Ep 236. - How Europe Erased Islam with Dr Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre
Why has the West obsessed about Islam for centuries? European thinkers and philosophers have for long caricatured Islam and its key figures, painting a picture of the faith that persists today. Dr. Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre offers a thoughtful reflection of the place of Islam in European imagination over the past few centuries.
Dr. Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre holds a MSc in Neuro-Cognitive Psychology & a PhD in Systemic Neuroscience (both from Ludwig-Maximilians Universität Munich, Germany) and a Diploma in Islamic Psychology (Cambridge Muslim College). She works as a counsellor in Islamic Psychology worldwide. She authored several books in poetry as well as essays on the relationship between Western thought and Islam.
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Transcript - This is an AI generated transcript and may not reflect the actual conversation
Introduction
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why is there such a persistent presence in the imagination of western thinkers about Islam
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the west since the inception of Islam needed to identify themselves as not
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for western philosophy to survive there needs to be a malign intent in
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erasing this Islamic philosophy and contribution muslims often times have been described as monsters and represented as monsters in the
0:24
western imagination the need of defining as if Islam never happened but it did figures like Bolterero Montescu admired bits of Islam parts of Islam
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but often reduced it to like an exotic caricature the West without Islam does not have a definition
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dr francesca and welcome back to the Thinking Muslim salam thank you well it's wonderful to have
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you with us and I think today we're we're having another really important conversation and that's a conversation about the West and Islam and how the West imagined Islam especially historically
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um post dark ages and how the West interacted with Islam and today we're going to I suppose engage
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with a number of western thinkers and how they viewed Islam and whether there was a malign or not
1:14
so malign um pretext or context behind uh their understandings of of Islam but I suppose the first
Islam in the imagination of western thinkers
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question to ask you is that why like why is there such a persistent presence in the imagination
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of western thinkers about about Islam i think that there is a natural asymmetry between how
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Islam sees the west and how the west sees Islam and the reason is that Islam sees itself in its
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imagination as the natural continuation of the Abrahamic narration and so it can then proceed
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and go on freely on the other hand the west has since the inception of Islam needed to
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identify themsel as not the Muslims really so while nowadays ideologies many times claim that
2:07
Islam is incompatible in its nature to the west what I claim is that the west without Islam does
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not have a definition and there are some books for example Muslims in the West imagination a recent
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book that describes how Muslims oftent times have been described as monsters and represented
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as monsters in the western imagination because they had to be the other the opposite that's
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fascinating because of course when we think about western tradition or at least in in the the common
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uh conversations we have about western tradition there isn't really an overt discussion today about
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framing the west and western philosophy in the context of of Islam so I I don't know we think
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about the Westfallian treaty or the birth of the nation state or you know we engage with at
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least from a British perspective lock or hobbs or some of these traditional philosophers that
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uh develop the contours I suppose of western philosophy there isn't like a a conversation about
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Islam but your argument is that Islam is embedded within uh the language of what it means to be
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western is that is is that fair to say yes indeed and there has been a removal from consciousness of
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it and this removal does not stem from Islam being incompatible with the West but with a
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choice of what to translate what to transmit what to talk about which authors to remember
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and even which names to give to things there are many things for example that in the west come from
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the Muslim world directly or indirectly and they're not given the name of their
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discoverer their founder or things that have been rediscovered a new as if Islam never existed as if
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this civilization was never there and this talks on the unconscious of Europe about a fundamental
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fear about the need of defining themselves as if Islam never happened but it did and we
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are here so what are we going to do about it i I suppose it begs the question why why would you
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know 15th century 16th century western thinkers and philosophers and and artists why would they
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be thinking deeply about Islam what is what's going on well on one level they were in fact if
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one goes back to many scientific works for example Copernicus he actually cites Muslim scientists in
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his work as if that was natural and many medieval authors and even of later centuries did cite
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uh Islamic authors but it never became a clear connection between them and their Islamic
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counterpart in the later rereading because of course we know that the science the history of science is not a neutral subject as is a science itself so there is a narrative about it as if is
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the one of individual the one of genius the one of these people that came out of the dark ages
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and the narrative of the dark ages is also problematic for us because it tells us that
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the west almost was not there for a while and then it emerged and this emergence has nothing
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to do with Islam in this narrative of course okay so let's begin with Dante dante in his
Dante’s Divine Comedy
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divine comedy places the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam prophet Muhammad and Alibabalib in in in
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hell uh while Salahoud and Abarose uh are resting in limbo i mean how do we interpret this mix of
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condemnation on the one hand and admiration in the Christian imagination of Islam this was ever
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present in the Christian uh imagination until the world became post-Christian and then there
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was removal but in the medieval world and in the Christian world Islam has always been there and
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Dante's view is not extraordinary uh concerning Islam it's very typical for a man of his age and
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of his time so Islam is seen by him as a heresy what it means that it it is part of the same
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history and therefore it is more dangerous because a heresy and the choice of the prophet wasallam
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and Ali shows also how the Sunni Shia split was seen in the medieval imagination as branches of
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what we as westerners could have been but were not so we need to get removed from that at the
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same time the usefulness of Islamic knowledge is acknowledged and therefore these thinkers are in
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the limbo but why are they there because they have transmitted something and this is a very dangerous
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idea because the Muslim world only exists and is only useful and positive as a bridge to bring us
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something and there are exceptions for example Salahubi is placed also in the limbo and is not
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a thinker per se so also in the medieval world of course the recognization of virtues for example
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was important so the example of chivalry wouldn't go unnoticed but this type of reading of Islam was
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very common in the west the idea it is something that we could have been but we're not we need to defend ourselves to not become like them and the fear associated with it yet the usage of
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their knowledge because it was advanced i I uh I remember reading uh a quote from Voltater where
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he says that Muhammad was an impostor but a wise and mighty one i mean fingers figures like Voltera
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and Montescu uh they admired bits of Islam parts of Islam but often reduced it to like an
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exotic caricature how did enlightenment thinkers both praise and distort the faith of Islam the
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enlightenment is a very interesting case studies because what it claims to be is to be a complete
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break with tradition yet what we see concerning Islam is that there is a striking continuity with
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what people have been saying since the middle ages so for example Voltater and Montescu they
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satize some aspect that they observe while not observing Islam because neither of them has a
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direct knowledge right and so they didn't study Islam in any great depth no no all these thinkers actually got their
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knowledge from Islam from encyclopedias that what the enlightenment was famous for this encyclopedic
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work that included all religions of the world and all things and one could pick and choose and this
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is again um beginning of a very dangerous idea we have in the west and that we can have a look at
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all knowledge like served on a platter of some sort of um clear explanation or encyclopedic
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knowledge and then choose bits and pieces as if we were a higher position as if we are the
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judge of of humanity of the world and this is a dangerous colonial attitude basically but
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um going back to to to Voltater there is this um strange play that he wrote at a certain point in
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his life which is Lefanatismo Mahome in which he tells the story of the prophet wasallam and of
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course is not his story it does it has nothing to do with it and it was a play that it was meant to criticize the church in fact he even asked the pope at a certain point if he could dedicate
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it to him as a sort of mock mockery uh towards towards the church right but at the same time
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Islam is used as again the monster the one we could have been but we choose not to be so it's
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exactly the same dynamic of Dante once over again yeah uh Renon Ernest Renon uh famously declares
9:36
Islam the complete negation of Europe why was this idea of Islam as a fanatical faith as as
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Volater or Renan sort of negation of Europe did we have currency at the time and beyond that time
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yes I think that uh Renan even if he comes much later it's uh 1883 so a lot of time has passed we
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are again stuck in the same narrative and this is incredible from the west how how little it
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has tried to reanalyze its position uh in relationship to Islam from a cultural and philosophical and literary point of view and Renan is is a problem for many sides because
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what he says in his in his lesson is that Islam is the negation of Europe and we have already talked
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about that maybe it's Europe that's the negation of Islam not the other way around but he also says that Islam is intrinsically enemy to science really and this stereotype then is perhaps at this
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point the breakage where the west stopped seeing Islam as the civilization which anyway produced
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great scientists produced great philosophers and removed it from its own consciousness in
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fact it's the beginning of the 20th century a lot of changes are going on also at other
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layers other aspects in fact we can even see in the Muslim responses to this that they are very
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weak not well argumented and they couldn't really tackle the point this is your brother Maztar the
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Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s rebuttal to Renan
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ghani uh he responds to uh that claim by uh Renon how how did Afghani respond to
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it in a in your mind in an apt way in an appropriate way how did he respond to that
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so his his rebuttal was very passionate yeah but I think it was not able to see things
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outside from the box of his time and age so it was a defense it was a defense to an accusation which is untrue though and so he said that although yes
12:08
um the church as well was an enemy to science what kind of a defense is that if it is not true that Islam is an enemy to science so it then started this whole complex
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that many Muslim had in the early modernity of demonstrating how Islam in theory would
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uh be a friend to science as if in practice it wasn't but it was so uh there is a big
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conflict on how Muslims see their own history how they read their own history and sometimes in defending ourself we actually fall prey to the same stereotypes that the accusers have towards us
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why why did that complex exist amongst Muslims of that early modernity early time of modernity
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it is difficult to explain uh decolonial scholars would call it the narrative that there is in the
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west nowadays and sometimes we have imported that too so we sometimes see oursel as the villains in
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someone's else's superhero story to make things uh simple yet we are not that Islam is its own
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thing and this is something which sounds so obvious but to be honest in literature and
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philosophy and culture there aren't many people that have really given Islam the dignity it deserves as a a religion as a people as a philosophy as a culture and all of them together
Gramsci’s critique of Islam and Muslims
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right Gshi I mean I studied Gshi at university and you know he's a very useful thinker and he
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talks about hedgemony and you know power and these are really interesting terms especially
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uh when we're trying to deal with u the war on terror and some of these some of the language
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associated with it but um I'm also struck by uh Grahamshi's statement that Islam is a religion
13:49
of desert people uh and these broad claims that Muslims are fatalistic um how do we weigh these
13:56
generalizations from people who are you know who we could regard as being quite sympathetic actually to some of our causes when it comes to their depiction and understanding of Islam
14:07
i think that one of the key words is the word you have used is useful so this thought can be useful but sometimes it's not useful and with dealing with foreign thoughts
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and ideas and Islamic culture we always done that we do not have a problem to engage with
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them and we take what is wise and live the rest yeah of course until a certain point there are
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thinkers that I believe like Michelle Fuku are too wretched to even deal with so I completely
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abandon them but in the case of Granchi as long as we see him as a son of his time anyway was an
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Italian of a certain period of time and of course he's going to have a blind spot for really giving
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other people the dignity that they deserve and we have to acknowledge it we can still use their their concepts however we have a problem sometimes in Islamic studies and Muslims discovering these
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thinkers and embracing their views a bit too much that's perhaps the cause also of Edward Sahed who
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uses Gracian worldview a lot and sometimes we become a bit enamored with these people without
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knowing their culture their context and these blind spots that they have uh they were human
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beings so they couldn't see the whole picture and they're missing out what comes from their culture from their time and so Gshi indirectly admits that he doesn't know a lot about Islam so when he talks
15:28
about the shang the vision of the world that religions have he said well Islam must be like
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Judaism like Christianity but he doesn't know so let's keep that in mind and use what is useful i
Ignorance or malign intent?
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mean so far when you talk about you know Voltater or Gshi or others it seems like there is a willing ignorance rather than anything malicious is there anything you're thinking that implies that there
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is an acknowledgement of Islam and its scientific and cultural heritage and richness but u uh in
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order for western philosophy to and modernity to survive there needs to be a denunciation or or a
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uh a malign intent in erasing this Islamic philosophy and contribution to to modern thought
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this is very hard to answer because I I don't know how much of it is intentional and how much of it isn't looking in particular at the Italian uh context
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i can say that there is a lot of subconscious projection going on for example we have very
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famous scholars like Franchesco Gabrieli talking about Islam he was an Arabist he knew the language so finally someone knowing the language speaking about the religion yet when he talks about Islam
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in his books and they're still used at university level in Italy he says "Well religion Islam is
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is a religion of the past like it doesn't exist anymore." And I think it's very striking telling to someone living in Britain from the Muslim community which is very much alive and well
16:54
yet in some parts of Europe and in all Italian books you would find on Islam mostly written by
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this type of scholars they would say things like yeah Islam had a great poetry and it's it's a finished story and this anxiety of saying that Islam is over perhaps it betrays a bit of a
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malicious intent but I I cannot know that however nowadays that we have the language the ability
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uh to really analyze things as they are I think that it should be ated to western psych uh to
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western philosophers that you know Islam is there is a thing it's alive we have to keep
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it in mind I I have a number of a good number of non-Muslim viewers and they may be surprised at
Are Islam’s glory days over?
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your response there because I remember reading a book and I can't remember the author's name uh immediately but he it's a book after empire and he looks at Catholicism and Islam and and
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I think another faith and and argues that Muslims have to realize that the glory days are over the
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caliphate of you know um um progress in science and technology but you seem to imply that actually
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that type of attitude of or that acknowledgment maybe from his perspective that Islam has to pass
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has to pass the baton on maybe to western culture western civilization we shouldn't think like that
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i mean just just expand on that to me why why should we not believe and remain good Muslims
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wedded to our spiritual beliefs why shouldn't we believe that Islam's best days are over
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well I think that first of all we have to request to people that are analyzing
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our tradition to realize that we are here we're alive we're well we're believing in what we're believing certainly so we're practicing what we're believing certainly
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so and we are transmitting our knowledges and this might seem marginal but a type
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of knowledge like the eza system so a direct transmission that we have and when we study theology we studied from someone who studied from someone who studied from the
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author has the potential of reviving at any time to the Islamic world incredible boundaries have
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been put and incredible challenges in the last thous0 years so these are mainly relating with
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colonialism and now they're not there anymore so what is avoiding us to really flourish again
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i think sometimes either our own fears and sometimes a narrative that we have
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agreed on that says that we're dead and so we we shouldn't have we shouldn't be so fatalistic
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when it comes to the future of Islam i mean I I came across a a scholar who said that maybe the best days of Islam are yet to come i mean is that is that a an idea that you subscribe to
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well on the one hand we know that in our ideas of the end of times they're not the most brilliant times for humanity but I think that sometimes we have generalized that
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from being an aspect relating to theology and faith to be an aspect related to other sciences
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such as politics philosophy literature poetry who said we cannot revive that so let us try to
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be optimistic which is our one of our key virtues in Islam and let us not take someone else's like
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death wish as our own reality and at least examine things as they are great and uh of course you're
Mussolini, Fascism and Islam
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you're Italian and um in the 1930s um there was a proposal by Benito Mussolini to open a
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masid in Rome to mark the closeness between the Italian regime or fascism and and Muslims uh and
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I think he proclaimed himself to be a protector of the favor protector of Islam like just tell me about that relationship between at least in his mind between himself fascism and and Islam
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i think that this is one of those stories that can really highlight how sometimes propaganda
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can become something we believe in without the necessary precautions so we have this story in
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which in 1937 Mussolini wants to have propaganda moment in which he gets gifted the sword of Islam
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if you never heard about the sword of Islam it's because it doesn't exist and it was made in Florence actually by the Pani Barlaki jewelry which is still active I think today and Mussolini
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asked them please make us sword of Islam so we can have it and what he did is that he got some
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marginal tribe leader to gift it to him and to have this great proclaim that this honor
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was gifted to him and that's that's nothing new in politics napoleon tried to do some similar
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PR stunts as well we know that and however this uh attempt to get close to Islam has to be seen
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through the lens of colonial domination of places like Libya we're seeing Mussolini as
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a protector would have crashed the resistance and however things were not as easy in fact his
21:53
proposal of opening this mosque in the 30s well the mosque was not opened and it took
21:58
until 1995 and it wasn't open by the Italian government but by King Fasil of Saudi Arabia
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and if you go to Rome and you need to find that mosque well it's quite outside of town so the symbol of having a mosque in Rome the city of the church is still not really there
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although there is a mosque in Rome but what what about this claim i suppose that was implicit in his uh in his language where that there is a that Islam and fascism are
22:25
are natural bed fellows and again you see that today I mean you know there are some who who who claim that the authoritarianism that we're seeing across Europe or or with Donald Trump
22:35
uh that best reflects some of Islam's sociological and political beliefs i'm like how how would you
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how would you engage with that understanding yes this is a very strange idea that fascism would be
22:47
an ally of Islam because first of all well the main islamophobes that we are seeing right now are really the fascist or the more right-wing type of extremist so that would be strange but further
22:57
on we shouldn't forget that the myth of like the Nazis being closed to the MUI of Jerusalem
23:03
was actually Israeli propaganda and why was that created well it was created in order for people in
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the west to believe that the Jewish state and the Christians were natural allies so let's exclude
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Islam we have to exclude Islam again once more we have to take Islam and define ourself as not being
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that so let us not forget that in reality what happened was the king of Morocco helping the Jews
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was the mosque of Paris helping the Jews during the Holocaust and there was no such alliance it
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it really wasn't a thing and if we think about it in abstract political science term well fascism is a secular ideology it is ultra nationalistic these are all things which as Muslim we naturally tend
23:47
to dislike and that many times the claim of Muslim being naturally despotic was actually a tool for
23:53
colonial domination not a point for an alliance but a point for destruction and threat i think
Authoritarianism and Islam
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it was Rouso maybe who called he who referred to Islam as the oriental despot or Islamic history as
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oriental despot um um there is even some Muslims I come across they do argue that look the history
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of the caliphate is one of a strong man and one of sort of total control and a totalizing impact
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upon society and and the sort of society working in a singular direction i mean is there a problem
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with with with Muslims uh communicating that um maybe natural we would say not the natural sort
24:31
of connection between authoritarianism and Islam yes let us not forget that fascism is an ultra
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power of the state and the weight that we give to the state and the thickness the state
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has to have in Islam is very different than what the nation state looks today
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so even though we some could argue but I do not argue that the caliphate was a strong man how
24:56
strong was really he i mean how many things could he control with the state how many things could he fund how many things did he have a control over did he have a control over the whole educational
25:04
system no the health system no infrastructures no because there was the alaf system so even if we
25:10
agree with that and I do not because of the power of the whisers the power of the court many types
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of power were there so the power of the Olar and the power of these institutions were were in a way
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tempered they moderated the power of the Khalifa and it definitely never became a hyper secularist
25:29
nationalist ideology yeah I mean I'm fascinated by but I know this is not the central conversation here but you know it does link to because of course we've internalized a lot of these criticism
Reinventing an Islamic Renaissance
25:38
towards Islam and and sometimes embrace some of these uh criticisms as being part of our our
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uh belief system um you know your your argument is that um the uh you know even any thought about
25:54
reinventing or or renaissance in thinking about Islamic political systems or about caliphates or
26:00
about unification has to be very wary of the authenticity of uh our our our thinking when
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it comes to uh how these systems would look like yeah there is a lot that we're giving for granted
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I think nowadays in Islamic thought and now moving a bit outside of my topic because it's more political than philosophical or literary but it it is true that we're giving for granted the
26:26
role of the state we're giving for granted nation state or homogeneity of language or the role uh of
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the government and all these things are actually something that ideologically it can be negotiated
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then in practice that's another story but at least we should be open in thought about recognizes what
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we can exist without all this apparatus ivan Agui coined the term Islamophobia in
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1904 and spoke of three kinds of Islamophobia clerical racial and rationalist i mean you
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know that that seems like language beyond its before its time like how how ahead of
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his time was this framework and how do we still see these forces uh in at work today
27:10
yes so Aguelli was really a person with an incredible insight on Islam and culture and he
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was he was actually writing this in an Italian newspaper which was also published at the same
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time in Arabic in Egypt so just to give an idea of how forward thinking was really all this process
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and he said he he wrote it as a European criticizing other Europeans so Islamophobia is
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a European thing it's a thing for the westerners and it really reflects how nowadays it has
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divided so we have the Christian clerical and still conservatives and nowadays we have this
27:47
phenomenon of the most conservative people not really being practices or clerical but their ideology is the same and the racist kind has evolved into xenophobia but it is
27:57
again the same characterization uh stereotypes of race of color and then finally the secular
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kind and we can see all the anti-religious Dawkins type of propaganda going on so I
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think that Aguili really gives us a framework to understand the types of resistance and the
28:15
type of aggression that we have towards Islam i mean I was struck by I I came across a an
Influence of Islamic sources on Western critics
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academic piece talking about John Lock who I'm quite familiar with and how his book on toleration
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um it it gives a nod to and an echo to a toleration that he understood existed in
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uh in Ottoman Ottoman society uh in the same way um scholars like Dante which we've already spoken
28:42
about um uh some claim that he was influenced by Iban Arabi uh and Islamic cosm uh cosmology
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um do you believe that and does it suggest that Islam deeply shaped even critics
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uh of of Islam yes I I do believe there is a stronger case for the Islamic sources of Dante
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not only in the divine comedy in fact if one looks at the poetry of Dante and his poetry of love it
29:13
really sounds a lot like poetry you would find for example in the Alashwa by Ibani or his the
29:19
monarchia or about monarchy really sounds a lot like Al Farabi and there have been scholars who
29:25
have been writing about it for example in Italian has written about it and several other Italian
29:31
authors claim for this and as for the comedy well the teacher of Dante Brunet Latini has been for
29:39
a long time in contact with Islamic civilization and there are some sources maybe not Arab directly
29:46
but some sources that talk about the maj of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam and imagine
29:52
recount the story in a way which is identical to it now there are some authors especially Italians
30:00
that try to claim that there is this sort of universal imagination knowledge and archetypes
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however if it was about any other culture if not Islam anybody would argue that this
30:11
is a direct contamination so yes Dante as many other medieval scholars was deeply influenced
30:17
by Islam and it is directly traceable to his sources too earlier on you talked about uh how
Erasure of Islamic influence on modern science
30:23
western science in a way uh is uh has um has got a lot to acknowledge from Islamic science
30:30
and European science in its in its early days uh really required the advancements of
30:37
of Muslim societies i mean why are these foundations marginalized still to today
30:43
yes one of the key myths that this type of discussion goes against is the myth of the
30:50
Judeo-Christian tradition or the Judeo-Christian roots of science of what the West is today
30:56
and if we look at famous scholars for example Fibonacci in the 13th century we look at their
31:02
biography while they studied in North Africa and that was common because even a pope perhaps
31:08
studied in fest and this is argued for but it is said that Sylvester IIA actually studied
31:15
infest and he knew about Islamic theology certainly he knew Arabic and that's not very common nowadays for a westerner to do yeah copernicus as we said was informed by
31:26
Arabic scholars and we have already before the at the year 1000 a lot of translation where this guy
31:33
Gerard of Cremona he translated over 70 books into Latin yet to find an Italian translation
31:40
of the Quran you have to wait until the year 1500 so there has been quite a lot of gatekeeping there
31:46
however we have point of contacts we have for example Frederick I the the most the the Christian
31:52
king of Sicily who had conversations with uh Muslim theologians and asked them question and
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had Muslims at his court writing poetry and we have some other relationships which are not so
32:06
direct but perhaps the fact that Galileo and his um scientific method is actually the same
32:13
reworking of Ibenham and his scientific method so even if there isn't a direct connection there why
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not to call it the Ibn Alhhatia method for example right okay but but they neither there's just
32:24
not a single conversation really in the public consciousness about that heritage
32:30
well there starts to be a bit in the English speaking world yeah for example in my subject being psychology in all books on the history of psychology for university of sin in English
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German or Italian it is always said psychology is born in the year 1879 in uh by v in Germany but
32:47
that's simply not the case because there have been labs of psychology before there have been Muslim psychologists and Arabic psychologist so in most disciplines it is like that tell me about Pico uh
32:58
de la Mirandola and um his contribution to busting this myth that there is a Judeo-Christian world
33:07
yes I love the figure of Pico because he was someone who is very well known in the west for being a person who had an incredible amount of knowledge and could synthesize with his
33:16
memory already was prodigious really amounts of information which were unaccessible to others and so he chose what to take in what to make of his models and he he actually directly
33:27
cites Iban Rush Iben Cena Al Farabi Iban Abaja the great thinkers that were available at the
33:33
time another reason why Pico is so important is that he was very interested in this idea from
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Islamic theology which is like the chain of being from Alhazal and human freedom and eventually he
33:46
starts writing about it he he writes an oratio the homminist dignit so about dignity of human
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being this is so influential because then it goes through Arasmos of Rotterdam to demon ko
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all these line of thinkers which we recognize as having no impact with Islam they have nothing to
34:05
do with it of course they are purely westerners yet they're teachers they're inspirations we we
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can never go back to a point where there is no Islamic influence in the western thought even with scholars who've accepted um uh the roots of of western civilization have some part to
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play in in Islamic knowledge there is very rarely a acceptance of Islamic spirituality
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um I mean why this double standard when it comes to looking at Islamic heritage um uh when approaching western civilization i think that part of it is a fruit of the western
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Christian experience and so the west is not born out of a bubble it is born of its own history and
34:49
its own history it's a very painful history of uh religious wars and a very painful history of
34:56
theology and philosophy trying to agree with each other but not quite really and this is a specific
35:02
Western European problem it is something that it has to deal with yet as long as this mindset stays
35:08
in place as long as this becomes and still is a conflict of course the spiritual impact of Islam
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will be diminished because it is given for granted as a prejudice that spirituality has nothing to
35:20
do with thought but even western thinkers that had nothing to do with Islam realized that this
35:27
conflict is bringing us nowhere one example is for example Martin Haidiger which we know very
35:33
much talking about metaphysics and we know at the earlier part of his life he tried to divide his
35:38
theology and his philosophy studies his brother was a priest and they have these letters talking about it yet the last interview that he ever given his life it is only one god can save us so how is
35:50
that let us try to uh follow what these thinkers had as an insight uh and has a view of what the
35:59
west could be saved so what the west could be without this dotomy this conflict within itself
Was Goethe Muslim?
36:06
i know that you're a student of go and uh he talks about Islam in a very positive sense in fact if I
36:13
remember he I think it was you who talked about this he fasted in in the Ramadan and he prays
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the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam if Islam means submission to God God's will then in Islam we all live and die which is a very positive statement um it is that positive like do we
36:29
universally accept that you know there's a glimmer here of of a a western thinker
36:35
uh who very positively is engaging with Islam and and actually there is a claim that he became a
36:40
Muslim i mean how how valid is is that claim yeah I I strongly believe this i strongly believe that he was a Muslim yes and this this fascination he had with the Muslim world that
36:49
is usually put down as romantic admiration but we can see that he did something that the other
36:55
romantics did not do and that's uh of course uh practicing Islam that would be one thing he met
37:02
uh Islam at 21 where he read the Quran just to further his culture but he became enamored with it
37:10
to such a level that he wrote some theater plays that unfortunately I think are not available in
37:16
English it's the Mahomes it's a it's a song of the prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam it's beautiful love and admiration through it as you would find in Sufil literature i really love this
37:26
and he writes much more about Islam through his life and the final fruit just his last work before
37:33
he died is the Vesus Lishard Devan so this poetry collection which is dedicated to the Quran I mean
37:40
I how I don't know how more can you be uh explicit in what you're saying and I'm not just saying this
37:46
from his published work i have went through all 143 volumes of his diaries letters and I have
37:53
found more than 200 references to Islam and it and several of it are letters stating how he
37:59
lived in Islam and from the divine already in the published part if someone is interested in finding
38:06
more they can find the actual translation of the Basmala in German they can find the
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transliteration translations of Quranic verses as well as the fact that we all live and die in Islam
38:18
but didn't go um rework or at least translate uh B's horrible play about Muhammad wasallam
38:27
the fanatisma um how do we how do we reconcile that with you know this his conversion to Islam
38:34
yeah I think that actually his reworking of this play shows how much he was a Muslim because well
38:40
first of all he didn't choose to do it he was forced by the Duke of Vimar and of course he didn't have power on it and so he wrote in his letters how much he hated translating it and there
38:48
are some letters which are really funny as please let me not do it and the Duke is back telling him yeah I know you're a Muslim sympathizer but please don't and so he ends up translating but he doesn't
38:59
translate he have bridges a lot so if one were to read the French and the German side to side
39:05
you would see that of course the horrible insults on the prophet are all taken away really and there are themes added and these themes
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are and revelation and subhan Allah they are really the key points of Islam and the character
39:18
of the prophet is made much better and the plot is changed so the prophet never has to lie in
39:23
the German translation so I think that again these are signs for people to understand really
Leda Rafanelli on Islam
39:28
yeah lea Raphaeli uh called herself a Muslim an anarchist and a feminist uh and even try
39:35
to introduce Mussolini I think to to the faith uh what did Islam mean to her spiritually politically
39:42
and philosophically i mean I've got a quote here from from Lya um Islam affirmed the dignity of
39:48
every human being in contrast to Europe's cru cruel hierarchies to tell us a little bit about
39:54
Raphaeli please as Lea is is a beautiful figure and she's part of a wider movement of people who
40:00
in the year 1,900 and further on as anarchists uh converted to Islam and of Italians there were
40:08
was this not much but among the elite there there are quite a few so it wasn't a masses movement but it was an intellectuals
40:14
movements let's call it and she converted Islam quite early she was 20 years old in in Egypt
40:20
and she does her best to study Arabic to practice Islam she's known to have dressed like uh an Arab
40:26
in a certain way she fasted during Ramadan as well and she talks about how Islam is
40:32
a superior worldview to the western western one all the time in her works in her letters
40:38
yet at the same time she be she still is an anarchist so it's quite a complicated figure
40:43
yeah and of Lea's her inheritage is I'm really sad about it sometimes because it is either stressed
40:51
that she was a feminist although right in many of her works she says I really wish that there
40:57
was an opportunity to marry like in the Muslim marriage with responsibility and commitment
41:03
which is quite a criticism to the free love that sometimes people associate with anarchy and even her relationship with Mussolini is quite interesting because she gifts him a Quran He's not
41:14
really interested and he falls in love with her and she denies uh being his lover even though
41:19
of course this is before he was the leader of fascism but still quite a charismatic and powerful man because she said that she wanted a relationship based on dignity
41:28
respect and commitment so very powerful figure so you've argued that Islam has been long present
The future for Islamic thought and western tradition
41:34
in the western mind and admired intellectually but possibly rejected spiritually and politically
41:40
um like how do we move beyond the binary towards deeper integration and acknowledgement of the
41:48
the rich connections and and and melding of of Islam into an Islamic fort into western tradition
41:56
i think there are I'll start from two case studies yeah the first case study is Muhammadbal the
42:02
founding poet of of Pakistan where he takes most probably Dante's divine comedy and he reworks it
42:08
in the Jav Name in a view of heaven and some of the condemned entities but he he does a
42:17
change so he never puts people in hell based on their names and he says that that it was Dante's
42:23
mistake so he takes from this tradition he takes on it through art and his poetry is great poetry
42:29
on the technical side and the politics it's amazing yet he also tries to remove what from
42:34
the west could have been dangerous so condemning people to hell by name as Muslim we don't do that
42:39
another case study is that I was just recently in a in a primary school in Damascus and there
42:45
were kids that were um memorizing and reciting poetry and this poetry was rhyming poetry in which
42:53
the children were playing the grape fruits which were given to the prophet wasallam after tif okay
43:00
and they were interpreting them and developing love from the prophet through this art and this incredible metaphysical understanding of things so on the one hand we engage with the west on
43:11
the other hand we aren't afraid of our own way of understanding heart and the deep spiritual impact
43:16
it can have on us since we are children because we are completely so uneducated about art literature
43:24
philosophy poetry that it comes to us as a shock when we are 18 or whatever we are and we say this
43:30
is the thing of the westerners we have nothing to do with it or we try to do it and it doesn't come out really well to be honest so engagement and engagement is not a thing of the mutis right we
43:41
do not go and say this is haram this is halal engagement is a thing of the artists that have to play a role they have always played a role in in in our community and at the same time we
43:51
should alphabetize our children and the younger generation to our intellectual heritage because no
43:57
Muslim Muslim child would want to become a poet if he doesn't know there are poets so if he doesn't
44:02
know how beautiful it can be no Muslim child would become an artisan and preserve calligraphy if he
44:07
doesn't know it is a thing so let's keep these things alive and that will be the best way to then engage with what is there from the western tradition too i'm from East London poetry is
44:18
far from my mind um Francesca uh but yeah you're you're absolutely right why shouldn't we think big
44:23
and why shouldn't we introduce our children to this rich heritage um one final question
44:29
for you um if you were to revise one western thinker uh and remember them in relation to
44:36
uh Islam like who would that be and and why yeah an example for me before uh conversion
44:43
during and after has always been Gut and there are many reasons for it and I invite anybody to read his poetry to understand more of it but there is one incident that comes to
44:53
my mind and there's once in Vimat he heard that there was an envoy from the Ottomans and it was
44:59
time for prayer and he could actually finally see someone praying so he ran and he could just see
45:06
this person praying and he writes in his diary as if the earth had opened and he was praying in
45:11
the presence of God but yet we know that good didn't really become like fati or didn't know
45:18
Arabic too well he actually had the Arabic Quran on his nightstand but only at the end of his life
45:24
could he figure out some words and this is such an amazing example because it makes me think of
45:31
that hadith in which there is the man coming to the prophet sallall alaihi wasallam and they ask him when is the hour and the prophet says what you have you prepared for it and he said well
45:40
not much but love for Allah and his messenger and the prophet respond that you will be with
45:45
the ones you love and I think that ge is such an example of that and if we could bring back literature and art to be about that as Muslims I think we could really change a lot of things
45:56
fantastic well this has been a really engaging conversation Dr franchesca thank you so much Jac for your time thanks a lot Wyak
46:06
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