Get Ramadan Ready

Get Ramadan Ready

Keynote Speech by Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad

Cambridge Central Mosque

Opening Prayer

In the Forecourts of Ramadan

So we're in the kind of forecourts of Ramadan, or the changing rooms perhaps, before we take the plunge. Some of us have been fasting a bit, kind of out of respect for the fragrance of the month as it approaches. And the theme at CMC in our free public presentations this year is going to be the Qur'an.

Ramadan is the month of the Qur'an, the month in which it was revealed, the month in which we experience it most intensely, and inshallah, by the grace of Allah, most deeply. Islam is the religion of the Qur'an, it's the gift of the Qur'an, everything that is significant in doctrine, practice, everything is there.

What I'm going to try and explore this morning is that Ramadan is an opportunity to reflect on the way in which we relate to this gift, and the way in which perhaps we can set our situation right, in the face of the myriad challenges that face us as individuals, as communities, as Bani Adam sharing this planet, we're not in good shape.

The Qur'an as Furqan: The Differentiator

The Qur'an, ostensibly emerging in the 7th century, but in reality predating all of the centuries, is not just a set of propositions about the ideal life, how to live in harmony with human beings, with the Creator, with the natural order, with ourselves, but is also a Furqan.

We often hear this: the Qur'an, the Furqan. Furqan is one of the many names of the Qur'an. It gives itself that name: (تَبَارَكَ الَّذِي نَزَّلَ الْفُرْقَانَ - the differentiator), differentiating obviously truth from falsehood. There is one, there are not many. There is life everlasting, there is not a terminus to our

consciousness. There are universal values and ethics, not just stuff that human beings make up to suit themselves or to suit the perceived utility of a particular time.

The truth stands distinguished from falsehood, but the Furqan also in a kind of cosmic way, explaining where we stand in the enormous sweep of the history of our species and indicating ways in which we might restore ourselves in this age of myriad sicknesses.

The Mental Health Crisis of Modernity

One of the interesting paradoxes of the age is that although officially we all still believe in progress, not everybody is convinced that things are getting better. Look at the BBC report on their website last week, so dismal I could hardly get to the end of it. The mental health crisis in modern Britain, especially amongst young people, the 18 to 24 age group, particularly hard hit.

50 years ago it was the other way around. As you got older you felt kind of depressed, anxious, things maybe weren't working out for you. But now overwhelmingly it's the young, a time when there was once carefree friskiness and optimism and health. No longer is this so.

26% of men of that age group now have diagnosed mental health conditions in the UK, 41% of women.

What happened to all of the liberations that we were promised? We have more gadgets, we have more rights, maybe we have more options and possibilities, we can reinvent ourselves in radical new ways, but happiness seems to elude us. An age of plenty, an age of melancholy.

And if religion ultimately is the divine strategy to coax us out of our selfish ways that don't yield happiness, and into a form of life that does, the Qur'an, religion, sanctity, the engagement with the sacred is actually more relevant, more up to date, more therapeutically essential probably than ever before.

The Uniqueness of the Qur'an

So the Holy Qur'an is an unusual scripture in many ways, and if you're Muslim and you're brought up with it, you tend not to notice how unusual it is. As you would expect from the final revelation, which is gifted to mankind, it has a certain summative quality, and it always reminds us of what went before, and an affirmation of what went before.

(مُصَدِّقًا لِمَا بَيْنَ يَدَيْهِ - Confirming the truth of what came before it), the Torah and the Gospel, this is all familiar.

Not familiar if you're generally aware of the way in which sacred texts, particularly the prophetic absolute nature work, where generally everything before them is regarded as diabolical and

problematic. The Qur'an, in its prophetic absoluteness, is strikingly generous and inclusive of what went before.

And the Qur'an, in this affirmation, because it is the scripture of the Khatmiyah, the final sealing episode of human sacred history, emphasises the Abrahamic.

The Abrahamic Way: Al-Hanifiyyat al-Samha

This is what we mean by al-Hanifiyyat al-Samha, which the Holy Prophet ﷺ tells us he is sent with: the tolerant Abrahamic way. That's the best stab at a translation I can attempt at that. Samha does mean kind of generous, hospitable, inclusive, forgiving, and the Abrahamic way is the monotheism that yields that, rather than stands in the way of it.

This is, he says, the essence of what he has been sent with. And the stories of Sayyidina Ibrahim Khalilullah are really central. The key events of his life, the fact that the follower of truth is typically outcast, unconventional, unloved by establishments.

We can feel that nowadays as we consider the inequalities of today's world, what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening everywhere, and the establishments are entities from which we are necessarily alienated. That's just the Abrahamic method.

Sometimes you have to go out into the desert, leaving behind family, familiar relationship, your echo chamber, your comfort zone, and head out into the unknowable beyond.

The Price of Truth

This is part of human maturation and part of what it means to have a conscience and to be committed to the truth, to be ready to make every sacrifice in order not to compromise with Nimrod and the establishment of his imperial, profane, destructive world, to go out on your own.

There is a certain way in which being gharib is part of the life of the believer, even though we crave a comfort zone and affirmation and status and MBEs and whatever the establishment might console us with. Prophetic religion has never really been about that.

It's about being a troublemaker for the sake of truth, having in mind a better, more compassionate, more spiritual world. So there is that Abrahamic overturning and the sacrifices that lead to the two sacrifices of the two sons, Ismail and Ishaq, both sort of sacrificed in enormous and obviously extremely traumatic ways.

And for us, the Ishmaelite covenant, which is the meaning of the repair and the upliftment of the Haram in Mecca, which is the first house set up for mankind, and the Hajj, our culminating ritual, is a retracing of those steps.

Yes, you have to be uncomfortable. Yes, you have to wear stuff that you're not familiar with. You have to make all of those sacrifices because that's what it is to be an Abrahamic believer, I'm afraid.

If you think that it's just going to be beer and skittles, no, it's never like that. You will always receive fitna, tribulation, temptations, compromises, and the Abrahamic way is not to do that. It's unsettling to all of us.

The Sacrifices of Ibrahim

We all know that we all make compromises and it's not to be like that. Alone with your son in the desert with Zamzam and the temple. Hajj, a sacrifice on her own between Safa and Marwa.

How difficult that must have been. The mother in her absolute self-giving. These are all symbols of the giving, the sacrifice, the danger that is entailed by being faithful to the spiritual way, which is Abrahamic.

Beyond the Abrahamic: The Religion of Fitrah

But this khatmiya must go beyond that. So the religion is the religion of al-hanifiyat al-samha, but also the religion of fitra. There's a Qur'anic term frequently encompassed and we know that Islam is din al-fitra.

What does that mean? That means beyond the Abrahamic, behind it, in older ages. The religion of the khatmiya must seal everything and manifest and affirm and bring to the surface and purify everything that is good and noble and true and compassionate about the human condition. In other words, the idea of khilafah, the Adamic calling.

So this khatmiya is something that we intuit very strongly from the Qur'an. Part of the blessing of Ramadan is that we engage with the Qur'an more. If we know Arabic, or if we don't know Arabic, we can read translations and this becomes very salient and it is unlike earlier scriptures.

(مُصَدِّقًا لِمَا بَيْنَ يَدَيْهِ - Yes, affirming) (أهْلِ الْكِتَاب - A respectful term to use). It is an honorific.

But beyond that, the khatmiya of the Holy Prophet ﷺ is a subtle thing that reaches back into nameless ages, peoples and generations, into the primordial. This is an important part of what is distinctive about the religion and distinctive about its practices.

Fasting: Prescribed for Those Before Us

Fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those who came before you, that perhaps you might have weariness, consciousness of the divine. That's the effect that it has.

(الَّذِينَ مِن قَبْلِكُمْ - Those who were before you).

Indeed, we can see, not just the fasting in Christianity and in Judaism, Yom Kippur, etc. Of course they have it, they know its benefits, but before that, it's a very primordial human practice, ancient part of the Fitrah, to step back.

It's an intermittent fasting, not just because you've run out of the gazelle that the leader of the tribe's hunters has just killed and you're hungry for a bit, but because of a conscious determination to step back. So fasting is something that connects us to the anciently human and the primordial and therefore to the natural.

Fasting as a Mark of Human Khalifah

But makes us distinct from the other species because they don't fast unless they have to (صِيَامُ اخْتِيَارٍ وَصِيَامٌ اصْطِرَارٍ - We can choose to hold back), whereas no other order of the animal world can do that or needs to do that. This is part of our Khilafah status, it's part of what it is to have a sacred culture whose function precisely is to restore us to the Fitrah, restore us to our balanced place, the Mizan, in the order of creation.

So primordial peoples always have fasting, it seems to be universal. And if we look not just at their practices of fasting but at the other things that they do, and we're not talking here about demeaning stereotypical images of Stone Age man, kind of Fred Flintstone or whatever stereotype we have of how things were, but at the example of the peoples who still just about managed to survive or who have been documented by 19th, 20th century anthropologists.

Understanding Fitrah Through Ancient Peoples

Those who were intoxicated by race theories of various kinds, to see how they were as a kind of mirror of how humanity was in the tens of thousands of years before the Hanifia, before the Abrahamic, the ancient times. Then we start to see what we really mean by Islam as the religion of Fitrah, the primordial natural disposition.

Too many syllables there, but how else can we translate it? It's one of those, well all of the Qur'an's key terms don't work very well in European languages whose sensibilities and categories and priorities have been shaped by a completely different sacred and or secular tradition. It's always a problem translating them. Primordial natural disposition.

(فِطْرَ اللَّهِ الَّتِي فَطَرَ النَّاسَ عَلَيْهَا - the Qur'an says). Allah's Fitrah, which he created human beings upon. In other words, what's natural, what's indigenous, what's primordial within us?

The Example of the Navajo People

So look at those communities. Some of you may have been to Dar al-Islam in New Mexico, the famous North American Muslim retreat center. It's quite close to the Navajo reservation, a bit to the north. There's 400,000 of them.

It's the biggest of the Native American tribes, the red people. They have fasting, for sure. And we know what their form of being primordial or fitri is because they're still doing it, some of them.

McDonald's has made inroads. Evangelical Christianity has made inroads. Alcohol has certainly made inroads, but you can still see their thing.

And by visiting those places, you get a sense of why we call ourselves and why the Qur'an emphasizes this idea of fitrah. And something like the ancient, timeless magnificence of Ramadan really reconnects us with that.

The Navajo people, the Dine people, they do a lot of fasting. And the fasting tends to be connected to natural cycles. They have a big fast where there's an eclipse. They have a lot of other fasts.

Cyclical Time and the Lunar Calendar

And generally, their forms of worship, their acknowledgement through the human body of the natural forms of nature and their environment are cyclical. Lunar calendar, very important. Not a solar calendar, which doesn't coincide with what you can actually see and what's going on at night when you're hunting.

Lunar calendar. Qur'an is very emphatic that you don't mess with that. Ramadan, another way of reconnecting us to that.

The dawn chant. The Navajo elder gets up in his hut, they call them hogans, and sprinkles water over his family to get them up for the dawn chant. The blessing way.

The memorization. They don't sit there with books. It has to be memorized. And some of their ceremony is gone for seven days and it's memorized. And the chants and the stories of the origin of the world and their ancestors, very primordial.

When you see that, you get a clearer sense of what the Qur'an is doing when it says you are to be of the religion of the fitrah.

Reconnecting with Ancient Humanity

Reconnecting, for sure, affirming selectively with the way of the Bani Israel, the way of the people of

Isa, alayhi salam, for sure, alayhimus salam. But there's something about the religion of Islam that insists that we reconnect in some way with something much, much more ancient.

One of the positive things about being alive in the modern world is that we know how ancient our species is.

If you go to, interestingly, the land traditionally associated with the birthplace of Ibrahim, alayhi salam, the town of Urfa, Şanlıurfa in Turkey. Beautiful place. Suffered a bit in the earthquake. May Allah heal their sorrows.

You can pray in the little mosque, which is the cave where Ibrahim, Khalilullah, is said to have been born. You can see the place where Nimrod was supposed to have confined him in the fiery furnace, the catapult. It's all kind of there in the sacred geography of the city of Urfa. Lovely place to spend time.

Göbekli Tepe: The Oldest Settlement

A few miles away, there is an archaeological dig which for the last 20 years has been pretty clear that this is the oldest settlement ever. Göbekli Tepe. And they've only dug up, archaeologists, they tend to work with toothbrushes, so they take their time. 20 years, they've dug up 5% of the site.

They think 5% of it. And there's houses and there's streets and there's what may or may not have been temples. Remember, this is really ancient. They think probably about 10,000 BC. All the traditional theorists turned on their heads about the origin of civilization. This is almost three times as old as the pyramids.

This is really ancient. No writing. This is the pre-pottery Neolithic.

They don't even have a name for that culture or that civilization. They're still working it out. Difficult without writing, without inscriptions. There's animal things and leopards seem to have been a big thing in that culture, but they don't really know who they were or what they were or what their sacred way was.

But of course, people have deemed maybe 12,000 years ago before there were wheels, before there was agriculture, before there was anything, there were these people. And ritual, worship, relationship to sun and moon, cyclical existence.

Bani Adam: Really Ancient

We have to assume as Muslims, and this is not some kind of Eric von Daniken fantasy, you have to filter what you read on the internet about these ancient peoples because flying saucers appear sooner or later. I don't know why the Western mind likes to attribute everything interesting from the ancient world to aliens. No idea.

But if you look at the actual scientific facts and what they've dug up, clearly these are Bani Adam, human beings, with all of the concerns of normal human beings. Reproduction, fertility, ceremonial burials, grave goods, therefore presumably belief in life after death. Bani Adam, really old.

The Muslim Middle Ages didn't really think that humanity was that old. But now we know that they were, and presumably older still. That was a civilisation. They think there's 120 such settlements in that part of Turkey. Must have been magnificent in its way. Before wheels, before crops, different people, but Bani Adam.

So it's important for us theologically when we read the Quran to have in mind not just the Abrahamic Hanifia thing, which is very specifically the way in which we configure our understanding of monotheism, what Native Americans often refer to as the Great Spirit, but something older still.

The Qur'an's Khatmiya and Natural World

The Quran's Khatmiya, its proclamation of the end time revelation beyond which nothing will be necessary because it's all in this Jamia, this comprehensive book, incorporates that as well. And as we go through the Quran in Ramadan with this in mind, we see so many signs.

One of them is the emphasis on the natural world in the Quran.

There's nothing but that it hymns Allah's praise. Tasbih is the proclamation of Allah's otherness, his glorification, his tanzih.

The Quran is saying everything is doing that. Tell this to a Dine elder in New Mexico and they'll say, absolutely. Can't you hear it? The praise is everywhere. You just need to put your phone down and be still and be aware of the mountains and you hear it. It's the most fundamental obvious human truth. You hear it.

Tasbih has everything in its Lisan al-Hal.

Animals as Nations Like Ourselves

And then every animal.

There's no animal that crawls on the earth and no bird that flies with its two wings but that they are nations like yourselves. We have left nothing out of the book.

Maybe this is an indication that this is the necessity for the people of Islam to reconnect with that ancient thing. Which cynics will call animistic and shamanistic and primitive. Doesn't matter. Those are

not crude people. Those are very refined people.

Look at any 19th century photograph of some grinning anthropologist or cowboy or circus entrepreneur standing next to any elder from any Native American tribe and you will see the shifty smirkiness of the white face and the intense dignity and immobility of the Native American face.

Who's primitive here? Who is the primitive? Who is the savage? These are refined people. They just don't need wheels or something. This is normal humanity. For 99% of the history of Bani Adam that's how we have been. It's normal.

The Tafsir on Animals as Nations

So the Quran, this is in Surat Al-An'am is telling us and if you look at the tafsir you can see the ulama are kind of taken aback by this. What does it mean for the animals and the birds to be nations like yourselves? Well, really?

Fakhreddine Razi lists six possible interpretations. Other Mufassirun have others.

He says, well they're nations like ourselves because they have basic biotic functions like reproduction and eating and they die so they're like ourselves. That's one interpretation.

Another one is that they have senses like ourselves unlike, say, the plants.

Another one is that they have some kind of consciousness, temyiz.

But then the verse goes on to say then they will be resurrected to their Lord and that's when the traditional tafsir writers kind of almost blow a fuse. Animals resurrected?

Moctezilite sect, of course, have no problem with this because of their idea of awadh. Because God is just, every animal that suffered in the world has to be resurrected to receive a just compensation and then God is just.

We don't have that kind of mechanistic idea of sort of automated idea of salvation that kind of karmic view. It's not like that. The divine is free, not constrained. But what does it mean for them to be resurrected? What is this?

It's certainly not biblical. We're here beyond the Yehudwa and the Nasara into some different space where the biotic is central.

Contemplating Creation

Nations like yourselves then resurrected unto God. Well, you can read the tafsirs for yourself and see what they say but it's an interesting example of the radicalness of the Qur'an causing stress to the formal patterns of exoteric interpretation.

But in any case, we know as we read the text again and again references to the natural world and also the requirement to contemplate that. Not just the biotic, but the mineral, the celestial.

Truly in the way the heavens and the earth have been created and the succession of night and day are signs for people of another untranslatable Qur'anic term أُولِي الْأَلْبَابِ

It means like a seed, a core which has the sense of something that is within us that wants to be more than it currently is to flower, to fluoresce, whatever. It's quite a pregnant kind of word. There's something within us that craves signs and even the succession of night and day the cyclical, the world, everything is signs. The whole world is made of signs.

The Divine Action in Every Moment

And in our traditional Ash'ari Kalam we have this very radical view of everything being nothing other than the direct unmediated action of الرَّحْمٰنِ. Everything. There isn't really any cause and effect. Moments are not causally connected. In every moment he recreates and therefore is absolutely present in his purposes and in his names discernible to the أُولِي الْأَلْبَابِ

This has to be something that we pay attention to in Ramadan because it seems to be an axiom that the Qur'an is trying to tell us. This particular style of spiritual way which is the Islamic way which is the Muhammadan way, the way of the one who lived in pure nature primordially in المدينة المنورة

The Prophet and the Camel

The one who left many teachings about animals, the one who seems to communicate with them. The hadith in Abu Dawud which again kind of mystifies the commentators:

Holy Prophet in the green city of Madinah hears a commotion and he goes to it and a farmer's camel has kind of run amok foaming at the mouth, uncontrollable. Everybody is afraid to go into its field and to deal with it and he goes in puts his hand on the animal's head. The animal is still and he comes out again and he says this animal tells us that it's been overworked and overburdened.

Owner of the camel comes up in tears probably saying it's true يَا رَسُولَ اللهِ and so out of respect for the Holy Prophet and out of a sense of guilt he kind of puts that camel into a luxurious retirement, never has to do any work again, gets the best kind of fodder.

Many hadiths like this and that's just an outworking of the Qur'anic insistence: nations like yourselves.

The Primordial Man of Madinah

And so the man of Madinah, this primordial man of fitrah as well as the hanifiya, is telling us something about our relationship to the biotic world which is kind of something rather important and has to be an essential part of following the sunnah. This is part of what it means to be a true emulator of the chosen one ﷺ whose life is shaped through the ibadah by the rising and setting of the sun by the phases of the moon, primordial people in the midst of the modern uproar still connected. This is part of the Qur'an's gift.

The style of this final ummah is to be a kind of primordial style, a return to whatever is best and purest and monotheistic about the truly ancient unnamed peoples who were with other ummahs. That verse in particular: go to any Native American reservation and they'll smile. Of course, they're peoples like ourselves.

There's the people of the eagles and there's the people of... that's exactly how they see it. Again this is not really something you find in earlier monotheistic scriptures, not really. It's one of the khasa'is, one of the special features of Allah's book.

Green Theology and Authentic Practice

And of course in the contemporary green theological world of everybody caring about nature and buying aloe vera organic shampoo and that whole commercialized inevitably cult of pretending to be in harmony with nature, it's actually very beautiful. It's an authentic way of doing it, in other words a ritual, sacred way of doing it rather than just voting for the Green Party and then being like everybody else. It's an authentic enactment of the reality of our ineluctable belongingness to the magnificence of creation.

So what can we say, maybe a little bit more theoretically about what the Qur'an is inviting us to partake in, the banquet of creation that seems to make it distinctively Islamic?

Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy

Well there's the famous book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, which I was looking at recently, The Birth of Tragedy where he's reflecting in his usual polemical way about the decadence and mediocrity of bourgeois modernity and how do things go so terribly wrong, why are we so miserable?

And he looks back to ancient Athens where he sees in the theatre a kind of world affirming embrace of tragedy and humour and the sacred, all rolled together in a single cultural form. And then he says the problem with the West since then is that they've put those things apart and they can't relate them holistically. Life is fragmented and therefore our consciousness suffers. Melancholia ensues.

And he looks around for cultures that he thinks perhaps have taken us back to that embrace of the tragic and the comedic and the sacred and everything and the natural world. Can't really find it but he has this differentiation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which is all over western philosophy, feminism as well.

The Apollonian vs The Dionysian

These are the two sons of Zeus who are kind of opposite principles in their pagan mythology:

• The Apollonian is linear, rational, individualistic
• The Dionysian is not linear but is cyclical, is to do with nature, to do with reproduction, it's ecstatic

And he's looking for a culture that puts these two together and does not deny, as he thought bourgeois European Germanic culture in the 19th century had definitely done, preferring the Apollonian: the individualism of the Enlightenment, the idea of linear time leading to a shining future when there'll be steam engines everywhere and good dentists, whatever they thought they had to look forward to, the triumph of the master race. It was that age.

He wants to bring back the Dionysian. Not quite sure how. How can you embrace life with its pain as well as its amazingness in a single attitude?

Camille Paglia and the Chthonic Feminine

Some modern, I mentioned the feminist writers have worked with this, Camille Paglia actually definitely worth looking at. She has a lot of chatty videos on YouTube and you might think she's at the opposite pole of anything Muslims believe in: lesbian atheist, feminist, etc etc. She's really smart actually.

And she in one of her most famous books appropriates this Nietzschean dichotomy come diagnosis of the modern schizoid personality as a gendered thing:

• The Apollonian is the linear male, individual, thrusting, striving, triumphant, looking to the horizons
• The Dionysian is the chthonic (she prefers the word chthonic) - that is the earth based, feminine, cyclical, fertile, ecstatic

So her view is the view of the whole course of civilization as being the progressive fight of the male principle against the female.

You can imagine a lot of feminists who like to see things getting better, not being comfortable with this which is usually controversial in that world, but it's an interesting read. But she still doesn't know

how you really put those together and modernity doesn't.

The Triumph of the Linear in Modern Cities

The linear Apollonian thing in our world is so absolute that that's all you see now. Walk through modern cities. Nature has been banished. Maybe in the Lloyd's office there's a small sad looking aspidistra in a pot somewhere with a few cigarette ends in it. Maybe that's all that Dionysian, that nature is allowed to be. And probably health and safety are going to say take it away for some reason. A trip hazard or it's whatever.

And the triumph is of the steel, the glass, the concrete, the linear, the masculine. And what she's looking for is some way of reintegrating the biotic, the chaotic, the ecstatic.

I don't know if she'd look good in a hijab, but we tend to speculate. (اللّٰهُ أَكْبَر - Allahu Akbar), (اللّٰهُ أَكْبَر - Allahu Akbar), Neil Armstrong became Muslim, that kind of weak minded Muslim triumphalism.

But what's important is that these thinkers, whether it be the very discrepant figure of Nietzsche or the very discrepant feature of Camille Paglia, are aware of this dichotomy in our culture of the linear against the cyclical.

Reading the Qur'an as Alchemy

So when we read the Quran in this blessed month a kind of alchemy affects us and we read those verses and we have to challenge ourselves: are we really taking this seriously?

Again and again the Quran speaks about the natural world and about the cycles of the day and the night and Ramadan is cyclical and everything is cyclical. The sun and the moon determine our whole pattern of life in Ramadan. Especially we are forcibly reintegrated into normality.

But what is the state of our communities? If we're diagnosing modernity as the divorce between the linear and the cyclical, where do modern Muslims locate themselves?

Well I think it's fairly obvious because of modern influence and because of our frightened reflex against modern influence we tend very much to be linear, to be absolute, to be quite individualistic, to be progress oriented. It's complex for the ummah. The ummah does not have a single point of view.

But the ecstatic, the biotic, the generative, the erotic which was very major in the middle ages is kind of pushed out.

The Victorianizing of Islam

I saw a long list of things that you can't do in Ramadan on a Braille-V website the other day. Long list

and it's right. We do need to know that stuff. But nowhere on the list was the obvious reference that should be there to anything erotic. Shameful, don't mention it. They couldn't bring themselves to say certain things. If you do them in Ramadan break the fast. Toba toba, I think the expression is. Ooh that's strange.

Any medieval fiqh text will put that at the top of the list after eating kebab for lunch. Obviously it's an important part of the siam. So we've moved in a kind of puritanical Victorian direction and some historians even speak of the Victorianizing of Islam.

The American-Palestinian orientalist Joseph Massad has spoken about the Victorianizing of Islam, the kind of puritanical, tight-lipped very unecstatic type of religion which is normative today. And I'm not just talking about the Salafis against the rest, I'm talking about just about all of us: kind of tightness that has emerged.

The Ghazal Tradition and Erotic Verse

And then we look at our classical literature and we think why is it the ancient Arabian Qasida, this beautiful but pessimistic, melancholy kind of thing has at the beginning this erotic prelude, the Naseeb?

And when the Arabs go into Islam, that's the bit they conserve and it becomes Majnoon Layla and it becomes the whole world of amateur-y verse, the Ghazal which then goes into Persian and Turkish and Urdu and it's kind of the central theme. Layla Majnoon is the kind of key emblematic story of the religion and it's in Hafiz and Sana'i and Ibn Kamal and it's kind of repeated maybe too often but it clearly satisfied the Muslim soul.

Why have we got away from the cyclical, the chthonic, the feminine, the reproductive and moved towards this kind of linear glass tower thing? Why is it that so many Muslims increasingly find that kind of culture odd?

The Qawwali culture even, which is maybe one of the world's great examples of Dionysian religion. Everybody, they can't stop moving around when they hear that stuff. It's all ecstatic, Dionysian, chthonic religion kind of fading away. It's folkloric, it's bid'ah, it's not quite right.

We'd rather do something strict and narrow because that makes us feel better and less insecure. It's a reflex across the ummah. That's not how the ummah was in its glory days when it wasn't subject to western influence or western anything, but was itself.

The Dionysian Was What We Were

The Dionysian was what we are, was what we were: cyclical, nature-oriented, reproduction. It's there in the seerah, it's the story of the Ahlulbayt, it's axiomatic to us.

So something's gone wrong and maybe that's the kind of fundamental diagnosis for everything else that seems to be going wrong. The desire for the linear, for dichotomies, for "I'm right and everybody else is wrong" - all of these kind of new Victorian, Apollonian ideas are something that we need to get away from and back into the world of Ibn al-Farid.

There's a zillion verses like that, the ecstasy of quaffing the wine, it's Dionysus himself. The wine of divine love. The man of God is drunk without wine but it's the intoxication of that fundamental awareness that everything partakes in every instant in the divine beauty and the divine command.

How could you not be ecstatic when you see things as the Quran orders you to see them? And remember that in every moment he's doing something. He's doing everything. That's an ecstatic state. Sorrows, melancholia, fly away when you're in that state.

Everything is What Allah is Doing

But we're taking causality too seriously. There's a lot of... we're withdrawing from that Quranic insistence that we see everything as what Allah is doing. Allah is over all things powerful doesn't mean that he can do anything he wants. It means he does do everything. It is very clear in our Aqidah and clear throughout our literature.

In other words, everything is fine even though we may be pretty uncomfortable. Everything is what he is doing.

The Quran says, the people who are truly close to Allah, there is no fear upon them, neither do they grieve. Fear is about what might happen in the future, grief is about what happened in the past. They're in the moment, still. No fear, no grief.

So this idea of wilaya maybe we should expand the meaning of it to include the embrace and the honouring of the primordial: the way of the traditional sage in the rainforest or wherever who is completely in harmony with everything because he sees everything as being simply the latest beautiful movements of the waves on the surface of the sea. That's ecstatic, that's Dionysian.

Closing Prayer and Blessing

So inshallah in this month of Ramadan we'll start to think deeply about this book and about what the book is telling us about the nature of this religion and about what it's telling us about the tumult that we see around us. That doesn't mean that we don't strive for justice as the Holy Prophet did, but it does mean that we don't let the tumult go too deeply into our souls because the Muslim soul is aware that everything ultimately is what God is doing.

That's the ultimate healing, that's the only real therapy for the stress amongst young people and old people today: return to the idea of Islam as the religion of the khatmiya.

So may Allah give us a really great serene, profound, successful Ramadan. May he grant us spiritual breakthroughs. May he give us the joy that is part of Ramadan, the shukr that is part of Ramadan. Make us people who are bringing together these two principles: the linear and the cyclical and the perfect balance that is the sirat mustaqim of Islam.

May Allah accept all of your fasting, bring you safely and soundly with your families inshallah to a blessed Eid and many Eids thereafter.

Cambridge Central Mosque

Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad

Chair of the Cambridge Central Mosque

Keynote Speech - Get Ramadan Ready

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