Question: Dear Hajj Abdassamad Clarke, you are one of the selected group of European born Muslims translators who translate essential Islamic texts into a European language. What are the necessary qualifications for this task?
There is perhaps no need to repeat the obvious, the need for a good knowledge of Arabic, its idioms and usages, its grammar, the culture of the Arabs before and after Islam, and the equivalent knowledge of the language and culture into which one intends to translate.
Fath al-mulhim
The translation and editing of the section of Fath al-mulhim by Shabbir Usmani in commentary on the book of Iman from Sahih Muslim is now complete. It is to be published by Turath Publishing of London.
The d-UK Debacle – or ‘disaster capitalism’s suicide bomber in the heart of Europe’
An article commissioned by Islam Hoy
Once when a child, my father took me to a small town in Northern Ireland to a point in the road where two different types of tarmac met. He stood me with one foot on one type of tarmac and one foot on the other and said, “Now you are standing both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland, in two countries at the same time.” Those were innocent times long before the ‘troubles’ and long long before the entire debacle around whether the UK could leave the European Union and how it could achieve that, in which the Northern Irish border and the famous ‘backstop’ play a central role.
The Desert Return
Worthing mosque, May 2008
This Symposium is intended as an antidote to the mode of debate that more often than not leaves the participants none-the-wiser. Instead we hope to recover the ancient tradition of interested parties thinking together towards the truth in an atmosphere of convivial discussion.
Continue reading “The Desert Return”Mawlid 1440/2018
Allah says, “Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The likeness of His Light is that of a niche in which there is a lamp, the lamp inside a glass, the glass like a brilliant star, lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west, its oil all but giving off light even if no fire touches it. Light upon Light. Allah guides to His Light anyone He wills and Allah makes likenesses for mankind and Allah has knowledge of everything.” (24:35)
Light can be sensory or meaning. Allah being the light of the heavens and the earth can mean that He illuminates the heavens and the earth, that He has created the light that is in them, has created the sun and the moon that give them light, that He has placed light in the hearts of the inhabitants of the heavens and the earth so that they can grasp meanings, and that He is the guide of the inhabitants of the heaven and the earth.
Continue reading “Mawlid 1440/2018”An Overview
The beginning of the human story is with the Adamic individual, the single nafs (which is feminine in Arabic) from which its spouse is created (zawj is masculine in Arabic).
The next stage, after the destruction of the first generations, is at the time of Ibrahim (Abraham), peace be upon him, during the age of the great city-based cultures and empires. Ibrahim’s millet comprises his two-wife family and his followers. One line that descends from him branch out into tribes, the Children of Israel.
Academia
When thoughtful Greeks experienced distress at the disorder within and the warfare between their societies, some of them, such as Socrates, Plato and others, began to question its causes and then to enquire as to the right way to live as individuals and in societies. It was for this reason that Plato established the Academy.
Today the word ‘Academic’ does not convey any of that human or societal concern, but rather an obsession with exactness and rigour, which are useful as means but not ends in themselves. It must be beyond time for new academics motivated by concern for themselves and others and utilising the skills of careful scholarship to serve that purpose.
Relations between Islam and Common Law
The Inns of Court
The Guilds of Law in Medieval Legal History: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Inns of Court
George Makdisi
University of Pennsylvania
Common Law
The Islamic Origins of the Common Law
John Makdisi