لَهُمْ قُلُوبٌۭ لَّا يَفْقَهُونَ بِهَا وَلَهُمْ أَعْيُنٌ لَّا يُبْصِرُونَ بِهَا وَلَهُمْ ءَاذَانٌ لَّا يَسْمَعُونَ بِهَآ

Which means “They have hearts they do not understand with. They have eyes they do not see with. They have ears they do not hear with.” (7:179)

We can thus say that understanding stands in the same relation to the heart as sight does to the eyes and hearing to the ears.

This understanding is called in Arabic “fiqh”, which is wrongly misunderstand to comprise its rulings – in Arabic ahkam. One cannot do without the ahkam, but one must, must, must understand them.

The Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is narrated by Mu’awiya, may Allah be pleased with him, to have said: “Man yuridi’llahu bi hi khayran yufaqqihhu fi-d-deen – whomever Allah wishes good for, He gives him fiqh-understanding of the deen.”

From the hadith of Jibril, the hadith on Islam, Iman and Ihsan called the Umm as-Sunna – the core of the Sunna or, literally, the mother of the Sunna, about which he, peace be upon him, said to the one who questioned him on the matter: “That was Jibril who came to teach you your deen,” it is known that deen comprises Islam, Iman and Ihsan. Each has its fiqh-understanding.

So the fiqh of Islam is to understand that every matter one engages in, whether worship or ordinary transactions such as marriage and buying and selling, is always comprised under one of five fiqh headings: it is obligatory, recommended, permissible, disapproved or forbidden. There is nothing that is not thus categorised. Those who think that ordinary transactions are outside this perspective, that somehow they are excluded from ‘religion’, are deeply mistaken. If one followed their logic, one would say that marriage and sexual relations are not included either, which they certainly don’t mean to say.

Iman, the principles of the deen or ‘aqida, also has its fiqh pertaining to Allah and His Messenger, peace be upon him, which is first of all threefold: there are those matters that are necessarily true (wajib) – most obviously that Allah, exalted is He, necessarily exists, those that are inconceivable and impossible (mustaheel), and those that are simply conceivable (ja’iz), such as that it was possible for the Messenger, peace be upon him, to suffer illnesses such that they did not impede his delivering the message. These three each subdivide into those that are immediately obvious, and those that are so after thought and reflection. That makes this sixfold. The principles of the deen or ‘aqida are also a kind of fiqh of iman.

Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi said: “Two kinds of knowledge are derived from the Book and the Sunna: the principles (uṣūl) of the dīn [i.e. the various aspects of ‘aqīdah] and the various branches (furū‘) of fiqh. Taṣawwuf is contained in the body of fiqh for in reality it is the fiqh of the inward just as fiqh refers to the outward rulings.”

The fiqh of Ihsan, tasawwuf or tazkiyat an-nafs – purification of the self, has one category: sincerely turning towards and directing oneself towards (sidq at-tawajjuh) Allah.

Does Ihsan come at the end or at the beginning? That would be a good question. Similarly with the principles of the deen. ‘Abdalwahid ibn ‘Ashir puts them as the first obligation.

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وصلى الله على سيدنا محمد وْعلى ءآله وصحبه وسلم

Clearly something must be done. The world is in the way it is. Somebody should say something, do something. But equally clearly we should know what we do and what we say. There is no room for ignorance. If, however, we put a gap between knowledge and action we are the heirs of Plato and the Greeks. Make no mistake they were earnest people who equally saw the need for urgent action, the need to speak, but something was introduced which was theory, which intervened between the heart and word and deed. And Plato founded the Academy, the origin of our university, and Aristotle his Lyceum. But do we need this intervening space? Should we not just begin? And here we have assumed a ‘we’, which in Arabic we call jama‘a, and in English community. And if we look, we see that things happen through such things along with exceptional individuals, people who are singled out.

Let us begin, and in Arabic that is the verb bada’a, as in the famed hadith: bada’a-l-Islamu ghareeban – Islam began as a stranger, and it will return as it began, a stranger, so blessed good fortune to the strangers.

The earliest dictionary of the Arabic language was compiled in Basra by Khalīl al-Farahidi and was called al-‘Ayn – the Source. He did a number of unusual things which no one followed him in: he began with the letter ‘Ayn, not Alif. And he put words together that were re-arrangements of the same letters. Let us follow his lead. We must do something but we need knowledge. Work and deed are ‘amal and knowledge is ‘ilm. They have the same letters but rearranged. That allows us to say that knowledge and action are in some way inextricably linked. There is no gap that allows theory. The intellect does not need to look at the action and produce a theory, and we do not need a theory to act. Theory is of course a Greek word. Knowledge will necessary produce action, and action will in turn produce knowledge. I’d go further: it is impossible not to be in action. We are already moving, doing, and acting, and the angels are recording our words and deeds. We don’t have the luxury of standing back and saying: what shall we do? We are already a ‘we’, or at least we are subsumed within various communities, including the nation-state, the community of bank users, shoppers, NATO, our local mosque community etc., and we are already doing.

The inseparability of knowledge and action is like the very beginning of Islam, which is shahāda – witnessing, because just as in English, this is to perceive, to see, it is also to testify, to bear witness. There is no split. To know is to act, and to act is to know; to witness something is to bear witness.

Our Messenger, peace be upon him, is narrated to have said: “man ‘amila bima ‘alima awrathahu-llahu ‘ilma ma lam ya‘lam. Whoever acts by that which he knows, Allah will cause him to inherit a knowledge he didn’t know.” Scholars of hadith say that this is a promise to give ‘ilm al-laduni – knowledge directly from Allah. That is not a Sufic concept but a Qur’anic one from Sūrat al-Kahf. The hadith could also promise simply an increase in knowledge. Just as study and accompanying the people of knowledge are ways to knowledge, acting by one’s knowledge is also a legitimate way, and these are not two separate ways.

The third term we would add here is the verb lama‘a it shone or shone brightly. Knowledge, action and shining light. All connected.

Exploring our cluster of words around bada’a he began, if we turn the letters around we get adab – courtesy. This does not mean good manners, although good manners are not necessarily a bad thing. However, sometimes good adab means to be rude. To be abrupt and impolite. The word nice, which we know deep in our beings is the word we use when we can’t really praise something, is a kind of indifferent word which is not really praise, but actually originally means “(… ‘stupid’): from Latin nescius ‘ignorant’, from nescire ‘not know’.” (The Oxford English Dictionary) So the art of adab is knowing how to comport oneself towards others, most importantly towards Allah, exalted is He. It is knowing when to be hard and tough with people, when to be sweet, how to behave towards the elderly, children, women, family and strangers, people of knowledge, the ignorant, the mu’minūn and unbelievers. All of that is adab. The poet said:

فَمَثَلُ الاَدَبِ فِي الاُمُورِ

كَخَلْطِكَ الْحَدِيدَ بِالاِكْسِيرِ

The mithal of adab in these matters

is like mixing iron with elixir.

أَمَـا تَرَاهُ يُقْلِبُ الْحَدِيدَا

فِي لَحْظَةٍ بِذَهَبٍ جَدِيدَا

Do you not see how it turns the iron

in an instant to new gold?

How will one have community without that adab? But the truth is that we are, by default, in communities, but perhaps not the ones we want to stand up from our graves among, and be counted among on that Day.

And community? Show me anything of significance that happened in history that was not achieved by a community. Thomas Carlyle, answering the charge that Islam was spread by the sword, made the point that Christians have perhaps not the cleanest hands in that respect, but he said that great things do start and always have started with one man, and then added: let him get his sword. As we know, our Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, spent 13 years patiently conveying the message, and he did that before beginning, and it was then that Allah, exalted is He, gave him and his people permission to wield the sword.

And the beginning? When was that? Later in the time of a man to whom we owe an immeasurable debt, ‘Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, may Allah be pleased with him, it became clear that years could not continue to be referred to as the Year of the Elephant, the Year of Badr and so on, it became necessary to establish the beginning. ‘Umar is important for us in particular because most of the Companions were still alive, and because he consulted with them, and took their views on things, and so many of his judgments represent their consensus, and as we know, consensus is our third source after the Book and the Sunnah. When asked, some of them said that the beginning was the mawlid, the birth of Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace; some said his death; and some said the first revelation of the Qur’an; but it was ‘Alī, may Allah ennoble his face, who said it was the emigration from Makka to Madina, because it was in Madina that Islam was lived as a community, and the sharia was revealed. ‘Alī said it, the Companions recognised it as true, and ‘Umar endorsed it and made it policy.

‘Umar alone also narrates this important hadith, with which al-Bukhārī begins his Ṣaḥīḥ and Imām an-Nawawī his Forty, on the intention, and then on emigration. The beginning is the intention, because man is heart, tongue and limbs. The intention is formed in the heart, it is articulated on the tongue, and performed on the limbs, and none of these processes are separable from the others. And it is done in community by individuals in community. And lest you think that community comprises an endless succession of uncles, aunties and cousins, we must resort again to ‘Umar, may Allah be pleased with him:

“There is no Islam without jama’a” and I insist on translating jama’a as community “and there is no jama’a without amirate, and there is no amirate without obedience.” We are more accustomed to seeing jama’a refer mostly to attendance at the prayer done by a body of people, but if ‘Umar had meant that alone he would have made clear that he was taking about imamate, but he said amirate, and then he made clear that this is an amirate that gives orders and is obeyed. In fact, the role we are accustomed to of ‘imams’ is a clear innovation. Imamate in our original language refers to the khalifate or the greater amirate. An amīr, a khalīfa was appointed to lead the jama‘a, and he led the prayer. They are indivisible. To separate off leadership as political would be obscene. And he was called the Imām. Later, because of the heavy burden he carried, he devolved the leadership of the prayer to imams of mosques, and he charged others with acting as qāḍīs, and so on.

So there is no theoretical interim in which we have to choose. We are not in a knowledge space having to choose what action to do, because we are already acting and Allah, exalted is He, will show us what we are doing. There is not a community that we have to join, because we have already made that decision and are members of various overlapping communities, including an ethnic one, whether that is English or Asian or, or, or, and the university is a community, the state, the corporation, and the bank. We are by default members of communities, and we will be raised from the dead with the community among whom we died. May Allah make us live among the mu’minūn and die among them. And probably you have guessed by now that we ought to investigate that word ‘mu’minūn’ for its reality, which might however be a task for later or another time.

Do we have a choice in the above? Can we choose not to be members of the state or the bank? First, we must understand them, know them. Is the state comprised of people of the same ethnicity, the same language, or those living on the same land, and does it comprise people living by the same religion, or even denomination? In fact, these things are usually confused in toxic ways, as we saw in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, but the example undermines the universality of the issue. It is not less true of India and Pakistan. It is one of the most significant issues of our age, along with science/technology, and banking.

We have begun – bada’na, and we have explored adab, and now turn to da’b – custom and practice. Again, we do not contemplate something about which we imagine we have a choice, because we already have a custom and practice. Indeed, many have taken a decision which is to embrace the dominant custom in the business world. It is called ‘living in the real world’. However, they do that at a time when on every level that reality is under question. Materialism, the basis of physics and its daughter sciences, has collapsed. But that was a century ago, and who noticed?

Against this da’b we unwisely put text, or our Noble revelation which we ourselves have reduced to text, both the Book and the Sunna. The latter we have conflated with hadith, and since I have so far drawn on a number of important hadith, you know that my argument is not against them. But the Book, what does it mean to reduce it to a text? Surely it is. It is a book, is it not? Yes, of course, and no. It is the Speech of Allah which is uncreated. The Book’s miracle, and we mean THE miracle, is that it speaks, or rather that the Dhāt, the Essence speaks, and numerous times each day we stand and address the Dhāt in the words He has given us, and then we listen to words He has revealed addressing us. Those words are the Speech of Allah now to each of us.

The Sunna is not a body of textual sources from a millennium and a half ago from which we deduce a practice, and from which we then exercise independent judgement (ijtihād) on the matters that confront us today. The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was told in the Book given to him that Allah gave him the Book and the Wisdom. The Wisdom is the Sunna. The wisdom is also ‘aql. Yes, it is intellect, and yes it is something else. Imām Mālik nailed it, may Allah be merciful to him: “Knowledge is a light which Allah places wherever He wishes; it is not a great deal of narration.”

Our Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, embodied in his being, his words and his behaviour this practice, but because he was a man of community, he transmitted it to them, and they embodied it, they are the transmitters of that practice, that Sunna. They are not merely narrators, and it is a great misunderstanding to reduce them to that, even if we love dearly the narrations we have from them. They lived it, and they lived and died for it. That is why Iran can’t ever represent what we love and strive for. It is an impossible idealism whose essence says: this is an unachievable, beautiful idealism in an evil world, an idealism that will always go down in defeat, and has gone down in defeat successively throughout the history of the Muslims. We say, on the contrary, that this is a cyclical reality that has plant form, which grows, flowers and gives seed, seeds which then fall elsewhere and continue the cycle. We don’t accept the interpretation that this is the end of history, or rather we would ask: is this the end, or is it the beginning of an entirely new chapter? Are we that chapter?

The Prophet, peace be upon him, brought a social order, which in Greek is pólis, but in Arabic is madina. This is the possibility always held out to mankind. A pólis gives you the political, and we cannot avoid seeing what that is. And madina gives you madaniyya, which is civilisation itself, if civilisation were not a Latin word with all the cynical connotations of Roman power that we are all too aware of.

Narrations give us the hadith literature. Mālik did something very radical: he saw the Madina and its three first generations, and knew that something vital had to be recorded, and because he was Imām in hadith as in fiqh, or we might say Sunna, he recorded it all in his book, arguably the first human-authored book in Islam. But the point is not that it is his book, but that it is Madina’s. And in it he carefully recorded, along with the most ṣaḥīḥ of the ṣaḥīḥ hadith, since he was in his role of hadith scholar the teacher of the men who taught al-Bukhārī and Muslim, at-Tirmidhī, an-Nasā’ī, Abū Dāwūd, Ibn Mājah, and the enormous numbers of others, he was the most exacting of the ṣaḥīḥ narrators, he recorded the practice or the custom. We have used da’b, but the word used in Madina was ‘amal – and this denotes the practice, but more importantly the practice that was agreed upon, as he reiterates again and again in his book, which it must be emphasised is not a Mālikī book, but a Madinan one.

But there I could not but put knowledge back in the picture and thus separating it from action when I had been trying to show that it is impossible to separate them. In another context – with another set of opposites – sharī‘a and ḥaqīqa – the road/way and the reality, this latter meaning the actual nature of how things are – a gentleman buried in Lahore a millennium ago wrote about one of his predecessors and said: “They say that he united the sharī‘a and the ḥaqīqa, and they lie! They have never been separated!”

The ḥaqīqa of action is as Allah, exalted is He, cites Ibrāhīm, peace be upon him, as saying: “Do you worship what you carve, when Allah created you and what you do?” This is a fundamental part of our ‘aqīda, to which Imām al-Bukhārī devoted an entire book, apart from his ṣaḥīḥ, on the creation of the slaves’ actions. We repeatedly in our prayer, as Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbī says, move from talking about Him in the third person to addressing Him in the second person: “You we worship/serve/adore, and You we seek help from”, and he says that it means we seek help from Him to serve Him and in all our affairs.

The last of our alif bā’ dāl words, is abad, for ever, may Allah make us of the people in His presence who are granted to gaze on His Face forever abadan.

Thus along with many commentators and conspiracy theorists, Zionists today do think that they are genuinely the force behind the throne, not remembering what that throne throughout history has done to them, whenever it needed. Their hold on some usurious purse strings (remember that since the Reformation, Gentile banking has been a formidable force) invites power to renege entirely on the bill, or kill and plunder the creditor. In the main, power holds the weapons, and they do not. This is not theory, but history. For a brief historical moment, Zionists have been allowed to think the stage is entirely theirs. They really do believe that a tail can wag a dog. But watch out. The retribution of the debtor and the Christian who feels betrayed is something terrible to behold. The Muslims, in Osmanlı lands and north Africa, were their safe refuge from Christian revenge, but that tide too has turned, which was entirely their own doing.

That is nevertheless a side issue, and the real matter is where does power stand now and where is it going? To understand that, we must know where it came from. That is as ancient as history. Ask the Akkadians. Ask Rome, its most recent forebear. And we only have to look at the Dacians, Carthage, the sack of Jerusalem, and the butchering of the Gauls and Germanic tribes, among many other things, to see the precedent, not just for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the precedent for “killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities”1 during World War II, and the destruction of Vietnam with napalm. The list goes on.

That original power’s relations to the People of the Book were twofold: first, it subjected and diaspored the first group throughout its lands; second, it elevated the second group to the throne of Peter, in other words subjected it in a very different way. There is no escaping the fact that these two groups were originally of the Muslims of their time. In their destiny is a warning and a lesson for us.

But what about us? Prophecy also came to us with power. But it cannot be authentically Prophecy if it does not live by the fact that there is no power and no strength but by Allah. Because that statement is textual, here we must understand Sunnah. Revelation was received by the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and embodied. There was no gap between reception and embodiment. That embodiment was transmitted to and taken on by his people seamlessly. Sunnah became ‘amal – practice. Sunnah is ‘amal. That there is no power and no strength but by Allah was their reality, it was their very state, and thus the reality and state of the people transmitted to until this very day. The people who have such a state – hal, are able to found a polity, and have done so, again and again throughout the ages and the lands.

Because power came to us married to Prophethood, it came with limits: first and foremost, the prohibition of the slaughter of non-combatants, most particularly women and children, even with the weaselly excuse of collateral damage. Barbarous behaviour is the surest sign of weak and fearful character. Our Messenger, peace be upon him, said: “The strong man is not the one who overthrows others in wrestling. The strong man is the one who is self-possessed when angry.”2

Over and against that power, it itself has posited an opposite, China, but one however which shares entirely in all its values, and thus in its nihilism. From a report by one of China’s own thinktanks there is:

1. A protracted Middle East war would be a “period of strategic opportunity” for China—one that drains US resources while pushing global capital, industry and trade routes towards China as the “next best option”.

2. Turmoil at sea leaves US allies—dependent on seaborne energy—vulnerable, expanding demand for alternative land routes and accelerating China’s “revival of continental power”.

3. Capital will initially flee to the US dollar, but as war drags on, it will seek new safe havens. Hong Kong has already emerged as a preferred destination for Middle Eastern money.

4. The war will accelerate the shift towards a global industrial chain resting on US demand, China as the hub, and the rest of the world in supporting roles, handing China pricing power and rule-setting authority.

5. This is a stress test for the petrodollar and US military credibility. The US is signalling that interests take precedence over allied security, while trade settlements are using the renminbi to hedge risk.

It explains superbly how totally China is signed up to capitalism, and thus to usury finance. It doesn’t represent an authentic Chinese voice and values, but an awful parodic mirror image. It is said that one understanding of nihilism is that it is when two apparent opposites are shown to be the same, and Europeans since Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Ernst Jünger have sought earnestly for a way out of the meaninglessness of nihilism.

Addressing our moment, Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley aptly said:

“So the peoples of Islam find themselves positioned between an empire in the West that is definitely on a steep decline and an empire in the East that is definitely very much on the rise. The way forward for them is, in fact, blindingly obvious. Allah says in the Qur’an: “In this way We have made you a middlemost community...”. (2:143) And that is the truth. The lands of Islam do constitute the very middle of the world. They are between the East and the West and the North and the South. Stretching from Kyrgystan in the east to Senegal in the west, they form a contiguous, unbroken chain of countries, all of whose populations are still between 90 and 100% Muslim. All they need to do to regain their integrity and ensure their meaningful and powerful presence in today’s world is to realise this and set up a Federation of Muslim Nations which is, in actual fact, already a geographical reality.”3

This is not a call for Muslim armies to march, or for the election of a caliph, but for a calm and principled stand in unity, not against an other, but standing for. The Chinese character 信 (xìn) also means trust, or to believe. It is composed of two elements: the character 人 (ren) in the radical form of 亻means person, and the character 言 (yán) means words, or to speak. Thus a person who stands by his word is trustworthy and represents integrity.

Where did this cleverness come from? It has three sources: the Jews, the philosophers, and the Christians. The former had turned their revelation into a law-religion, and then were unable to live up to it because they were repeatedly subjugated by great brutal pagan empires that made it impossible to do so, Babylon, the Seleucid Greeks, and Rome. They resorted to something that ought to be a warning to Muslims concerned for knowledge: their scholars set to contriving ways to circumvent difficulties in the practice of their laws, e.g. the strictures on usury. See Ammar Fairdous’ How Usury Came to Rule the World for a record of that and how Christians and then Muslims came to follow them in it.

In the second group, the philosophers, the example of Plato is salutary. Thwarted in his natural desire to participate in the public life of Athens and later in Sicily (see his Seventh Letter), and witnessing democratic Athens’ act of suiciding his teacher Socrates, he withdrew into his Academy and began the philosophic tradition we have inherited, as much in the East as in the West. Philosophers and academics are thus doomed to try and imagine better cities and polities than Athens, knowing that they will never see the light of day.

The third group, the Christians, had a theology with an impossibility in it that nevertheless they felt compelled to try and prove: the trinity. The effort to shore up this absurdity produced great and very clever people who could dance on the heads of pins with the angels.

These three groups of clever people would bequeath us scientistic humanists, who wrapped themselves in the robes of their Jewish, Christian and philosophical forebears. And today, the narrative they have forged is so well rehearsed that they have achieved the goal: glibness.

And yet, as Heidegger said, the most thought-provoking thing in this most thought-provoking of times is that we are still not thinking. He didn’t mean thinking about beings, but thinking Being itself. To do that, one has to slow down and leave cleverness behind. Schiller’s poem, ‘The Sentences of Confucius,’ contains these memorable lines: “The full mind is alone the clear, and truth dwells in the deeps.”

“The author was born in 693 AH. His name was Abu ‘Abdullah Muhammad, called al-Qasim, ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, i.e. from the Arab tribe of Kalb, may Allah be pleased with him and make him contented, and make the Garden his shelter. He was al-Gharnati (from Granada in Andalusia, Spain) and thus European. Ibn Juzayy wrote widely on all the sciences of his day: hadith, fiqh, Qur’anic recitations and tafsir. He died fighting as a shaheed in the Battle of Tareef in the year 741 AH.” (from the introduction to “The Sciences of Tafsir”)

The book includes his outline of all of the sciences of commentary on the Qur’an, and his commentary on the isti’adhah, the basmalah, the Fatihah, the last ten surahs of Qur’an from Surat al-Fil to the end, and the first ayat of Surat al-Baqarah, with a considerable amount of explanatory notes and footnotes.

The Sciences of Tafsir.

The Commentary on the Fatihah from the Sciences of Tafsir (84Kb).

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وصلى الله على سيدنا محمد وعلى ءاله وصحبه أجمعين وسلّم

The identity of the Muslim and of the Ummah could not be clearer. Indeed, the issue before us is in some sense behind us: the translation of that identity into a British, European and Western setting. The fact of our meeting and the fact that it is we who meet is proof that this matter is well advanced.

But let us not be triumphalist. As we work, others are working and often more eagerly and dedicatedly. Just as we strive to translate our dīn into this historically new setting, others are far further advanced in translating the secular worldview into a Muslim setting. And others of our own community are working to translate an understanding of the dīn we can hardly recognise into a form that is even more aberrant in order to fit into this age. It is quite conceivable that lands such as Egypt will lose Islam entirely. But these are not separate issues: the spearheading of Islam here and the preservation there. The issue is not geographical but temporal: the translation of the dīn into the new age we are in, and that is the timeless challenge the dīn has always faced, and thus gives the title for our symposium: Identity and Time. The issue is the same here as it is in Egypt.

Identity

Identity – هُوِيَّة ‘he-ness’ in Arabic – is from the Latin idem ‘the same’ and is ‘the relation each thing bears just to itself’. This is a Wikipedia definition, however, that cites as reference the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Since it is written within the paradigm in which things alone have substance and thus meaning, it is full of contradictions. How can a thing relate to itself? It IS itself. So there is authentic identity when a human being is who he is. Who else could he be? Well, he could try, aspire or pretend to be something else, and this is the condition of much of the world, and even of many Muslims today; it is the condition of inauthenticity. It is the result of taking one’s identity from others, from the eye of others, whether in trying to please the other or displease them, and a surprising number of people take their identity from what is displeasing to an other or others. Trying to be what one is not is the basis of most so-called education. Facilitating the person’s discovery of who they are is the basis of real education. The most confusing of all confusing things is the Muslim who is pretending or trying to be a Muslim. Being who one is, is the condition known as fiṭrah. Islam is the way of fiṭrah.

Man and Society

As with man so with the society. As with the Muslim so with the Ummah. Those things that are true of the individual are true of the bigger social design. And not merely as an aggregate of individuals. Just as the human being is more than an aggregate of cells, so the Ummah is more than just its constituent Muslims.

Time

In both cases, identity is something that persists over time. The man on his deathbed can remember vividly the days of his childhood. The young man pictures the life before him. The human being is a time being. If he had only a present, he would have come from nowhere and be going nowhere. Astonishingly this is the condition of many people and many societies. Stuck in the present not really understanding how they got here nor where they are going. The eternal shopping mall of the present.

As with the individual so with the society, so with the Ummah. The Ummah without its history is lost in the present without a past or a future. Only a past allows one to understand the present and conceive a future. But for identity you have to remember your own history and imagine and intend your future, not take them from someone else. More importantly, one must understand. Even if the other gives you your own history utterly faithfully, it is still not your history until you remember and understand it. The modern Muslim is like an amnesiac whom the doctors – academic historians – are trying to convince has had a past which he himself cannot remember and does not understand, and then on that basis his own politicians try to convince him that he must advance into a future that doesn’t make much sense.

Translation

So for the purpose of translation, there has to be something to translate. We have set ourselves the task of ‘the translation of identity’, the translation of that which is authentically what it is into a new being which is exactly that which it authentically is. Or as we saw, it is an issue of time: translating from the past into the future by means of the now. But the nature of identity is that it is the same. It is identical.

Arabic

If we look at the Europe in which we live and consider its Christian roots, now long abandoned, we discover that the Gospels were written in Greek – not Aramaic the language of ‘Īsā, peace be upon him, – they were quickly translated into Latin and then on into German and other European languages during the Reformation that is at the beginning of modernity. Thus modernity left its moorings far behind and gazes back at them through a glass darkly, thanks to the work of translators. Aramaic was a kind of Arabic, and we will come later to what that means. Greek came carrying a great burden which it was unable to put down: its long cultural and philosophical tradition which had been given a final fateful shape by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. This is the language that was used to record the words and life of ‘Īsā, peace be upon him, upon which later Latin, German and English translations are based. Upon the basis of a Greek solidification of its own heritage and its misunderstanding of Christianity an entire worldview was built. This is the dark glass through which we peer trying to see.

In our paradigm, however, the translator must give the reader a help to look on the authentic original. The intent is not to look through the glass of the translation but that the translation will be a light shone on the original. Nevertheless, here the waters have been muddied for a couple of different reasons.

Translators

When looking at the issue of translation we assume your understanding that we are talking as much about a way of being and practice as we are about words and texts.

Some of our translators are in awe of the culture whose language they are translating into. They are trying to prove themselves to be absolutely amenable to everything in this culture, a culture that is the dark glass through which we are unable to get a clear picture.

Others, not awed by the dominant culture but earnestly wishing to address them in terms they already understand, make exactly the same translation decisions.

For example, unaware of the history of the emergence of the modern state from its roots in Plato’s Republic, through the Peace of Westphalia and the French Revolution, they translate dawlah as state, whereas it means ‘a turn of good fortune’ and came to be applied somewhat loosely to a dynasty. Of their natures, dynasties come and go. Thus, something inherently dynamic was made static. They are trying to persuade the dominant culture that Muslims are in fact ‘modern’, so in awe are they of modernity, so unaware of its history.

The result of these decisions made separately by two different types of translator for very different reasons is to create a new form, which is neither an Arabised form of modernity nor exactly a modernised version of Islam but somewhere in between and a bit of both.

As with the words so with the beings, society and the practice. A new type of being, society and a new type of practice. Therefore it is not the identity because a society’s identity is the same through time.

However, the intention is something prior to this. We do not wish to make self-standing translations, but rather our translators are attempting to give the reader a help to be able to see the Arabic original, which is revealed in the language of the fiṭrah, originally to people of the fiṭrah, but today calling to whatever of the fiṭrah we have in us.

Fiṭrah

We must note here that usually, the word fiṭrah summons up the image of lost primitive tribes in the jungle. It is romantic, we think in a condescending way. We invariably think of fiṭrah as simple and primitive. The reverse is true. The fiṭrah is sophisticated and complex. The language of fiṭrah has a complexity that no later learning can ever equal. The modalities of fiṭrah family, clan and tribal life are organic, intertwined and complex. It always devolves not evolves. Islam is a vessel designed to safeguard the fiṭrah, whether in the being of its people or in the language.

Arabic – the language of fiṭrah, Islam – the dīn of fiṭrah

Contrary to the place accorded it today, Arabic is not a classical language. Rather it is a completely unpolluted natural language, a language of fiṭrah. Although it has had a superstructure of religious meanings come to adhere to it, its real essence is precisely of the desert and the natural setting, un-programmed by the prior culture, science, civilisation or philosophy of the Greeks, Romans and Persians, peoples whose commonwealths had devolved into highly militarised and aggressive empires. In spite of our own centuries of culture, religion, science and philosophy, our great men of knowledge have striven valiantly to preserve its fiṭrah nature, just as the great have striven nobly to preserve Islam as the dīn of fiṭrah. And they did succeed, in spite of the efforts of others and the natural entropy of history.

So although we have chosen language to some extent as a metaphor for ways of being, types of society and practice, nevertheless the matter of language is pivotal, because most of the contemporary world’s disputes revolve around radical re-definitions and indeed alterations of words’ meanings. We can say that the people of the dominant paradigm are themselves the prisoners of a worldview seen through a glass darkly, but that their tragic imprisonment in it dooms them to be at war in a needless and senseless way in order to bring about the ‘state’ that lies at the root of their tradition – now a world-state – truly a Greek tragedy of universal proportions. The authentic recovery of language, definitions and identity can only serve the good of all. Arabic is a clear translucent glass for that process.

(The Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies, Winter Symposium, 8th December 2012. https://www.themuslimfaculty.org/winter-symposium-2012)

Imam Malik said: “Knowledge is a light which Allah places wherever He wishes; it is not a great deal of citation.”

The danger with citations is that we think this is how the judgement is reached or indeed that it is sufficient just to quote eminent authorities. In this respect, I must here also express my gratitude to my learned colleagues who do cite copiously, from whom I have learnt a great deal, and I certainly do not mean to impugn their very valuable scholarship or to deter them from citation and strengthening us with their knowledge. But the distinction must be made.

Usulis say that there are two types of fiqh: the fiqh of words and forms, and the fiqh of intentions, purposes and outcomes. Maliki fiqh, when it is well, is of this latter type.

The former type, in the worst case, allows the manipulation of words and forms to produce words and forms whose outward nature is legal but whose inward is deeply illegal. The famous case is often cited of the well-known qadi who one day short of a year gave all of his property to his wife, who dutifully returned it to him some days later, so that neither he nor she ever had the nisab for an entire year and thus never paid zakat. An outwardly legal form whose inward is deeply anti-legal, or as Imam al-Ghazali who tells the story remarked: it was correct in the dunya but of no avail in the akhira.

But we don’t have to go that far for an example; in our own time we have the numerous judgements given in favour of Islamic banking which, while preserving words and forms, have endorsed gross capitalist institutions such as HSBC in plundering the wealth of the Muslims, for usury capitalism is like a vacuum cleaner that hoovers up everything it encounters. The fiqh of words and forms allows such a thing to happen, but the fiqh of intentions, purposes and outcomes will refuse to let that happen.

This passage from Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi in his Qawanin al-Fiqhiyya is a very telling one, particularly since he discusses precisely the mechanism behind Islamic banking, which is bay‘ al-‘eena, but which they have falsely renamed murabaha:

“A man says to another: ‘Buy me goods for such-and-such and I will give you such-and-such a profit’, for example he says, ‘Buy it for ten [dinars] and I will give you fifteen for it at a later date’ because this leads to usury since the school of Malik is that one looks at what comes out of the hand and what comes into it and one ignores the intermediary steps. So it is as if this [second] man gave someone ten dinars and took fifteen from him at a later date and the goods were simply an intermediary step which is ignored.”

Maliki fiqh throughout its history, where it has been a lived societal fiqh and not merely the scholarship of the men of libraries, has always produced judgements that went to the core of what was happening.

One of the most distressing issues of our age is the appearance of a new type of Maliki who is outwardly mashhour and rajih, but who is in essence something not really in harmony with the school. The difference between him and salafism is a moot point. In reality, he is a transposition into the school of Madina of the ethos of salafism: all citations and rigid legal judgements. Typically he has taken from books and libraries in societies in which the fiqh did not impinge rather than from fuqaha and qadis in the lived tradition where a society ‘uses’ the fiqh. His mark is his lack of community or society; he stands alone. The mark of his judgements is that in their utter ideological purity they lack concern for people. And we have just had two centuries in which ideological purists wreaked their havoc. He is the dialectical opposite of the ‘ulama who sanction Islamic banking, for, when they are not motivated by the very considerable sums of money to be made from it, their judgements are ordinarily characterised by the desire to make things easy, not to make things difficult for the Muslims, but mistakenly doing so in such a way that perpetuates an abhorrent form of society. Where it is well, Maliki fiqh is in between these two excesses. It is compassionate to the people but can cut where necessary.

An insight that puts some of this in perspective comes from an orientalist, George Makdisi, who called the madhhabs ‘Guilds of Law’. In other words they are fellowship bodies or even brotherhoods. See the wonderful documentary by the Timbuktu Foundation (there is a taster here: http://www.timbuktufoundation.org/missionvideo.php) to get a glimpse of this brotherhood of fuqaha in action. Thus the solitary scholar is almost always one to beware of, most particularly the ‘superstar’ who has gathered ijazahs, texts and narrations until he desires self-servingly to be an ‘absolute mujtahid’. That is almost always a measure of his utter uselessness to the great mass of people, to society as a whole. All too often his judgements are irregular in the extreme, and that is the sole result of his existence: confusing judgements.

That is the face of ambition. As for high ‘aspiration’, a word which derives from ‘spirit’, the great neglected task facing people of knowledge is knowledge of civilisation, particularly of context: the context in which judgements have come about and the context in which they must be issued today. Indeed, not merely a knowledge of civilisation but of how to bring it about, a desire to do so, and an engagement with a body of people to do so. To confront those issues, we in the Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies formulated four questions: Where are we as a society? How did we get here? Where do we go from here? How do we proceed? Clearly these do not necessarily impinge on the eternal matters of fiqh such as wudu, but it is clear that a clear line can be drawn from the issue of soft drinks containing alcohol to the more alarming impact of the massive doses of sugar they contain and the resulting epidemic of obesity, heart disease and more, and then on to multinational corporations and usury capitalism, matters which our scholars have shown themselves woefully incapable of confronting in a meaningful way, simply because they could not in the main begin to confront our four questions.

The key to success for the faqih is to be a part of the brotherhood of fuqaha, their guild, like yeast in bread hidden in society, whether an existent one or an embryonic one coming into being, preserving the limits of the deen and the madhhab and yet alive to the needs of ordinary people living in society, working to strengthen civilisation where it exists or bring it into existence where it does not.

Praise belongs to Allah for His universal bounty, and blessings and peace upon our master Muhammad and his family and companions with the purest of blessings and most complete grantings of peace. This is a subtle composition of biographical notices of narrators mentioned in the Muwatta of Imam Malik, may Allah be pleased with him, which is revised and exactly defined more than other books composed about that for whoever can see. I have named it Is’af al-Mubatta’ bi rijal al-Muwatta’.

‘Ali ibn al-Madini said narrating from Sufyan ibn ‘Uyaynah, “How strenuous Malik was in criticism of narrators and how knowledgeable he was about their affair!” ‘Ali narrated from Habib al-Warraq, Malik’s scribe, “ Ad-Darawardi, Ibn Abi Hazim and Ibn Kinanah gave me a dinar to ask Malik about three men from whom he had not narrated, so I asked him. He bowed his head in silence and then he raised it and said, ‘It is what Allah wills; there is no strength but by Allah,’ which he used to say very often. Then he said, ‘Habib, I came to this mosque at a time when there were seventy shaykhs in it of those who had reached the Companions of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and who narrated from the Followers, but we have not carried away knowledge from anyone but its people.”

Bishr ibn ‘Umar az-Zahwani said, “I asked Malik about a man, and he asked, ‘Have you seen him in my books?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘If he had been a trustworthy narrator you would have seen him in my books.’”

‘Ali ibn al-Madini said, “I don’t know of Malik leaving out a person except someone in whose hadith there was something [to cause concern].” Ibn al-Madini also said, “If Malik brings you a hadith from a man [who is unnamed] from Sa’id ibn al-Musayyab, that is preferrable to me than Sufyan [ath-Thawri] from a man from Ibrahim [an-Nakha’i], because Malik only narrated from trustworthy narrators, and even if Sufyan’s companion had something in him [to cause disquiet] he would have cried out about him clamorously.”

Yahya ibn Ma’in said, “Everyone from whom Malik ibn Anas narrates is a trustworthy narrator except for ‘Abd al-Karim al-Basri Abu Umayyah.”

Ahmad ibn Salih sad, “I do not know of anyone more giving to sifting narrators and people of knowledge than Malik, and I do not know of him narrating from anyone about whom there was something [a cause for concern]. He narrated from a whole people none of whom are to be abandoned.”

An-Nasa’i said, “Those who were entrusted by Allah with the knowledge of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, were Shu’bah ibn al-Hajjaj, Malik ibn Anas, and Yahya ibn Sa’id al-Qattan.” He said, “And ath-Thawri is an imam except that he narrates from weak narrators.” He said, “Similarly, Ibn al-Mubarak is one of the greatest of the people of his time except that he narrates from weak narrators.” He said, “No one is more acceptable to me after the Followers than Malik ibn Anas, nor is anyone greater, nor more trustworthy in hadith than him. Then Shu’bah comes after him in hadith, then Yahya ibn Sa’id al-Qattan. There is no one after the Followers more trustworthy in hadith than these three, nor less given to narrating from weak narrators.”

Mutarrif ibn ‘Abdillah said [narrating] from Malik, “I left a whole group of the people of Madinah without taking anything of knowledge from them, and yet they were of those from whom knowledge was being taken. They were different sorts. Some of them lied but not concerning their knowledge and I left them because of their lying. Some of them were ignorant of what they had, so that for me it was not appropriate to take from them because of their ignorance. Some of them are found fault with because of a wrong theoretical understanding (ra’y saw’).”

Ma’n ibn ‘Isa said, “Malik used to say, ‘Knowledge must not be taken from four, and it can be taken anyone other than them: it must not be taken from a fool; nor should it be taken from someone of erroneous opinions (hawa) who calls others to his erroneous opinions; nor from a liar who lies while talking about people even though he is not suspect when narrating the hadith of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace; nor is it to be taken from a virtuous right-acting shaykh given to worship if he does not recognise what he is narrating.’” Ibrahim ibn al-Mundhir said, “I mentioned this account to Mutarrif ibn ‘Abdillah and he said, ‘I bear witness that I heard Malik say, “I reached shaykhs in this city who were people of virtue and of right action and who would narrate hadith but I heard nothing from any of them.” Someone asked, “Why?” He said, “They did not recognise what they were narrating.”’”

Isma’il ibn Abi Uways said, “I heard my maternal uncle Malik saying, ‘This knowledge is a deen, so look at who you take your deen from. I met seventy people who said, “The Messenger of Allah said, may Allah bless him and grant him peace,…” around these pillars, and I took nothing from them, even though if any of them had been entrusted with the bait al-mal he would have acted in a trustworthy fashion, because they were not people of this business. Then Ibn Shihab came to us and we used to crowd around his door.’”

Yahya ibn Ma’in narrated that Sufyan ibn ‘Uyaynah said, “Who are we compared to Malik? We would only follow in the footsteps of Malik and look towards the shaykh to see if Malik narrated from him or not, and if he did not we would abandon him.”

Ashhab said, “Malik was asked, ‘Is knowledge taken from someone who has not memorised but who is yet trustworthy and a sound narrator? Can hadith be taken from him?’ He said, ‘No.’ Someone said to him, ‘[What if] he produces his writings and says, “I heard them” and he is trustworthy; can hadith be taken from him?’ He said, ‘I fear that he adds things into his writings at night.’”

Ibn Wahb said, “I heard Malik saying, ‘I reached people in this city who had attained to live a hundred years or a hundred and five, and nothing was taken from them, and fault was found with someone who took from them.”

Ibn Wahb and Ashhab said, “Malik said, ‘I went to see A’ishah bint Sa’d but I regarded her as a weak transmitter, so I took nothing from her except her saying, “My father had a washtub from which he and all his family would do wudu.”’”

Mutarrif said, “Malik asked me, ‘Does al-‘Attan ibn Khalid narrate hadith?’ I answered, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘We belong to Allah and to Him we are returning!’ He said, ‘I reached trustworthy people who would not narrate hadith.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘For fear of slips.’”

Ibn Wahb said, “Malik looked towards al-’Attan ibn Khalid and said, ‘It has reached me that you take knowledge from this one.’ I said, ‘Of course.’ So he said, ‘We would not take hadith except from people of fiqh.’ He said, ‘I saw Ayyub as-Sikhtiyani in Makkah on two Hajjs and I wrote nothing down from him, but on the third I saw him sitting in the courtyard of Zamzam, and when the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was mentioned in his presence he would weep so much that I felt mercy for him. So when I saw that I wrote down [hadith] from him.’”

Abu Mus’ab said, “Someone said to Malik, ‘Why do you not take from the people of Iraq?’ He said, ‘I saw them coming here and taking [hadith and fiqh] from untrustworthy people so I said, “They are like that in their own country, and they take from those who are untrustworthy.”’”

Al-Athram said, “I asked Ahmad ibn Hanbal about ‘Amr ibn Abi ‘Amr the mawla of al-Muttalib and he said, ‘It increases his standing with me that Malik narrated from him.’”

Abu Sa’id ibn al-A’rabi said, “Yahya ibn Ma’in used to regard a man as trustworthy because of Malik’s narrating from him. He was asked about more than a few people about whom he said, ‘A trustworthy narrator; Malik narrated from him.’”

Yahya ibn Ma’in said, “It has reached me that Malik said, ‘How surprising of this Shu’bah who is so critical of narrators and yet he narrates from ‘Asim ibn ‘Abdillah!’”

Ja’far al-Firyabi said, “A part of Malik’s approach [madhhab] is to inquire deeply and research from whom it is one takes knowledge and to whom one listens.”

‘Abdullah ibn Idris said, “I was with Malik and a man said to him that Muhammad ibn Ishaq says, ‘Show me the knowledge of Malik for I am skilful in it.’ Malik said, ‘Look at one of the dajjals [liars] saying, “Show me the knowledge of Malik.”’” Ibn Idris said, “I never saw anyone else use the plural of dajjal before him (dajājila).”

‘Atiq ibn Ya’qub az-Zubayri said, “I heard Malik saying, ‘I went to ‘Abdullah ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Aqil to ask him about the hadith of ar-Rabi’ bint Mu’awwadh ibn ‘Afra concerning the wudu of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, but when he reached to wiping his head and he wiped his ears I left him and didn’t hear anything from him.’”

Ishaq ibn Muhammad al-Farawi said, “Malik was asked, ‘Is knowledge to be taken from someone who has not actively sought it nor sat [in the circles of the people of knowledge]?’ and he said, ‘No.’ Someone asked, ‘Can it be taken from someone who is sound and trustworthy but who does not memorise nor does he understand what he narrates?’ and he said, ‘Knowledge is not written down except from someone who memorises and who has actively sought it and sat with people, who recognises [what he narrates], and who acts, and who is scrupulous.’”

Yahya ibn Sa’id al-Qattan said, “I only accepted the narration of Malik because of his discrimination, his great research and investigation, and his abandoning those who are enigmatic with respect to it.”

Ma’n ibn ‘Isa said, “I used to ask Malik about hadith and repeat the names of the narrators to him, and I would say, ‘Why did you abandon so and so, but you recorded from so and so?’ and he said, ‘If I had written down from everyone I heard, this house would have been full of books. Ma’n, choose carefully for your deen and only write down on your paper from those whom you can use in proof and who will not be used in proof against you.’”

Shu’bah ibn a-Hajjaj said, “Malik was one of the most discriminating people. I heard him say, ‘It is not everyone from whom one writes down, even if they have eminence in themselves; it is only the news of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and so it is only taken from its people.’”

Ibn Kinanah said, “Malik said, ‘Whoever makes discrimination the capital of his wealth will never suffer loss and will always be in profit.’”

Qarad ibn Nuh said, “Malik mentioned something and so someone asked him, ‘Who narrated that to you?’ and he answered, ‘We did not use to sit with fools.’” ‘Abdullah ibn Ahmad ibn Hanbal said, “I heard my father when this statement was mentioned saying, ‘There isn’t a statement in the world greater than this among the eminent virtues of the people of knowledge, that Malik ibn Anas mentioned that he had never sat with a fool, and no one is safe from that apart from Malik.’”

Ibn Wahb said, “Malik said, ‘I came upon people in Madinah whom if others had sought rain [from Allah] by means of them they would have been given water, and they had heard a great deal of knowledge and hadith, but I took nothing from any of them. That is because they had obligated themselves with fear of Allah and doing without, whereas this business – meaning hadith and fatwa – needs a man who has taqwa, scrupulousness, careful preservation [of knowledge], exacting mastery, knowledge, understanding, and knowing what comes out of his head and what will come to him tomorrow on the [Day of] Rising. As for doing without [the world] without exacting mastery and without ma’rifah, then there is no benefit in it, it is no proof, and knowledge is not to be taken from them.’”

Ma’n ibn ‘Isa said, “I heard Malik saying, ‘How many a brother I have in Madinah whose supplication I hope for but whose testimony I do not regard as valid.’”

Sufyan ibn Harb said, “I said to Malik, ‘What is wrong with you [people] that you do not narrate from the people of Iraq?’ He said, ‘The first of us did not narrate from the first of them, and so similarly the last of us do not narrate from the last of them.’”

Mansur ibn Salamah said, “We were with Malik and a man said to him, ‘I have lived here for seventy days and have written down sixty hadith.’ So Malik said, ‘Sixty hadith; you think them not worth the trouble?’ The man said, ‘We would probably write them down in Kufa or in Iraq in a single session.’ Malik said, ‘What have we to do with Iraq? That is the abode of fighting; they fight at night and spend by day.’”

Hamzah said, “I heard Malik saying, ‘Iraq used to overflow against us with dirhams and clothing, and then they began to overflow against us with knowledge.’”

----

1 Dajajilah.

In one of the revealed books there is: “I am Allah the King of kings. The kings’ hearts and their forelocks are in My hand. If the slave-worshippers obey Me, I make them a mercy over them, but if they disobey Me, I put them over them as a punishment. Do not occupy yourselves with cursing kings, but turn in tawba to Me, and I will make them kindly towards you.”

Among the du‘as of the Mustafa, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, there is: “Do not put in authority over us because of our wrong actions those who will not have mercy on us.”

And at-Tabarani related from Ka‘b al-Ahbar that he heard a man supplicating against al-Hajjaj, and said to him: “Don’t do it. You have brought him from your own selves for it has been narrated: ‘Your actions (a‘mal) are your governors (‘ummal) and just as you are so you will have put in authority over you.’” (al-Munawi, Fayd al-Qadeer)

At-Tabarani also narrates [the hadith in the same sense] from al-Hasan [al-Basri] that he heard a man supplicating against al-Hajjaj and said to him: “Don’t do it. You have brought him from your own selves. We fear that if al-Hajjaj were removed, monkeys and pigs would be given authority over you for it has been narrated: ‘Your actions (a‘mal) are your governors (‘ummal) and just as you are so you will have put in authority over you.’” (al-‘Ajaluni, Kashf al-Khafa)

Although the hadith is regarded as weak in some respects, it is in harmony with the ‘aqida and there is much evidence corroborating it in the Book and the Sunna, as al-Munawi and the other commentators show.

Clearly this applies as much in the west as in the east, for the same facts pertain: Allah has power over everything and He is able to do anything.

Saturday 7th April 2007

Our imam in Norwich often told us:

الْحُكْمُ‏ ‬فَرْعُ‏ ‬التَّصَوُّرِ

“Reaching a judgement is a branch of having visualised/conceptualised it.”

i.e. before one can reach a judgement on any matter one must first have a proper picture of that matter.

Prior to intention there is knowledge, because if you do not know something you cannot intend it.

So what is health? If we do not know what it is, we cannot intend it.

We currently operate on the premise that health is the absence of sickness. Thus we have a medicine that expends all its energies on the identification and eradication of sickness. Our medicine is a war medicine, and that is probably because its real origins and its major successes have been in wartime or in crisis and emergency situations. We think if the enemy is dead, then the friend will be alive and well. We have anti-biotics. They are anti-life. We want them to kill the bacteria, forgetting that many bacteria are helpful and useful, such as in the digestive tract.

With our obsession with sickness, we have not only identified and labelled a whole host of conditions, but we have also been forced to admit numerous new conditions which were previously unidentified as pathologies, so that we are faced with an extraordinary host of plagues, all of our medical services are nearly in collapse, and people are visibly neither sick nor well, in a new interspace of twilight ill-health. And we have a medical fraternity whose livelihoods are dependent on sickness. They and the pharmaceuticals have a vested interest in sickness.

But we would say that defining health as the absence of sickness is no definition. It is as if we were to define men as not-women or women as not men.

A sane definition of health would have to define it and not illness. Moreover, it would depend on prior definitions of the human being, life, the universe, existence, etc.

You would have to frame it in the widest possible terms, and would need to ask whether physical, mental, economic, social and emotional well-being can be separated at all. Certainly neuro-physiology would rule out the possibility of making any meaningful separation between physical, mental and emotional states.¹

We would want to know whether the individual can seriously be considered separately from family, relatives, clan, tribe, society and the rest of humanity. Can one be well in any meaningful sense if everyone else is desperately ill? As you can see, sometimes the questions one asks are more important than the answers. We are probably in an age that has arrived at more answers than any other age without really asking the right questions.

So let me present a different answer to some of these questions. It is a Greek argument as transmitted by and modified by a Muslim scholar, Mahdi ibn ‘Ali ibn Ibrahim as-Subayri al-Yamani, although often mistakenly attributed to Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti, in a book called ar-Rahmat fi’t-Tibb wa’l-Hikma, i.e. the Mercy. That is its title, “The Mercy”. And its subtitle is “Concerning Tibb and Wisdom.”²

Tibb comes from a root to do with treating skilfully and gently, and is the ordinary word for medicine. But hikma is another word for medicine. However, this word, often translated, as I have done, as wisdom, needs some explanation. It signifies the Sofia, love of which is called philosophy. Hikma comes from a root to do with judgement, which is hukm. Our doctors used to be called hakeem wise, because they showed people how to live well, not because they treated them when they became ill, although of course they did that as well. Hikma, in the limited sense of medicine, is the knowledge of how to eat, sleep, exercise, etc., so that one is in the best of states. Wisdom in Arabic does not mean the store of knowledge that the old accumulate from long lives and sometimes terrible mistakes, such as Oedipus who, after discovering that he has killed his father and married his mother, and after his mother’s suicide because of this terrible discovery – becomes wise. Wisdom is the sound judgement of people, young or old, that means they do not kill their father and marry their mother in the first place, although we are human and do make mistakes, and learning from our mistakes is not a small thing.

In his book, Mahdi ibn ‘Ali has first to set the scene in a way which is very unfamiliar to us today, and if you want access to this you must accept it – from Kuhn’s perspective³ – as a paradigm, which has been replaced by the Newtonian paradigm.

In this Greek way of seeing things, everything comes from the interplay between dual opposites that emerge from the unitary reality, and which in their interaction with each other generate four, the most well known of which are: earth, water, fire and air. The argument he advances is that at first there is a movement that throws into relief movement’s opposite: stillness. Movement, however, is warmth just as stillness is coolness. Warmth brings about dryness and coolness brings about wetness, and we have our first four. Putting them in pairs, then warm-dry is fire, warm-wet is air, cold-dry is earth and cold-wet is water. Everything then can be seen in terms of these four. What you have to retain is that these are all to do with dynamic motion and interaction. You would make a very serious mistake to think that there is an essence called “earth” or “fire”. This is a way of looking; it is a different focus from the Newtonian way. You ought to understand, however, that the Newtonian focus has arguably been a disaster for the human race; its implicit thesis is that in essence things are material machines,⁴ the individual, society and the cosmos itself. Later developments added sophistication to that, including the Einsteinian and quantum discoveries, but in essence it was and is this idea of the machine. That epoch is over. The mechanical metaphor has been a mistake. We cannot go back to the age that was lost, but we are looking for new and true ways to see things. In that, we can gain something from re-examining the old ways.

The point to grasp from this Greco-Arabic view is that the beginning is motion, and that it is always in motion; it is dynamic. Thus, health as a static concept is not going to get us anywhere. This view is dynamic, and then there are balance points. In these terms, of all created beings, animal life is the most balanced. Of animal life, the human being is the most balanced. Of human life, the mu’minun are the most balanced.

And if I were to say one thing about the mu’minun – those who have the quality of iman – then it is this thing that some of the Arabic lexicographers say: iman is being true to the trust, the amana, placed in one.

Of the mu’minun the awliya’, the close friends of Allah, are the most balanced. Of the awliya’ the Prophets are the most balanced. Of the Prophets, the Messengers are the most balanced. Of the Messengers, the Ulu’l-’azm “those possessed of great resolve” – Nuh, Ibrahim, Musa, ‘Isa and Muhammad, peace be upon them – are the most balanced. Of these five, Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is the most balanced.

Having arrived at the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, then let us take our way onwards with him, with some of his words, not mistaking the words for the reality or for our goal: health. Having come to a Prophet, we are going to expect revelation. Anything less, such as information, will simply not do.

In approaching this matter we bear in mind the adab (courtesy) of Imam Malik, who when approached would ask if the person questioning him had come for fatwa or for hadith. If it was for fatwa then he would listen to the question and do his best to answer. If it was for hadith:

When he sat down to narrate hadith, he put on perfume and donned new clothes. A dais was set out for him on which he sat. He emerged from his house with tranquillity and humility, and sat with gravity and forbearance. Aloes wood (‘ud) was set and it continued to burn as incense until he finished recounting the hadith of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.⁵

‘Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak said, “I was with Malik while he was relating hadith to us and a scorpion stung him ten times. Malik changed colour and grew ashen, but he did not interrupt the hadith of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. When the people left him, I said to him, ‘I have seen something wondrous from you today.’” He mentioned the story and Malik said, “I was not steadfast out of fortitude, but out of respect for the hadith of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.”⁶

But the reason for this is because the hadith are not pieces of information but they partake of the revelation, they have this quality unique to the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, of being jawami’ al-kalim – concise comprehensive words, words which although small in number may contain numerous un-contradictory meanings and levels of meaning.

So, we will take one of the most well known hadith, these verbal reports which are literally ‘novelties’, and this one is transmitted in Sahih al-Bukhari and later Imam an-Nawawi included it in his Forty, one of the most famous hadith collections of them all.

It is narrated from ‘Amir that he said: I heard an-Nu’man ibn Bashir saying: I heard the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, saying, “Certainly there is in the body a morsel of flesh which if it is sound then the whole body is sound, and if it is unsound then the whole body is unsound. Certainly it is the heart.”

So here we are in a new territory, and we are somewhere that we had not really expected to be. Because here we see the health of the body entirely dependent on the heart, and the heart is defined as a morsel of flesh, not some spiritual or esoteric entity. We are clearly not, however, talking about the cardiac entity which is ordinarily meant by modern man when he talks about the heart; we are not talking about a mere pump. The key word concerning its condition is salaha meaning:

“it was, or became, good, incorrupt, right, just, righteous, virtuous, or honest; it was, or became righteous, in a good, incorrupt, sound, right, or proper, state or in a state of order; he, or it, throve” (Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon)

So if the heart is right the body will be fine. This is not the same as cardiac medicine that is basically concerned with the well-being of a pump.

Around the turn of the millennium, I was privileged to hear a talk in Denmark of doctor Søren Ballegaard, a GP, talking about the human heart. He roundly refuted the idea that it is simply a pump. Moreover, he had some rather interesting scientific evidence. He talked about a research project done in Sweden more than 30 years before the time of his talk. In it there were two groups of rabbits one of them being the control group, both groups being fed exactly the same high cholesterol diet. The control group, were simply given their food at specific times. The researchers sat with the other group before, during and after the meal and talked to them, played with them, tickled them etc. After some time, when examined, the latter group had markedly less heart disease than the former. So this activity of sitting before, during and after eating with the eater has some positive effect on the health of the heart.

Then he talked about which are the healthiest human hearts in Europe in cardiac terms. The answer is the Cretans. Their diet, however, is not low in cholesterol nor would health aficionados endorse it. They smoke, drink coffee, etc., plenty of meat. Cretans, however, never eat alone. The table is always alive with men, women, children, neighbours, aunts and uncles. It is this that keeps their hearts alive. But we are clearly not talking about pumps, even though it is the health of the pump that the medical establishment are qualified to measure.

So with this we have altered our perception of the human being, and now we see him as one with a principle organ upon which all of his well-being depends: the heart. From everything else we know about the revelation, we can sum up a number of key points about this organ: it is the organ of understanding, intellect and insight or we might say inner sight. The following verse of Qur’an was revealed reprimanding the people who cover over the truth, who are kafir, this condition that is the obverse of iman – being true to the trust placed in one.

لَهُمْ‏ ‬قُلُوبٌ لاَّ‏ ‬يَفْقَهُونَ‏ ‬بِهَا وَلَهُمْ‏ ‬أَعْيُنٌ‏ ‬لاَّ‏ ‬يُبْصِرُونَ‏ ‬بِهَا وَلَهُمْ‏ ‬آذَانٌ‏ ‬لاَّ‏ ‬يَسْمَعُونَ بِهَا‏

They have hearts they do not understand with.
They have eyes they do not see with.
They have ears they do not hear with. (Surat al-A’raf: 179)

Note that in this ayah we see clearly that the relationship of the heart to understanding is the same as that of the eyes to seeing and the ears to hearing, i.e. the heart is the organ of understanding.

فَإِنَّهَا لَا تَعْمَى الْأَبْصَارُ‏ ‬وَلَكِن تَعْمَى الْقُلُوبُ‏ ‬الَّتِي‏ ‬فِي‏ ‬الصُّدُورِ‏

It is not their eyes which are blind
but the hearts in their breasts which are blind. (Surat al-Hajj: 46)

So in this ayah, it is said that the hearts of those who cover over are blind – and it is stressed that it is the actual heart that is in the breast which is intended – and this is also said in reprimand. It is obvious from this that the heart is meant in some sense to be an organ that ‘sees’. Putting it together with the previous ayah, then this understanding is such as to have the quality of seeing, i.e. it is not merely the understanding arrived at by thought but an immediate and direct form.

Putting this together, we can say that human health is dependent on an organ of understanding, or an organ of vision.

Given who we are and the age we live in, for historical reasons, we probably associate the heart with a warm sentimentalism; it is in our view an emotional organ, and we associate it with such matters as falling in love. Intellectually, we are the heirs of Descartes and his cohorts who threw the human project entirely off the rails. They envisioned that one could think things through entirely rationally and unemotionally, indeed mathematically. The furthest fruit of their endeavours in our time is the science of neuro-physiology. This science has, however, shown relentlessly that there is no such thing as a thought without a feeling. This science is the child of Descartes. But it has disproved his central driving impulse. He wanted to think things through without subjectivity and all human feelings, but his own science was to be used to show that this is not possible. But it leaves us in the difficult position, as his children and as thoroughgoing Cartesians, of trying to recover this wholeness of heart and intellect. Nor can we in a dialectical somersault embrace the woolly emotional heart; it is no good for us. But the dry intellect is a proven disaster. It is inhuman for it means that someone like Madeleine Albright can make her infamous remark when asked by an interviewer with regards to the effect of sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”. Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it.”

So we would say that the disease that afflicts the heart is this covering over of the nature of existence, and the healthy heart is an organ of recognition, understanding and vision. So here we have a a health to aim for and to intend.

This Muslim community has always recognised that one does not automatically have a healthy heart merely by being Muslim, and the Muslim community has always had a science for the purification of the heart, and the recovery of its wholeness. There is a science of the sicknesses of the heart (amrad al-qalb) as well as of the fostering of inner sight and understanding and the other noble qualities.

And the heart’s wholeness is most evident when it is able to see. In Qadi ‘Iyad’s magnificent work ash-Shifa bi ta’rif huquq al-Mustafa – “The Healing: by means of making the rights of the Chosen One, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, known” – a work loved and admired by ‘ulama’ and Muslims in the East and the West, he examines carefully the events of the Isra and the Mi’raj, the Night Journey of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, to Jerusalem and his Ascent through the heavens to the meeting with Allah, exalted is He. He examines whether the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, saw his Lord with his eyes, and finds that this was a matter over which the Companions were divided quite passionately, some of the Companions and the later ‘ulama’ denying that he saw Allah, exalted is He, with his eyes and some affirming equally strongly that he had seen Him. But the ‘ulama’ are unequivocal in their affirmation that Allah, exalted is He, may be seen by the heart.

We have remained within the zone of the individual and now we wish to consider the social dimension.

It is narrated of an-Nu’man ibn Bashir who said: the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, “The likeness of the mu’minun in their mutual affection for each other, in their showing mercy to each other and their kindness to each other is like that of the body.” (Ahmad and Muslim)

Not only is the individual not a compartmentalised entity, divided between intellect, feelings, spirituality and so on, but neither is he separate from his society. Can the individual be healthy when his brother is ill? I leave you with the question.

So we have come this far with the hadith of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. An Arabic word for health is sihha, which has some of the sense of soundness and possibly even authenticity. It is known to the technically scientific Muslim because of a cognate term from this root being used in the science of transmission of reports, such as those that we have examined, from the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. A certain class of such reports are termed sahih – sound, authentic – if they are transmitted by a line of narrators, a chain of transmitters who combine complete integrity with proven powers of memory and a number of other key qualities. But these are transmissions of words and accounts of events. They indicate the health we are seeking, as we have shown. But more interesting to us is the fact of the embodiment of this health in the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and in his companions. More interesting to us is the transmission of that in its entirety.

We call to mind the du’a of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, may Allah have mercy on him:

اَللَّهُمَّ‏ ‬إنِّيَ‏ ‬أَسْأَلُكَ‏ ‬إسْلاَماً‏ ‬صَحِيحاً

O Allah, I ask you for a sound Islam.

i.e. for the entire din to have this quality of authenticity that we expect in the science of reports.

That lived and practised embodiment is called in Arabic the Sunna. When it is transmitted in a whole manner, you will find the same phenomenon again: a noble man surrounded by his companions engaged in establishing the practice in the outward and in purification of this extraordinary organ the heart in the inward, ready for vision of Allah. This has been the true history of Islam across the ages, and not the doings of various figures in their palaces, and endless wars. Certainly not the doings of our current crop of nihilists today.

If you are even half awake you must see that our society is in terminal decline. The machines are superb, but the humans are almost an extinct species. That is because this extraordinary Judaeo-Christian culture has exhausted itself. There is a need for a new direction, and Islam is always the new venture; it is always post Christian. Do not be content with a partial Islam, even if such is legally acceptable.

Finally, we are perhaps able to approach our title: Health is an Intention, and for that, having examined the ground, health itself, we must look at the intention. We have already seen the dead hand of this mechanical culture of technique and the devastation it has wreaked. Some of it came from quite simple misunderstandings and falsehoods in what we know as ‘aqida. The West inherited a Roman misapprehension, the thought that God created nature but man created civilisation. However, Allah, exalted is He, said:

‏‮ ‬وَاللَّهُ‏‮ ‬خَلَقَكُمْ‏‮ ‬وَمَا تَعْمَلُونَ‏‮

Allah created both you and what you do. (Surat as-Saffat: 96)

The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is reported to have said:

إِنَّ‏ ‬اللَّهَ‏ ‬تَعَالَى صَانِعُ‏ ‬كُلِّ‏ ‬صَانِعٍ‏ ‬وَصُنْعَتِهِ

“Allah, exalted is He, made every maker and what he made.”⁷

As-Suyuti comments on this in his al-Jami’ as-saghir, “Meaning [He is] the Creator of every actor and the action.”

This is the ‘aqida of the Muslims. It means that we don’t see man as the creator of technology, for example, but that it is Allah Who is creating it. Thus, the Muslim has a very different relationship to action.

Moving on then to niyya “intention”, we find that there are three words that are to some extent synonyms for it in Arabic: qasd (purpose), iradah (will) and mashi’a (also: will).

There is a necessary fiqh aspect of intention, which can sometimes obscure its deeper importance, the facet of it that makes it in the view of many of the ‘ulama’ the very first matter in the din. In fiqh, people think of intention as, for example, intending Salat adh-Dhuhr as four rak’ats etc. This, however, can obscure the deeper significance of whether the prayer is intended for the sake of Allah or for a variety of other reasons, such as out of habit.

Allah, exalted is He, says about will:

وَمَا تَشَاؤُونَ‏‮ ‬إِلَّا أَن‏‮ ‬يَشَاءَ‏‮ ‬اللَّهُ‏‮ ‬

But you will not will unless Allah wills. (Surat al-Insan: 30)

So at the end we are brought face to face with our inability even to intend and will without Allah. We are brought to our utter dependence on Him.

—-———————————————-

But this examination leaves an issue still to be explored, that the individual cannot be genuinely well in a world that is sick. At the very least they must be in a community that shares these values, or creating one, or on the way to one.

¹ Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness

² There is some controversy among modernist thinkers about this book, but Hajji Khalifah in Kashf adh-dhunun says that is: “Subtle (lateef), useful (mufeed).”

³ Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. ISBN 0-226-45808-3

⁴ From Descartes’ idea of the res extensa, the external world of things including animals, as being subject to cause and effect much as mechanical things are, it not taking scientists very long to begin to include human beings in that order, even though Descartes initially proposed man as being res cogitans the cognitive being that is aware of its own being, which Descartes considered as of a radically different order from the res extensa.

⁵ Qadi ‘Iyad , Tartib al-madarik, 1:14, as-Sakhawi, Fath al-mughith, 306.

⁶ Ibn Farhun, ad-Dibaj al-mudhahhab, 23, with a slight difference: he was stung sixteen times by a scorpion.

⁷ Al-Bukhari narrated it in a book called Khalq af’al al-’ibad – The Creation of the Slaves’ Actions

Abdassamad Clarke

Asking myself the question, what is this for? Why are we doing this and studying this? brought me an answer which gave some focus to what we want to do. The answer is, from George Orwell: who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past.

But that puts us immediately in another relationship to the past: we are now thinking quite politically and engagedly. We are also not going to be too surprised to discover that we have not been told the truth about the past. This puts us in a tricky position, because if we abandon the clear scientific criteria of history, we may be subject to delusions of conspiracy or what-not, which I have already clearly evoked by referring to control of the present. So aware of all of the above, if not having dealt with it, let us proceed. As much as possible we will stick to broadly accepted facts, so as to preclude marginalising ourselves with too arcane a view.

Primordial knowledge of Divine Unity (tawhid)

One piece of Qur’anic overview that we definitely need is that we expect when we encounter the past to find there cultures which in their early stages may well have been pure cultures of natural behaviour (fitra) with clear knowledge of Divine Unity (tawhid) and some form of revealed law. These cultures we would also expect to degenerate at some point into idolatry and to lapse from their unitary knowledge.

Evolution

We have to state this view, which is derived from clear ayats of Qur’an and the Sunnah, because the dominant view within which we all live is that the basis of everything is the evolutionary process that started at the Big Bang. Humanity, they say, began with a sort of animism, evolved into polytheism, then to monotheism, then to the sophisticated rigmarole of christianity, and finally to our new era of sceptical scientific agnosticism or atheism.

Megaliths

The British Isles in their antiquity have megalithic cultures, about whom an increasing amount is becoming known. These are cultures that often, as in Newgrange in Ireland, predate the pyramids and which are quite complex and sophisticated. That in itself, when discovered, threw history into a tumult, because it was widely believed that the middle east was the birth place of civilisation, which then spread out from there.

The Celts

More recently in our prehistory, the peoples known as the Celts arrived here in various ways, and were themselves somewhat awed by these megaliths. In Ireland the Gaelic q-Celts ascribed them to magical super-beings.

P-Celts and Q-Celts

These Celts are widely regarded as two distinct groups, because there are two distinct language groupings among them: the P-Celts, i.e. the Welsh, the people of Brittany and Cornwall, who were in fact the original inhabitants of all of England and Wales, at least in this most recent part of our pre-history, and who clearly share much with the continental Celts such as the Gauls of France; and then there are the Q-Celts of Ireland and later Scotland, and the Isle of Man. Much points to the Q-Celts, whose language is thought to be older, having arrived here later than the P-Celts by sea-routes. That is posited by acknowledging that whereas for us the land is a route and the sea a barrier, for many ancient peoples the land was heavily forested and thus a barrier, but the sea was a route. Those who take this interpretation say that there is evidence from language and culture linking the Gaels with middle and near eastern cultures, North Africa, as well as Spain.

Gaelic legend and the Declaration of Arbroath

The Gaels themselves in their own legends are quite clear that they came to Ireland from Spain and beyond, and this is recorded later in one historical document by Robert the Bruce (ironically a Norman) and the other Scottish Barons written to the Pope in which they stated their origins as follows:

Most Holy Father and Lord, we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots,2 has been graced with widespread renown. They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today. The Britons they first drove out, the Picts they utterly destroyed, and, even though very often assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, they took possession of that home with many victories and untold efforts; and, as the historians of old time bear witness, they have held it free of all bondage ever since. In their kingdom there have reigned one hundred and thirteen kings of their own royal stock, the line unbroken a single foreigner.

Although we are not relying on this as a historical document, since the Gaels certainly did not ‘utterly destroy’ the Picts, for example, nevertheless it is a telling example of their memory of themselves as Scythians, and the traditional telling is increasingly born out by DNA and archeological evidence.

Irish Gaelic Christianity

Scots here is the old name for the Irish. So let us return to Ireland. At some point in the history of this seafaring people, it may have been that another seafaring cultural imprint arrived: christianity. Now, I am deliberately discounting the official version, which is that the Romanised British Celt, Patrick, brought it. That is because he is much too clearly a Roman and a trinitarian. He may have been a myth, but there is quite a possibility he is historical but that his role in the evangelisation of Ireland has been subsequently exaggerated in order to endorse the later Roman Catholic dominance in Ireland. Since that Roman Catholic presence has definitely muddied the water a great deal, and since the historians haven’t yet really got to grips with the epoch of early christianity in Ireland, I have to admit that some of what I have said is speculative.

However, without too much detail, we can say that this early Irish christianity was not Roman. It is called Gaelic christianity and it was in disagreement with Rome over substantial issues.

Authentic history

You might well ask at this point why we are giving so much emphasis to Ireland? That is because, as Ahmad Thomson said in his admirable little book on the nature of history, authentic history is the history of the knowledge of Divine Unity against covering over the truth, of prophethood against the near friends of God. Thus, we want to catch this thread because it is the nearest thing we have to a genuine natural society with some indications of the knowledge of Divine Unity, and it is in the contrast between it and the other model that we expect to find some light.

Rome

The other model is the Roman model. That takes us back to mainland Britain, since as you know the Romans invaded here, once in the time of Julius Caesar and then in 43 CE when the subjugation of the island began. So this Roman imperial model is essential to grasp because it is the basis of the world order under which we live today: it is pragmatic, brutal, imperialist (but always ready to evoke its old republican values), and polytheistic. Faced with the effect of christianity upon its populations, it finally, after brutal persecution, permitted it, and then ultimately, in one of the most fateful events in all history, made it the state religion. That was not christianity’s conquest of the state, but the state’s subversion of the teaching of Jesus, peace be upon him (who remarkably has the same name in Gaelic, Issa as in Arabic, ‘Isa). Roman adoption of christianity was the way for the ‘state’ of Rome to metamorphose and to continue in existence. Shortly before our story begins, two things happened: the western Roman empire collapsed, under attack from barbarians but also under the pressure of usurious debts which had grown exponentially out of control, and shortly afterwards Clovis the Merovingian was made the sword-arm of a new militant christianity in 481 CE. The deal he and the ‘church’ made was utterly pragmatic on both sides. The ‘religion of peace’ now wielded the sword against all who refused to adopt it. Which religion was it exactly that was spread by the sword? we might well ask.

Arian unitarians

However, those whom Clovis faced were the Germanic tribes who were all apparently infected with the Arian ‘heresy’, i.e. they did not believe that Jesus was a god, but that he was a prophet. In fact, the more you look in this early history, the more widespread does this ‘heresy’ seem to have been. You must understand that it is not just the Muslims who take this position. I refer you to the document from a man completely detached from any relationship to Islam, Peter Beresford-Ellis, who is a populariser of Celtic history, but in this small account gives an outline of early christianity in its jewish setting. He explicitly connects this non-trinitarian form with Gaelic christianity.

“The first Celtic community to emerge in recorded history as accepting Christianity was Galatia in modern Turkey. Christianity arrived in Galatia in the person of Paul of Tarsus who visited Pessinus, on the Galatian frontier, which was the tribal capital of the Tolistobogii, sometime between 40 and 50AD. Paul was apparently sick when he arrived but was surprised by the warmhearted Celtic hospitality he received and, on his recovery, succeeded in converting many to the new faith. The Galatians received a permanent place in Christian history when, about 50-55AD, Paul wrote his famous ‘Letter to the Galatians’ which is now part of the New Testament. Paul admonished them:

“I am astonished to find you turning so quickly away from him who called you by grace, and following a different gospel. Not that it is in fact another gospel; only there are persons who unsettle your minds by trying to distort the gospel of Christ.”

“Paul, is so heated that at one point he exclaims: “You stupid Galatians! You must have been bewitched!”

“The document is reflective of the first great schism within the early Christian movement; the break between the teachings and ideas of Paul and those of the original Christian movement led by Jesus’ brother Jacob (James) in Jerusalem. Paul, who had Latinised his name from Saul, was a native of Tarsus in Cilicia; a Jew born a Roman citizen and brought up within a Hellenistic cultural environment but also with a strict Judaic orthodoxy. He was sent to Jerusalem to study under the celebrated Pharisee Rabbi Gamaliel and also learnt the trade of a tent-maker. But Paul was a Sadducee, an aristocratic traditionalist sect. He became an agent for the Sadducee High Priest and began a persecution of the Christian sect. This sect, then called the Nazarenes, still saw themselves as part of the Judaic faith, believing in Jesus as the last of the Jewish Messiahs. Jesus was not regarded as divine by them nor did they consider themselves to be outside Judaic law. This was the movement led by the original disciples of Jesus.

“Paul had witnessed the execution for blasphemy of Stephen in Jerusalem in 35AD, acknowledged as the first Christian martyr. It was about the following year that he converted to the Nazarene sect and soon established himself as one of its teachers. However, his views of Jesus’ life and philosophical teachings were at variance with the leaders of the movement. It was Paul who gave Jesus a divine status, declared that he had abrogated Judaic law and introduced the ‘salvation doctrine’ and gnosticism. Many ideas seemed to spring from his Greek background. Paul’s important innovation was that he did not see his religious interpretation as being confined as part of Judaic religion and he went out of his way to convert non-Jews. Initially those non-Jews who converted to Christianity were seen as converts to Judaism and had to be circumcised. But soon Paul was teaching that this was not necessary. The bulk of his followers came from a pagan Hellenistic background which enabled them to respond to the gnostic aspects of his teachings.

“Paul’s innovations brought him into bitter conflict with the Nazarene leaders such as Jacob (James), John and Simon Bar-Jonah who was nicknamed ‘The Rock’ - Kephas in Greek and Petra in Latin and it is by the Latin, Peter, that he is known to Christendom. Paul freely admits his quarrel with them and speaks of a face to face confrontation with Peter. To the compilers of the New Testament it seemed unseemly that Paul should quarrel with Peter; after all, according to the Gospel writers Peter was the man designated by Jesus to lead his movement. To get round this, they left the Greek ‘Cephas’ in the contentious passages while translating the name to the Latin Peter in others. Thus, in places, Cephas and Peter appear two different people instead of the same man – Simon Bar-Jonah.

“Paul himself, claiming authority for his breakaway group, wrote to the Galatians that Jacob, John and Peter had given him their wholehearted approval.

“‘They acknowledge that I had been entrusted with the Gospel for the Gentiles as surely as Peter had been entrusted with the Gospels for the Jews. For God whose action made Peter an apostle to the Jews, also made me an apostle to the Gentiles.’

“‘Recognising, then, the favour bestowed on me, those reputed pillars of our society, James (Jacob), Peter and John, accepted Barnabas and my self as partners and shook hands upon it, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles while they went to the Jews.’

“On the evidence of the later conflict it was obvious that the Nazarenes were appalled that Paul was surrendering their teaching to pagan idolatory, as they saw it. Within a short time there had been a deep split between the Nazarenes, who claimed they were the authentic transmitters of Jesus’ teachings, and Paul’s new movement. In this conflict the Nazarenes held their own for a little while and sent out missions to counteract Paul’s teachings, spreading their version of Jesus’ message. The Celtic Galatians were among the first to take notice of the Nazarenes and it was this that brought forth Paul’s famous letter which was an attempt to bring them back to his movement. ‘You were running well,’ he told them. ‘Who was it hindered you from following the truth? Whatever persuasion he used, it did not come from God!’

“For one breathtaking decade, during the 60s AD, the struggle between the original Nazarene Christians and Paul’s breakaway ‘Gentile Christians’ continued with neither side pre-eminent. Then in 67 AD the Roman emperor Nero, angered by the continuing Jewish revolts against Roman rule, decided to move against the Jewish insurgents. The veteran general Vespasian was sent to bring them to heel. In the spring of that year he over-ran the flat regions of Galilee and attacked the stronghold of Jotapata, defended by Flavius Josephus (born in Jerusalem about 37-38AD). Josephus surrendered and, thankfully for posterity, was allowed his freedom. As a historian Josephus provides an invaluable source of information on the period.

“After Nero’s death in July 69AD, Vespasian was elevated to emperor and the campaign against the Jews continued under the general Titus.3 Jerusalem was besieged that summer. After its fall the Nazarenes, who had been in the forefront of the fight against Rome, suffered greatly. Josephus tells us that Annas, the High Priest, saw a chance to destroy this irritating movement completely. ‘He assembled the Sanhedrin of judges and brought before them Jacob (James) the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, and some other men whom he accused of breaking the law and delivered them to be stoned.’

“This single event was a considerable blow to the Nazarenes although they continued to exist and, indeed, existed as late as the 5th Century AD. The ‘Gentile Christians’ now constituted the bulk of the Christian movement and saw their opportunity to declare the Nazarenes as heretical. In 90AD the Nazarenes were also expelled from the Judaic fold for the same reasons. Their Gospels were suppressed although fragments have been found. To the end they taught that Jesus was the last Jewish Messiah but not a divinity and that Paul was the heretic who had perverted the teachings and merged them with “pagan Hellenistic philosophy.

“For the first two centuries of Paul’s ‘Gentile Christian’ movement, both Peter and Paul were treated as equal apostles. But the early tradition was that Jesus had personally nominated Peter to found his church. According to the Gospel of Matthew, written about 80 CE, Chapter 16, verse 17:

“‘And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou Simon Bar-Jonah for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.’

“It was at the beginning of the 3rd Century CE that Pope Callistus, quoting this passage as his authority, declared Rome the centre of the Christian Church; a claim hotly disputed by the Eastern and African Churches. Tradition then had it that Peter had journeyed to Rome, worked with his old antagonist Paul, and was executed there about the same time as Paul during the repression of Nero. There is no evidence of this, however, and, in view of the schism between the Nazarenes, of whom Peter was a leader, and Paul’s ‘Gentile Christians’, it does not seem credible. An interesting point about Matthew’s Gospel is that its author was not a Jew and that scholars claim that he was probably a Galatian.”

So mainland Britain was composed of pacified, Romanised, christianised to some extent, Celts with admixtures of Roman citizens, probably from all over the Empire. Here you have a classic picture of a people without what Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyya, that binding force of ties of kinship and religion that forges a people into a strongly united group. Thus we have the pathetic cries from Britain as the Roman Empire collapses for someone to come and protect them. On Europe you had the vigorous ‘barbarian’ Germanic tribes, ‘infected’ with the Arian teaching, and they are knocking down the walls of Rome, as well as subjugating Spain and North Africa.

The Angles and the Saxons

One collections of these tribes, the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, the first two of whom we would really consider Danes, begin over quite a long period of time to take an interest in British affairs, moving over as farmers and workers, getting involved in internal British squabbles and the wars with the Picts. They have that Germanic solidness, energy, stamina, hardworkingness, and intellect. The Celts give way before them, but this is not a massacre nor are the Celts driven into Wales. However, this Germanic culture becomes the dominant one, and the people begin to speak their language, along with a lot of words from the old language.

One Germanic tribe, the Franks under Clovis fatefully undertake the mission of Roman christianity.

Distinctive traits of Irish christianity

In Ireland, there is another form, which has never been called Arian, but which retains some interesting characteristics.

1 The christians retained much of the old culture and did not entirely do away with it. Their approach is very much in harmony with a statement by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi “Islam is not a culture, but a filter for culture.” They behave very much as Muslims traditionally did when coming to a new culture: they filter it and remove the barbarisms and retain what is wholesome.

2 There are no martyrs. As opposed to elsewhere where christianity was spread by torture and murder, in Ireland, however it spreads, it happens willingly. Presumably also the old Gaelic now pagan culture didn’t entirely disappear and they lived side-by-side for some time.

3 The christians took on the law forms of the Irish. Elsewhere, christianity was wed to the remains of Roman law and various hybrids. In Ireland the marriage was with the Brehon law, which is already interesting, because it illustrates the point I made earlier about expecting to find tawhid and Shari’a somewhere in our past. The Brehon law looks to us like a Shari’a or the remains of one. The Brehon is a faqih. He does not pass down a state law, but sits in arbitration according to known norms between disputants. The law applies to high and low, including kings. Most matters including killing can be resolved by compensatory payments. The pre-christian brehons had, in common with all the Celts, refused to write their knowledge down, and it was passed down orally and committed to memory, often in verse of astonishing sophistication.

4 Although there is rule by kings, their rule is characterised by their taking counsel from other interests, first and foremost the learned. So here the practice of consultation is widespread, as it is in the shura-informed rule of a Muslim ruler. And the king not only upheld the law but was himself subject to it and not above the law as in other monarchic forms.

5 There is a lack of fear of death, accompanied by a culture which is absolutely impregnated with the conviction that the unseen is right-to-hand. Again, something held in common with others such as the much-maligned Vikings.

6 Contrary to later feudalism, the land belonged to the tribe among whom the king had his rights. In feudalism, the land and the people belonged to the king.

7 The form of monasticism of the Gaels is central to the society and not peripheral, i.e. the monks are not getting away from society but are sustaining it, although there are also these extraordinary hermit figures who set out into the oceans to find a rock somewhere on which they can sit and worship their Lord and live on whatever few seagull eggs they can find.

8 Their monasticism is not necessarily celibate, and monks and even abbots have wives and children. And it is ‘wives’ because polygyny is not unknown among them.

9 Coming as they do from an ancient culture of learning, there is an explosion of scholarship in the Greek, Hebrew and Latin languages and the sciences of the church and of the ancients. Ireland at this point is a lighthouse of knowledge, at a time which is elsewhere called the Dark Ages, and the Irish monks move out adventurously to take their knowledge to the European continent and the rest of the world.

Scotland

This Gaelic synthesis was in Ireland and then, because of the kingdom of Dal Riada, spread quite naturally to Scotland. Dal Riada is in Northern Ireland from which Scotland is only a small rowing-boat journey away, and as we have seen for many peoples the seas were roads and not barriers.

Arthur

In mainland Britain a figure emerges, or doesn’t, depending on whether you regard him as myth or history, who checks the advance of the Saxons: King Arthur who is a Briton, a P-Celt, and whose traces extend up into Scotland.

Columcille

Another figure later appears, who is completely historical: Columcille or Columba. Outgrowth of this dynamic Gaelic monasticism, Columba is from the ruling elite, but has chosen the life of the spirit. However, that he engages in the power politics of the day no historian is in doubt of. In 563 CE he founds the settlement of Iona, seven years before the birth of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. This island monastery had such light that a visit to Iona is still memorable today. It was from there that Columcille brought his teaching to the rest of Scotland, which becomes Gaelicised in the process. These Picts – and we are still not sure that we know who the Picts were – and the Gaels become united. At this point too there is the beginning of a new branch of the Gaelic culture, which for many centuries will be uniform across Ireland and Scotland at least linguistically, i.e. until around the time of Elizabeth knowledgeable Gaels could speak the same language together in both domains. The Brehon law goes where the Gaels go, and the last Scottish king known to have ruled by it was MacBeth who was slandered so badly in Shakespeare’s play.

So what is it that has happened? Some transmission from Jesus, peace be upon him, has got to Ireland and Scotland. People are intoxicated with learning, some others are set adrift from worldly ambition and they go off to find lonely locations in which to worship Allah for the rest of their lives. A system of justice that was originally Gaelic but has been refined and filtered by the christians is spreading. Scotland accepts all of this. It begins to spread down into Northumbria.

Augustine, Columbanus and Gregory

However, there is an ominous note. In 597, the same year that Columcille dies, a man called Augustine arrives in Kent. He is the official face of Roman christianity, dressed in the purple and riding a horse. A foreigner and agent of a great imperial church. He has the reputation of a missionary, but much of his mission is to gain authority for Rome over churches that are already established. The pope who sent him, Gregory, has already corresponded with another dynamic Gael, Columbanus (543-615), who full of passion took to the Continent and established monasteries. Columbanus did not follow the authority of Rome, and so Gregory called him to heel, reminding him of the verses in the Gospels where Jesus, peace be upon him, allegedly called Peter his rock on which he would build his church, and reminding him that, as was widely and commonly believed, Peter died in Rome, thus claiming Rome as the city with authority over christians, all of which Columbanus cheerfully acknowledges, only adding that, “A living dog is better than a dead lion.”

The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace

This is the official beginning of christianity in Britain after the collapse of whatever order the old Roman empire brought. Note that at this point the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is around 27 years old, and so has probably been married to Khadijah, may Allah be pleased with her, for a few years. The Qur’an has not yet been revealed. Note again, that these two very different christianities are only arriving in Great Britain at around the time of the revelation of the Qur’an. The case is even more extreme in Scandinavia, where christianity arrived several centuries after Islam, and possibly after Muslims had actually arrived in some places in Scandinavia.

Two christianities advance to meet

Now this force is at work in the north, but advancing northwards from the south is another imperial force.

Our Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, emigrates to Madinah, and all of the events of his life and mission take place. Christianity finds its way southwards from Scotland into Northumbria. And in 634 a man appears called Oswald, whose father, the previous king, had been killed by Edwin, who subsequently accepted christianity by marriage to a christian princess from down south who took a missionary north with her. Their kingdom was overthrown by some of the P-Celtic tribes. Oswald had taken refuge on Iona, and on returning to the battlefield and retaking his kingdom he summoned a man called Aidan, who in 635, three years after the death of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, founded the famous island monastery of Lindisfarne.

Aidan

The following account I have from a television documentary narrated by a certain Thomás O’Fiagh. The quotes below are my paraphrase and do not represent his words:

Aidan, accompanied by Oswald, walked across Northumbria. When they met peasants in the field or people in the town they talked with them, and the demeanour of Aidan coupled with the sense he made when translated into Saxon by Oswald inspired people, who became christians in great numbers. On the other hand, Augustine arrived on horse and spoke in Latin from the back of his horse dressed in his imperial purple, and not many were interested.

Augustine again and three christian wives

However, representing as he did the new power structures then emerging – remember he represents both the Judaic-Hellenic teaching of Paul and the might of the Roman Empire – he could talk to kings, and so there is a record of kings, courtiers and queens becoming christians at his hands. Indeed, there is a very clear pattern in several of the events of the spread of this christianity, and that is the role of the wives of kings in it. Augustine’s first success was through Bertha, the daughter of a Frankish king and a christian, and wife of king Æthelbert, who although a pagan was later to be one of Augustine’s most spectacular missionary conquests, with thousands of his people following him into christianity.

Edwin had become a christian through marriage to Æthelbert’s daughter from East Anglia, who in her turn brought missionaries north. We will come to another king’s wife who will play a significant part. How does this happen? The cult of the virgin? Certainly in my time in catholic Ireland it was quite clear that catholicism emasculates men and produces devastatingly strong and often admirable women who singlehandedly hold their families together while the man becomes a hopeless drunk. An overstatement, but an indication of something.

Aidan dies in 651 CE and thus nineteen years after the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, sometime during the caliphate of Sayyiduna ‘Uthman, may Allah be pleased with him.

The Synod of Whitby and after

Twelve years later in 663 CE, a king, whose wife is Roman Catholic whereas he is a ‘Celtic’ [although Saxon] christian, summons a synod, at a place called Whitby, a good deal further south than our story hitherto, in North Yorkshire. At the Synod of Whitby, the Roman Catholic and the Gaelic church meet in one key doctrinal encounter.

Again from Thomás O’Fiagh in paraphrase:

…the Celts send a simple and devout monk but the Romans send a skilled scholar and debater, and that, combined with the aforementioned wife, swings the day. The synod finds in favour of the Romans, and it is the beginning of the end for Celtic christianity. The Celts return to Ireland…

It is perhaps apropos to mention here that Thomás O’Fiagh I later discovered to be the primate of all Ireland of his time. Thus, his account could certainly not be thought to be from an anti-Roman Catholic or anti-christian source.

And the monks lapse into making silver chalices and illuminating manuscripts, until because they had also lapsed into collecting silver in copious quantities, first the Vikings arrive to wake them from their slumbers, and finally the first and only English pope in history, Nicolas Breakspear or Adrian IV, issues a bull to the Norman Henry II of England granting him Ireland because of the ‘apostasy’ of the Irish. The Synod of Whitby took place in the caliphate of Sayyiduna Mu’awiya, two years after the death of Sayyiduna ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, may Allah be pleased with them both.

Thus just prior to the spread of Islam, a more closely authentic christianity of a sort can be said to arrive in north Great Britain, and then to be snuffed out at the end of the period of the Caliphs who took the right way, may Allah be pleased with them, by the force that has withstood Islam until our day, and the same force that is attempting to exterminate Islam again today.

How do we understand that force?

The Empire

We understand it as the continuation of the Roman Empire in a new phase. With the new model of christian kingship, sanctified by the church, the armies now moved in propagation of the creed of the man who is reported by that church to have told people to turn the other cheek and to love your neighbour as yourself. So it is:

• Empire – and empire comprises standing armies, priesthoods and bureaucracies, held together and paid for by loans from banks who, in the old model, are repaid in booty acquired in imperial conquests, but in the modern version from interest payments taxed from the populace. Nevertheless, in the end the exponential nature of the loans’ growth destroys empires too.

• Polytheism – one worships money, the other sex, one worships power, and the other possessions, one might, the other…, indeed you can even worship God if you wish, as long as you are tolerant of whatever others might want to worship, and as long as you do not have the expectation that God might have any say whatsoever in the world’s affairs.

• Multiculturalism – it blends all the peoples into a homogenous and colourless mishmash with a recognisable identity as pawns of the empire in exchange for their lost identities as themselves. They no longer cohere in the way that Ibn Khaldun sees as the basis of authentic political power, in a people’s knowing each other and knowing their ties of kinship and their genealogies.

• And the empire can shift back and forwards between republic and demonic emperor depending on the circumstances – remember the film Gladiator!

• Its law intrinsically makes distinctions between the elite and the poor, even when apparently proclaiming that there is no distinction.

Note that this Roman form is re-formed in the Reformation, which is just another way for it to perpetuate itself, but that is another history for another day. But the protestant and catholic models only differ in details not essentials.

The natural living pattern (fitra) and the knowledge of Divine Unity (tawhid)

And the natural living pattern (fitra) and the knowledge of Divine Unity (tawhid) model has:

• A law to which all are subject, both high and low;

• There is an abandonment of the world, not because of guilt or fear of it, but because this person has something else of much greater interest to him or her;

• A love of knowledge and learning that is not restricted to a priest class;

• A walking in the world that is not arrogant, and not raised above others.

Is that not something that is clearly on the road towards Islam?

Conclusion

So why did Gaelic christianity just disappear precisely at that moment? We can say that because they had some degree of authenticity, when the new Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, appeared with the final revelation for all mankind until the end of time, then that transmission was abrogated, not only legally in the outward, but inwardly in the reality, even though the people themselves might not yet have received the news of his coming. It is as if their light had been turned off, and only the form remained. However, the outward form of the Roman model, since it had no inner authenticity was not affected inwardly in the same way, but could even increase and grow in the vacuum created by the other’s removal. However, the dynamic tension between, on the one hand people’s fitra and their sense of tawhid, and their aspiration to live in a just mode by just laws, and on the other hand the imposition of a state and religion and later a banking system upon them has never gone away and determines the rest of British and European history up until today. Europeans by their inner natures have been and are reaching out for Islam.

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1 Talk delivered at the Deen Foundation. Leicester, Sunday 19/12/2004

2 ‘Scot’ originally denoted an Irishman.

3 Titus as the son of Vespasian and succeeded him as emperor. Abdassamad

“Where it falls there bury me,” he faintly gasped so that all had to lean closer to catch the words, but then he spoke with unanticipated force, “As a Muslim, mind!” and they nodded their heads. Thus passed away one of the great men indeed of the English, Robin Nuruddin Hood, and it is my task to put right the record on the man which has been so maliciously altered.

My name is Abdullah Tuck, his Imam many a long year in the wonderful forest of Sherwood, perhaps the most beautiful mosque in the world, certainly the only one I’ve seen, so I have no real means of comparing to know.

The men went and found the arrow. A party have gone with shovels to dig, carrying his blessed body which is so light and sweet in death as never did I see the like of. And the abbot of my first ordaining, how heavy in comparison, how quick to rot and how glad were we to see him under the soil. But let me go back to the beginning of the story while they are away and use my scrivener’s training for this one last task to tell the true story of noble Robin Hood which otherwise may never be told in truth.

‘Twas while serving in far and distant lands his king, he that is called Richard the Lionheart though Cravenheart did we come to call him, that my Master Nuruddin got the name that I will call him by at that point in the narrative which suits. Robin, as then he was, went not as many a merry adventurer and freebooter for pillage, rape and spoils, but driven by a longing to see the Holy Land where the Messiah, peace be upon him, had walked upon its soil. True he also accepted, what all of us had been told from the cradle, that Mahometans were infidels, enemies of our Lord and truly worthy of extermination. Yet Robin, ever a tenderhearted being, most passionately longed for their conversion to the ‘true’ faith, as indeed did many a noble knight.

Yet, strange to say, a coincidence set him off on his path, on a very different footing from what he had imaged. By a marvellous chance he had cause to visit the learned Abbot of a monastery not far from the lands of his noble father. The revered old man was steeped in lore of both the ancients and the Bible; he was a reservoir of Greek knowledge, Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew and other learning that few others of any age master. And still the old man remained strangely unsatisfied. His learning only added fuel to his desire to know more. Indeed his advancing years only seemed to lend desperation to his quest as if he was in danger of passing away while yet being within reach of his goal but not having attained it.

The aged Abbot was fair set on fire by Master Robin of Loxley’s visit for he somehow recognised in him a kindred spirit, though Squire Robin neither before nor since showed any inclination to rout among manuscripts. But what sent the old man into a delirium of excitement was the knowledge that Robin, pure-hearted being that he was, went to the Holy Land as a pilgrim not as pirate or bandit. If the truth be told, most of our kinsfolk went for pillage. Naturally they spouted a great deal of Latin and dressed in crosses and the Bishops prayed very much for all concerned. But I think seeing those bloodthirsty robbers and brigands set sail, robed in the cloak of religion, blessed by mother church, I think that was the first thing in my adult life that set me a-thinking, even though in those days my liking for ale was such that I did not progress very far in thought at that point.

Robin told me about that meeting in later years.

“Squire Loxley,” the old Abbot said, sizing Robin up as if judging whether to entrust him with some momentous secret, “What do you say to the Mahometans and us?”

“Why, Abbot, they are damned and we are saved, God be praised,” Robin said with the cheerful certitude which he was soon to lose and yet regain though only after a sizeable period of doubt and deep thought.

“Wish that it were so simple,” the Abbot replied, eyeing Robin to judge his response to this less than orthodox remark. Robin, with his great trusting heart, was open to the Abbot’s superior knowledge and so merely looked slightly puzzled.

“Wish that it were so simple,” the Abbot repeated, and turned away looking for something among the piles of manuscripts laden on his old oak table. Sunlight streamed in from a beautifully blue sky with just such cloud cover as makes an English spring day so unique.

“What, dear master, do you say to the Mahometans and us?” ventured bold Robin of Loxley, inquisitively yet genially enough, so that the old Abbot after scrutinising his open countenance found courage to address these words to Robin, words which were to transform the man forever.

“Robin,” he said, “We’ve been lied to for hundreds of years. They follow our Lord more truly than do we.”

Now that I have written those lines they seem bland enough but as Robin told them to me they hit some deep area in his bosom and try as he would he could never wrest them from his heart even in the most extreme of circumstance.

Faced with some Saracen warrior in battle, Robin would be weakened by the thought, “He follows our Lord more truly than do we.”

There you have the reason why he did not cut such a dashing figure in the Crusades, our Robin whose valour and chivalry were never questioned. For without doubt a man may fight with excellent weapons, he may have the best martial training in the arts of war that an Englishman could have, his company may be brave but if his heart be not in what he does he is doomed. If he does not believe in his cause he cannot win and even if he did by some accident win, his very victory would be ashen and bitter in his mouth.

Now you see what laid poor Robin at the feet of the Saracen on that fateful day, a man who was in truth not his equal in battle.

“Aslim!” the man said and Robin, who had never acquired so much as a word of their lingo merely gazed up into the marvellous light brown complexion of the man, a man he was later to learn was a true Arab of the desert. Something in his complete acquiescence must have spoken to that Arab and touched his heart, for Robin neither struggled to flee, pleaded for his life nor sought some means to regain his weapon to defend himself or at least do hurt to that Arabic man before he died. Truly the struggle within his breast as to the truth of the position of the Saracens and the Crusaders overcame him then and there.

He later told me, “At that moment I was completely surrendered to whatever my destiny was, completely at ease and reconciled to whether I should be killed, captured, imprisoned, enslaved or set free. Indeed my senses were overcome by the beauty of the day and the extraordinary visage of that fierce Saracen.”

“Muslim,” the Arab said and pointed to Robin, and Robin could see that, in the middle of the carnage which surrounded them, the screams of the dying, the rage of those still living and fighting, some still bond had been forged between the two. The Arab extended his sword hand, having sheathed his weapon oblivious, it seemed, to the mayhem around them, and helped Robin to his feet, then turned away to mount his horse. Robin moved after him in astonishment and coming up to his stirrup grasped at the reins of his horse to stop him moving.

The Arab turned to him and Robin could only speak his question with his face, “Why did you not kill me?”

They gazed at each other for that timeless wordless moment which was filled with an eternity of knowledge and the Arab leant down and patted him on the breast saying only, “Muslim, Muslim,” and then rode away from him into the fray, unsheathing his sword again, as he did, for fresh killing.

“Imam,” Robin told me on his deathbed nary an hour before he fired that last tremendous arrow, “From that day nothing could ever be the same again. It was that day that put me in this forest here, an outlaw in my own land, I who never willingly broke a law of God nor man in my whole life,” and he wept, though not I feel in sorrow but overwhelmed by some other powerful arousal of emotion in his bosom.

“Imam,” he had continued, “Let my story be told. We are early comers, we are too early I fear. Others will come, later, much later. They must know, they must know.”

And so I write. For Robin saw the churlish and treacherous behaviour of him we knew to be the Cravenheart, the massacres of the helpless, the breaking of oaths, the rape of the women. You might blame some of that on the troops but it must be that the leader carries the terrible responsibility for his men. And what a contrast when that noble lord, Salahuddin Ayyubi, he they call Saladdin, set free most magnanimously his enemies and the captives when he took Jerusalem. If truth be told, why, his noble conduct won that war more than force of arms.

Yet none of that was sufficient to convert my troubled Squire Robin of Loxley from the religion of his ancestors. Rather, the meeting with the ancient and venerable Shaykh Burhanuddin was the matter that clinched the affair. It fell in this manner. Robin sought high and low for some things that the Abbot had asked of him, including some manuscripts of long-lost gospels in the Syriac tongue or Aramaic. Long-lost I say but truly they had been destroyed by mother church along with the poor folk who had the temerity to possess copies and how many they had been! Rumour long had circulated in the West that certain churches of the eastern rite had secreted various fabulous texts, and seekers after truth such as the old Abbot thirsted after them mightily.

While engaged, during one of the frequent truces, in trying to find such a manuscript, which demanded much intercourse with Arabic-speaking Christians, who might often appear to have more in common with Mahometans than with Christian folk, Robin was wandering alone and unprotected through a little Arabic market place in some small town. He told me that he felt closer and closer to the goal of what the Abbot required of him and so he became excited as if the very spirit of the old man were running in his veins. Thus was he so incautious as to be totally alone in this dangerous land, surrounded by treacherous infidels. There it happened that he was greeted by two beardless youths who insisted on taking him by the hand and leading him somewhere. They were so evidently worthy beings and Robin always the most trusting of men, even sometimes when he ought for his own sake to have taken more care, that he followed them, they leading him like a little child wherever they willed.

Glory be to God, and did they not lead him to a simple little house in one of those twisty little back-streets that run through their beehives cities, their rabbit-warren towns? In the house sat an old man, the very age and mirror image of the venerable Abbot, yet I don’t mean in his physique but in his being. That old Shaykh, Shaykh Burhanuddin sat in front of a plate of food enough for two with two small loaves of the Arab bread before him, patiently waiting. The food was piping hot and he did not look at all surprised to see what the Arab youths had brought him. He merely motioned our Robin to sit down and then with great dignity he pronounced “Bismillah” which we since learnt means “In the name of Allah,” and, signalling to Robin to commence, he began to eat.

“Imam, I tell you that neither of us said a word, for we had no word in common, yet by the end of that meal I was a Muslim,” Robin told me.

“But how could that be, Robin?” I queried him.

“Scarce can I tell, yet I hazard that if you had sat there with that old man you could have done naught else,” Robin said, scratching his head, searching for the words to tell me of it, for he was ever a man of action never really a man of words, “All I can say is that that man sat with God, ate with God, slept with God, talked with God, saw God, heard God and knew little but God. I never saw the like of him before or since but I knew that if this was a Mahometan then I was a Mahometan, I mean a Muslim.”

When he told me the story, as he often did, Robin himself reflected some of the glow from that meeting, so that it was as if I could see that Shaykh sitting before me bathed in the presence of God, eating simple and humble food with a man he was supposed to be at war with.

“When I left he put a gold coin in my hand and kissed me on the forehead and I smelled the beautiful musk smell that came from him,” Robin told and retold me in wonder, “He entrusted me to the two youths who appeared, as if out of nowhere, and took me to another man, Adnan. Adnan spoke some of my language and a bit of the Frankish lingo and he taught me the basics of being a Muslim. He taught me how to wash for the prayer and he led me in prayer five times a day for the days I was there.

“‘We not go to mosque now. It not good for you. You, me, pray together here, house,’ he said, ‘Wine no good. Pig – bad meat. Riba, riba, riba …?’ and I could see that he was searching for the right word in my language. Then we took a long time miming and acting out what it was for I could see that he saw it was very important for me to know. ‘Usury!’ I suddenly cried out. ‘Yes, usury,’ he answered, delighted that I had understood, ‘Very bad. Worse – murder, worse – other man’s wife, worse – killing, worse – stealing, worse – dead drunk. Very bad. God,’ and he gestured heavenward, ‘God hate. God make war. Usury – riba very bad. God make war. We make war,’ and he stopped, exhausted by the effort of trying to convey his thought. He gave me much to think about, for, as you know Imam, the church is the fountainhead of all usury in our unhappy land.”

“Another day he taught me about jihad. ‘Call people to God,’ he ordered me. There was a whole lot more about offering to let Christians and Jews live under Muslim governance for the payment of four gold coins, each adult male, every year, but from the moment I landed on English soil my hands were never empty of a weapon. It was a fight from the first moment. I had no chance to summon them to Islam even. When the story went around that I was a renegade all hands were against me.

“He had taught me the rules of raiding parties. ‘You take all booty, all booty,’ and I learnt that I was to gather the booty together, take a fifth of it myself and divide the rest among the men equally. I learnt that the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, had then given and given from his fifth of the booty until it was all gone.

“Imam, you have seen, we have raided and we have plundered these despoilers of our people and our land. You have seen my fifth go to the poor and the needy, and there are plenty of them in this accursed age. None of the fifth was left for me. You have seen my men divide up the other four-fifths fairly. Many of them have been most generous with their portions too. Tell the people our story,” and here he had coughed and it had come up bloody. We had looked at each other and the knowledge of death was in his face.

“Imam, it will never be mentioned even that we were Muslims, they have covered it all over. Imam let them know,” and with this he had coughed again.

I reached down and felt his toes, “Robin can you feel this?” I asked, giving them a pinch and he said, “No.”

I reached up and felt his knees and also pinched them, “Can you feel this?” and he told me, “No.”

“Then Robin Nuruddin of Loxley prepare to die, for it is very close,” I remember telling him with tears running down my face, for I loved him as I have never loved any other man and was deeply hurt that the Lord was taking him and leaving me here alone.

He pulled himself up maybe an inch or so and raised the forefinger on his right hand and repeated in Arabic first and then in our English tongue, “I bear witness that there is no god, only Allah alone without partner. And I bear witness that Muhammad is His slave and Messenger whom He sent as a mercy to all mankind and as a warner and bringer of good news and I bear witness that Jesus is His slave and Messenger and …,” and then he slumped back sightless but with a light in his face, so that it was as if he was telling me again of that marvellous old Shaykh Burhanuddin. Thus passed Robin of Loxley, Nuruddin, he they call Robin Hood.

And I, Friar as I was, Imam as I am, Abdullah Tuck bear witness to what he bore witness and I also witness that Robin Hood was the best man of his age in England. You cannot understand him and what he fought for unless you know that he fought a just fight according to the way of Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, taking from the wealthy Norman barons and church usurers, giving to the starving poor of the parishes. I have heard the ballads that are being sung about us now. They, none of them, have understood anything. People! Worship your Lord! Follow Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace! Take to prayer! Establish the poor tax on your wealth. Rise up against the moneylenders! Eat clean food! See that justice is done and not only the law! Above all see that justice is done!

(from New Tales for Old, by Abdassamad Clarke)

Interpolation

The purpose of the emergency or the state of exception is quite simple and mundane: a rising middle class who took power, and used that as a means to enrich themselves. The Napoleonic Wars, for example, licensed them to introduce for the first time an income tax on ordinary people rather than wealth taxes on those who could afford them. Moreover, it allowed them to license government debts from usurers and the interest that accrued from them and then to pass on the burden of servicing the debt to mankind at large. Of course monarchs had done that, but they were their own private debts; now they have become national debts to be paid from the income tax and other invented taxes such as VAT, which to their shame Muslim nations have embraced wholesale, and thus all the rigmarole of democracy just to present a facade that it is as if popular opinion wants to be taxed onerously.

The European Civil War 1917-1945²

In the latter stages of the event that lies at the foundation of our age, the European Civil War, six men climbed up to the point where they could leverage an emergency to lay claim to their respective sovereignties with an eye to the main goal, global sovereignty, with an emergency that they together created: Mussolini, Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and the Emperor of Japan (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p009bhtp/the-war-lords-3-winston-churchill) each with a lust for total power not only in his own domain but a global ambition, particularly Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Then, although Roosevelt built the atomic bomb, Truman dropped it because of the ‘emergency’ of bringing the war to an end, although in fact the Japanese were trying to negotiate surrender.

The War on Terror

In our more recent history, mediocre men have had the ‘war on terror’, a gift from Bin Laden and his cohorts, whom Adam Curtis showed in “The Power of Nightmares”³ were co-dependent with the US State Department on the need for a global enemy and thus on an emergency or ‘state of exception’. Thus the former by his state of exception gave himself sovereignty over the Divine and the Prophetic according to both of whom murdering civilians indiscriminately is prohibited absolutely. Significantly, of course he handed his adversaries the excuse they needed to carry out a plan they had long hatched, only needing a suitable provocation to expedite. The two parties depended on each other to lay claim to the sovereignty they desired.

When that argument wore thin, then the ‘pandemic’ turned up, for which various agents had been readying, and preparing public opinion for years. It turned up on the current incumbent’s previous watch too. Again, it was global sovereignty that was the object of desire, since the US as the hegemon is the door to that ambition.

World dominion

It is Nietzsche who:

“… is the first to pose the thoughtful question – thoughtful in that it starts from metaphysics and points back to metaphysics – which we formulate as follows: Is the man of today in his metaphysical nature prepared to assume dominion over the earth as a whole? Has the man of today yet given thought in any way to what conditions will determine the nature of such worldwide government? Is the nature of this man of today such that it is fit to manage those powers, and put to use those means of power, which are released as the nature of modern technology unfolds, forcing man to unfamiliar decisions? Nietzsche’s answer to these questions is No.”⁴

But Heidegger makes clear that this is to do with Nietzsche’s widely misunderstood Overman about wh0m he writes:

“The superman never appears in the noisy parades of alleged men of power, nor in the well-staged meetings of politicians. The superman’s appearance is likewise inaccessible to the teletypers and radio dispatches of the press which present – that is, represent – events to the public even before they have happened. This well made-up and well staged manner of forming ideas, of representation, with its constantly more refined mechanism, dissimulates and blocks from view what really is.”⁵

And:

“Let me stress it again: the superman in Nietzsche’s sense is not man as he exists until now, only superdimensional. The “superman” does not simply carry the accustomed drives and strivings of the customary type of man beyond all measure and bounds. Superman is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from existing man. The thing that the superman discards is precisely our boundless, purely quantitative nonstop progress. The superman is poorer, simpler, tenderer, and tougher, quieter and more self-sacrificing and slower of decision, and more economical of speech.”⁶

Then President Putin, with his own needs and with his invasion of Ukraine, supplied his opponents with the emergency they needed, and quite suddenly the pandemic was over. It became yesterday’s news almost overnight.

Then, in their turn, Hamas handed the Israelis, and by extension the US State Department, a gift on a plate: the excuse they needed to turn Gaza and then the West Bank into a field of slaughter, perpetuating the aspiration to sovereignty of one very unsavoury criminal and contributing to the aspiration of a certain POTUS.

‘The people’, the mediocre and the bourgeoisie

Since its arrival in the French Revolution the cry of ‘the people’ has been the means by which mediocre people (mediocre being “from Latin mediocris ‘of middle height or degree’”)⁷ sought aspirationally to climb out of their middle class backgrounds and take sovereignty – bankers, lawyers and journalists, in other words: the bourgeoisie. One must remember that these people are a ‘middle’ class in every way: in terms of wealth, even when they reach millions, and intellectually they scavenge off the great heritage of mankind producing studies that both tell you why you must read Carl Schmitt, for example, and more importantly what you have to understand from him, which is probably not what he tried to convey. We could make the same point about anyone from Plato to Wagner and so on. And we are as grateful as others for the ‘honourable exceptions’.

The middle class is a missionary movement with global aspirations and in Napoleon found its apostle. It again appeared in identical fashion in the Russian Revolution, with global aspirations, and if Ernst Nölte is to be accepted, although not everyone does, bringing about Fascism and Nazism as reactions.

Banking

The revolutions and wars were staging posts on the arrival of banking from the underneath to the fore. The World Wars saw the institution of the major global banking institutions, in 1944 at Bretton Woods, the World Bank, the IMF and so on – the Bank of International Settlements previously founded in 1930 to oversee debt reparations by the Germans for the first stage of the War conventionally known as the First World War – with the international legal order, the UN, which would cement the nations together impotently to the banking order. What was a period of unparalleled chaos and de-struction would produce very tangible structures indeed, while simultaneously licensing the bankers’ favourite nation in the Middle East.

The reality-show POTUS

Our current dis-order – presided over by an apparently super-erratic reality-show host, making a series of moves widely understood to bring pan-demonium to the world economy, punishing Lesotho and other desperately poor nations with their tariffs – also reveals a surprising order, in its de-struction bringing about the strengthening of banking structures, the POTUS presiding over an all-engrossing piece of theatre, which is nevertheless vital to this project. He had dismantled the US apparatus to channel funds to a whole host of societies, USAID thus engendering in them a dependence on global capital. With the destruction of USAID, they, convinced of their desperate need, will of course go to those international banking institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, and that global agenda will be enormously advanced.

So the middle class have arrived centre stage, lacking the strengths of character of people who actually work and do things, with their capitalism exploiting the labour of the disenfranchised poor, lacking too the merits of the aristocratic order they abolished, neither knowing noblesse oblige nor the ethics of service and work.

And the Muslims arrive in this age and on this late modern stage with its usury capitalism having imbibed the usury that guarantees their destruction and the seizure of their lands and their wealth and the loss of their deen. And yet, the Muslims alone hold the key to the matter: the abolition of usury, the vital obligation of the provision of free markets for any to enter except for usurers, leadership which empowers the people of knowledge among whose duties it is to prevent usury in trade, and the establishment of sound currency, the whole revolving around the pillar of zakat.

Zakat is the Robin Hood tax which takes from the rich, not out of any ressentiment towards them and thus is not a punitive tax such as that of the welfare states which arguably forced global capital off-shore⁸ and set up a dialectic to which there is no solution. And zakat is not a miserable dole that keeps the poor dependent in their poverty as a terrible warning to others to submit to capitalism lest a similar fate befall them, but actually a sharing of capital – gold, silver, sheep and cattle, grains and the like – that allows the poor to lift themselves up. But this requires a figure who has been absent for too long: the leader. This is not the fantasy of the caliphate that some have, but initially just someone(s) who will take the lead and dominate the commercial sphere, in the name of the Divine not in the name of ‘the people’.⁹

Only the Divine can save us

And the last word must go to Martin Heidegger via Giorgio Agamben:

“Heidegger’s abrupt statement in the 1976 interview with “der Spiegel”: “Only a God can save us” has always aroused perplexity. To understand it, it is first necessary to return it to its context. Heidegger has just spoken of the planetary domain of technique that nothing seems to be able to govern. Philosophy and other spiritual powers – poetry, religion, the arts, politics – have lost the ability to shake or otherwise orient the lives of the peoples of the West. Hence the bitter diagnosis that they “cannot produce any immediate change in the current state of the world” and the inevitable consequence that “only a God can save us”.”¹⁰

And he concludes:

“How should we understand the philosopher’s bitter diagnosis? In what sense “only a God can save us”? For almost two centuries – since Hegel and Nietzsche declared his death, the West has lost its god. But what we have lost is only a god to whom it is possible to give a name and an identity. The death of God is, in truth, the loss of divine names (“the divine names are missing”, Hölderlin lamented). Beyond the names, the most important thing remains: the divine. As long as we are able to perceive how divine a flower, a face, a bird, a gesture or a blade of grass, we can do without a God that can be named. The divine is enough for us, the adjective matters more than the noun. Not “a God” - rather: “only the divine can save us”.”¹¹

But here we beg to differ with Agamben in spite of his eminence and the great respect we have for him. ‘The Name’ has a chequered history. Rabbinical Judaism anathematised its mention, except for in the Temple in Jerusalem during the cacophony of horns at the Passover, when the priest invoked it but none could hear it. Subsequently there arose among the Jews figures called Baal Sham (in Arabic Ba‘l al-ism – master of the Name), who similarly monopolised the Name but in an esoteric fashion that can only be characterised as deeply magical. These figures were to give birth to a cult, wrongly thought of as ‘Orthodox’, called the Hasidim. It is not accidental that one discovers this obscure part of history when exploring the roots of Freemasonry, although there appears to be no direct connection between the two groups.

Leapfrog the intervening centuries and the ‘death of God’, and the circle comes around again to the Divine Name or rather Names. Without ‘Name’ we have only the god of the philosophers, and as Heisenberg said to Pauli in Copenhagen: “I might go on to remind you of Pascal’s famous text, the one he kept sewn in his jacket. It was headed ‘Fire’ and began with the words: ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – not of the philosophers and sages.”¹² It is time for His name and His names. And He is called by His name and called upon by it, for sovereign is He.

Footnotes

1 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology – Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.

2 Ernst Nölte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus – The European Civil War 1917-1945, translated by two anonymous writers, Publius Agrippa and Russian Cosmist.

The Indo-European Friendship Club

ERNST NOLTE'S EUROPEAN CIVIL WAR 1917-1945

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4 years ago · 89 likes · 3 comments · Theognis of Megara

François Furet differed with Nölte and they had a correspondence which was collected in a book Fascism and Communism.

3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p088s5k4/the-power-of-nightmares

https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-AdamCurtis

4 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? p.65

5 Ibid. p. 72-73

6 Ibid. p. 69

7 Oxford English Dictionary

8 Rana Dasgupta – “The Demise of the Nation State”, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/05/demise-of-the-nation-state-rana-dasgupta

9 Economist Michael Hudson sees how the liberal order removes any reins on the ambitions of capital, and that paradoxically, despots and tyrants reign it in.

10 https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-solo-un-dio-ci-pu-lvare

11 Ibid.

12 Werner Heisenberg, “Positivism, Metaphysics, and Religion”, Physics and beyond: encounters and conversations.

Where are we?

How did we get here?

Where do we want to get to?

How do we get there?

Thinking about the nature of the world order within which we all live, both in the East and the West, we looked at these areas: the politics of power, technique/technology and science, psychology and psychiatry, philosophy, and we looked at society through literature, economics – in seeking to understand where we are.

Essaying an answer to our second question, ‘how did we get here?’, the world order today arises from a fourfold: the Jews, Greeks, Christians and Romans.

The Children of Israel took many things from the ancient world, Babylon in particular, and, contrary to their revelation which forbade usury, gave the modern world banking. That was taken up by mediaeval Italian bankers such as the Medici and then, during the Reformation, by the famous Protestant banking houses, examples of which today are Lloyds and Barclays;

The Greeks give us the university, academia (from Plato’s academy), theatre, and physics, philosophy, metaphysics (from Greek words) and a great deal more. Just look at how many words in the English have Greek origins;

The Christians are ostensibly the rulers. They sit on the throne, much as the Romans gave them theirs, but then as now the reality of power is that of an oligarchy of families who rule behind the apparent occupants of the seat of power. Contrary to our received perception of the event, the Christianisation of Rome was really the Romanisation of Christianity;

As to the Romans themselves, they had given birth to democracy as a ‘power’ when they threw out their king Tarquin and embraced the Republic, their ‘power’ often brutal and ruthless both before Christianisation and afterwards. They exterminated ancient Carthage, then a million or more of the Gauls (French Celts) and the Germanic tribes, and in an eerie echo showing the continuity of modern and ancient power, a US military thinker said during the Iraq War that the US “should do to the Iraqi city Fallujah what Rome did to Carthage” i.e. obliterate it. Modern examples of such brutality are all too common.

We can argue that these four forces give rise to subsequent manifestations such as the British Empire, Soviet Communism, Fascism and Nazism, Putin’s Russia, the declining US Empire, modern China, and so on.

They supply a grid that helps us to understand the origin of the current world order of banking, academia, politics, and brute power, and how it has arisen. As you can see ‘Islam’ apparently doesn’t ‘fit in’. For modern people it is the great question mark. Developing the implicit question here is then the fifth that must be pursued, for more than a few see the world order itself in epochal crisis.

The ‘where do want to get to?’ question must be answered with: the Madinan order, since that is a civic order of a strong but open family structure, neighbourliness, care for the poor and needy, and indeed love for them, upholding law and order and not least law and order in the marketplace excluding usury from it since that always acts injuriously to one party in the transaction and does damage to the wider society, respect for the wealthy and powerful, and more than anything great respect for knowledge and its people, and people of ma‘rifah – direct experiential knowledge of God. Madinan society always included People of the Book and quasi-People of the Book such as people of the Avesta and the people of the Vedas within its overview with a great deal of autonomy, as for example in the Osmanli millat system, and in Moghal India.

The ‘how do we get there?’ question must also be answered: by knowledge and education. Not by an exclusively ‘madrasa’ style education, nor a western mode, nor even a simplistic synthesis, but rather a genuine new approach that draws on the very best and highest from both, from primary up to tertiary level and beyond. And the core of that would be by a restoration of the guilds of the professions, trades and skills, and the creation of new ones tailored for the age where the young would both acquire their livelihoods but also worldview, moral upbringing and more, and those drawn to a more scholarly or even scientific approach would have a dedicated education in a range of subjects. And the fundamental requirement in both would be the inculcation and development of the noble qualities of character without which life in this world is meaningless, and because of the lack of which the world today is spinning out of control.

NOTE: it would be all too easy to frame things in a facile East versus West, or Islam versus the rest manner. Within the very heart of the global order itself we must seek for the ‘saving power’ that the poet Hölderlin intuited to be there “where danger is,” and it is hard to argue against the proposition that we are in a perpetually dangerous age and that the matter is urgent.

Our original four questions are quite open-ended, and although this has been a stab at answering them partially, it is not done to close the questions but on the contrary to open them up and suggest ways to approach them as a useful grid to understand the MFAS programmes, modules and lectures.