycle they know intuitively that they have matured become women for something extraordinary and marvelous so it's harder in general for women to become detached from the body and hence from nature and hence from remembering God so in our time from those crude and outspoken vowed mouth atheist tend to be men well the most solid custodians of traditional religion are very often women now a lot could be said about the way in which it's Lomb which deliberately and explicitly in its sounding moment and Interpol and enshrines a natural form of life women promotes well-being those who've entered Islam from the past of confusion about gender and prozac taking broken relationships often seem to embrace it with a kind of palpable relief and recognition may be one reason for the often for some mystifying fact that the majority of educated converts to Islam in Britain are women puzzle secular and feminist commentators but there may be some some clue to this here of course some of Islam social structures of wisdom are offensive to our anti natural and atheistic --all age but that is probably not something that should worry us but perhaps should reassure us religions which comply with the value set of are profane time unlikely to be religions at all they're just strategies of accommodation secularization still I'm not going to be talking today about its alarms gift will be connecting us to a natural way of being from gender specifically partly because the topic of gender has been done and done to death so many times and to many others are talking about that and instead let's rewind a bit and consider the implications of the way in which we're talking about the Holy Prophet as the man of the Dinos fitrah what does this tell us specifically about his way we know that Islam is not just a package of beliefs but is enactment actions engagement relationality mamala engagement with God with mankind with the natural world and in the deep forms of it five pillars we're going to find an abundance of clues the first chadder does not comprise faith but it points to faith which is the essence and purpose of everything it's those evidence of these natural forms towards which the fitrat is pointing that ilaha illaallah evidently means not only that so-called gods apart from the one god are many human figments with no reality but that every source of power and apparent causality in the world is entirely subject to the divine command quadrille devil Connaughton everything is s learner totality God is not a kind of as I said dares abscond etirsa got his son doesn't seem to be around who's receded from a cosmos that is therefore dark and without divine control the fullness of Islamic monotheism always recognizes that omnipotence is ala kulli shay'in qadir means what it purports to mean he knows it relief footfalls he through and the Holy Prophet through he created us he created what we do I like kulla shay'in qadir and this was the victory of some ISM over the mortadella particularly sono Buell ISM therefore God is not descending in a halo of light into a world that has gone wrong but out of his control trying to put it right with looking around early in different success the Quran refutes all crypto pagan suggestions of a partially active but still effectively resisted deity instead the marvels and the sublimity and the order of the created world the natural world to which it directs our attention are entirely his handiwork there's no co-author even time itself as the quantum theorists and the asha rights often seem to agree is not what we think it is his aura is closeness his presence is total and incessant and this is the basis of our view of nature now aslam is certainly not animism but if animism is in a sense the rejection of the distinction between the natural and the supernatural definition then actually see all of you in particular with its insistence that every atom moves by the direct divine power might be said to push back to roll back Cartesian Aristotelian and often Christian ideas of a dualism between nature and spirit and return us to a very antique modality of experiencing this of the world his core of his closeness and his omnipotence ensure as it were Maximus equality to the natural order and this is normal Fitri human believing so the atheist sees the world as undirected or as existing in the grip of a merciless relentless set of physical laws it has no purpose and there are no reassurances but this terrifying it in human vision is not normal since the upper paleolithic human beings have been religious some academics are now even wondering what the religiosity is so natural to ourselves that atheism should technically be considered a mental illness it's so intrinsic to what we've always been as part of our normal metabolism now however that might be easy advantages of belief in the unseen are evident the believers soul is protected by the armor of confidence and trust in God's providence his sense of guilt is waged by his knowledge of God's mercy and forgiveness his pain and suffering are made easier to bear by his awareness but on some level probably incalculable to his finite mind there is wisdom in all things hence religiosity itself is healthy helping us to deal with stress releasing endorphins into our system it's the normal human attitude to which the metabolism and the brain have been adapted for hundreds of thousands of years nobody knows exactly how long but maybe something of that order so we are Homo religiosa it's the nature of our species and it's a fact which the medical curricula are now increasingly taking note of religious faith and its associated emotions particularly gratitude are known to boost serotonin production actively religious people live noticeably longer than agnostics and atheists or those who believe in a religion but in practice it so very famous study at the University of Colorado which worked on 28,000 people found that regular worshipers live on average seven years longer than others this is not apparently in the obvious case of people who are in any case living a more healthy life avoiding alcohol and other narcotics for instance not smoking because the researchers took care to factor in education level tobacco alcohol use just to ensure parity in the findings for some causes of morbidity the correlation is even more striking they found that death from respiratory disease for instance was around twice as likely for people who did not believe we worship in a congregation general it seems to be the subtler diseases asthma allergies and so forth which have a strong psychological component which likely to impact significantly less on those who have strong religious commitments and that finding that was the first big one but it's been correlated by literally hundreds of other studies and it's now generally accepted that religiosity as a general principle is strongly associated with better health outcomes and longevity prospects there's the more subtle dimension to this insofar as our lifespans are as long as we experience them to be and here also it is emerging that religion stretches our lives in remarkable ways the experience of the sublime a paper has been shown to enhance our sense of being present in the moment and also our subjective experience of time the more magnificent and or inspiring we find the world to be the longer our lives seem to be for us so Stanford University professor Stephanie Rudd's who's nominated quote when you feel or you feel very present it captivates you in the current moment and when you are so focused on the here and now the present moment is expanded and time along with it and that really corresponds very precisely with Anik injunction to after the subhanAllah when we consider creation and each other and life itself all the more wonderful and amazing when we realize that it's not per doll meaningless concatenation of particles but is the design artistry it's the nature of the believer and the gift of faith to see the world as intrinsically astounding so already we find that following a religion that hints to be in harmony what human beings have been adapted to for tens of thousands of years has massively benign health impacts but earlier I was speaking specifically of Islam as being the Danelle pitlor so narrowing the compass a little bit not talking about religiosity and worship generally but the specifically Islamic form of this specifically Muslim practices well we know that the specifically way of relating to the fullness of their heads a lot it sounded in the for ritual pillars of sedin which all enact truly ancient and timeless sacred ways of being human and the beginning of it is with water all living things come from water or minute marie charnelle called oj in height and that it is with our basic practices we connect with the principle of movement cyclicality purity life itself by engaging personally and intimately with water in it in jet in world war and awesome and so on and the symbolism here mirrors our archetypal human intuition is from heaven by connection with heaven we wipe away our sins and our evil inclinations Quran tells us that Allah loves the penitent and loves those who purify themselves in Malaga your hip would toe were being were available not at our hearing so ritual purity which we tend to think it is something to get us a bit less smelly when again to the message is actually something very profound that has a deep impact on subconscious aspects of the human consciousness very important a hadith even surprises us by saying a portal shuttle Eman purity or purification is half of faith which is a pretty emphatic statement half of faith and Eman Muslim puts this hadith in the book of Waddle which shows that for the hadith scholars this is referring to the formal ritual splashing it's not talking about some abstract intellect or the purity or moral purity of them about evolution half of faith well of course you can see that it's good basic personal hygiene - what's regularly and to wash your feet doctors of inter nod approvingly but the important thing here more than that deeper than that is that the profound psychology that is going on not only is it appropriate that we be clean and fragrant when we enter a place of worship or bow to our maker but also we Intuit that act of washing somehow influences the soul because as we said body and soul are not really separate things but a tooth that's of one human thing and what we do to one is going to have an immediate and probably profound impact on the other now psychologists whether or not they're interested in religion perfectly aware of important aspects of what's going on here some call it and the best effect you remember the dramatic scene in Shakespeare where Lady Macbeth frantically tries to wipe out the blood of King Duncan who's the King has been murdered in scientific research confirms the immense impact of ritual watering practices not a clearly all think it needs to be addressed with football and with with respect experiments show that those who wash are more likely to act ethically or in a selfless way while those who do not are more willing to engage in profane or egotistic practices so for instance one big study of the so called Macbeth effect which was done by Katie Lillian quest and Chen boson of Northwestern and Toronto universities reported in the journal science and their concerns again a not specifically on religious rituals but they find for instance that volunteers who are asked to think of an immoral act are then more likely to read the letters W - - H as wash and s - - P as soap then those who've been asked to think of something morally uplifting it's a big statistical correlation there and then they guard - to conduct another remarkable experiment they asked volunteers to imagine in their minds an immoral act and then gave some of them the opportunity to wash their hands but not others they then asked them whether they would volunteer to help a needy student seventy-four percent of those who hadn't washed their hands agreed while only 41 percent of the others did so and the reason was those who had not had a chance to wash their hands were trying hard to cleanse themselves by doing something moral it's big statistical differences just from washing in other words all the evidence suggests that the act of washing has a powerful effect as on the sole we do need those more door taps before entering our last sanctuary in order to prepare ourselves and perhaps in these scientific findings we can find further encouragement to follow the prophetic prophetic advice to keep our we'll talk whenever we can and to renew it whenever we can it's silent sound advice for mind and body alike renewing the world thought is always going to have this positive impact on us related to this one should mention a hygienic practice which the hadith specifically identifies as one of the customs of the fitara which is circumcision and this Abrahamic practice no doubt assists with mental health concomitant upon cleanliness but it's more than that it does seem to confer a number of physical health advantages which are now starting to be understood so if you look at the World Health Organization website you'll find that they officially urge countries to adopt mass circumcision programs specifically because their trials in Africa show that circumcised men are 60% less likely to be infected by HIV than others 60% it's estimated at universal circumcision in Africa could save 3 million lives over the next 20 years that's only one of many factors incidentally which gives Islam a demographic advantage in Africa the 10 most heavily infected countries in Africa are all Christian and the 10 least infected countries in Africa or Muslim so the divided birth map if you look at the website the dividing line between high and low rates of HIV and the continent is essentially the boundary between the two religions follows it very accurately of course circumcision is only one factor here there's other things at stake Muslim modesty rules reluctance to pre-mixing the prohibition of alcohol which reduces inhibitions these are also thought by people who are looking at this to be to make Islam actually the most effective weapon against HIV infection the world has yet developed incidentally I know somebody who used to run a development-oriented radio program in Botswana where HIV rates are kind of catastrophic and part of a purpose of this which was funded by the United States aid agency was to increase AIDS awareness and he found that actually the Muslim community was so little affected by HIV in Botswana that he formally suggested to the State Department that he be allowed to use his radio station simply for the promotion of Islam and they thought about this for a while and then they said well isn't quite you know HIV is bad but some things are worth it anyway lower rates of STD transmission may account further still actually not very well understood correlation between circumcision and significantly lower levels of prostate cancer in men the big British urology journal bju international recently confirmed the general perception that Jewish and Muslim men have lower rates of prostate cancer than the general population and one theory for this and really sure why should be is that STDs may be a factor in the onset of prostate cancer in any case having cleansed ourselves outwardly and inwardly we then embarked on the deepest and most ancient acts in all human culture which is worships this is what we're for that's the reason for our creation down the ages despite the endless divergences differences between religions holy ritual has been the central affirming act of human life the keystone of the individual sense of meaning and of the community's internal cohesion and sense of common purpose life without ritual is historically freakish it is an aberration like a body trying to continue to live when its heart has been ripped out rituals are native and normal to our biology the repetition of physical motions and the phrases combined with some form of mental self-regulation and direction is a truly archaic practice EEG and magnetic resonance imaging shows clearly how beneficial rituals are to us there's even evidence of permanent changes to the brain thanks to neuroplasticity quite similar to some changes which were brought about for instance by memorization which might also talk about studies of practitioners of meditation for instance regularly showed that long-term meditators have larger than normal regions as the prefrontal cortex the brain actually changes if you are engaged in regular ritual the implications of this is still not clear but it's likely that there's numerous benefits to this including an improved capacity to concentrate and also to remember and there's another intriguing dimension to this the normality of ritual the life of ancient man was shaped by the motions of the Sun and the moon and Islam as the Dinos fitrah recalls us to this ancient aspect of the normality of our species as muslims will use a lunar not a solar calendar and so we refused as it were to fight the geometry of the solar system we are part of it Sun and Moon are B hast been by measure and they're there for our reckoning the Muslim life which I guess exists for the sake of prayer is shaped by the rolling of the planet beneath our feet and also by the moon's stately and beautiful procession through its phases when we look up and see Sun and Moon yesterday we saw the beautiful moon of Rajab here we saw what our most distant and justice or with no change at all nothing else in our life is quite so archaic and so fixed uncertain now modern neo-pagans was their attempt to revive their dim and pretty inaccurate speculative memories of how religion was like in pre-christian England also tried to respect the movements of the Sun and the moon like ourselves the pagans seek to understand themselves as being healed through a kind of oneness with nature but for them there's no real continuity with that ancient past for the most part they're hobbyists play-acting and middle-class obvious engaged in amateur theatricals really it's not real paganism now we play a more serious game we are authentic we are in living unbroken continuity with a primordial past nobody is really going to revive belief in Odin or hair cutting the neo-pagans don't really have authentic access to ancient tradition who can legitimately initiate a druid nowadays where is that you Jazza why is this naired whereas the sins of that schmuck talk instead it to revive it is just to have a kind of ambulance museum but at least they do feel some sort of real unease about modernity and lifestyles disconnection from nature and our worship of matter and money in some sense they do hanker after a time when humanity intuitively recognized the sanctity of nature so for that certainly let's respect them still turning to the way of Salem wolf Selene master of the messengers we find that yet life is still shaped primordial II who in modern city still knows when the Sun rises and sets we just prayed Maghreb no one else in soul in college probably has the least idea when the Sun sets but we are shaped by it only the adherents of the Dino fiddlin especially in Ramadan for instance look out of your window over the point blocks of Lambeth before dawn you'll see lights and a lot of windows those people at least remember what their souls are for they're doing something very ancient they are they are normal what happens to us exactly when we are disconnected from the fundamental rhythms of life on the planet scientists are only starting to understand how plugged in we are to the movements of the Sun and the moon we know that the lunar phases for instance affects sleep so a study at the University of Maryland Switzerland has shown clearly that we do genuinely sleep less well when the moon is full even if we're living underground and can't see the moon and this puzzles the scientists and their various theories could it be the gravitational effect of the moon rather as it affects the tides not sure if there's some human circle lunar clock within us that still operates even if you can't see the light of the Moon we don't actually know but if our distant ancestors lived in close recognition of the light of the Moon and its phases it is reasonable that something deep within us continues to respond to that other psychical aspects of the human metabolism which may once and sometimes still are connected to lunar phases such as ovulation or times of cyclic although testosterone production also known to be associated with the changes in our capacity for spatial reasoning there's somehow this idea of the lunar month is a basic feature of how the mind works but in a subtle way so the solids and the other rituals which Islam connects to the Sun and the moon seem to relate to very deep and subtle and actually rather poorly understood aspects of human physiology and ritual itself of course being a natural ancient human activity is good for us in multiple more palatable ways study after study as we've seen indicate that rituals and prayer do thicken the cortex of the brain and one consequence of this is to reduce the likelihood of clinical depression so professor Lisa Miller of Columbia University's Center of Clinical Psychology who has done a lot of research on this speaks of quote an entire and extremely large protective benefit of spirituality or religion in the case of rituals of the Muslim type which are done from memory in the absence of books the brain also gains from the benefits of memorization interestingly London taxi drivers who had to memorize all the names of the streets in London before they're allowed to be taxi drivers of cortlandt knowledge and when they have their themselves scanned you can see there's this enlarged hippocampus in the brain that the memory does that and it's the same for half his heart is has memorized that whole report and his brain does look different hippocampus is larger and there's some other features as well and France has again shown that this does benefit our well-being a larger and healthier hippocampus would uses more endorphins which contributes to our general levels of happiness the prayer also as a Congregational act reduces our sense of loneliness and physical separation from others you might think that that's kind of trivial medically but there was a recent British government report that dubbed London the loneliness capital of Europe 1.1 million British adults suffer from extreme loneliness and it said that the medical consequences of that are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day is not good for us to be alone yet Elahi of Gemara god's hand is over the congregation holy prophet tells us we are to be with others ours as a religion a fellowship of brotherhood of togetherness it's not really a religion of solitaries now the Muslim style of prayer unlike the prayer that exists in certain other religions that a little bit more buttoned up in includes a lot of close physical contact it's recommended to be physically touching the worshippers on either side shaking their hands afterwards is also a widespread Islamic practice and again studies seem to agree that physically touching other human beings releases oxytocin raising the spirits contributing to general well-being modern lives tend to atomize us to separate us out particularly when we engage with others through technology most of our friends may not even be in the same country but it's normal for human beings to touch each other to embrace and to experience each other's proximity and clearly the obligations of the Sunnah can really help us to reconnect with this this is particularly important for salat areas for older people to have that practice of five times a day going to the mosque and being physically with other people helps enormously to dispel this this problem of loneliness and to release that oxytocin so staying in company with others and maintaining high endorphin oxytocin levels also protects us from addictions of various claims some of these are particularly damaging the most recent being the current epidemic of pornography addiction recently searchlight here University of Cambridge emphasized how pornography use causes permanent changes in the brain particularly when the brain is and is still formative state for teenagers and young people dopamine the pleasure chemical is constantly being triggered in an abusive way which leads pornography addicts to more and more extreme and violent images the next picture has to be still more extreme in order to get the same the same high scans show that the brain of those who regularly use pornography resembles the brain of drug addicts the teenagers now being addicted to this stuff routinely impose the preferences of their newly modified brains on their girlfriends and find the girlfriends not up to scratch and the result yet another reason for the volatility of relationships amongst young people and also stress for girls and young women as they modify that behavior and physical appearance sometimes even surgically in order to comply with their partners internet induced preferences and this is a real source of anxiety and even suicide amongst young girls trying to live up to the expectations of a partner or a boyfriend's brain the brain has been has been changed thanks to repeated pornography use another modern addiction which happens with increasing frequency in our awesome communities and is also related to low self-esteem and loneliness is what some are calling fundamentalism addiction and that might require some support there is a very interesting book by Catholic priests called Lear booth called when God becomes drug and it gives some sobering examples of how this works in his Christian world I think also in the world of a lot of young Muslim extremists and fundamentalists those who go in and out of extreme forms of religion are often coming and going from drug addiction problems again fundamentalism becomes a way of dealing with a dark external world which stimulates a happy rush of dopamine production in the brain so here's his list of telltale symptoms of fundamentalism addiction listen to this listen if Catholic wealth but it does fit with the mindset of some of our extremists one the use of guilt to punish oneself or others number two manipulative behavior number three finding pleasure in identifying the force of others number four using religion to avoid social and emotional issues in the family typically number five a general tendency to be antisocial and insensitive to the experiences of others well does sound depressingly familiar again a correct and balanced Muslim lifestyle far from drugs and lonely vices is likely to be a very strong protection against this pathological state protection from extremism fundamentalism is not just a matter of teaching people the correct ugly debt it's also a matter of people psychological state and the self esteem says the holy prophets Elvis famous hadith answer hate Muslim hello Ken Mullen of the homes may the extremists develops Parrish is not some kind of Western thing this is our own tradition also strongly dislikes of extreme obsessive fanatical dark types of religion holy prophet moralist curses done so positive health outcomes of the kind that we have been describing oral consequences amongst other things of the practice of regular very regular preferably congregational ritual and this is a game to turn back the scientific literature pretty firmly accepted now so here for instance is the verdict of Duke University's dr. Harold Koenig studies have shown that prayer can prevent people from getting sick and when they do get sick prayer can help them get better faster I'm John Mabry an ambushment some colleges doing work specifically on this he goes on quote the benefits of devout religious practice particularly involvement in a faith community and religious commitment are that people cope better in general they cope with stress better they experience greater well-being because they have more hope they're more optimistic the experience less depression less anxiety and they commit suicide less often they're stronger immune systems lower blood pressure and probably better cardiovascular functioning moreover of course in the Muslim context where prayer is really a physical thing and it's evident that the physicality of the prayer keeps joint supple and the sedge death helps strengthen the brain's capacity for memory and for hard work a study at university of malaysia drew attention to a number of physiological benefits of the select of the namaz for the back and posture and suggests that the prayer is an effective way of dispelling the onset of osteoarthritis and other joint disorders as well as reducing the harm done by the modern habit of not sitting on the floor sitting on the floor being too normal we're sitting for Homo sapiens from millennia and those are already suffer from arthritis study said yes may find the gentle but significant movements of the prayer more beneficial in maintaining the health of the joints than any available pharmaceutical intervention the prayer then is a sign and facilitator of our awareness belonging to nature we could sit in those terms it links for the insole in a serene but psychologically and symbolically powerful enactment no doubt it's linked in subtle ways to other aspects of our circadian rhythms sleep is perhaps most evident of these we know that the human daily by rhythm is adapted to the light-dark cycle with the release of melatonin at the end of the day preparing the body to sleep artificial light and electrical gadgets generally can subvert this resulting in typically modern disruptive patterns which can cause anxiety and depression and possibly other symptoms as well so the University of Surrey has a Sleep Research Laboratory which is noted that if human beings are shifting from a 24-hour day to a 28 hour day rhythm without a natural light dark cycle and you then take blood samples 97% of the rhythmic genes in the body are observably out of sync and hence dysfunctional jetlag and medical issues caused by shift work for instance are pretty widely understood as consequences of these extreme modern habits which profoundly interfere with the genetic basis of Armagh Tabitha's something like jetlag is an extreme example but getting up a long time after dawn and going to bed a long time after sundown also kind of it's not not what the body needs it has to be said that scientists don't actually seem to understand the seat mechanism terribly well but it does seem clear that a lifetime with lifestyle which as a Muslim case recommends sleep right after the night prayer getting up early the dawn is a healthful and potentially extremely important support to our mental as well as our physical well-being but humans are evidently biphasic creatures that is to say we are programmed to function not with one but with two those of sleep every 24-hour cycle we do need our 40 winks in the early afternoon was a natural dip at that time and this is as we would expect confirmed in the summer lots of hadith about the merits of the early afternoon or midday nap the failed order there's a famous one in sahih al-bukhari that indicates that the Sahaba would always have an ass after the Jummah prayer there's a lot of it and we've even noticed this I would say amongst us Madras our students at CMC because the alone institutions in England often maintained a very healthy practice teaching after third row and then letting the students have a power nap in the early afternoon usually between zorah and Arthur and if you go to the CMC library at that particular time you may will see some of our students demonstrating this particular summer in action ah but there's other aspects is so much to this in this rich story of islam's rich intervention in our physical lives a lot could be written for instance about the number we prophetic medicine now we could also spend time on with some of the wisdoms in our diet and we just deal with one of these big assisted come up with somebody who just emailed me last week about issues of a fiance who vegetarian and it is about the consumption of meat and so very often Muslims when they engage with people in the new age community and many ways also not happy about modernity trying to be spiritual trying to reconnect with nature there's a lot of potential Islamic themes there they're usually not happy and a door fitter it'll up half when the local sheep get the chop and local vegetarians who've been kind of talking to us about conservation get a little bit unhappy and glastonbury the Muslim community for instance and this is one of the things that divides them from many and the local community is Glastonbury being essentially the capital of New Age religion in Britain so there's a big controversy here about the way in which specifically our spirituality should take us back to nature now obviously protein is good for us the medical case is not difficult to make in fact our species is naturally omnivorous and the way in which our teeth in that digestion are designed indicates that meat is part of our mixed ancient diet and also shapes ancient rituals patterns of life so there's something about the Abrahamic principle which is actually strongly represented by the idea of Idol of time and our friends that the Glastonbury pages are alarmed by this and there's a lot of lot of discussions [Music] between us and them and it's been one I think significant reason why people from that world who get a little bit tired of endless festivals under the moon and Pagan thing Islam looks really interesting and it is related to the natural world in this beautiful way it doesn't have Christian ideas of shame guilt original sin really appealing but the vegetarian thing is often what keeps them out they're actually mistaken in their understanding of how to be kind to animals we all know that there's a gigantic global environmental crisis which they're worried about which we're worried about and in some measure this is provoked by excessive and abusive agricultural and also of course fishing practices consumerism and human greediness generally plus an ever growing global population results in a decline in biodiversity which to us of course is a shocking munition of the number of divine signs in the world we have theological reasons for liking biodiversity the vegetarians who point accusingly at the sunlit in this respect all of that animal husbandry often claim that it's meat consumption specifically that is killing the planet and sometimes they're not quite sure how to reply to that but in fact if you think about it it's not difficult to explain our position it is true as the vegetarians will tell us that to produce one pound of protein you need at least 10 pounds of plant matter in order to support the grazing animal it looks like an inefficient way of producing the food in a world of scarcity but the mass conversion of the world's grazing lands to arable cultivation even where that would be possible into the desert areas that's not going to be possible but even where it is possible would actually be a catastrophe for animals and to biodiversity grazing is much less damaging to native ecosystems than is arable farming overgrazing this truly could be calamitous can destroy a desiccator a landscape but a sensible livestock manager is going to ensure that this land is always going to be sustainable once you convert that man terrible use however and there's a kind of holocaust the end of plant diversity the end of the small mammals which usually can coexist with cows and sheep rabbits and Badgers and so forth mice but generally they can't coexist with machine harvested wheat or legume crops so that's why George Monbiot was a vagrant the years and years recently announced that he was no longer vagin but was going to become a omnivore he's now eating meat again and that's because he's read several recent studies which point to the disastrous consequences a typical arable farming when compared to livestock husbandry as a very influential essay in that world by somebody called Simon fairly this seems to have been what two initiatives are form on view which shows that arable cultivation actually results in far more animal deaths than livestock production through the destruction of habitats the death of small mammals in harvesting machines and the poisoning of millions and millions of mice and rats in in grain storage facilities so there are food and it turns out here we do have a moral animal loving case there's also drink and drink is one of the easiest and most acute cases you hardly need to point to the countless lives and also relationships saved by his arms straightforward policy of temperance and prohibition and I've already mentioned that religions that tolerate alcohol consumption tend to have relatively high rates of HIV transmission that alcohol has so many other health consequences and the significant ones are all really negative the scientific evidence here has been piling up for decades not to the annoyance of politicians who reap millions for the Exchequer every year by taxing booze cynical way of breaking money for the state it gets spent on the NHS NHS is dealing with alcohol epidemics well we've all heard of alcoholic liver disease and that actually causes over 4,000 deaths a year just in UK but that is just the beginning 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women are classified by the NHS as actually alcohol dependent 50 percent of physical assaults in the UK are alcohol-related 58 percent of rapes 30 percent of suicides 22 percent of accidental deaths 21 percent of AMD admissions the NHS is also reporting that child abuse and also elder abuse shows a very strong correlation with alcohol consumption so one we can study at Oxford University confirms that even one glass of wine a day significantly increases a woman's risk of breast liver and rectal cancer just one glass of wine a day gives you the greater risk of those calamities and they decided that in the UK perhaps 7,000 women a year are affected too which is quite a massacre but a rather depressing look at the NHS statistics shows that a huge raft of other preventable diseases are triggered or made much worse by alcohol so here's a quote from the list on a recent NHS report on the subject consequences of alcohol brain damage stroke fatty liver liver failure hepatocellular carcinoma gastritis peptic ulcers diarrhea and malabsorption acute and chronic pancreatic problems heart arrhythmia hypertension pseudo Cushing's syndrome technologies hyperglycemia hypogonadism loss of libido impotence increased risk of accidents fetal alcohol syndrome increased risk of adverse drug reaction reduced effective of therapeutic drugs and the list goes on this is not just your typical dipsomaniac to the extent that you consume any alcohol statistically your risk of these afflictions increases overall the NHS calculates that alcohol is the third largest cause of disease burden not only in the UK but across the developing world and the burden often falls disproportionately on minorities and the poor which we often forget so consider the ongoing tragedy and humiliation of Native American and Australian people 12% of deaths among Native Americans are caused directly by the white man's firewater among Australian Aboriginals aged between 34 and 55 death is seven times more likely than among white Australians and alcohol is the major cause there's also that the horrible curse of fetal alcohol syndrome study of one region of Western Australia showed that 120 per every thousand children demonstrated physical features and mental impairment associated with alcohol consumption by their mothers during pregnancy a similar rates of in count another non-muslim errors in the developing world including South Africa where rates seem to be even higher incidentally this is one of the reasons why there's this very significant increase in Aboriginal conversion to Islam in Australia this is it report by ABC recently on that which is on YouTube somewhere it's really quite amazing and quite quite moving alcohol and Christianity's ambiguity about it is cited as a major reason for this it's very hopeful move I'm running very short of time and I need to wind up it's a huge topic as I think we've seen and I've neglected a lot and despite a Davina's introduction I haven't actually said anything about fasting a specifically Muslim form of it which is a form of intermittent fasting as she said and you can find a lot about intermittent fasting on the Internet as a ferret health-conscious websites there's one good one called ten benefits of intermittent fasting which is directly relevant to Muslim fasting and to Ramadan so it's a big and complex subject the conclusions also I think are are numerous and rather complicated but most fundamentally we see that the sonim the life form of the Hakim the sage of Medina conserves for us a natural way of being a natural form of life is absence is likely to hurt us it turns out that despite our modern love of high-tech lives that we actually need a lot of ancient things we need faith we need ritual we need a body soul synergy which shapes our lives to enable us to attain a connection with nature and with our natural and ancient cells in our what is now very strange and unnatural habitat which we now occupy if we pray according to the blessed founders council see the world in the spirit of awe and wonder avoid alcohol and other narcotics sleep at natural times maintain close relationships with others we are very considerably extending our life expectancy and reducing the risk that many ailments particularly those to do with anxiety and stress which seemed to be really proliferating getting out of control in our as it were post natural society perhaps we could conclude by proposing this as a new form of Dawa there's so many lifestyle programs available nowadays that promise better mental and physical outcomes you can pay upwards of 800 pounds a day to clock in to some health spas that will offer you various rather imprecise diets and massage therapies and aromatherapy it's expensive but when we're finished with those programs we'll go back to the workplace and back to our lifestyle we might feel better for probably a bit poorer we go back to the old routines and habits so let's start advertising a better lifestyle option to our burdened compatriots which we could call Sumner therapy has so many advantages it actually works it seeks to turn us into interesting spiritual healthy active and beautiful people and also not uninterestingly in these times of financial uncertainty the entire course of treatment is absolutely free so no Marley [Applause] thank you very much I have that I came for that illuminating talk we're now going to open the floor for questions anybody from the audience could you maybe expand even more on specific acts of the Sunnah that are also very good for the health so for example like the prophets insistence on using this work and you know sitting down to green to drink water these kind of things which are also now being suggested by dentists and doctors that are also really good for the health yeah I mentioned that I had to confine myself to some core things like praying and and water and often things that Muslims tend not to think so much about in terms of their health implications there's things to do with sleep for instance in positions you adopt doing sleep it's against us on that and not good for you to sleep on your stomach sleeping on your back is not particularly good the best position generally is to sleep on the right hand side left hand side is less good for you right hand side because it puts less pressure on the heart and some other organs if sleep on the right is better and this there's so many other things sometimes Muslims push it a little bit too far I think and I've tried to confine myself to some fairly conservative and I think scientifically on arguable conclusions based on on the latest research if somebody the Imperial College has done something amazing on the Missal accurately certainly very interesting to to look at that but I focused on core a bad at issues Sahara and and I better largely because that's what I have been reading about but also some considerations of time and because these are important the prayer is a million times more important than the miss lack or sitting down to drink a glass of water the prayer is what Islam is for a question from Facebook are there any specific parts of the tip and nubbly that contradict recent rigorous scientific study and how do you view that in light of the list of positive benefits of the sumner I'm not sure I think you'd have to ask her Hakeem's Pacific tilted number way that's something that I girded never we tends to operate a lot with with curves and those are the experts in the area knows that it has certain gentle non-toxic positive health outcomes it's approximately what we call complimentary therapy these days something aspect of the summer that very often we have we have neglected I think that is it is part of the summer we do have this healing tradition people go to the Holy Prophet Ali circus now not just for their spiritual ailments but their physical ailments as well he was like the chief medical officer of Medina and those much there that we can learn that we can learn from occasionally there are difficulties identifying the exact herbs and plants that are specified in the hadith but the key ones are pretty much available and you can buy them in we've had herbalist shops particularly if you go to the Middle East ones that you get here may not be the exact equivalent and one assumes that even slight differences can have a significant significant difference in terms of their therapeutic value and it's also worth bearing in mind that tip number eight is understood to be part of a larger holistic program delivered by a sage who really knows the patient and is taking the patient's pulse and engaging in various ways with the patient's well-being whereas nowadays we tend to use technically on the web or looking things up in books which is kind of an abusive way of dealing with it prophetic level now medicines are part of an ijazah based system which is to do with the physicians getting to know the fullness of the patient and their lifestyle as well and not just listening to a list of symptoms I mean just looking at symptoms and looking for remedies is something that even Western med tries to avoid because you have to know the patient that's why you're here to see the doctor remember I once had a little computer program which purported to be able to tell you what was wrong with you if you entered all of your symptoms this is 20 years again at infancy of computers it was on a floppy disk and so I entered all of my aches and pains and it told me that I was pregnant 20 years I don't know which method means it can be 20 years at film no sign of a baby so yeah a slum really wants the physician to know the patient really well and the prescription has to has to reflect that knowledge so you mentioned and you're on of all prayer being a good for your health now what about a regular recital and bickered is it scientific proof of benefits of this well any kind of repeated ritual incantation or performance will have the benefits of something like prayer or Quranic recitation if it's done collectively it will be more effective better inducing endorphins and so forth so yeah anything like that is going to be a going to be healthy and so people's spirits should naturally and be felt to rise as a result of that the bigger experience is just good for the body touched on consuming meat and a lot of Muslims that I'm aware about so into veganism now and that is mostly to do with the spiritual damage now do you mean could you talk about it well that's just a subjective judgement the great alia and great profits of Eton meets seed maker used to eat meat it's the universal experience that this is part of what's natural for human body so there's a certain Hindu or Indyk idea that meat contains blood and hence it is fleshly and pollutes our spirituality which is to do with a very ascetical real soul trying to get out of the body and they have strong traditions of self-mortification in that world but in the monotheistic context no the Saints even eat and rabbis Christians Muslims the great ones I block oddish Gilani even out of the all the great awliya of Islam as far as I know and there's a few exceptions for specific reasons of how large I suppose but generally eating meat is part of accepting the divine permission which one does not reject without good reason so maybe in some Indian context for Aslam and Hinduism sometimes fused a little bit you can find even some Sufis who will prefer a vegetarian option it's not the Sun that they can't really be part of Sufism the question from Facebook about depression and anxiety what is a way to deal with this spiritually and especially the person doesn't have motivation to any acts of worship well it that will depend on the individual there can be many reasons there can be a recent personal tragedy there can be some medical reasons for depression anxiety sometimes people overdose on the headlines which is generally not a good idea we can't do much about the catastrophes of the world so why be depressed by learning about it all the time check the news every couple of weeks maybe but there's no point in wasting your time learning about some famine in Africa if you're not immediately doing something about it just make you feel dismal and as that builds up the media succeeds in attempt to make you kind of look at it with a sort of horrified fascination of course you'll start feeling dismal after a while so concentrate on what's good concentrate on it's beautiful follow the prophetic example to engage with the natural world to do what is beautiful to engage with beautiful people to keep the right company to engage in Vicar and as your spirits rise then it shall allow your energy for a better and even quite secular people when they have looked at actually that real benefits for all the spirit of the Muslim prayer they should do it even if they don't believe in anything you know there's this movement of atheist religion now in England and under bottom and this book religion for atheist is there as we atheists we've missing so much and we have such poor health outcomes that we need to do something and so even in Cambridge as an atheist church now but building them all over the place so they do as much as they can at religion but without actually being able to believe so people if they don't have much energy for a better should be told about as it was a secular benefits of a bada so they inhabit that space and then I'll start to feel better and then in short novel start to experience that the spirituality and the beauty of the practice as well family from regarding dimensions a down column the alcohol is guiding the more damage to the NATA than the smoking you but vomit has done to stop smoking but still the government is not saying that they're going what it means yeah well it's partly to do with the fact that they get big duties import duties and dat on alcohol sales it's also to do with the fact that I think there's nine bars in the House of Commons and NPS has that particular lifestyle and they don't want to drink a bottle of beer and it's got a health warning I'm saying alcohol makes you three times more likely to rip somebody whatever it didn't want to see that even though why do you need one no I need that that's a kind of canard there is a certain tannic acid in red wine that does seem to have some beneficial cardiovascular effects but that's not to do with the alcohol it's something getting in grape juice and is readily available elsewhere so it's not alcohol I know it that's just a kind of desperate excuse that they have just have another glass yeah not convincing I wanted to discuss the point that you kind of somewhat like Hardy alluded to about dawa and the medical benefits of the selenium I think a lot of days they kind of stray away from this because of they sure they'll fall into the trap of kind of Democritus religion is the opium of the people etcetera etc although even in that quote is he mentioned as the heart of a heartless world right so I guess what religion has a massive place and even in terms of bringing a soul and a reality to people but I just wanted you know there's a focus in our workplace and in many offices of kind of well-being and they do borrow from a lot of religious tradition you know how do we then bridge the gap between that and then theology ie that this is a divine device or will daily yeah the problem with all of those say mindfulness type or secular yoga processes or offers meditation section or sessions is that they operate on a rather basic level of relaxation and exercise but the deeper benefits of religious ritual are to do with the state of mind to do with trust hope optimism gratitude which affects you much much more profoundly so the challenge for those therapies that you've suggested is how they can actually have not just the form of a spirituality for the content as well and that is something that really describes them because of the kind of irrational phobia that people have a religious religion nowadays religion is a bad word ritual is a bad word ritual is normal to what we are everybody has rituals students in exams if you see the rituals and the students have teddy bear has to be there and three pencils and ritual creatures but it's become a kind of dirty word somehow people feel trapped by it they want to be free there's not a new-age spiritual nonsense about how spirituality is being free from restraints which is completely crazy the ego has to be restrained and then this variable be free but they've got no conception of ego and Roth that is trying to be themselves we don't really want to be ourselves we know what the self is not very impressive most of the time we want to run the rook to be active the self is just nafs with its unpleasant habits but that wisdom is just not known in the new-age environment at all which against just the kind of self-help teaching and self affirmation self-esteem they can't deal with egotism as a as a human vice because it's all about expressing yourself discovering yourself being yourself which is the inversion of traditional religions transcending yourself but they still have some beneficial effect I read about one office in New York where they adopted a got a secular office where they decided to adopt as their office mantra toilet tissue toilet tissue toilet tissue they would say this regular did you find some kind of blood pressure would go down come up that's ultimately what it could be all it can be unless there's some sense of real trend and there's tricky if you've got a religiously mixed office I must say they're not too many genuinely religious practices that can be shared across religious boundaries that's a tough one another one from Facebook first I'm not such discussions complicit in the medicalization of society in this case of Sumner which scholars like Foucault and so they were critical of by extension rather than discussing medical benefits of Simlish and we discuss how the body one acquires through the similar it's different than the body that is envisaged by biomedicine well I did begin by talking about the idea of the prophetic perfection and the prophetic patek perfection being constituted by a balance of the Jalal and the journal that mirrors the presence of those divine qualities in the exterior creation I've used a lot of examples for modern medical science partly because the based on empirical methods and they do yield certain outcomes are often quite uncomfortable to secular people their secular arguments for the sacred if you like and therefore very useful to us but of course ultimately our conception of the body the soul the Roth is something that is derived from Revelation and particularly when you get to the beating heart of our humanity consciousness itself it's evident that the science breaks down there is no scientific model of consciousness they can't really define it it's not a scientific term they say that they're working on it that they haven't really understood even the elementary functions of the brain it's moving but in terms of creating artificial intelligence for instance which theoretically possible on a physical list model of the world is no sign that the Internet is waking up and becoming conscious consciousness is something mystical mysterious not really native to the physical world you spoke about some of the ways in which so worship or things that we would consider ritualistic can intervene in ways that upon our physical body that we can observe empirically and medically do you have any insights about the ways in which aspects of modern life or being hyper connected technologically or certain forms of very new technology or other aspects of modern life have the opposite effect or observed opposite effect in terms of mimicking what we would call like a cult or demonic sort of effects upon the human being that might be observable empirically if you have any insights in that respect it's clearly an important subject and a lot of people are wondering about the effects on human consciousness and brain function of our increasingly wired reality what is the I mentions the effects of pornography is on the permanent rewiring of the brain but something that's established and known now what do we know about the implications of NASA's use of social media or texting this University did informal inquiry recently about the impact of texting youth among students on examination performance whether regular texting keeps the brain kind of constantly firing so there's no downtime as always a new message students are sending six seven eight thousand text a month for instance we found some students are texting in their sleep we find some students make kind of movements when they're asleep because in their dreams they're texting what is the consequence of that in terms of neuroplasticity and the possible flexibility of the brain and the limits of that ableism we don't really know what we do know is that a lot of young people are hurting and reporting more and more psychosomatic disorders there may well be a connection there but our understanding of how the brain works is so limited and our experience of these new technologies so recent but in the long term we really don't know what's going to happen to the species as a result of these radical new forms of being chances are that the further we go from what we're designed to be the sicker will get but we shall see it's like I'm sure if they're a concept of the mind of no mind in Islam like the emptiness because when we when we have consciousness we have God consciousness but I was just wondering whether we ever in Assam now we have the idea of getting our mind empty and then just seeing it's a Buddhist type concept chinma motion that is number of as early says that is not possible because the thoughts in the mind the whole lot have never come to an end it's just part of the nature of the mind that there are always concepts since the sense of aggression something new happening even when you are asleep so the idea of the mind being completely blank which is a fairly horrible idea is modest like an atheistic conception of death is not something that Islam aspires to we want to be the best form of ourselves rather than to deny ourselves

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

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Published: Fri May 26 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/fahim9280]

Can someone make a summary of the benefits of the Sunnah? (a tl;dr)

[u/AlbanianDad]

Alhamdulilah, our Sustainer has given us commandments and recommendations that do what? Give us goodness in this world. And for that, we are rewarded in the next. An eternal reward for... taking care of ourselves.

[u/uchicha15]

TL;DR which Sunnah?