Dr Adis Duderija | Patriarchal Travesty, Purposive Trajectory & Process Theology | MindTrap#54 |MALM

[Music] [Music] all right people aura alhamdulillah i'm just going to check do a sound audio sound check make sure you can all hear me um

let me just check with mrente on facebook and youtube right i've just brought up the youtube comments facebook people are right claire you're doing it ash all right i take it the sound is coming through fine just give me a quick uh just quick bounce back confirmation of right so people yep claire you do when it shook and shook it and all right and shukran hassam much appreciated and azerati alright people of rice

so let me just bring up before you a a profile of our guest tonight you can see right here coming up before you the esteemed guest right that people ladies and gentlemen damasi caballeros as you're seeing right there no it's not a younger version of liam neeson which you're probably imagining it is a much greater personality i present to you people the man the myth this is dr professor edis uh i'm gonna get the surname wrong

judoria all the way from griffith university australia let's welcome our for joining us today and taking out your time shukriya for having me i'm really excited to be with you it's an absolute pleasure people a brief uh just a backdrop to the professor we have today

who who who hails from bosnia born and raised and then has traveled across the globe has a deep commitment and passion for the dean of islam has engaged in higher education and further studies through a master's right into a phd focusing on aspects such as you know a huge range from makkah of sharia to feminist theology within islam to the radical narrative of salafism and how that presents certain dangers or challenges uh to muslims and as authored over six books and

several other editorial pieces as i said i'm so i'm very honored to be sharing this platform with your mufti because uh i am very much in awe of your amazing eradication and your moral courage and you represent the best of what our classical islamic heritage can offer us today

and as i said um i am so delighted to to be in your company wow wow now as people are going to say i've obviously paid the professor to say that not at all not at all not at all those of you who know me know that i have endorsed you publicly uh on previous occasions and as i said i am very much in awe of of your uh reasoning your intellect your vast erudition your moral courage to stand up and call a spade a spade and

to to uh essentially uh allow us to view islam through a different lens based on based on reason based on intellect based on beauty and justice so i i appreciate that it really means a lot to me because not in i mean obviously they're amazing words and i'm sure that they incredibly you know just gratifying and just hearing them but it actually means a lot in the sense that

you know i naturally as a i say that you know i face at times a lot of heat a lot of hate for the stuff i say and even though there's a lot of love out there but but every time you know some somebody reiterate especially in your standing professor it means it means a lot to me so shukran uh you know may allah keep you smiling for these kind words professor your journey right cheer you know you've been through an incredible profound academic uh you know a path really that has spanned many years in your life

first first of all islam i mean you're in australia pursuing a an academic path in islam how did you come about that i mean because that doesn't have much of a a great career prospect does it for many people they would assume not thank you for that question it's an interesting question so um i actually initially trained as a primary school teacher but have had an interest in academic

discussions on islam from my early undergraduate days so hacking back to mid to late 1990s um so um at that time there were very limited opportunities i i grew up in bosnia and moved with my family to australia when i was 19.

you know in the aftermath of of the bosnian war and conflict um so yeah i as an undergraduate student i became involved in the muslim society muslim student association at my university and was increasingly interested in in my face and started to explore different approaches to this is mid to late um kind of 1996 97 98 uh the internet was very much in its infancy

um i came across the the website understanding islam uh that was administered by a group of students of uh sahab ghamidi okay yeah wow and i also through my university i was reading academic works on islam primarily i started off with with professor fazu rahman who originally is from pakistan of course but ended up being a professor at university of chicago i read a lot of his works especially on the concept of sunnah and and hadith

and of course work on sunnah awakened my interest in in in this topic and i never really looked back i was i i understood the centrality of the concept and how different interpretations of islam often were a product of and the derivative of of these different understandings and approaches to this concept of sunnah putting of course the quran aside so i was and then um when 9 11 happened

um i was then increasingly asking myself as to why do we have so many different interpretations of islam where do they come from why is it that my islam of my childhood was so friendly so open-minded so cosmopolitan uh why why is there a different kind of islam in different places which led me eventually to do my honest thesis on neo tradition what i call a traditional salafi concept or approach to sunnah and hadith and from there i did my phd on

[Music] comparing two contemporary islamic movements the salafis and the progressives how what are the interpretational assumptions that underpin the approaches to quran and sunnah and how do they play themselves out in relation to this concept of what it means to be a religiously ideal muslim woman wow and what did you and what are some key features and aspects that kind of uh you know that that raise their heads in this in you've got these two uh polarized views you know almost you said progressive

uh people and you've got like selfie inc uh people these true traditions what were some key features you discovered in this all right so when it comes to the interpretation of the quran and sunnah the one of the major differences is that the level of contextualization and um so the progressives are contextualizing the quran much more because they recognize that the very nature and of the language of the quran and its ontological status require contextualization that even at the level of its grammar

and the usage of words we see that the context shaped the content of the quran quite significantly that is not to say that the quran doesn't have ontologically divine status however that it was very much a product of a particular context and that text and context are but two sides of the same coin so so there's an emphasis on contextualizing especially the ethical legal elements in the quran

that are reflected in its language because i i always find a confusion professor with uh or a misleading or a miss um you know uh easily misconstrued statement which everybody agrees on is that islam or the quran is for all times and even though this statement this maxim everybody agrees on it they radically disagree on what that actually means because to some people it means that it will reflect each time and to other people it means no the time it came in

must be superimposed on each time like you know so when this yeah that's an excellent point obviously the progressives would very much argue in the favor of once we interpret the quran contextually and once we and holistically we can we can deduce a particular worldview a particular quranic ethic and that is that is what remains central in the quran the quran but there are many let's say historical or accidental elements to the quran

that need to be seen in the buddha context in which the quran was revealed and and we need to and then then we go down the path of what you have also often stated that the teleological um moral trajectory the kind of that kind of argument that uh we need to look at we need to look at the the the the the significance of meaning rather than digest the surface literal meaning uh and we need to extrapolate certain um values and principles um that are ethically

rationalist in nature that do not require textual substrate um and these are the these are the the the the these are the principles that remain um whereas the rest uh needs to be seen from a contextualized lens you see what people say to that uh doc what they say to it is that you see so what your uh ex what you're stating in other words is that you see there was a morality or an understand a perception of a morality that existed 1400 years ago and

morality has kind of had some evolutionary process along the way uh did god not know that so as to not highlight it in the quran this uh is obviously a an immediate knee ninja comeback that is presented um what are you doing what are your thoughts to that yeah there are there are a couple of we can um we can look at that argument or respond to that argument from two perspectives one is quranic and we saw okay we look at the quran and the nature of quranic language and how does the how does the quran go

about let's say does the quran give us any definitions of moral concepts quran uses moral language definitely refers to moral and ethical concepts but the quran never defines these concepts does it so what does that imply the quran that implies so like the words such as all of these all of these all of this terminology is present in the quran but the quran does not define these concepts which which which means that the quran must imply that these concepts

are rationalist in nature and they are they can be understood without the aid of revelation yeah and to somebody for therefore we do not need revelation to tell us what is morally right and wrong the the the nature of revelation is to aid us yeah and and what supports that straight away professor is you see clear verses of the quran that allah simply states as a maxim he states that look uh

he makes bad things or feel let's say uh things which are uh whether you want to say filthy or wrong he makes some haram and he makes good things halal for you now this verse doesn't highlight what is good or what is what is bad it's there's an assumption that you already have a an understanding as human beings of what is good and what is bad yeah i mean the progressives when it comes to the concept of revelation itself it's not purely textual okay the concept of revelation is much broader in in progressive muslims thought so their

pretext uh or reason is actually constitutive of revelation as well as nature itself so it's about progressives have a much broader concept of what constitutes a revelation so the quran is one dimension of one aspect of revelation and professor ahmed who has written a wonderful book called what is islam on the importance of being islamic yes

and he he talks about how [Music] actually what's happened over the last hundred years or so this very concept of what constitutes revelation and its sources has shrunk to to a primarily textualist hermeneutic whereas in the past what he calls the bengal from bengal to balkan complex which he means the kind of intellectual paradigm the predominant intellectual paradigm that was prevalent in the muslim world from the balkans to the bengal actually had a much broader much broader understanding of the of the concept of

revelation and its scope so um therefore we we consider that revelation in the form of the quran is but one source of overall guidance of god yeah you know an important one an important one but nonetheless not the only one of course and you know just to uh just a point uh that i'd just like to pick your brains on professor that you know progressive progressive islam i um

personally don't uh use personally don't use that term generally and i don't identify personally uh as a progressive muslim uh even though i'm sure i'm perceived as that by many and i kind of argue that you see this way of thinking that i'm saying about makkah sid and saying that you should go with ease and you should go with this is actually i would argue in the sunnah in the original sources i'm not coming up with it now don't do you feel but i understand when people use it today to kind of they differentiate between selfies and

but do you not feel that this these terms you see the problem is don't you feel it then hijacks the cause of uh of this of this kind of of this trajectory because people say well oh that's just a modernist islam you know it's not the traditional islam i mean what are your thoughts on that yeah at one level labels are inevitable especially um like in academic discourses when i was conceptualizing what i consider to be progressive islam i had to situate it in relation to

other scholarly works yeah that have that have similar ideas or similar approaches so i was like grafting it on an existing on an existing approach that use the word progressives yeah so but if you look at for example my last book on progress of islam the imperatives of progressive islam uh there are one like eight constituting elements of it and none of them use the word progressive in that you know it's not uh it's not it's it's just a shortcut of course of course yeah uh you know

sometimes we need to take shortcuts and we don't have the luxury of explaining yeah uh like i would always religious philosophy i would also feel professor depends on the audience as well as isn't it that that who you're addressing because if in an academic arena or in the arena in the field of academia i feel you would have to use these words because that's what the academic textbooks understand and that is their frames of reference whereas uh i suppose i'm generally just more addressing the kind of common muslim out there who

to them this word might seem a bit like oh my god that's you know people taunt uh muslims with these words who so but in your field obviously as a lecturer as a senior lecturer i mean it's only right that you use these words so the audience the students know exactly what you're referring to exactly and there is a number of other terms that could be used to substitute the word progressive it could be cosmopolitan it could be contextually cosmopolitan

muslims that's that's really uh yeah i was gonna ask but hopefully we can go beyond the semantics of course of course of course yeah and the only reason i mentioned that professor is i could see some people were questioning oh uh you know progressive and i just wanted to kind of get that out the way to say well that's not you know you're using it because in your field that's how you have to address uh these terms you know in academia but coming to the core unpacking the actual you know trying to get to the the the actual kernel of it so this whole um this whole

search for things like meaning for objectives of sharia do you feel there is a greater need for this in this day and age to start off with because somebody could say well you know if i go back eight hundred years yes they were makassid but people weren't obsessed i mean what's all this obsession with my passive yes uh of course um every concept is a product of a particular contextual positioning of the people who are kind of utilizing and employing it so there are a number of reasons as to why we've had the revival of the makassar discourse in

this day and age you know it's interesting there's a couple couple of fascinating books on this uh as to why for example and in many ways makassar discourse over the last 10 15 years the revival of the makasi discourse was a direct response to the ever-growing presence of the salafi discourse yeah so um so it was kind of a corrective to to the to what became a more dominant discourse so and it of course every concept

that is trying to be revived that is that is being revived has an antecedent in islamic intellectual history so now so we have the charities and and there are ghazalis who have talked about uh all of these concepts but the way progressives use the concept of maka acid is different from let's say the way even salafis use the concept of makkah acid and the so-called tatarid based uh approaches to islam the mainstream sunni if you like all of them use the concept of makkah acid but

the um the underpinning usually uh paradigm within which makasit is positioned in a hierarchical sense is very different so progressives have a contextualist approach to makassar just traditionally several years just for a second just to uh just as an interjection to clarify for the audience uh who are unfamiliar with the term makasid we're using time and time again makasid is referring to the objectives of the sharia that the shariah is operating to serve these objectives

and the purpose of that is that if the sharia is not obtaining those objectives it would then adapt in order to obtain them you understand so if it is trying to seek welfare for people if that particular ruling was no longer bringing wealthy the sharia ought to adapt to make sure the welfare muksa the goal the objective is being met yeah that's right it's a kind of a fil it's premised upon this idea that there is an underlying philosophy between behind islamic law and ethics it's not just for the sake of

rituals not only that but um so islamic law is not just for the sake of coming up a with asca regardless of context and regardless of what's you know it's it's promised upon this idea that it has a personal islamic law has a purpose yes a public objective exactly exactly so now of course uh as i said you could have at least three different pathways or conceptualizations of the macroacid as i said it can be it can operate within a very

decontextualist paradigm that emphasizes the the the the nas the the quran and the hadith and and situates the matasa uh as like a secondary rule in the sense that they are subservient to a a textualist hermeneutic of the quran and the hadees so that's that's the salafi approach you know they say well um acid must always be derived from a texturalist hermeneutic from a you know it must always be linked to a particular

dalil that is in the nose yeah uh uh whereas the tathalidi the mainstream sunni islam uh because of the because of the uh because they have more scope in terms of the uh paradigm by allowing prayas and ejmah then they that opens up more space for the makassar but however the overall quran sunnah is still i would say at best and and as professor hashem kamali has argued for a very long time mainstream sun islam

uh has placed the makasid in a secondary role in a subservient role so even though they agree with the idea that there are certain mata said they can never overrule a particular interpretation of the quran that is based on a semi-textualist or textualist an analogy that i or an allegory that i give at times professor is like and this may help some of the viewers understand it better is that imagine there's a product which is the sharia which is the rules within islam let's say it's i don't know it's a piece of it's it could be

a vehicle or it's something that is there that has been created that has been made yeah now we all understand that it was done using tools that there was a toolbox that had tools to make this particular product this much everybody agrees on and so they all agree that there were tools that these things that there was a purpose and there were tools that that made this in that way what they disagree on is when we inherited this product whatever it is did we also inherit the toolbox or is it just the knowledge that yes

there was a toolbox made to use this we accept that but we don't have a toolbox to adjust it any further or do we have the toolbox so we too can tweak it with the day and age this is where the methods kind of fell apart and disagreed and even individual scholars disagreed over time yeah that's a that's a good analogy uh i think uh but you know the the most crucial element here is also um the the the the differences is the the the makassid theories also are directly linked to this idea whether or not

ethics is objective and is it depend upon text or not uh you know so if you if if we if we say that um the macacid are basically rationalist in nature uh they can then they can evolve uh over time and what was just in one context might not necessarily be just in another context so if a contextualist approach allows for these concepts to be epistemologically updated and to be contextually driven whereas uh mainstream sunni and the sun of the approaches

uh are premised on a completely different world view that locate authenticity and perfection in the past and and they they they theory the ethics is completely textualistic a bit of the divine commandment theory uh professor you know the exactly so basically socrates had this understanding people that look um did god command x because x is good or is x good because god simply commanded it

so this is the divine commandment theory that you know is god telling us to do things which are already good or is it that god just came up with a list of things and because he came up with the list they are now what we call good that's the um exactly yeah so and um i think a holistic a holistic approach to the quran and the way the quran uses ethical and moral concepts suggests that they are ethically objectivist in nature meaning they are independent of texts i mean there is a wonderful

book written by written in early 20th century by an egyptian scholar muhammad oh yes the moral view of the quran it's a 600 page volume it was originally written in french and was translated into english it's the most comprehensive and most authoritative who worked on the shatterby i think so yes i i don't quite because there is one that was edited and brought into uh you know mass published uh was by either as well egyptian from the 20th century

uh yeah so okay yes yes it's most likely him i mean it would make sense because he was probably interested in the art excuse me uh because of the fact that uh you know it's it's one of the major scholarly works on on the concept of maslache as a kind of major interpretative tool through which to evaluating the islamic legal philosophy so yeah i wouldn't be surprised if that was the same but he in that work which is as i said by far the most

comprehensive examination of the moral language of the quran he is very much on the side of the idea that ethical moral concepts in the quran quran assumes that they are objective my just to uh just put this out there i don't know what your thoughts are on it uh doc see my take on this has been um very similar to the kind of psycho psychological analysis of language that i feel that there is a morality instinct that is there that we have it already

just the way we have a language instinct uh if you want to call it an instinct like stephen steve pink pinker or whether you want to call it a kind of modality whatever you want to use but that there's this kind of raw base which exists like how norm chomsky says with language a universal grammar this kind of wiring exists and then we get influenced by our kind of zeitgeist by our day and age by things to really pack it up so i feel that for morality at a base level of avoiding harm recognizing harm uh and then empathy with the quality

with the aspect of empathy not wanting that or wanting to avoid that um these kind of core things serve the base and then we add on it based on our society so i i don't feel it's like something we entirely just purely philosophical like we sat down and thought well hmm you know chopping off or blinding someone i think that's bad philosophic i think we've recognized harm like when we see it we understand suffering and we then don't want it and then we add on these from a social position that's been my take i don't know

what what you feel about yeah yeah um yeah i mean that's a separate question and i i do yeah um what i'm interested here in a certain is if we if we take the quran as a as a whole of course as a unified whole and we want to analyze the way it employs and uses moral language and moral terms

i think we cannot come to any different conclusion but to say that quran assumes that there is this inherent moral compass that exists in humanity and that it addresses that and the kind of and that is very very important in terms of trying to develop um an interpretative model of the quran and

overall in terms of his overall islamic legal philosophy as such islamic legal theory we need to know what is this relationship between reason and revelation and ethics because that will have a flow on effect in terms of how we do islamic jurisprudence and how we do islamic ethics uh absolutely absolutely i'm not sure oh no that's very that's that's amazing and you and part of uh this right um you've you see part of the

things that have developed throughout the age uh throughout the centuries and over you know millennium is not obviously there's understandings of social aspects of our philosophies but a key aspect especially in the modern day and age is is of feminism and this whole thing of women's centricity in in a dialogue or in the dialogue you know so to speak now you know

in the wider address and this is something you've written expansively about as well so uh yeah tell us tell us about this uh professor all right um so what i've tried to do some of the things that i've tried to do is i think to deconstruct how the concepts of femininity and masculinity that we find in the islamic interpretative tradition you know and how these concepts uh infiltrate and taint the interpretations of the quran

[Music] and and how they also are dealt with in the hadith literature so so let me let me see a bit more um [Music] when we look at muslim family laws we see that they are and the entire muslim cosmo islamic cosmology looking at it from a classical paradigm is very gendered you know with many aspects of islamic law for example are gendered even rituals are gendered

so and often if we dig very deeply and we try to understand what are the ultimate reasons behind investing so heavily in a gendered approach to islamic law and ethics we see that what highs what hides underneath are certain ideas pertaining to the nature of masculinity and femininity especially in general and especially in relation to nature of male and female sexuality so so there are a cluster of concepts that have been used to construct what is

masculinity and what what is normative masculinity and normative femininity in islam classical islamic tradition when we look at the concept of masculinity for example it's associated conceptually there are certain conceptual markers of masculinity and femininity when it comes to masculinity we find these ideas of masculinities conceptually associated with things such as religious authority political authority uh even even some level even aspects of superiority ontological superiority so we have ideas uh you know using particular quranic

verses or hadith primarily hadith saying that god just prefers just just as a slight interjection here just for the viewers we're not saying that's correct we're just saying this is the perception no this is how it's portrayed projected that is how that's predominantly islamic interpreted tradition in islamic interpretative tradition and islamic interpretive tradition includes here

and okay so in all of these genres we find these ideas that masculinity is associated with religious authority political and public authority and even this idea in some cases that there is an inherent preference for men over women on behalf of god and and also a particular approach to male sexuality as something that you know like the idea of what i would call um very ugly concept of male male sexual jealousy

you know that is completely out of proportion that a person could you know he could kill his wife if he'd seen her doing this and yeah and he's almost justified in his you know in this kind of rira that he has the concept of patriarchal honor resides in and this was i was going to mention in relation to the concept of femininity so the constant of femininity is exactly the opposite of of of masculinity in a sense that femininity is because is constructed along along along uh like it's constructed in relation to the concepts of

absence or lack of religious authority lack of political and public authority and in relation to the female sexuality the concepts of fitna and aura as as kind of aggressive sexuality that can erode the societal fabric of muslim society that is extremely dangerous to to to the civilizational health of muslim society but it's sadly true that's the yeah once you invest once you invest in these ideas of what masculinity and femininity

is you use them to interpret certain quranic verses and to give kind of to to to um to give these to to give these concepts that we find in the quran are very much uh are very much a patriarchal and angiocentric example that just coming straight to mind is like for example um owning uh sorry having sex with the slaves or with the or even marrying um of other faiths but the slave one came straight to mind that it's even though the quranic discourse

was generic but the understanding uh after the prophet's lifetime when it emerges in the time of the was that wait a minute this is uh you know this is humiliating that a a slave is having then sex with this muslim woman you know women and they obviously these uh these these these concepts are being challenged like because they're struggling with that shouldn't be because they're thinking no that's uh you know that's not right it's not justified yeah so yeah so what we do in a progressive

progressive or contextual islam if you like one of the elements of its hermeneutic is this idea that to call something truly quranic a quranic value it needs to be initiated by the quran and not reflected in the quran all right okay so the quran all of the societal practices all the societal practices that the quran confronted at that time the quran didn't really initiate them it confronted them and tried to mitigate them yeah so uh therefore uh what is normative here is is

the the element of mitigation and not the actual prescription as such uh so because there is uh we also make a distinction between meaning and its significance the meaning can still be the same but its significance could be different and then if we look at the quranic words we could still say that in that context the idea of a man being kawa moon made sense but in a different context that that that meaning could have a different significance uh if let's say you know if if the societal norms change that that that quranic concept mine that quranic verse

would no longer have any significance because it only had significance in a particular context that was appropriate to that kind of in the sense that all these things uh what you call bill or bill or in other terms are they situational or dispositional like is this a key disposition that it is true that in arabia that the men had so for example this debate occurs in the hanafi usual you know in the time of imam abu hanifa where they're saying well women don't need a man to authorize them to get married they can

marry themselves off and other scholars are challenging them and they say well allah says in the quran you know prevent them from getting married now they the hanafi reaction to that was that yes it was stating that as a description of what the society was doing that this was the kind of situational factor it's not that men had the dispositional right to prevent women so this yeah this it's a fascinating point yes but it is interesting it is interesting i mean we do need to pay careful attention to the quranic grammar there

you know when the quran talks uh it does address it does address those who have social and political capital and who are the men so it says you know it uses you know uh it's basically suggests that men do have that power but they are not supposed to be abusing it yeah so so you know you should if you divorce your women do it in such and such a manner so it assumes that that men do have that power but that they should be mindful of god because there's a day

of judgment you should be mindful of what you do but it does not radically challenge the idea that certain group of men had the social and political capital because possibly it wants to bring them on on its own to its you know it wants to win them over uh yeah so that's why it is so important to understand that uh the the nature of the quranic uh language and how it's reflected in the actual grammatical constructs that it uses because it tells us about it tells us about the power relationships that

existed at that point in time yeah yeah uh so you know when you look at the the divorce verses it clearly talks about it suggests or it assumes that men have the power and then should they divorce muslim women uh so that is very revealing from from the perspective of of contextualized approaches to islam that that taking we need to take this language into account seriously because it has hermeneutical implications it has important interpretational implications yeah i see i mean and and also things which are

debated today like things like inheritance and and even the aspect of people sometimes bring up as a debate the blood money or this this whole debate of the the blood money for a woman you know if she's if there's been accidental if there's been manslaughter is you know scholars in the past many had said just half of that of a man and this is obviously today used to kind of deride and to kind of uh almost you know to take pokes islam in saying look islam is very misogynistic yeah yeah and again

all of these ideas as i said because the the interpreters of uh and the the people who are constructing islamic knowledge and islamic sciences uh living in a patriarchal uh cultural setting um they it has definitely tainted or reinforced certain ideas that they had that were very much at least androcentric if not patriarchal and they were definitely uh the the the they were definitely bringing these ideas into the exergetical

and you know into the into the interpretative uh frameworks it's very very difficult to kind of have a completely objectivist approach to scriptural reasoning and interpretation because we are all inevitably uh conditioned by our cultural upbringing uh and many many many situational factors uh do affect the way we go about interpreting and some of them are extremely subtle and unless we have unless we have this clearly on our radar we could we could

bring many pre-existing ideas and read them into into the scripture yeah no absolutely they might not necessarily believe that you see hadith because i feel that hadith were obviously one is using revelation scripture to to kind of manipulate the meaning or to kind of interpret it in a particular angle but hadith on several occasions obviously i'm not saying all hadith but there were certain hadith that were fabricated or misrelated to people over you know throughout time where i feel people's biases have really not only come out but then

influence people because you're saying you know a moment ago professor he said well like people's upbringing but you see when the upbringing reinforces a narrative so if you take the hadith that speak of things like the youth you know this person uh that the prophet almost curses this person who is at the youth and the definition of the youth is the one who doesn't have this excessive jealousy over his women now you see now here what you're doing is you're strong arming individuals into thinking they need to have that aggressive jealousy otherwise they're lacking

in faith and yeah definitely definitely and professor khalil has used the word authorial enterprise when you look at the hadith authorial enterprise meaning that inevitably all the people who were involved in this not have there's an indelible mark of their own personality and biases imprinted in it and the way in which the narrative came out the way it was structured the way it was articulated it was a it was an enterprise or multiple

authorship if you like definitely i mean i i would definitely feel because i would feel these kind of hadith to do with the youth and stuff like this are clearly fabricated and they've been done i'm not saying everybody who fabricated them or was part of that enterprise had a malicious intention you see sometimes some things just come together in a particular way that people reinforce their own cultural perspective and and they think that's oh that's what they heard and they think you know there's also false memories there's things that happen because when you look at the hadith it's it's fascinating this is a hadith and ibn rush brings it in his discussion in

bitter which they do as well that that there was a companion who complains to the prophet about his wife always being not just flirty with men but she the actual word he uses that you know when men not only flirt with her but they get very they try to be intimate with and touch her she she doesn't mind and she kind of like goes with it and likes it and and the prophet said because the prophet in the discussion and that ibn roost brings that the prophet says oh like he's obviously complaining as in he's had enough of this relationship so the prophet says well okay

why do you end the relationship and he says and and the prophet says why do you divorce her then and he says no but i love her. and then the prophet said fossbeer you know then be patient i mean you know that and there was no insult here in saying oh my god you lack you're at the youth and you know how can you woman do this and you you still want to be with you know you lack faith there wasn't this kind of a reaction so yeah but that's spot-on analysis that's spot-on yeah um [Music]

yeah i mean i do think that these these conceptual markers of masculinity and femininity are ultimately responsible for a lot of a lot of uh kind of legal legal edicts and legal uh understandings that are doing a disservice to both men and women and they really need to be they need to be conceptualized alternatively we need to we need to strengthen the conceptual relationship between let's say femininity and scholarly and religious knowledge

we need to strengthen the conceptual relationship between femininity and public authority we need to move away from the idea of female sexuality being inherently uh corrupting morally we need to move away from the idea of this aggressive sexuality that meant reduces men to to beast sexual beasts you know to to really uh move away from these conceptualizations that basically characterize patriarchal societies and that we find also importantly we find in other religious traditions and cultures i i find

sometimes this irony uh professor i'm not sure if you covered it in as part of the gender studies of feminism within uh islam that you see there's almost a uh a co it's it's almost a a mirror polarized two polarized versions or lenses placed on the female entity in in much of tradition and that is on one hand it's they say no it's the man who is for example like you mentioned this sexual peace to you know and therefore it's kind of

justified in many ways you know well it's his nature it's the woman is by default modest and she's like this and she shouldn't really even you know sex is almost like a passive thing for her it's not even this you know she just it's really procreation or just serving the husband his needs but then you have on the other end you have this same this a parallel concept that no this woman's sexuality if unleashed is so dangerous that it would not only destabilize societies this is why allah says wasaniya to first

was the and before saying the zerni and this is exemplified in the story of zuleika and yusuf and you know and this temptress has led many a saints you know off the path and she's destroyed robbed the iman of many you know you get these two shockingly polarized views and and yeah professor fatima nisi who died a few years ago moroccan sociologists have she's done an amazing amount of academic work in this in this space she has very much uh pointed to this paradoxical

construct of female sexuality that is kind of kind of schizophrenic even in a sense that they are mutually exclusive and and uh and they produce uh you know it its impact can be very um you know it has impacted the nature of muslim cultures throughout islamic history because the religious ideal has always been a woman who is operating entirely in the in the in the private sphere

uh a woman who an invisible woman is the ideal woman so to speak you know that's kind of that's always been kind of upheld as a as a religious ideal um and yeah and it can in its in its most in its most uh detrimental uh kind of its most sentimental dimension it can lead to honor-based violence because there is this there is this uh conceptual linking between patriarchy honor the the owner of the male resides

in the behavior of the of the of the female folk women uh wives and and female children so uh uh you know especially what could be construed and everything ends up being construed as sexual flirtatious behavior so whatever a woman does it's cons construed as having some kind of a sexual connotation to it therefore they have to be regulated they have to be there needs to be gender segregation women's movement needs to be strictly regulated and so on and so forth and you're right and

and this is why it's almost like the pack that creates this code uh which then the individual in many ways is kind of even forced to live by so you get in these honor killings and these honor attacks were people themselves it because it would be their own daughters their own sisters their own and they don't they may not even want to but they feel they have to you know they feel that i'm obligated to kind of now punish this person because that's what needs to be done you know that's the

what is the that's the code yeah that's the that's the other that's the kind of the the the social pressure the social pressure that is exerted on them technically yeah and and one thing i mean what i think we traditional islamic leadership has failed is not to is lack of condemnation of these kinds of practices and the underlying the underlying ultimate kind of the ultimately responsible

ideas that are under the surface that kind of enable these practices to to to to you know continue to exist in muslim cultural contexts why do you think that you see why do you think that was the case that they failed in doing that like because it's not that you see there have been many female popular or influential or significant personalities within islam starting from you know whether it's the mothers of prophets right down to the wives or whether it's going to be the daughters or just female figures within

islam they have existed many countless but yet why has the the kind of scholarship just failed in kind of condemning harshly like yes they will say it's wrong but you're right they don't they don't condem they don't kind of stamp the point out and and what led to that yeah i i think there are parallels here there are parallels here with what you've talked about in terms of underage marriage you know there are there is this residual ideas uh you know we even have the hadith of of you know if uh you know if someone if someone finds the

you know their wife uh you know committing zina and if you if the person kills both in you know because of his short temper then that person is given a lenient sentence so it's kind of this kind of crime you know passion that they have a passion yeah yeah and and because the the interpretative tradition has invested heavily in these ideas of what masculinity and femininity are about it undervalues it under values at the end of the day it undervalues the life of women and girls that is unfortunate tragically

i mean it's very sad but true yeah uh we have to i i mean we have to call a state of spade uh because because the the the kind of the ultimate the ideal muslim is i think you never invariably a male kind of a male a male kind of a male figure or who has a particular uh pious let's say you know particular understand particular approach or particular uh let's say

um who has internalized a particular concept of piety you know that that essentially is patriarchal heavily patriarchal that construct construct is heavily patriarchal and it's based upon you know i'm not saying you know all the men are patri you know you know uh irredeemably patriarchal but they do not the the current discourses on on these issues um are still uh

there is this benevolent but benevolent patriarchy i think is one way of putting it where you whether where men think they always know best what is best for the you know wives and the daughters and that they all they think that they always act in their best interests regardless of whether or not the ideas are actually uh helpful or not no and just to reiterate that point uh that it's definitely uh and i don't agree with the and you know what what you said i i 100 second that and and i i've never said that all men muslim men are like this and i would

condemn that statement because muslim men i don't believe all muslim men are like that at all but i feel that the you see the the muslim voice boxes because muslims generally don't neces they don't actually speak for islam they don't actually they kind of constitute the the masses that's on the ground but islam is presented in writings in speeches in you know in kind of like you have these mahadarat lectures in videos it's that's how islam is generally

kind of wrapped it's representation and in that in those whether it's circles or that platform it is unfortunately for whatever reason it is presented in this way that it is presented and people seem to get very insecure if you challenge certain narratives they think oh is this an attack on traditional islam you know like this whole thing you mentioned about underage marriages and i've been banging on about it for so long that look listen people need to be very very clear they need to be very kind of

uh just just have one voice on this matter but the reason they don't is because they will say you see they will try and justify it by saying oh but there's this hadith you know of aisha's age but that's one side but the irony is you see this is what i find so ironic that then you look at many of the fatawa according to several ulama like let's say the hambali mother or even other madhabs scholars of they then set the bar according to that hadith like they say okay the age nine is the age that we can do how do we

know this because of this hadith why don't we pick on this uh why don't we pick on this hadith oh no because the hadith is done by this ruling but this ruling is based on this hadith and it's like a self-serving kind of mechanism and yeah um yeah having said that i mean there are there i wonder whether you also covered

prophethood as an angle in that because there was a huge debate can women become prophets um not not not so far no i haven't really i haven't gone down that path but i i certainly would not have any objections to the idea of a female prophet would uh and i would consider it legitimate i mean we i mean some people consider [Music] yeah that the figure of marion in the quran

obviously because yeah uh yeah yeah i i myself society i've said that i do believe was a prophet from god yeah yeah i guess because of the patriarchy or strongly patriarchal nature of the societies in which the prophets operated so to speak uh was not conducive if you like to to a female prophethood but uh i think you know but

uh i don't see any particular reason why as to why women would not be capable of prophethood of course of course yeah i mean that's uh so yeah and i feel sometimes what what's happened is because you see if we don't own the discourse and we don't start to kind of challenge and hopefully change certain perspectives what happens is i fear that there are you know that that it would then be uh usurped that the narrative would be kind of hijacked by people

who would then just do more islam and more harm to to islam and the greater you know the greater muslim uh communities even whether that's people who don't like islam or whether it's islam critics or even sometimes i feel that there are certain um there are certain you know very whether you want to say ultra feminist movements or things that will hate on hate on whether it's going to be hate on men or hate on things that they will use these things from islam to say well look islam hates on women because blah blah blah blah and these things will show and because muslim scholars men are not challenging

it well it shows that well you're content with it then you know you're complicit with it because you're not really challenging the problems yeah and often often often these ideas about you know gender issues in islam come from the uh come from the hadith literature and all the time hadith became seen as the only repository or vehicle or perpetuating sunnah and therefore it's given a normative kind of normative standing whereas and [Music] well given some of the stuff that i have done uh over the last decade or so we see

i mean i i i've come to the conclusion that the mainstream sunni what we consider the the mainstream sunni approach to sunnah and hadith is actually quite substantially departed from the way the concept of sunnah was understood during the formative period of islam and i'm happy to talk to you a little bit about sure about that and i know you have i know you have on several occasions raise this issue and i'm so happy that you are one of the very few people who is actually very much conscious and you know kind of insisting upon this distinction

um between early concept of sunnah and how it evolved and became embodied in hadith much later on please do yeah but if you look at your thoughts on that because i've always highlighted that look the early schools amongst them the early school of medina imam malik school even imam abu hanifah amongst other scholars saw a distinction between hadith wasunna and it's only over time that these distinctions have blurred and then until to you know like some schools saw them as synonyms like the shafi's and others that today that's become like the norm like people say well

you know it's in the hadith therefore a girl it's sunnah yeah yeah i mean this can be the the concept of sunnah can be approached from many different angles like linguistically conceptually uh like its relationship with the quran and the hadith hermeneutically so the but the first point that i think we should always keep in mind is that this concept of sunnah like any other concept has evolved over time all right and and that linguistically when we look at the concept from an etymological linguistic perspective

we see that the the the it was used in a number of different contexts you know what was different from how the the quran uses the concept how the concept were used was used in let's say the first century or second century of islam and then third century and so on and so forth and like during during the the formative period of islam sunnah was not kind of what its meaning was not fixed actually i mean the professor's ansari i think he's also pakistani he wrote an excellent

paper back in 1972 on on on islamic jerusalem prior to shaving okay i have one i think i think it may be his actually but this one the one i have is more centered uh he looks at the muata but the concept of sunnah and how it uh its origin yeah yeah yeah yeah and even even uh what the the conservative scholar from saudi arabia was written on this azami i think all right okay okay yeah he says that like in informative period of islam the way the concept of sunnah was used by seems scholar

in different works could be different it could have a different meaning so there is like a in terms of usage the concept of sunnah was used differently by different people and so that's the first point that we need to make and then so there was a comparative lack of fixity in meaning and and it was used in different contexts yeah that's the first point and then there is a difference between the way the contents of sunnah was used let's say islamic jurisprudence later on and the way it's used in uh you know in arabic lexica

or or in you know so there's there are so it's a very police the concept of sunnah has so many meanings depending upon the context in which you use the word yeah um but also so that's one element okay but even if we even even if we restrict its meaning to how it's used let's say in islamic jurisprudence in in the formative period of islam for example uh sunnah was not necessarily always associated with the persona of the prophet himself so you had you have the sunnah of the caliphs

the sunnah muslim the sunnah of all the muslim community uh you know the sunnah of of especially the community of medina as as you have repeatedly stated so you have the you have this idea of the sunnah the well-known the well-preserved so so you have so the sources of sunnah informative period of islam were not restricted to the prophet himself islam but the other people could not or actually could also institute new sunnah

or embody and perpetuate that concept moreover if you look at the works of western scholars on the concepts of sunnah for example shakhtar jumbo khalak and many others they've they've said that the concept of sunnah for example um was constitutive and inclusive of reason itself so later on of course sunnah and reason due to the due to the influence of hadith and those kinds of people they have kind of tried to monopolize the concept of sunnah and said the sun has nothing to do with reason it's a texturalist-based thing

whereas informative period islam something that was constitutive of the reason was actually constitutive of sunnah and i have lots of references i have written a a very lengthy journal article published in arab law quarterly back in 2011 or so that summarizes especially the western scholarship on this question um so so it's important to understand that the idea that the sunnah to not be is a very secondary it's a very second historically speaking a secondary development in islamic history that came around you know as a result of the the efforts of the muhammad in the second and third

centuries so when people talk about the concepts of sunnah and mainstream islam they actually referring to a concept of sunnah that only became more prevalent in the third and fourth centuries of of islamic calendar it's not necessarily faithful to the concept of sunnah the way it was understood in the first and the first half of the second century now that is a very that is a very profound point uh professor yeah so yeah and like also certain questions pertaining what is the scope what is the normative scope of the concept of sunnah does sunnah tell us something about akira or is it just about

and is it just about fick or is it just about armor so i would i argued like yourself in my article in 2007 that sunnah cannot introduce elements pertaining to aqueduct must be cannot cannot be based upon hadith yeah so that's why i mean i rejected the the second coming of the jesus on the basis of the fact that uh you cannot introduce uh islamic islam iman on the basis of a hadith uh you know it must be you know and it's

fascinating that even just as a side tangential note there were many ulama who as amongst them for example the baghdadi or the many of the iraq queen of the malikiah and other people who said that the the ahadith okay the hadith cannot make something haram or cannot make something worship that sorry as in fun that any commandment that comes through hadith can at most be recommended or like so if there was a do that we get from the quran it can mean an obligation

but if there was a do from the hadith it can only reach the level of it's recommended to do it as in it's a good thing do it and if there's a don't it can only reach the level of kara like it's discouraged but not haram i mean this is even this is in just do's and don'ts let alone beliefs i mean beliefs are like you know so much more like they would be on another level but that's just a tangential note but yeah exactly yeah yeah that's that's very pertinent very pertinent so uh you know uh we need to really when we talk about the concepts of sunnah then we need to be clear as to

what is its nature and what is its scope what what is its uh kind of territory what can it tell us what what you know what are the boundaries of its of its um of the way it operates and what what what what it can in terms of a source of islamic law [Music] as a source of islamic teachings in general yeah so i would argue uh that

the concept of sunnah regardless if it's hadith based or independent of hadith it it cannot and should not include religious beliefs that are part of kind of basic belief systems of muslims yeah um um so yeah so we have you know um the concept of sunnah has evolved significantly over time and and this is something that mainstream discourses on sunnah and traditions islam brush aside and don't want and and do not really grapple with it and there are huge implications

in terms of how you go about evaluating the hadith if you if based upon how you approach the concept of sunnah itself because even this term uh even this term sunnah which now represents for example the mainstream body of muslims or orthodoxy the people of the sunnah i mean this term doesn't even truly really emerge until the almost what we're talking about almost a third century or fourth century of islam this term kind of like emerges and kind

of like starts to preponderate uh but for the first hundred years second almost hundred years of islam these muslims never even referred to themselves like they didn't have a name to refer to themselves by it's fascinating you know when you just think about that it's like whoa yeah yes and it's always inevitably you know these certain groups try to monopolize certain concepts i mean the same thing happens in relation to like even the concept of

that uh has been used as an antonym of sunnah if you look at there's also a secondary development like i read uh last year uh phd thesis on on the on the evolution of the concept of video professor this is why you see people what's you're just reading tabloids and and other social media professor is reading phd theses this is why he's doing it

so we have to be basically what i'm trying to say is that often people can hide behind certain concepts and they can appropriate them but we need to be critical of the way in which they appropriate and use these concepts because often they do not do justice to the complexities that we find in what these concepts represents uh this the the multi-dimensional nature of this concept how it evolved uh how the changing shifted how it can be mean a different thing in a different context so if i could there's one message that i

would like to convey to our listen listenership is to always be very critical of any kind of concepts and ideas that are presented to us and you know in in overly simplistic kind of uh ways because they hide more than what they tell us but the the thing is professor that the simplicity of these things is what this sorry not the simplest but the simple simplistic nature is a better way of saying it of some of these slogans is what makes them sell

yeah yeah at times perhaps they can be justified but nonetheless there needs to be a platform where people who engage and do these and engage in these discussions uh as you say do a disclosure with a big deal because what happens what happens as professor has said there is an authoritative approach to knowledge and not authoritarian approach to knowledge an authoritative approach to knowledge recognizes the complexities the uh

situates all the opinions and pardon me explains all the positions and situates one's own vantage point and perspective within that spectrum so that's an authoritative approach authoritarian doesn't is a is not premised upon this kind of heuristic it's not it does not acknowledge the the wide spectrum of interpretations it's not a disclosure with the big d as you see one thing that i wanted to ask you uh from a more classically informed perspective uh is this concept of origin of islands

when did they start to be systematically used as a means of authenticating hadith i mean i i have i have lost touch with this kind of scholarship maybe five ten years ago but the best that i know is uh this is primarily on western scholarship um basically it says that the the more systematic the earliest time that we could situate the the usage of islam for the purposes of verifying and authenticating hadith is the third quarter of the first century of hijri so around the year 75

year 75 right yeah so i think by that time by that time the vast majority of companions and even if we use this sunni expensive expensive understanding of who companion is all of them would have died yeah so there is this uh so this is a fatal flaw in in a sense i mean how can you if there is not only started to be systematically employed at the earliest in the third quarter of the first century of islam when the majority of the companions had already died then how can you have a a proof like a uh entirely

kind of robust how can you have so much confidence in this system despite all the different problems that the hadith suffers from based on even the mainstream approaches i actually feel that that's if and i'm being fair here i am part of the sunni tradition i am you know involved with hadith studies myself i have asanith and chains going back and have devoted years of my life to their studies and still discuss hadith analysis i would actually feel that that is actually a very

generous kind of take really to say that it's not is you know it's unless it's meant that some faint origin but to say that it's kind of roots have taken place within the first century of islam and that too by the you know the third quarter so we're talking like uh really the time of people like let's say i don't know uh abdul malik uh i'm sorry before abdul malik maybe yazid and then going into marwan abdul malik ibn marwan i i honestly feel that that's very generous uh

the reason why and i'm trying to be transparent here because look this is our own tradition and if we are transparent with it then we're taking the bull by the horns you know people can't come and attack us because we are being open and we're saying yes we know these are the things and this is how we handle it you see the earliest compilation efforts of hadith take place during the time of um aziz which is really the which is around 100 history so he he ruled from 99 to 101 and it's it's not his first thing so he's in office and he's taking care of things

and then as he goes into it he highlights and highlight that he says that there is a strong concern because so many hadith have been fabricated for and against bani umayya so he says look there's so many hadith that people have been fabricating to please bani umayya and so many also to kind of take digs at them and support other causes against them so he says i think we should collect hadith now there is no mention of isla these records of him saying let's collect his nuts

he he instructs commissions and then ibn shah abzuri really who's in medina to compile hadith now what you have is this is probably the first effort real effort of trying to put hadith together in a book but there's no mention that chains are being mentioned they're just collecting this hadith this is and i would feel it's maybe within a decade or two of that time that had it's not start to emerge uh so you see people like ibn sireen saying look people are being asked um

you know who do you get this hadith from now you know we don't just it's not that just to stall us as imam muslim transmits they started to say who did you get it from and he passes away i believe uh these people pass away like 120 something or something like in into that time of injury so it's between maybe 110 hijri to you know the decades that follow that this emerges and hence isn't is there you see even if you fast forward several decades by imam malik's mother it's there but it's still very secondary imam malik sometimes won't even mention an island then he's

not bothered it goes to oh he'll miss out people and it's not a big deal it goes to show that isla is still developing you know it's not taken that strong it's not at the forefront yet it's by because imam malik passes away 179 history so you know and if we're looking at this beginning in one let's say 20 it's still there's 50 years and it's definitely emerged it's definitely on the horizon but it's still not at this strongly at the forefront because imam malik will sometimes say you know it's reached me he will miss out the entire sun earth

he'll do but then by the end of that century and moving into the next century with this second wave of mahadithine the likes of imam ahmed the likes of really imam bukhari and all of these people around him and in that era the razian and many others here isn't is now at the forefront uh you know people are very and we want to you know is this person let's criticize who are the reject but it's interesting and i've mentioned this before that they still yes it gets logged and then in the centuries later it's going to get more you know it's going to get scaffolded further and then in

ibn salah ibn salah and ibn hajir's time it gets really crystallized this science of hadith however i've said that look is if we're going to be transparent professor we have to be honest when people say like look imam there's a narrator and he's trustworthy and we say okay how do we know he's trustworthy well people say well let's say let's say for example they say well abu dawud said he's fine or said he's fine or but this narrator passed away in let's say the early second century

like 110 120 100 these scholars who vouch for him don't appear till about 120 years later they're obviously getting this from someone so jachiev is obviously being told via someone who also most likely didn't meet that person who's getting it from someone else but this substrata of data is not being conv conveyed to us we don't know when ibn is saying oh look i know ahmed she's trustworthy or he's like who did you get it from because you never met him and neither did your

teachers meet him so that is completely missing from the discourse and we you know people say well just blindly and i'm look i'm not calling to dismiss isla or hadith i'm not but i'm saying that look let's be real this does have you have to give some margin here of saying well hmm okay there has to be some you know like a pinch of salt here there has to be some margin of error because these people that are vouching didn't see those people yeah especially if if people are so keen to justify certain beliefs and practices on

the basis of these kinds of information and that can have huge implications on on on in terms of the way the society is structured the way legal system functions you know um it just it just strikes me that um the people could have so much confidence in this knowledge yet be aware of so many potential vulnerabilities and and and discrepancies and and problems that

are part of the system itself and i feel that you see the part of that is that um because they fear that the whole enterprise might be swept away and because this this layers to what they're not disclosing so at a lighter level this the layers that they all disagree upon the what so that you know there's hardly i mean there may be some but most narrators there's never an agreement by the the dawns of hadith about him you know people yeah several may have said he's okay and other great people like nasa you might say

you know there's several people in sahih bukhari that um imam nasa would say no he's utterly unacceptable or he's a liar or he's naive or or other scholars but this person may have said it and he won the culture vote you know his his book kind of gained currency over time uh it didn't necessarily make it more true it just made it more popular you know that's uh so there's that layer but then there's a deeper layer like what i highlighted that how did they even know about the people they never met because this you know there isn't transparency how you acquired that knowledge about that

person who was from 100 years before you even lived uh yeah yeah and and the tabakat literature on the rijal itself is even later maybe maybe fifth century if i'm not mistaken the compilation of the yeah so that's also problematic and i feel that they fear that look if you start showing the holes or if you start showing the flies in the ointment people are going to chuck the entire thing away but i feel i feel that look let's be honest that the hadith project as a project

is is a testimony of great and outstanding human endeavor you know it is you know you can't knock the the hard work and the the outstanding kind of effort that has gone into this you know with a with a capital letter this great project the hadith project and and and i feel that as far as the effort is concerned it deserves to be saluted that you know in no other tradition have people worked so hard to preserve something and i feel that if we're transparent we can not only own it with pride but we can be real and people won't have

to be deadlocked and strong-armed into you know accepting things where because when you do come across an absurd narration and people say well you know and they say oh but you know you if you this is on the same level with the quran and if you don't accept this you might as well just be a kafir and and then it you know i feel it what it does is it compromises the entire faith based on the risk of jeopardizing a project yeah yeah i i couldn't agree with you more i also myself am not a hadith rejecter you know deny in that sense uh

i i actually think that um if approached from a proper kind of heuristic of proper interpretational methodology then they can be useful but they they need to be also contextualized this scope needs to function only within you know outside of the realm of religious beliefs uh and and um any kind of religious practices uh that are considered to be core of uh you know islamic theology

yeah as such you know somebody had asked that um i think that's what they were trying to say in the question that look but don't you ultimately just fall victim to trusting then the scholars and the imams and the interpreters and and uh i mean i'll just give a brief uh response i'd love your take on it as well that you see i feel that yes there would always be in any field where one lacks expertise and knowledge a sense of reliance on other people who have some expertise and knowledge that is inevitable in any walk of life however i would always say that you have your reason

and if you come across something which uh you know just seems abhorrent or seems wrong but somehow it's been rubber stamped with religion i would say that you as which ironically is from the sunnah teachings as well that whatever disturbs you then no the hadith says you know what you know what what and the islam is what your heart cannot find peace with you know the the the crime or the wrongdoing in the hadith it says is that which your heart can't find tranquility with and and an example of that is the hadith in

bukhari as well which is interesting and that you see there was a group of people that the the prophet had sent somewhere and then they come up with amongst themselves they have a leader and one of them they have some disputes and he says okay what we're gonna do to settle this dispute is uh okay we're gonna have a fire because they had some kind of fire and you gotta jump into the fire and we're gonna see who gets burnt and whatever and the guy says that that's stupid you know the guy even though what you see one of the last instructions from the prophet when they left medina was to obey the commander to obey the the amir but when the amir tells them that

one of the people says that's dumb he says i ain't gonna do it i don't care if you're the emir and when they go back to the prophet the prophet says good you know you good you didn't obey him even though the final instructions were to obey him but yet you see they had the voice of reason and they're like well that sounds dumb i'm not going to jump into fire you know and but i'd like your input on that professor people that say well you know aren't you ultimately reliant then on just imams and muftis and scholars and um so isn't there is still a blind dependency yeah i think what i said about the distinction between authoritative and authoritarian

knowledge as long as we understand that all knowledge is constructed and and is not perfectly certain that everybody operates on an epistemological level that is far from being entirely certain and you leave scope for critical applying critical reason as a filter then that's fine yeah i mean professor khalid to bring him in again i would love to get professor on yeah you know i know his health isn't doing too well but now he uses the he uses the concept of a conscientious pose

so if you come across something that is morally ugly uh in in in in a text uh then you use a conscientious pause i like that yeah i mean yeah because we don't believe in a god who is irrational or sexist or you know this this you know that by definition uh that's not a god so if your god is sexist then i don't believe in that god or if your god is allows for these um morally abhorrent practices or irrational practices to exist then that contravenes the very nature of god

the way we define god exactly and just to add to that and that teaching is not from the prophet sallam in our in in my understanding and i'm sure in your understanding professor but rather it would have been interpolated and introduced by people over time because if you find i i i cannot believe that that like you said that god allah the creator of this majestic cosmos would be sexist or would be cruel or irrational or throw a tantrum and do all these kind of i don't believe that and i don't believe that

a god who would then uh inspire and reveal to a prophet that that prophet would be like that so yeah yeah indeed perhaps this this this side this could lead us to perhaps our last uh last um major kind of concept or discussion yes pertaining to the actual like uh the the the how the the god is conceptualized in classical theism compared to processed theology perhaps maybe that's something that perhaps our audience might find interesting i recently myself i myself have come across i have come across

process theology process philosophy perhaps two years ago and i found that it has a lot of affinity with the way i have approached what i call progressive theory of academic theory of progressive islam so so yeah and perhaps um [Music] i would be interested to get to know your views about how processed theology goes about defining god yeah because i see from from how i've understood processed theology professor is that it um it kind of rests

on this is how i've understood it i'm you know i've not um how i've managed to grasp any understanding of it is that it speaks of experiences or what kind of make up the fundamental kind of blocks if you like at a granular level and that god is very much part of the process he's kind of very much part of uh it's a very kind of transactional um kind of give and take if that's a better word relationship uh between god and creation and interdependency uh i have seen it

in by some christian polemics than speaking of it i've even though i understand certain aspects and i agree i agree with certain thoughts like uh you know god does not uh do evil to people and god does not i understand and agree with with all of that although i've not understood why how the inter interdependency element would uh brings value to the islamic discourse i've not understood that i mean the that so i'd love your take on it because i uh my understanding of process theology is very

uh is restricted yeah yeah i mean you you've mentioned already important conceptual tools i'll contact concepts there which is fantastic um i myself am still learning uh about process theology uh process theology is basically a subset of process philosophy it's a kind of entire metaphysics that goes back to the writings of alfred north whitehead who was a mathematician and philosopher um he was originally from the uk but then he moved to harvard later on towards the end of his career but here kind of the the the kind of the

main metaphysical ideas that constitute process philosophy are based upon this understanding of reality as being dynamic in process that there is that god himself is also in process uh uh and he's constantly interacting with with the creation so um so um so perhaps the first thing that i should mention is this idea of pan and theism you know uh the idea that god the the god

is part of the world but is always more than the world but everything and everything unfolds so all life god is life in which all life unfolds or god is love in which all love unfolds um so and um so god actually in in process theology god has two dimensions god has a primordial nature which is a non-changing aspect of god okay god's character is an unchanging element in god's character

so and that is um it's referred to as primordial primordial the nature of god has a consequence i was going to say or somehow uh like almost what some theologians call pre-eternal the kind of kardeen kind of aspect yeah exactly exactly so beyond time and space i guess yeah but god also has um a consequent nature uh an element in which god responds to and reacts to uh the the creation yeah so so um and absolutely classical up to that point i mean it seems yeah

because you know even in the quran you have uh uh you know he speaks and he is every day in involved in an affair you know and classically that part even as scholars understood that you know that god is involved in all uh current affairs yeah yeah so also process theology has a different understanding of god so everything is relational so even god is relational in that sense well that could the consequent the consequent element of god

godhead if you like is relational um but also the way the the the concept of god's perfection is not it's conceptualized not as something that is you know can unilaterally and supernaturally intervene in the world that god also and this i think this is in harmony with some of the things that you were talking about with respect to miracles in the quran where you denied that god can super naturally intervene and suspend laws of nature all of that is actually is in congruence with processed theology

with where god is the prime exemplification of the metaphysical principles that und that underpin reality so god god cannot god cannot break his own or her own laws of nature because god is an exemplification and embodiment of these laws see because i was i was kind of saying it from the angle that you see when god set creation into into motion and with it comes certain laws and whether it's the laws of physics or other things are set into motion

then as god i suppose it comes back to that other discussion what do people mean by sunnah but the quran says i obviously understand this as all part of god's sunnah then he what he has set into motion and then he has told you to observe them because you know allah says in the quran look go around observe look at this oh you want to understand how creation began allah says in the quran that facility you know like why don't you look around you observe you're going to learn from the world around you you can pick up principles and laws and and if

this the the thing around us was uh volatile in the sense it didn't have a pattern it didn't have no patronicity to it but rather it was just just erratic and just just did ad hoc things then that would defy the very commandment of god that why don't you learn from nature around you because well nature then doesn't have to behave that way tomorrow it could just be different and then it could just be different and so i was kind of coming at it from that angle that god doesn't do it as opposed to an incapacity uh as opposed to saying he's incapable

but that he wouldn't do it uh i suppose it was more philosophical the discussion but yeah sorry yeah yeah yeah um you see process theology believes that god's power is kind of open source if you like because god's perfection is not conceptualized as in like being able to unilaterally impose himself on the creation but actually um [Music] god is the most moved mover rather than immovable mover god has the most power but not all the power

and god is affected and affects others and that's where the god's power resides in the ability to influence others but also he has that god has the highest capacity to be influenced by others see now that you say this i recall this yes yes when i was reading up on process theology you see but what i was uh as a as a question which i'd like to put to you professor what do you think that could bring you see because that kind of a view

is it's seen as kind of uh diminishing some uh the the uh whether aspects or power or capacity of god what do you think that kind of a view could bring to islam because wouldn't that just be kind of detracting from the concept that islam has of god would you i think yeah what it brings is first of all it emphasizes the the imminent nature rather than the transcendental nature of god the transcendental nature of god is still there but it emphasizes this this worldly nature

of god so that we take comfort in the fact that god responds is responsive to our joys our sorrows that god um is affected and kind of sympathizes with with us and wants to bring about healing and compassion because god hasn't done anybody but in processing they say an initial aim god has an initial aim which is to bring about a world that

brings about beauty harmony intensity of experience and value so um so if we had a god that is beyond space and time that is utterly transcendent that has this um kind of immediate glance of the past present and the future and knows the future in a predetermined sense then it takes away from the imminence of god so in process theology god god is a source of all potentialities but uh it doesn't bring about every actuality

it needs input from the creation so god although god is all knowledgeable if uh but god doesn't have a knowledge of future because there is no knowledge to be known okay once the knowledge is there then god has no complete knowledge of the knowledge that already exists but because the future is open and because the creatures and humanity in particular has agency and plays a part in determining the future given its context and situation situation in which every person finds themselves in then god does not have a unilateral

monopoly on power and i think this reconciles this goes for her this kind of has affinity with with the idea of of human beings being being the the khalifas on on earth you know it gives pain it reconciles i think it from my perspective it gives due credit to human agency without taking away from god you see because i think because i kind of uh all you see a lot of those premises being positive that you were saying along the way i agree with those uh things like you're saying about like god is about

creating values about compassion he's about kind of loving what you loving you loving things being you know that whole the whole description i am all with that and i do teach that uh except the difference being that i still don't feel i personally don't feel the need to say well god is not all-powerful or he's not all because i feel that there's that there are different like you said different aspects or different perspectives on when we see god there is the transcendental

uh understanding which you mentioned like which is um when we're discussing ontologically or something about god as in the transcendent but then in our experiences he is the the imminent he is here he is something that you know that blesses us that all that you know loves us or that intervenes in his own way but he doesn't because he sets out laws of nature of of you know the forces he does not change them as he has already stated uh i mean so this is why i felt that you see a lot of these things

i we already uh believe them but i just didn't see the need in saying things like well god is not then all-powerful or he does not necessarily know or he doesn't because i felt that kind of detracted from the understanding of god yeah the problem is that one of the main reasons why it's important to understand god's power as being really relational rather than unilateral is because it helps us deal with this question of theodicy and the presence of evil you know why didn't god intervene in the holocaust in the bosnian war in all these wars

you know because if god is all-powerful then god is basically written the conclusion that we can come to is that god died or doesn't care or god is evil or permits hero but if we say that god lures us and attracts us to do to goodness and wholeness but it cannot coerce us and doesn't have unilateral power to prevent evil from happening because of the way god chose to create a world in which god limited himself but could it not also be professor that god does those things like because i would answer and obviously the concept of theodicy is

i mean the question of theodicy is a very difficult one throughout the ages for all theologians but i would say that it's not that god uh because you know the dichotomy that either god can do it but he doesn't so either he doesn't care or either he is doing it i would say that neither of them that god has given agency to humans and by divinely intervening at each point uh it would take away the agency and the responsibility from human beings so even though the result is the same that you're saying that god has given agency and but i'm saying he's doing this by will

not by incapacity not by he can't but that he's he's doing it by will that he has given uh human agency and responsibility to you know human beings on earth to to to be responsible for their actions um i i think that would be the the kind of the distinction the distinction you know but i feel like yeah but i feel that's very um interesting but i mean i i definitely in the past when i did look at process theology what was it about i couldn't get a good grasp of uh i was trying to understand and i was thinking maybe i'm misunderstanding what they're saying and

yeah it is it is a very complex metaphysic and it's it's not easy to understand so i didn't actually do justice to it but to me it does make sense and i i think that this idea that god's power should be seen as something in relational terms rather than unilateral terms it's very attractive to me and the idea that the

being god means it's about capacity to influence and experience the feelings of others rather than to have the power to determine to determine events kind of so that like a soft power soft soft power i guess rather than kind of a hard part yeah i i would kind of right yeah i would kind of reconcile like i've said in the past people say that because i i've often said that i feel that the the core at the message of the

prophet sallam was or the core message really or what was at the heart of it was to bridge between you know the the transcendent and the imminent the the kind of personal guard and i've said that that has been a difficult journey it's been a difficult journey for for you know humanity but what i would often say there that kind of helps bridge that and i suppose it's almost like a negation of saying something but it's that lisa kamith that allah you know says that look it's it's because there's no parallels to it

you won't be able to truly grasp it because we only grasp based on parallels we say well this this and then god is like that so yeah that's how i there's always an element of speculation you know and and process theology very much takes that seriously into account but i think it is so important to move away from this classical theistic view of god as you know a patriarch who is all-powerful and can determine everything and you are just supposed to be a puppet following in the you know yeah no i agree that i feel is that kind of old anthropomorphic

uh benevolent tyrant that kind of benevolent dictator view is very i feel it's a uh it's like when i've ever spoken on that i quote the verse of the quran that you know they did not truly estimate god but they misunderestimated him and yeah and the ideas that we find like the idea of god being a beloved that we find in islamic mysticism really i think there's a lot of affinity between yeah this emphasis in process theology on god being this creative responsive love that works with every individual

where they are at situationally and being ever responsive in a creating loving way i think that's this concept of a beloved that we find the mystics in islam they definitely have this kind of very uh intimately personal relationship with god it's a very intimate and uh exclusive almost like an insider relationship that is strange to the outsider they they can't even relate to this and at often the mystics not even referring to god

by as by god but as like you said as the beloved or as as whether you want to say it or you know because people say he but it hua in arabic is not necessarily he but that they used terms and often didn't even use the word god it's interesting this whole legacy of uh the mystics within islam how they managed to carve a very still even though it was seen as you know art but a very powerful identity that left an indelible mark on our tradition of islam yeah and i think it speaks to human

psychology i think because we like the comfort of knowing that there is someone who can understand us completely as who we are and understand our concerns absolutely sorrows joys you know because to be honest with you you know despite what they say about romantic love we all know those of us who are married romantic love only goes certain to a certain level you know you can never be perfectly understood then then professor murray again no because i'm joking

god's love operates at a you know deeper level i do i do feel it's interesting that as humans we forever are in search of that um almost the inner seeking that that unfound yet intimately familiar love and affection oh that's beautifully put that's beautifully food and i think i think the god of process theology that we also find in islamic mysticism as i

would argue in some forms of islamic fisticism really satisfies that that need and it conceptualizes god in like as that ever responsive kind of companion kind of a companion kind of the best parent best friend you can ever have wow that's well professor shukran ever so much i've really enjoyed uh having this dialogue i've really you know you're amazing and very informed highly informative company well i can clearly see why you're the senior lecturer where you are professor so

yeah i'm deeply grateful grateful for you you know actually uh i've said this before and i'll say it again the the rudi the most rudi person you are much more rudi than me i am so happy to have been able to benefit from your knowledge i continue to hope to benefit from your knowledge and i hope more and more people will recognize that the the the the kind of the the critical um kind of the the the the um i'm trying to use my

uh language carefully the kind of the the preciousness i would even call it the preciousness the precious input and the pressure the critical input that you bring into many of these debates pertaining to religion islam in particular uh you are an indispensable uh highly important and critical voice and and please continue what you are doing and may allah you give you good health excellent health to continue what you're doing in the future and i really hope that more more people will discover you and listen to listen to your wisdom

and and and subscribe to your channels wow wow professor wallahi there's so much love man honestly you're going to bring tears to my eyes professor well deserved before we sign off if people want to reach out to you or connect with you what are the best platforms to do so um i have become increasingly social media shy

i have a few a few youtube videos on gender egalitarian interpretations of islam and concept of salafism but i prefer i'm not a very articulate person i prefer the written word so i have my academia.edu i have my profile there many many of my publications are available on myacademia.edu are they also available on amazon oh well yes that's but i don't want people to spend money so don't do that yeah just go to my obviously some of this stuff look at the love vr look at learn from learn from the professor this

is love and affection allahu akbar but shukran once again and people hayakum allah as always i deeply appreciate you guys taking out these vampire hours to tune in with us obviously professor is in australia it's a very good morning over there and for many of us here it's it's good night so professor first of all to you once again shukran or barakallahu feek and to you as well people i'm gonna sign out i'll put up my page so if you can if you haven't already liked and shared now obviously professors yes i'm not gonna use my normal foul language

so people you can tune in and shukran and speak soon people masalama professor