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Read our privacy policy for more details. He is sorry for saying that now. I now regret in the past being silent about what I have heard in the Islamic discourse and being part of that with my own anger. His great concern is that Muslim thinking has sunk into theological shallowness that allows violent fundamentalists to fill the vacuum. Colonialism and successor powers, he contends, dismantled the great Islamic learning institutions, leaving a poverty of great scholarship.
Islam has been hijacked by a discourse of anger and the rhetoric of rage. We have lost our bearings because we have lost our theology. He has been examining the backgrounds of the extremists. The consistent feature, he says, is that they have been educated in the sciences rather than the humanities. They don't understand the subtleties of the human soul that you get, for example, from poetry.
Take the Iliad, for example. It is the ultimate text on war, yet you never know whether Homer is really on the side of the Greeks or the Trojans. It helps you understand the moral ambiguities of war. Yusuf's language has a rare cultural fluency shifting easily between the Bible and the Koran, taking in, within a few breaths, Shakespeare, Thoreau, John Locke, Rousseau, Jesse James, Dirty Harry and even, at one point, the memoirs of General George Paton: "Did you realise," he asks, "that Paton wrote in his diary on his first day in Morocco, 'Just finished the Koran.
A good book. Makes interesting reading. We finish our tea. Another convert, Yusuf Islam, formerly the singer Cat Stevens, is waiting to speak to the new arrival. I suggest to Yusuf that life could get a lot tougher now he has broken ranks. What about physical danger? There are Muslim fascists who are intellectually bankrupt.
The only way they can argue is to eliminate the voices they don't agree with. Hamza Yusuf is arguably the west's most influential Islamic scholar.
Many Muslims find his views hard to stomach, but he is advising the White House on the current crisis, and today he will be talking to religious leaders in the UK. Jack O'Sullivan meets him. Topics Religion Abu Hamza. His journey of reflection, prompted by a fateful car accident, took him to many parts of the Middle East over a ten-year period where he received numerous teaching licenses, or ijazas, from the some of the greatest remaining scholars of traditional Islam.
He has since travelled to numerous countries around the world giving talks on various topics on Islam, with his video and audio recordings selling by the thousands. His ability to move many to tears, both of laughter and humility, have ensured his popularity with many, but only someone who speaks from the heart will have any lasting impact upon it-and it is in this aspect that he has left his greatest impression. His talks have inspired confidence in many young Muslims disillusioned with the West and further disillusioned by other Muslims insisting on a suffocating interpretation of Islam.
He advocates a refreshing tolerance that counteracts the cancerous intolerance crippling the Muslim community, and promotes a sincerity and purification of the heart that will necessarily permeate and purify societies. For those who have attended the short courses, organised by traditional learning institutes in the West, in which he is one of many teachers, it is to bear witness to this possibility.
In meeting the teachers of sacred knowledge who have come from all walks of life to teach students living in the West, is to witness the greatness of Islam itself in its inherent ability to dignify and elevate all who embody its teachings regardless of race, rank or background.
For Islam truly is an invitation to all mankind.
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