The Thinking Muslim

Inspiration from Sami Hamdi. How do we contextualise the current state of the Ummah? And how do we interact with politics? Excerpt from 'Raving in Riyadh - The New Saudi Arabia' with Sami Hamdi Please consider making a donation, however small, to The Thinking Muslim, to receive a share in the reward and to help us make a greater impact. ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/Donate⁠⁠⁠ Join o...

Please consider making a donation, however small, to The Thinking Muslim, to receive a share in the reward and to help us make a greater impact. ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/Donate From its first moments, Islam was linked to a state-building process, and the shari’ah explicitly addresses rules that can only be discharged by a government, such as the rules of hudud or apostasy. Imam Ghazal...

From the war in Yemen to raves in Riyadh, political analyst Sami Hamdi analyses the ‘modern’ Saudi Arabia as a regional power. Many see the country to be a staunch ally, even stooge of the United States, yet others hail its recent strategic turn under Muhammad Bin Salman as a sign that at last the country is looking to forge an independent path. From moon sighting to Hajj, the country remains at t...

Paul Williams of Blogging Theology talks to Muhammad Jalal about his ten most influential books, why he recommends them and the importance of reading. Titles mentioned in order of rank: 1. The Meaning of the Holy Qur'an by Abdullah Yusuf Ali2. Islam and the Destiny of Man by Charles Le Gai Eaton3. The Book of Hadith: Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad from the Mishkat Al Masabih selected by Charl...

The recent atrocity at al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan underscores the brutality of Israel’s settler colonial project. Our guest this week, Palestinian and Islamic activist Dr Azzam Tamimi gave us a background to the apartheid policies of the state and explained why he believes, ultimately, the severity of Israel’s brutality only serves to express its sheer failure as a project. Azzam Tamimi is a Br...

Please help us this Ramadan by making a donation to the show - more information here:  ⁠⁠https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/Donate The great Damascene scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350) authored the masterpiece of Islamic psychology Madarij al-Salikin, (Ranks of the Divine Seekers). It sets out the great Hanbalite's advice on how to journey to Allah and reach the ranks of a loving believ...

Please help us this Ramadan by making a donation to the show - more information here:  ⁠https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/Donate This fascinating interview with Dr Sohail Hanif looks to uncover the secrets of Ramadan. What should the month indeed mean to believers? And what should we be striving to achieve this month? How should we treat its minutes and hours? And how do we know whether, as the hadit...

Dr Imran Waheed is a consultant psychiatrist who specialises in acute mental health cases. We ask him about the mental health crisis, whether the lack of iman has a role in its prevalence and whether Islam has role in its cure. We look at consumer capitalism and sadness, the absence of community and faith and how one can build mental resilience. Join our Telegram group here:  ⁠https://t.me/thinkin...

Dr Jonathan Brown joins us this week to engage in an in-depth discussion about the Hadith corpus and why contemporary arguments forwarded by orientalists and modernists lack rigour. He takes us on a journey of informed exploration of some of the key personalities and thinkers of early Islam and the lengths they went through to determine the veracity of a tradition attributed to the Messenger of Al...

99 years ago, the Ottoman Caliphate, the world's last widely recognised caliphate, was abolished on 3 March 1924 (27 Rajab 1342 AH) by decree of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The process was one of Atatürk's reforms following the replacement of the Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey. Abdulmejid II was deposed as the last Ottoman caliph, as was Mustafa Sabri as the last Ottoman sha...

The British Conservative government has for some time embarked upon a project to make life difficult for ordinary Muslims. We have spoken previously about its policy of Prevent, an extraordinary state plan to compel all public servants to monitor Muslims in their midst and report on them if they showed signs of extremism. This project has enveloped the community within a cloud of suspicion, spread...

The sadness we feel after the earthquakes in Turkiye and Syria is heightened by our Ummatic feelings of closeness to the worldwide muslim community. Many of those affected have been subject to years of civil war at the hands of a brutal dictator. Sadly, this is yet another disaster that has befallen this Umma and we pray that Allah has mercy on those that died and enter them into a place where the...

The war on terror, a US-led strategy that saw deadly interventions in the Muslim world, has transformed a generation of Muslims. Some, like my guest today, unwittingly got caught up in this mindless campaign and 21 years after the events of 9/11, we still feel the aftereffects of programmes that placed every Muslim in categories, moderate or extreme, good and bad, loyal or disloyal. Moazzam Begg,...

After a brief pause, we are back and now on YouTube video. In this episode, we explore with Hamza Tzortzis the crisis of the modern Muslim man. We live in a fast-paced world dominated by technology. Social media has enhanced our lives and given space for Muslims to build networks, raise the profile of beleaguered members of our ummah and forward the call of Islam. With the goodness that comes from...

Joram van Klaveren understands the far right in Europe, this is because he was one of them. As a leading member of Geert Wilder’s Dutch Freedom Party and MP in parliament, he argued for a Netherlands without Islam. This was until he decided to write a book to attack Islam, and his research ultimately led him to embrace the faith. Today he calls for Europe to reconsider its irrational hatred toward...

Mobeen Vaid has been at the forefront of addressing the creeping liberalisation of social attitudes of the Muslim community and how these opinions often are way out of sync with the global Muslim ummah and Islam. Mobeen’s erudite commentary has looked to counter and critique these trends and today he lectures at Mosques and community centres across the US. Thanks to the team: Riaz Hasan, Musab Muh...

Prevent, a statutory duty of all public officials, looks to find what the government calls signs of radicalisation. Often, these indicators are conflated with Islamic practice or subject to the prejudices of teachers and other officials that have been whipped up in a McCarthyite-style frenzy. Dr Layla Aitlhadj is the Director of PreventWatch, she Is an academic and activist who has been following...

The journalist Peter Oborne stands out as one of the few defenders of our community in the mainstream press. Over the past two decades he has worked tirelessly to speak truth to power. He is currently a writer for the Middle East Eye and was named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. Previously he worked as the chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph until he resigned in...

Imam Dawud Walid has recently published a serious contribution to the subject of manhood. He argues that the rich classical scholarly works detailing how to bring up young men have been forgotten. This sacred idea of chivalry may look out of place in modernity, but it produced well-balanced young men that combine courage with humility, strength with forgiveness and public duty with prayer. Imam Da...

This is a repeat of a show first published in early 2020 Death has become a part of our everyday lives. Covid-19 and its spread have brought home to us the undeniable reality that we are mortal beings and our accumulation of wealth, prestige and power will come to an end. How we think about death impacts on how we think about life. So how should death be conceptualised? How should we really rememb...

Our guest this week, Professor Ovamir Anjum argues that any future reconstruction of this sacred institution has to be premised upon what he calls an Ummatics framework, an ummah-centric model. He argues that the rashidun model was fundamentally based on the consent of the ummah, and through shura, that is, consultation, and this is how the earlier caliphs successfully built an empire unlike any o...

Our guest this week is an insider turned sceptic. Harris Irfan takes on the essential purpose and complexities of Islamic finance and questions whether it has fulfilled its lofty Islamic objectives. Harris is the author of “Heaven’s Bankers: Inside the hidden world of Islamic Finance”.In this discussion with Riaz Hasan, he talks candidly about how much Islamic finance depends on a capitalist riba-...

Is there a problem with Muslim public intellectuals and scholars that engage with the political right? My guest this week, Yayha Birt, believes that white convert scholars that interact with the likes of Jordan Peterson should evaluate whether they risk confirming their anti-Islam prejudices and a distasteful pro-white ideology that today undergirds the populist white nativist backlash. In a recen...

Our guests this week, distinguished in their fields take a deeper look at the issues arising from the revocation of abortion as a constitutional right. What exactly is the position of shari’ah regarding abortion? What did the classical scholars say about the issue and is there a difference with more modern takes? How do we appreciate the political context of the Supreme Court decision and what are...

The trojan horse affair upended education policy in the UK and gave rise to one of the most problematic policies, the prevent duty. If you haven’t already, The New York Times Serial podcast on the subject is worth a listen – Tahir and his colleagues were vindicated as concerned parents caught up in a systematic programme of islamophobia.   Riaz Hasan and Muhammad Jalal caught up with Tahir Al...