18. Abdulhakim Murad — Liberalizmi Islam, popullizmi nacionalist

Talks again, a new tour characteristics. [Music] Publicity. [Music] Foreign beauty. You can start the election. Thank you very much. Firstly, my apologies for not being able to address you in the language of these parts. It's slightly embarrassing for me to come to a place that has such a deep and distinguished Islamic strand to its regional cultural identity when I come from a little cold island at the edge of Europe whose Islamic identity has hardly begun to form yet. But in our history, we do have a few individuals where you can see the way of the English and the way of the scripture kind of overlapping. One of my favorite characters in British Muslim history was a man called Thomas Keith. Thomas Keith was a Scottish soldier who found his way into Ottoman service in the time of Mehmed Ali Pasha and in the company of some Albanian soldiers. This was still the time of the genesis converts to Islam, and he became such a devout Muslim as well as a good soldier that the Ottomans appointed him and his Albanian entourage to be a governor, vali of the city of Medina. Great honor, of course, for the Scotsman. Another figure that comes to mind is, of course, Islam Abdullah, who in the 1890s became close to Sultan Abdul Hamid, stayed with him at the Elders Palace, and was sent by him on missions to this part of the world. You take the train after that time, went up to Mitrov. It's a very kind of slow puffing thing, and then he would return and tell Abdul Hamid of what he had seen amongst the people there. Were they loyal to the sultan? Were they loyal to the Committee of Union and Progress? What were their tensions? And he was very much trusted. He was known as the Sultan's Englishman. So we have a little bit of connection historically, but as I say, our story is relatively new. If you think about Britain and the shape of Europe and the shape of Eurasia, we're about the furthest point from the Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean Islamic core lands, and our history is generally one of second-hand reports. Foreign people ask, and in the context of this book, they wonder what point of view could possibly be advanced from someone who is from this rather thin heritage. The book seeks to be not so much a sociology of Muslims in Western Europe—there are thousands of books like that already—but rather a Muslim insider's account of what one's theology might look like if one wishes to be in what we take to be rather an interesting cultural situation in the contested overlap zone of what used to be Christendom and the new diaspora Islamic space. What does it mean? Is it indeed possible to be really British and to be really Muslim and to have, as it were, not just one set of cultural ancestors but two? Of course, we are not the first to have found ourselves enriched and challenged by such a bifurcation. The Jewish communities in Europe have long found their identity challenged and enriched by the fact that not only do they belong locally but they have that other story that leads back to the Temple of Solomon and David. Perhaps there is a close comparison. Though in any case, in our apprentice efforts to develop a specifically British Muslim theological apprehension of our situation, we've already moved through a number of stages. One stage, which in my conversation with some of you, Allama, earlier today, I gather has also been part of your learning journey, has been that those who come to our places from Middle Eastern countries seeking to advise us, to support us, to shape us generally bear with them a message that does not really suit the sensitivity and the precarity of our situation. One might, if one was feeling cynical, suggest that the model of Islam and its relationship to non-Islam has clearly failed spectacularly even in the core Arab lands. So what right do those people have to come to us, to new places where they hardly speak the language, to advise us on how our Islam should be? So we are, as it were, in a state of declaring independence, even though the ummah is a single body, and this is established in the hadith. We do not give to the activists of other parts of the world, whether they be from the Gulf or from Turkey or from Iran or from any country that finds it in its interest to project its soft power through the use of a religious discourse, the right to advise us or to shape us. We are very happy to drink tea with them and to listen to their stories and to read their books, but we nonetheless believe that our roots have to be local rather than elsewhere. So as we formulate this interesting task of developing a deep but relevant, islamically rooted but contextually applicable Islamic discourse in a country that, like most countries of Western Europe, has historically seen itself really as a paradigm of non-Islam, we are confronting a number of quite fundamental but, I think, very rewarding questions about the nature of the religion itself. What is it in our not-so-little-now diaspora community in the United Kingdom that can be enriched by an understanding not just of the outward forms of the religion, still less by folkloric or dietary customs of migrant communities, but rather by what one might take to be the essential vision, the spirit, the elan of the Quranic revelation? How does that voice, with a capital V, that sounded in the cave of Hira so very long ago, so very far away, directly impinge upon our needs and our sensibilities and our difficulties and our accomplishments 1444 or more years later in a different linguistic space, with different cultural roots, with an utterly different technical, mechanical, economic, political superstructure? How do we hear that voice that is faithful to that voice but in a way in which that voice assists rather than impedes our due belongingness to the modern European reality? So there's a certain amount of speculation in the book about the irony of our situation, which is that Europe historically constituted itself as the non-Islamic. China never decided that that's what it was. China decided that it was the non-Mongol and sometimes the non-Buddhist, but the Chinese imperial wisdom never defined being Chinese as being not Muslim, and they were indeed very significant Muslim communities within imperial China that assumed positions in the mandarinate, significant positions in the Chinese state in a way that was never possible in Western Europe. Europe, however, invented itself following the early Arab conquest as that last little bit of the Greco-Roman Hellenistic Christianized world that had not been flooded, inundated by this extraordinary and in many places very popular accession to the Ishmaelite charism. Everywhere you go in Europe, you find local narratives, local stories that define the foundation of the nation as a struggle against Muslims: Portuguese, the Spanish, the Sicilians, the Serbs, the Greeks, the Russians. Everywhere where there is a liminal relationship between Europe and the then dominant civilization of Islam, there is a narrative of conflict and of the definition of the Muslim as the dark other, the terrible Saracen, the dark-skinned, more the epitome of everything that is unlike ourselves. And yet those places whose identity was historically begun with those stories, stories which have only been muted and not abolished by secularization and the rational discourses of the Enlightenment, are nonetheless now hosts to minority communities, the largest of which is in every case in Western Europe loyal to, in some sense, the narrative of Islam. This presents both Islam and what's left of European identity with some very interesting questions. To what extent can one truly be Muslim in Spain, for instance? I spoke at a mosque in Madrid last year where these issues are very raw. Franco, until 1975, did not allow the presence of Islam in Spain. Not a single mosque could operate under his National Catholicism. Spanish identity was Catholic identity. It was the Reconquista. It was the Inquisition. It was Santiago, the patron saint of Spain. His official name is Saint James the Muslim killer, Santiago Matamoros. I went into the chur...

a place that has such a deep and distinguished Islamic strand to its Regional cultural identity when I come from a little cold Island at the edge of Europe whose Islamic identity has hardly begun to form yet but in our history we do have a few

individuals where you can see the way of the English and the way of the the scriptare kind of overlapping one of my favorite characters in British Muslim history was a man called Thomas Keith Thomas Keith was a Scottish Soldier

who found his way into ottoman service in the time of mehmed Ali Pasha and in the company of some Albanian soldiers this was still the time of the Genesis converts to Islam and become such a devout Muslim as well

as a good soldier that the Ottomans appoint him and his Albanian Entourage to be a governor Valley of the city of of Medina great honor of course for the Scotsman another figure that comes to mind is of course uh

Islam Abdullah who in the 1890s became close to Sultan Abdul Hamid to stay with him at the elders Palace and was sent by him on missions to this part of the world you take the train after that time went up to mitrov it's a

very kind of slow puffing thing and then he would return and tell Abdul Hamid of what he had seen amongst the people there were they loyal to the sultan were they loyal to the Committee of Union and progress what were their tensions and he

was very much trusted he was known as the Sultan's Englishman so we have a little bit of connection historically but as I say our story is relatively new if you think about Britain and the shape of Europe and the shape of Eurasia we're

about the furthest point from the Mediterranean Eastern Mediterranean Islamic core lands and our history is generally one of second-hand reports foreign people ask and in the context of this book they wonder what point of view could possibly be Advanced from someone

who is from this rather thin heritage the book seeks to be not so much a sociology of Muslims in Western Europe there are thousands of books like that already but rather a Muslim Insider's account of what one's theology might look like if

one wishes to be in what we take to be rather an interesting cultural situation in the contested overlap zone of what used to be Christendom and the new diaspora Islamic space what does it mean is it indeed possible

to be really British and to be really Muslim and to have as it were not just one set of cultural ancestors but two of course we are not the first to have found ourselves enriched and challenged by such a bifurcation

the Jewish communities in Europe have long found their identity challenged and enriched by the fact that not only do they belong locally but they have that other story that leads back to the Temple of Solomon and David perhaps there is a close comparison

though in any case in our Apprentice efforts to develop a specifically British Muslim theological apprehension of our situation we've already moved through a number of stages on stage which in my conversation with some of you Allama earlier today I

gather has also been part of your Learning Journey has been that those who come to our places from Middle Eastern countries seeking to advise us to support us to shape us generally bear with them a message that does not really suit the

sensitivity and the precarity of our situation on might if one was feeling cynical suggest that the model of Islam and its relationship to non-islam has clearly failed spectacularly even in the core Arab lands so what right do those people have to

come to us to new places where they hardly speak the language to advise us on how our Islam should be so we are as it were in a state of declaring independence even though the ummah is a single body

and this is established in the Hadith we do not give to the activists of other parts of the world whether they be from the Gulf or from turkey or from Iran or from any country that finds it in its

interest to project its soft power through the use of a religious discourse the right to advise us or to shape us we are very happy to drink tea with them and to listen to their stories and to read their books but we nonetheless

believe that Our Roots have to be local rather than elsewhere so as we formulate this interesting task of developing a deep but relevant islamically rooted but contextually applicable Islamic discourse in a country that like most countries of Western Europe has historically seen

itself really as a paradigm of non-islam we are confronting a number of quite fundamental but I think very rewarding questions about the nature of the religion itself what is it in our not so little now diaspora community in the United Kingdom

that can be enriched by an understanding not just of the outward forms of the religion still less by folkloric or dietary customs of Migrant communities but rather by what one might take to be the essential Vision the spirit the Elon

of the quranic revelation how does that voice with a capital V that sounded in the cave of Hera so very long ago so very far away directly impinge upon our needs and our sensibilities and our difficulties and our accomplishments

1444 or more years later in a different linguistic space with different cultural routes with an utterly different technical mechanical economic political superstructure how do we hear that voice that is faithful to that voice but a way in which that voice assists

rather than impedes our due belongingness to the modern European reality so there's a certain amount of speculation in the book about the irony of our situation which is that Europe historically constituted itself as the non-islamic China never decided that that's what it

was China decided that it was the non-mongle and sometimes the non-buddest but the Chinese Imperial wisdom never defined being Chinese as being not Muslim and they were indeed very significant Muslim communities within Imperial China that assumed positions in the mandarinate significant

positions in the Chinese state in a way that was never possible in Western Europe Europe however invented itself following the early Arab Conquest as that last little bit of the Greco-Roman Hellenistic christianized world that had not been flooded inundated by this

extraordinary and in many places uh very popular accession to the ishmaelite charism everywhere you go in Europe you find local narratives local stories that Define the foundation of the nation as a struggle against Muslims Portuguese the Spanish the Sicilians the

serbs the Greeks the Russians everywhere where there is a liminal relationship between Europe and the then dominant civilization of Islam there is a narrative of conflict and of the definition of the Muslim as the dark other the terrible saracen the dark-skinned

more the epitome of everything that is unlike ourselves and yet those places whose identity was historically begun with those stories stories which have only been muted and not abolished by secularization and the rational discourses of the Enlightenment are nonetheless now hosts to minority

communities the largest of which is in every case in Western Europe loyal to in some sense The Narrative of Islam this presents both Islam and what's left of European identity with some very interesting questions to what extent can one truly be Muslim in Spanish for

instance I spoke at a mosque in Madrid last year where these issues are very raw Franco until 1975 did not allow the presence of Islam in Spain not a single mosque could operate under his National Catholicism Spanish identity was Catholic identity

it was the Reconquista it was the Inquisition it was Santiago the patron saint of Spain His official name is Saint James the Muslim killer Santiago Matamoros I went into the Church of the Spanish Armed Forces and there indeed is the image

it's mythological but it was key for the Reconquista and for Spanish identity of Saint James with a very white face sitting in his shining armor on a horse cutting the head off a black-faced man with a turban he is the patron saint of Spain so what

does it mean to be a Spanish Muslim when Spanish identity has been constructed with all the violence and the cruelty and the dichotomizing power of the medieval Church the Inquisition the alto dafe what does it mean to be Spanish and

Muslim in that context a friend of mine is or was the mayor of a small town in southern Spain he converted to Islam however as part of his mayoral duties he was required to lead the annual profession procession

to a local Catholic shrine to give thanks to the liberation of the towns from the Muslims the town had been a Muslim town the entire population was massacred the Jewish population has massacred and they celebrate this event every year and the

now Muslim al-qaede or mayor of the Town had to lead the procession that celebrated the ethnic cleansing of his town that's a rather intense version of something that many Western European Muslims whether they're of Migrant or convert background have to contend with

Europe has this dark side this dark history which in many cases is a light sleeper simmering just beneath the surface ready to break surface again when economic or political circumstances determine that migrants and ethnic difference becomes a convenient

lightning rod for National discontent so it's a very interesting question more interesting I feel than the Muslim Chinese relation the Muslim African relation even the Muslim American relation one way of resolving this it seems to me is by

considering the essence of what we mean by the Islamic ishmaelite dispensation back before all of those often distracting alienating stories of the manlooks and the Moguls and the Ottomans and the saracens and the Crusades back beyond all of that to the

Irreplaceable pristine essence the time of the Iqra the 23 years of the Sierra what do we find here unfolding well what we find is not the dark other the one that inspires The Cry of Santiago Matamoros and James the Muslim

killer the one that inspires Russian nationalists as they remember the battle of kulikova Field the sense of the other that inspires Serbian nationalists when they think of Kosovo polia we find something else something not contaminated by bad memories and misconduct on both sides

but rather a message of a man who was bringing something better hope unity and an abrahamic tradition not something radically alien what is coming to Europe now and what Europe historically fought with such excruciating violence is not an alien principle but is an

adjustment and as we Muslims would consider it a purification and a correction of what is already present had the largest community in Europe being composed of Believers in a multiplicity of gods or in dualism or in Satanism or in atheism

the matter would have been much more difficult instead we have a more subtle engagement between two rather tired molotheistic communities with difficult memories this helps because the Quran with all of its prophetic absolutism and it's called for justice and it's

called for reparation it's nonetheless not a dichotomizing document it does not reproduce the idea of a chosen people it does not propose an ethnocentrism of any kind its insistence is that every nation has been sent a guide Muslims when they went to India were

busy looking for evidence that at the root of the Apparently strange exotic humid pluriform religion of Hinduism there was a point of origin which was monotheistic this is alburoni more than a thousand years ago goes to India after that

intellectual learned Sanskrit engages with the pundits finds out for himself what this Hindu brahmanical thing is about and he said well they don't believe in Resurrection but they do believe in the one they can't be considered to be like the

mushrikeen of Croatian it's different and when the Muslims were ruling in India they didn't regard the Hindus as you couldn't marry them eat their meat and so forth but they were at nadima they were a protected community so what we find with the quranic

dispensation is a series of gradations rather than an absolute dichotomizing of the right and the wrong unfortunately in times of confusion and ignorance and fear people sometimes reach for very dichotomizing interpretations of their tradition it is them and us

light and darkness the saved and the unsaved a means of consoling oneself when faced with apparently insuperable challenges this is not really the quranic message the predominant religion of Western Europe for the most part to this day are

spoken of with guarded respect clergy or spoken of with guarded respect we are not reciprocating their absolute rejection of our ishmaelite sarasenic principle with a rejection of Our Own but this surely is one explanation of the fact why

when Islam came to Prevail politically in some corners and edges of the continent minorities continue to exist who can forget the fact that the greatest flourishing of medieval Judaism was not in Christian Europe but was in Muslim Europe in Spain

who can deny the fact that the greatest refuge for the carriact Jews was in Muslim Crimea who can deny the fact that the majority of popular only city in the world with the majority Jewish population before 1948 was Salonika selenic some of

you may be familiar with Mark mazawa's book about the history of Salonika an extraordinary phenomenon not so far from the ottoman Metropolis but nonetheless one where the century after Century different types of Sephardic Jews were able to flourish and become a stable and

successful Metropolitan Community only 30 years after the end of Ottoman rule when Darcy and Pasha surrendered the city to the Greeks they only lasted another 30 years before they went to Auschwitz so there is a lesson in this where

Muslims have prevailed we cannot say that there has usually been equality in the modern Enlightenment Civic sense but there has certainly been tolerance and a form of conviviality that are very segmented modern European and also American societies with their very deep

uh divisions of race and class might well find something to learn from so as the Muslims moved to Western Europe they come with a Heritage of an experience of diversity some but they come to live amongst populations whose experience of

diversity is very recent this is the irony Muslims are assumed to be totalitarian fundamentalists coming from barbarous lands who have to be educated in the way they should live in pluralistic Western democracies but the deeper historical reality is

that Muslims are coming from pluralistic lands to places which in the case of Spain until 1975 there was no pluralism at all and in other cases in Europe particularly Central Europe and Eastern Europe during the catastrophic ideological experiments of the mid-20th

century again the possibility of minority existence was ruled out Prima facial so there's an imbalance there and a misunderstanding I feel on both sides and this is one of the paradoxes that I try to tease out in the book

another aspect of this has to be to look more carefully at or perhaps to hear because in Revelation there is a musicality as well as a formal discursive statement what is the mood music of early Islam claiming to be not just the corrector

of earlier Traditions but the protector of earlier traditions in 1912 there's an interesting reportage by a French journalist who went to mount Athos the famous argios auros the holiest part of Greece holiest part of Orthodoxy apart from their corner of the

Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and this journalist found the Turkish governor of Athos and because Athos has always forbidden the presence of women it was not a very popular posting for the ottoman civil service because you couldn't take your

family so this guy with the tarabosh was sitting there in his office carrier which is the village and not Athos everybody there is is a monk only males still allowed and he's smoking his nargila his shisha and is waiting to be arrested by the

Greeks and he talks to this French journalist and he says look at what you did to your priests and your monks and your monasteries as a result of your various religious turbulences and as a result of the French Revolution

and as a result of Napoleon sacking and closing so many of the monasteries stealing the communion plate imprisoning the pope carting him off to Notre Dame so that he could watch Napoleon Crown himself and what have we done to these

monasteries here on Mount Athos in many ways they experience their Golden Age detached from the Party politics of the Byzantine Court they flourished they grew new monasteries were founded on Athos during the five centuries of Ottoman rule as to his credit listen to this with

respect it's interesting to note that shortly afterwards the secular government in Greece wanted to turn those monasteries into casinos Ali of man would never have done that the point is not to justify or to airbrush uh the falls out of the past

but merely to note that Muslims in Europe can look back to episodes in their history and tendencies in their recurrent historical religious practices which are worthy of respect and which compare very favorably when set beside the dark history of so much of Europe

so rehearsing these things is a helpful way of redressing certain European triumphalist discourses of the Civilized white European and the dangerous migrant swimming the sea bringing drugs or bringing bombs hell-bent on subverting a pure liberal Christendom the historical reality is far more

complex than that and people from say the ottoman Balkans or from the subcontinent or other places while not inheritors of an Immaculate tradition history is always a dirty business nonetheless uh have the right not to accept the negative stereotypes which are being

heaped upon them by the Western press or at the moment by the British press considering the 500 or so often quite desperate refugees Asylum Seekers economic migrants who are trying to cross in often very dangerous circumstances the channel trying to

improve themselves trying to escape Wars the anger against those people as if they were guilty of some criminal offense rather than simply following the logic of capitalism which is that neighbor markets must be mobile and human beings should be encouraged to

better themselves economically the discourse has become very unfair and potentially lurching back to those very ancient European images of the dark other the sea might without the saracen the terrible Turk but again to revert to the image of

pristine Islam not in the sense that some kind of fundamentalism is possible so we can just ignore the story of the ummah and get back to the books with which the religion was founded although all I might know that that is

not possible because the libraries are there the olama have not wasted their time as down the Muslim centuries they have considered the way in which the Quran and the Sunnah can most appropriately and Faithfully be interpreted confronting radically new situations

it is heirs to that complex ongoing silsila or tradition of interpretation in ichti had that we are to find our present coordinates rather than jumping into a time machine and imagined that we can replicate first century Medina on the streets of

Frankfurt or Birmingham that never works and it is not a faithful understanding of the sunla or other or so we have this extraordinary lineage and as a measure of our respect for the authenticity of that transmission we regard

the intactness of our practices this again becomes a challenge for Europe we show visitors around a mosque in Cambridge for instance and if they are from religious communities they always have a history of how their worship has been changed there is church

councils there is papal degrees just two years ago Pope Francis issued his tragedy on this custodes in which he massively restricted the use of the Latin Mass which had been used by the church for centuries and they are used to the forms of

religion always changing and shifting they come to a mosque and on the one hand they're aware that Islam doesn't have a Vatican it's very decentralized localized it's more like well the Christians would call a free church it's not pyramidal in its

ecclesial hierarchy and then they find that what we do in the mosque is what we do in the other mosques of Cambridge and what is done in every other mosque in the United Kingdom and in just about every other of the 10

million or so mosques around the world and they are taken aback by this hmm how is it possible in the absence of a Vatican for Muslims to be praying and to be fasting and the other things in the same

way everywhere consistently with a very few marginal exceptions that only prove the rule how is that possible the church hierarchies have struggled mightily to try and bring together the ecclesial community in liturgical uniformity often not successfully if you look at

what's happening in Catholic churches in Germany at the moment more or less an open Defiance of instructions from Rome and that Muslims have no room they are not organized religion in the Christian sense more like disorganized religion I

suspect and yet the Five Pillars are almost uniformly practiced everywhere with small differences that you need almost a microscope to tell there's a shadow and there's a small differences this is very extraordinary to them and the reason I'm citing this apparently

miraculous preservation of our Primal forms is because it indicates that we should have confidence in the ulama as Century after Century after Century they have Faithfully through the ijaza system handed on the correct interpretation of the tradition so this is one of the first things that

we realize when we try to figure out how to survive in these historically unstable Western European worlds where there is the discourse of equality Freedom human rights coming from the enlightenment but there's also the worst genocides and massacres and

holocausts in human history it's a uncomfortable place to be to recognize that the basis for our thinking has to be not the time machine but rather the accumulated wisdom of the ummah down the centuries not that we have to replicate the

ottoman or the mobile fatwas of hundreds of years ago but that their methods which have stood the test of time should be the basis for our methods this is what we mean when we refer to traditional Islam tradition in the sense

of traditio handing on that you Faithfully maintain the tradition that Millions upon millions of ulama have studied and investigated and argued over and handed On to the Next Generation rather than attempting to work it all out for yourself

but what we find in this discursive tradition is tremendous Multiplicity and that's another of the points that I wanted to make in the book one of The Temptations of modern religion is to see the confusion and the Uproar

of the modern world and the proliferation of the Apparently deadly threats that it places in the way of religion all religions and in a state of anxiety to retreat into a simple monomaniac totalitarian reading of the religion you can understand why people want to

think that there is only one true Islam and everything else is wrong mistaken these are right these are wrong my own Sheikh is right and they spend much of their lives arguing against other traditions of ichthy had even though those are almost invariably

within the broad circle of what classical traditional Sunni Islam regarded as the broad circle of Truth perhaps some of you are familiar with Thomas Bauer the German historian who published a book some 10 years ago called the culture of ambiguity

a book which has been rendered from German into English by Columbia University press quite recently Thomas Bauer as a historian he's not really trying to Champion true Islam he's just describing what he finds in the history and the texts

pre-modern Islam as a sea of discussions and interpretations and madahib and masharib and points of view and he notes how consistently the olama until really almost the end of the Ottoman period of the Mogul period we're very happy with what he calls a

culture of ambiguity that's his title for the book and anybody who's studied the usual of the religion will know certainly that it's very difficult to get unanimity on anything and that serious passionately committed to the Quran and the Hadith will always reach different

opinions on very many subjects it's an inevitability and he finds the ummah or its learned Guardians very comfortable with this until he says the middle of the 19th century in the subcontinent The Watershed is 1857 and the Rebellion against the

British and the development of new more codified Islamic schools reacting to that and in the Ottoman Empire you have the tonsil met the magella and attempts to create a single unified reading of hanafi mataridi Islam that was to be the

official code of the khilafa of the empire but in more recent years the insistence amongst Muslims unschooled in the usual to find only one correct interpretation of the book and the Sunnah and he I suppose laments this this loss of a traditional Urban culture

of respect for difference and he points to what the West believes is not the case and is not possible within the certainties of prophetic religion which is pre-modern Islam's comfortableness with a plurality of views different HD herds different factors

different tariqas different schools of understanding the Divine Essence and the Divine attributes that was normative Islam that was the Islam of the alamat now giving way to something totalizing totalitarian because of people's fear and because also the certain

westernization which comes from the enlightenment or possibly from a certain type of authoritarian Christianity that seeks a single correct interpretation for everything so it's worth reading he's a good historian so in the context of our attempt to evolve a theological meta-historical

understanding of where we stand in these hitherto dangerous polities of Western Europe we are aware that we are heirs not to a single narrative but to a plurality of different HD herds just last week in Cambridge I was

sharing with my non-muslim students some passages from was now always commentary on the Hadith collection of Muslim ibno head Church and we found a Hadith in which noahi offers 21 different possible interpretations students were Amazed by this and they

said but don't they want to know what's right very Western kind of mentality or possibly a certain authoritarian ecclesial understanding of authority here I said no these classical Islamic texts they might give you a probabilistic or a preferred View

um but they will always in most cases respect the other views as well this was a revelation to them nurtured on Headline accounts of Muslims dichotomizing everyone the religion of fundamentalism and totalitarian rule it was a good lesson for them

so the starting point for our evolution of a theologically rooted discussion about our identity in Europe and the basis for any HD head based considerations of how we operate practically in Europe has to be this generous fertile polychrome ground of Muslim plurality

rather than a totalitarian singular interpretation another thing that I write about in the book is and it's the subject of one particular chapter is the apparent diminution and this is related to the question of the loss of the culture of ambiguity of the historic

Muslim reluctance to follow narrower interpretations and if you've had the occasion to live with an entirely pre-modern pre-reformed Muslim scholar and it's not so easy nowadays you have to go to the further dustier Oasis of Mauritania or to small towns in Yemen or villages in

Sumatra to find people who are completely unreformed and give you the pre-modern view what do you find with those people is that in their public teaching and in the hospitality to their guests and their students their assumption is always firstly give

everybody the benefit of the doubt and secondly give people the easiest interpretation that is viable according to the Sharia and yet if you ask them what ask their families what they do in their own time they are the furthest of people from

what is historically called the Rojas they're the ones who will pray at night they're the ones who don't eat very much they're the ones who are always studying they're the ones who you know will pray always at the beginning of the time it

may not be very visible but that consistently has been my experience of the traditional Muslim scholar very gentle accommodating forgiving with others not tolerating the criticism of others in his medulis but in his private life usually following the more difficult and

tough and rigorous azima to use the shariato interpretations this can be quite inspiring however there is a tendency today for Muslims again because of an ignorance of the usul and because of a certain psychological anxiety to assume that the narrower

interpretation is always likely to be the more correct interpretation that the azima is the ahwats again to use the classical term and when confronted with the evidence of classical Islamic texts including those from the Hadith that indicate the exact

opposite a Hadith says in Arabic isn't the holy prophet was never given the choice between two things but that he chose the easier as long as it entails no sin again some of our zealous Brethren fidget uncomfortably weren't of this

when they told the Hadith what is the sound Hadith give people good news and do not repel them make things easier and do not make things difficult again some of our less educated Brethren fidget and look uncomfortable we find this with some members of our

convert community in England who haven't studied or saw who tend to assume that whatever is more difficult whatever is more strict must be more authentic and must be more pleasing to God and it can sometimes take years for

them to understand the wisdom and the authenticity of the classical View so I've invented a term in the book I have no idea whether it will catch on probably not to replace the conventional and rather subjective category of extremism

which we sometimes render as well in Arabic and traditional Islamic languages with the idea of ten fear because extremism is a very relative term one man's extremist is another man's moderate it all depends on your point of view

but tanfir is objectively measurable you can see whether people when they hear your hutpa want to hear more and want to come closer to you or whether they're desperate to head for the exit as soon as the hotba is over

what I call the flamethrower approach to giving a hotba you stand on the Min bar with your flamethrower and you roast the congregation with dire threats and terrifying warnings against those who do not accept the narrowest of all possible

interpretations and perhaps those who are still sane at the end of the khutbah they say masha'allah that was a really strong but most human beings it may only come to the mosque occasionally who have been roasted by this voice are unlikely

to come back because we have read some of your books and the the topic that we are interested mostly is for liberalism and its relation with Islam because on the your essay you have said that the liberal interest from

Christ in Europe and uh and now we would like how can you explain this complex relationship in Europe and in balcony all the Muslim sphere with the liberalism and with the popular nationalists right Wings in in Europe as you have

explained in your book so well the Point of Departure there would be what I was just saying about the Muslim Shady are uh strategy when considering what form of Islam we regard as being most appropriate or viable in these rather

strange environments and that it should be evident that tanfir driving people away following the strictest interpretation is less likely than a softer more authentic interpretation to to allow us to continue to be tolerated and not to be subject to ramping up of

anti-muslim attitudes and laws usually whether it's anti-muslim rhetoric in Europe it is because of Muslim extremism either in Europe or somewhere else 90 of the time it is those manifestations that people will point to and we need to hold those

brothers and sisters to account uh for the ugly image the ten Fury image if you like that they have given of the religion because the religion is a missionary religion we're trying to bring people to the truth rather than drive them away with

our anger and our narrowness so in the context of the liberal realities in Europe which have replaced in some cases intensely totalitarian realities Spain flipped very rapidly following the death of Franco in 1975 and has become one of the world's most liberal

countries the Netherlands similarly we find a number of phenomena which nobody had really expected to do with what one might term coercive liberalism legal liberalism of the human or the lockian type has very much acted in the interest of the entrenchment of Muslim

communities that is to say human beings should be free to live as they choose as long as they are not directly obstructing the right of others to live as they choose but a new type of liberalism seems to be

gaining ground emerging particularly or ultimately I think from some of the American universities which holds that the consequences of liberalism are so important that they are to be considered truths to which all members of society are required to comply

so there is a shift now away from classical human liberalism in the direction of this coercive liberalism and not just Muslims but other religious communities conservative people generally have found this rather bewildering and rather alienating for a while it looked as if the

anti-clerical or anti-religious militancy following the Enlightenment and particularly the French Revolution was calming down but now it seems that we are going back to the time of the Jazz of the Jacobins condos and those fanatic opponents of religion

those who turned Notre Dame into a cathedral a temple of reason and who guillotined the Bishops to humiliated the pope it seems that it's a type of secular idea of liberte which is against religion rather than assuming that human

beings if they are harmless have the right to occupy a religious module within Society so this new coercive liberalism has been the subject of quite a few studies but it's quite difficult to investigate or to speak about because

of the sometimes inquisitorial atmosphere in a number of the universities particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world I think it's less bad in France less bad in Germany but it has become quite quite intense so the question I suppose and this is uh

explicitly what I ask in the book is can liberalism tolerate anything other than itself in other words can it only tolerate that which it already agrees with can there be a space in Liberal Society or a liberal world order in which people

still have the right consensually to opt out and to do things that liberal Elites consider to be not liberal well it's not a new argument John Rawls in his book The Law of Nations which is one of the kind of founding texts of

modern liberal political Theory proposes what he calls his kazanistan sort of thought experiment what he'd like to see is a free world of consensual self-governing peoples who adopt his human liberalism allowing people to be themselves as long as it's

not disruptive but then he asks the question of what happens to a community that consensually decides not to be that not to be liberal to adopt certain views about the family about the elderly about children that many liberals find problematic at

his conclusion is that such a module should be allowed to exist otherwise liberalism becomes just another coercive ideology and particularly becomes a colonial ideology because its roots are in Europe and Paris and koenigsberg specifically they aren't elsewhere to the danger of liberalism becoming

just another imperialism is one of the reasons why Rawls pulls back from the idea that liberalism should somehow be required of all peoples on Earth so here we find ourselves even the Muslims didn't move to the west to go

anywhere near the cultural Wars at the center of some of the large battles that are taking place that is more or less divided the United States for instance the interior the trumpian interior from the Democratic coasts that has divided

the French political establishment down the middle and that is an issue for which Muslims are a kind of symbolic case or lightning rod but which is much more widely impactful and in which Catholics in particular Orthodox Jews and others who

choose freely to opt out of certain consequences of what they take to be radical individualism are now in the firing line so if you identify Western Europe with liberalism which a lot of Europeans of a conservative event would not wish to do

then there is an incipient problem uh uh and it's probably true that most Muslim theologians have not really grappled with this to what extent is there to be a forced conversion to beliefs that we have always historically considered to be

unacceptable to what extent can you fully operate as an enfranchised member of the political establishment of the academic establishment if some of your beliefs are regarded as incorrect by the consensus of that establishment and on this we have not yet reached a consensus but

I think that we have the more difficult arguments still to come um we saw it in the recent Scottish elections we see it in the London elections across Europe really Muslims are participating as never before in the political process

but are increasingly interrogated about whether they comply with European liberal social doctrines I mentioned in the book The Case of Rocco butillione very distinguished Italian Catholic constitutional lawyer who has proposed as a European commissioner that was actually vetoed

because he supports the traditional catholic view on sexuality that's an example not of a Muslim being disenfranchised from high political office but of a Catholic being disenfranchised and he was hailed by many conservatives as a kind of martyr

and a proof that Europe is once again moving in a totalitarian Direction this is an argument which is still unfolding perhaps the pendulum will swing back it's by no means clear what the conclusion will be but at the moment a kind of colonial

liberalism is posing one of the most significant challenges to a successful Muslim coexistence in Europe but at some point I think there is going to have to be a recognition by secular Elites that religion will not go away

the demographic changes which have been unfolding in Europe for the past 40 years show no sign of diminishing the United Kingdom according to the 2021 census Muslims increase in number by 40 percent every 10 years the office of national statistics in

London not an organization usually given to sort of colorful exaggeration predicts that the Muslim population will reach about 30 percent of the British population by the middle of the 20th century something similar may be expected in other European countries

so it is clear that we're moving towards an area where the leadership of the national communities and also religious communities have to trade with Extreme Caution and care again it's a case for us not being 10 Furies not repelling people through

proudly uh platforming our arrogant difference it's an opportunity for nuance for dialogue for engagement for the creation of genuine human bonds and of reminding the European mainstream that our presence is economically vital to the ongoing economic performance of Europe

Germany recognizes that it needs a million young immigrants every year if the Aging of its population is not going to make the German economy such a miracle after the second world war lag behind and become extinguished a million

every year in a country of 80 million people the figure is roughly the same for most Western European societies so we need to tread here with extreme core care the Cambridge Muslim college with which I'm associated in Cambridge is precisely

in the business of trying to create a Muslim leadership that can calm down the ignorant Hot Head voices that want to shout and shout and Shout until finally they're expelled uh and to recognize that we need tacier that we need easy photos for people and

that this is more authentic than narrow-mindedness and on the other hand we also need a leadership that can assuage the fears sometimes understandable fears of national communities that feel that their identity is being threatened by this ever-expanding module of internal

difference One Way Forward of course is to remind them that French identity Dutch identity British identity is not being confiscated by the Muslim presence it's been confiscated by globalization and by Americanization Hollywood is the real threat to British

identity not Muslims making Shawarma on the street corner this needs to be acknowledged another aspect of this that I talk about in the book is the need to generate Muslim identities that genuinely resonate and in culturate and I don't mean here changing the

immutable forms of the religion but rather issues that were historically regarded as ORF or Ada issues of cultural difference which has often been imported by migrant communities to Europe and to America I like to reflect on the trajectory of

European Muslim thought which I believe begins with somebody called Ivan agueli the 1890s Swedish Anarchist and poet who converted to Islam and really wrote the first ever serious theological Reflections on what it means to be Muslim in Europe he was

mainly considering Islam in France he wrote In Paris and in French but he has a very interesting essay in which he points out that those people he knows who have converted to Islam become more evidently rooted in their local

culture and particularity than they were before the Frenchman he says and he holds this up as something extraordinary but demonstrable becomes more French the Swede becomes more Swedish the Indian becomes more Indian once they enter Islam and he offers some Reflections on how

this demonstrates Islam's universalism so another key to the survival of Muslim minorities in Europe I think has to be the loss of a certain unnecessary exoticism or conspicuousness it's not necessary to build a mosque with the shape of a window that reflects a

memory of one's grandfather's home in Egypt for instance there's no shitty a requirement for any of those cultural forms styles of cantellation of elahis of architecture the general idiom of communities need to be adjusted in order to make the

Muslim presence less potentially inflammatory to host communities this again may turn out in the longer term to be a matter of survival the rhetoric even in London about migration is becoming ever more harsh our former Home Secretary commissioned designs for enormous

machines that were sit in the English Channel generating waves to push the refugees back towards the French Coast that's the level of extremity that they're going to the deportation of refugees Asylum Seekers and the like to Rwanda seriously considered the recent

announcement that there will be Financial inducements to help albanians return to their home about half the population of Crookes is now in London they say and they were so in the longer term this is going to be more and more intense so essentially

just to close the book's purpose is to advise strategies that are in keeping with our tradition that do not entail bending the rules of the Sharia that will maximize our chances of continuing to grow and flourish as communities in

these very ambiguous bit of difficult historical regions of Western Europe I'm not speaking about Eastern Europe where the dynamic is very different I'm not speaking about the United States where there are further problems with Trump's Muslim ban and a

number of quite flagrant contradictions of the church State Separation on the basis of which the U.S Constitution was launched I'm talking specifically about a few countries in Western Europe which may mean that some of it is not really

relevant to your experience here in Kosovo but I nonetheless found it an interesting journey and I hope that the Albanian translation will be of interest at least to some of you thank you very much Sheikh thank you for

your lecture if you can take on the headphones because I because I will present the questions on albelian Albanian and then you you can respond on foreign the new context history thank you it's very clear that is a good

question I'm not an expert on Islam in the Albanian space and as I said earlier just as you didn't want people coming from Riyadh telling you how to solve your problems you probably don't want people coming from London

telling you how to solve your problems it has to be you on the basis of your knowledge of what is possible here in your history to develop these Solutions I was not really suggesting that the Islamic past is a sort of Utopia of

Tolerance merely that there have been recurrent examples of communal coexistence which can deflate certain xenophobic and absolute views of Muslims as being Eternal Taliban throughout their history and I think that is a valid point to make in terms of this region with its very

difficult traumatic history the Balkans has always been the space on Earth where the two well the three civilizations of Latin Christianity and Orthodox Christianity and the Islamic World met together it's that triangular point and there have been tragedies as well as

interesting CrossFit conditions as a result of that that it seems fairly evident that the forms of Islam which should be officially preferred here are those which favor respectful conviviality and a doctrine of legal equality with others however much some people may be

nostalgic for the better aspect of the Ottoman Empire the ottoman solutions to the complexities of a multi-confessional society are very unlikely to be applicable in our circumstances the Ottomans had a particular solution to a world that is very different from our

world so what is required it seems to me is a sense of national Unity is a sense of fraternity is a sense of exploring the significance of a constructive dialogue with the atlilkitab with whom we are quranically mandated to speak

well in the most beautiful way and to try and deal with a more intransigent and divisive voices because there's no way in which those voices and those polarizing principles can be in the interest of the the future flourishing

of Muslim and other communities in this part of the world hey thank you very much I have plenty of questions so I will I will continue the other question pedia theater group liberal it's very interesting I mean my

particular bandwidth of the Muslim communities I come from the sort of convert background we have about a hundred thousand converts in the UK at the moment the numbers continue to grow but it's still a particular perspective within the

Muslim Community we find that the major thinkers of European Islam if you like have actually come from a wide variety of political Persuasions on the right I suppose you know the famous conversion a few years ago of euron Von claveren who was second in

command of Holland's a very popular main anti-immigration policy under social conservative traditional question moved over into Islam partly because he approved of firstly the greatest Simplicity of Islamic doctrines but also the ongoing commitment of Muslims to Neighborhood to family to care for the

elderly and so forth traditionally conservative concerns and there have been other people from the far right in Europe including at least three politicians in Germany van mcclavon is one example of them they've also come into Islam from that traditional rather

than neoconservative political stance but there have been people from the other side and the famous example is of course Roger gahodi the former chairman of the French Communist Party really quite a convinced died in the wall Marxist leninist until his interest in

religion forced him out of that and ultimately in the direction of Islam very different trajectory another example would be um Target lindbon founder of the Swedish Social Democrat Party again left to Center individual who found his way into Islam and wrote

ultimately about 20 or 25 books in which he explores the uh the need for tradition when bills essential Panzer is one of his best known books there are others a few of which have gone into English so it's not easy to see that people at

least in the convert communities are coming from one end of the spectrum or another it's probably just as well and there are some interesting dialogues between Muslims and people of the traditional religious right not so much in America but in

in Western Europe dialogues which are sometimes fraught at the outset but sometimes can be quite quite fruitful because the conservatives do regard themselves as beleagued in an increasingly secularizing and liberalizing Europe and after certain stereotypes overcome they can find themselves

quite happy to have allies and often the Muslim thinkers are quite happy to find allies in traditional catholic or Protestant politicians so with that work I would say is still in its infancy thank you very much the other question

is if you can put on that phone so I will repeat the question is thank you yeah it's interesting I think there has to be a balance on the one hand it is not wise for minorities which is the

object of Suspicion to be provocative Jewish communities have learned over the centuries to keep their heads down because they know that if they put their heads up their heads tend to disappear but on the other hand prophetic religion does say comfort and

there arise and won so there needs to be a careful balance between on the one hand the need for respect conviviality discretion and on the other hand proclaiming God's Eternal truth but we do find that even without there

being much of an effort on the part of most of our mosque communities certainly in Western Europe for whatever reason people are continuing to join us last year in Cambridge in our mosque not one of the biggest mosques in England we

formally registered 104 conversions this year is it's already said to be more than that however one interprets it and I don't have a simple explanation myself there is a steady increase in the influx of people into Islam across Western Europe

in the United States sociologists write that Muslims are that converts are a quarter of the Muslim population a lot of Hispanics now a lot of Vietnamese Muslims as well as black and white conversions so one doesn't need to be outside 10

Downing Street with a megaphone in order to perform the prophetic office and responsibility one simply needs to listen to people to be respectful to be aware of the issues that they have their dissatisfaction with many aspects of modernity and then just to welcome them

lovingly when they come in and it's certainly one of the most unexpected sociological phenomena of modern Europe and modern America that despite the resurrection of the old image of the saracenic other as the Paradigm of different more and more people are

coming into Islam I've I could almost write a book about the people who I've personally witnessed their conversion an Israeli settler for instance that was a surprise I've seen four Christian clergy convert to Islam I was present including one Jesuit priest

people from Hindus seek Chinese every conceivable background it's just one of the if you like signs of God in this age an often very educated people as well and academics one of my aspirations would be to create a study center here in Kosovo which is

such an interesting place where the two worlds are interacting specifically for Western academics who've come to Islam but have a strong kind of philosophical or academic interest just to be a kind of retreat study center for them I think

it would be really beneficial we have so many uh Muslim academics now the convert Community it's a miracle of God if you like but it's often people have a very high standard I was interviewing one of the applicants

for our ba in Islamic Studies in Cambridge a young convert maybe 21 years old who just finished his degree in Oxford where he studied very traditional classical history Latin and Greek and then during the interview he said during

my second year I got bored so I taught myself Japanese we find really brilliant and promising people from some of the best families coming into Islam now and this is as I say one of the paradoxes of the age

occasionally in Britain the Tabloid newspapers Panic about it last week I was talking to Joel Hayward who used to be the dean of the RAF College also a convert to Islam there's plenty of them out there some of

them announce it others don't and this is adding another complexity not anxiety for many Europeans but also promise I think because the converts somehow inhabits Both Worlds the Islamic world the Western World they can sometimes punch above their weight in

creating Bridges and showing how the Two Worlds can interact and as it were into Maori and fruitful ways Intel question is Christian conservative is Vanishing and being replaced by Muslim alternative [Music] in Europe I mean it depends where you go

in Spain for example where I visit quite frequently there is a conservative kind of crypto Francois movement that cannot engage with Muslims because one of the planks of Franco's National Catholicism was the denial of any religious freedom to any minorities and the myth of the

Reconquista the cave of Don pelayo the Virgin Mary appearing at battles talking to Muslims is not possible for them in the Dutch context and in some of the Scandinavian contexts where the xenophobia is not so rooted in historic

memories of the country not being Muslim it becomes a lot easier in the United States there have been attempts to reach out to the conservatives there but The neoconservative trumpian Fringe in America is so far from what one would

regard as being a really traditional form of life Trump in his private life is not exactly an example of of Christian family values that again and the racial issue in America is a lot stronger very often islamophobia in the

U.S right is just a veil for racism and that makes the conversation almost impossible thank you in Beauty theater foreign the situation of Muslims in each Balkan country is very different Bulgaria is not the same as Greece it's not the same

as Albania Kosovo is different a little bit better generally one should note that things have improved if I came first to Yugoslavia during the Communist period when it was as if a kind of thick layer of gray concrete

had been poured over the human spirit and everybody was kind of gray and it was quite quite shocking quite appalling colorless and uh and almost dead and now you see mosque's churches open again more color people laughing uh the old

Dead Hand of atheism has been removed something which back then I didn't expect to most people back then didn't expect but was still the age when and then your children had to eat pork at school there was no way out of it and

if you wanted to go to church or mosque you couldn't join the Communist party or League of Communists as it was locally things have got better and I think we need to assume and to hope that insha Allah things will continue to get better

but the dynamic in each of the countries is different some of the underlying meta-historical challenges still remain uh the Serbian Rite is still what it is and what it has always been and the the Greek lurched to the right with the

succession to the Golden Dawn party of various other crypto Nazi parties in Greece must be a concern for people in the Albanian space because being at the the kind of fulcrum of these three worlds you've lost a lot of territory if

you go to Southern Serbia or northern Greece half The Villages have half a minaret and you know that once the space was more and Byron could travel through half of Greece and the meeting Albanian people and that's been pushed in and

that creates a problem for the local desire which I believe to be a valid desire to be part of the European story when you consider what Europe has historically done for the Albanian people the Ottomans for all of their

horrible Sultans and that strange history did at least have the Albanian people in a single political unit which provided some kind of protection from Crusaders from nationalists and probably preserve their existence as a people now that has gone and the Europeans have

wrote the book designed the borders to be in very perverse and cruel and inappropriate places the kind of drunkards who designed the map after the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 which guarantee that there were going to be massacres in

southern Serbia and they say you can still tell where the mass graves are on the roads that led from those places and the mahaja community here is still nurturing those those stories that albanians want legitimately to be part of the European

reality because there's a certain protection in that Europe has not always treated this part of the world particularly well some of those prejudices unfortunately remain um and even though religious equality and as it were unified national identity is essential for people in this region

uh one hopes that there will be uh a recognition of the role that the past has played in preserving the people here and a certain diversity which was not possible in Christian Europe and a recognition that Europe can be problematic if you look for

instance at compare Europe's response to Bosnia and to Ukraine Ukraine they're emptying their arsenals to send them every last cruise missile and rocket and they're doing everything except pull the trigger against Russia which to me looks dangerous but they're

prepared to take that risk in Bosnia arms embargo sit back French Battalion at Sarajevo Airport knows that there's a rape camp that they can see they didn't do anything about it um so join Europe but be aware that

Europe's imperfections I think any European would tell you that it's an uneven record thank you I have some other questions that I will make them in directly in English it they will be translated by the translator is there

a tendency or likelihood of ready collection by the various opposite oppositions in Europe if they come to power or are they only for election campaigns another good question and I think the world is in such an unprecedented place

that nobody can really guess at the future will it really be the case that a third of European Union citizens will be Muslims within our lifetime maybe will it be the case that there is some kind of the buildup of antibodies as it were to

expel this extraneous material which has happened before in European history that's also a possibility but it seems to me that the far right in Europe unlike the far right of the early 20th century really lacks firm philosophical or ideological foundations

Franco based himself on pre-concilia Catholic conceptions the Nazis based themselves on a particular strange reading of Darwin the Marxist leninist world had an ideological materialistic philosophy behind it whereas the new xenophobia in Europe doesn't really seem to be

ideologically or philosophically very sophisticated so I suspect that it will be very volatile they will do very well in the polls one year and the next year they'll disappear which we've seen in the UK with the rise in the collapse of

the British national party there isn't really a core idea there they're only United by their dislike of the visible other so I'm cautiously optimistic awesome how do you describe the penetration of Islam in Europe in recent decades and do you think that the Muslim

minorities living there should hope for a better future for them or is this the peak of the spread of Islam in European societies well again I'm being asked to prophesy quite a lot this evening I don't know the current Global reality was

unimaginable 10 years ago let alone 20 years ago um amid the world's biggest war is now in Europe nobody expected that um inflation pandemic demographic change demographic collapse in Western Europe they're emptying out of the churches these are kind of unpredictable things

and we really don't know where we'll be in 10 or 20 years time nonetheless that does not exempt religious communities from carefully planning with optimism because religion invites us to be optimistic about the future God's truth will rise to the surface but at the same

time to be very cautious about some of the more negative possible outcomes so we need to hedge our bets and recognize that for instance if the Jewish Community is subject to persecution again they can get on the next flight to

Tel Aviv Muslims in Britain France where exactly are they going to go many of them are not ethnically mixed so if you're half Turkish and half Moroccan in Hamburg and they're marching again in the streets with those armbands where

are you supposed to go so this is why we need a recognizably integrated but islamically legitimate indigenous identity and this is a matter of urgency I think um also the convert communities would as I say seem set to continue to grow need

to act more uh vitally than they have done so far as mediators showing that you can be 100 local but also 100 Islamic which is something that the far right at the moment seems to believe is impossible thank you very much I have

I will make only two last questions because of the time the last one is more personal uh sorry if you could call foreign during the lecture you mentioned the Ottoman Empire many times I would like to know your opinion about the influence

of this Empire on Islam and in general during the time of their domination so what is the impact of the Ottoman Empire yes in Islam and what is your perception or your thoughts about the influence of the Empire on Islam

well in the academic space in which I operate there is a steady output of new monographs and books one of the most interesting recent Publications is by the American academic and historian Karen Barkey called Empire of difference in which he studies this great unwieldy

sometimes corrupt sometimes cruel enormous Empire which lasted for 600 years compared to say the British Empire which lasted for 80 years and which nonetheless managed to hold together such an improbable variety of different ethnicities and languages and tribes and denominations

and different kinds of Muslims The ecumenical patriarch Catholic communities all together in the single doliti Alia and regards generally the ottoman practice of diversity management as a success story underestimated by Western detractors and something which has not been successfully replaced

in countries which under the Ottomans could be diverse but which when turned into nation-states become diverse in a way that's problematic Lebanon would be an example Iraq could be an example the Ottomans ruled Iraq for four centuries there

wasn't a single significant Insurrection or instance of major civil violence for four centuries if you read Gertrude Bell who is an English traveler who visited Iraq in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire she wanted to see the governor

so he went to his quanac in Baghdad there was a god outside but he was asleep she walks in sees the whirly now in Baghdad you've got the green zone you've got Armored Cars you've got drones it's kind of The Nightmare of the

West trying to turn that into a nation-state after its own image big contrast so however much one they regret aspect of the Ottoman Heritage they did manage to keep difficult diverse places more or less stable and peaceful for

hundreds of years so Barker's book is a good place to start I think she doesn't idealize but she certainly regards the ottoman spaces having been infinitely more successful in diversity management than Western European Western Europe during the period

last question how you have found and reverted to Islam this is maybe known for someone maybe you have shown your story but for someone other things on the internet you can read about it it's not a very interesting story 1979

1979 yes and my first visit to a Muslim country was actually Bosnia well no this was the time when Western teenagers grew long hair flared jeans rucksacks and for no good reason just wandered around so I would what was the

impression of Bosnia you were Muslim at the time or not I remember waking up on the train perhaps maybe you don't remember the old Yugoslav trains a very slow broken windows interesting people eating pickled cucumbers I went to sleep on the train woke up and

I was in Bosnia and I saw rockets on all the hills and I thought Yugoslav Army is very up to date white Rockets and then I realized this is an Islamic space I wasn't Muslim yet but that was a

kind of interesting rather Pleasant initiation people are very hospitable um despite the difficulties of that period that was one step in my journey so yes I've been coming to the Balkans for a long time a long time but yeah

people maybe who are younger people should remember that things were much worse inshallah they will improve in the future I think there's great grounds for optimism in child life thank you very much [Applause] it's an honor for us in Kosovo to have

this organization I respect for you thank you very much like Christina talks on Facebook