A series of outdoor, in-person events with authors & audiences around books, biscuits & brewed beverages.
Every Saturday from 28 August to 25 September 2021, we held a series of outdoor, in-person events focusing on a selection of unique books at our campus in Cambridge.
🤚Select a book below!
On Saturday mornings from 28 August to 25 September 2021 Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad covered Imam Al-Ghazali’s ‘Faults of the Tongue’: Book 24 from his Revival of the Religious Sciences, the Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din.
In the afternoons we engaged in conversation and Q&A with the authors of a series of recently launched books:
- 28 August 2021: Servant of the Loving One – Paul Abdul Wadud Sutherland
- 4 September 2021: The Spirits of Black Folk: Sages Through the Ages – Shaykh Adeyinka Mendes
- 11 September 2021: Travelling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe – Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad
- 18 September 2021: Developing a Model of Islamic Psychology & Psychotherapy – Dr Abdallah Rothman
- 25 September 2021: Transcendent God, Rational World: A Maturidi Theology – Dr Ramon Harvey
A boxed lunch, tea & biscuits was provided for all attendees!
About the Books
Part of the third quarter of Imam al-Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din) titled ‘The Ways to Perdition’ (Rubʾ al-muhlikat), and following Book 23 on ‘Breaking the Two Desires’, is Book 24: ‘Faults of the Tongue’. Still untranslated from the original Arabic, Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad will elucidating its meanings directly from the original text over four 2-hour sessions. See here for more information & tickets.
Paul Abdul Wudud Sutherland is a weather-beaten old soul who came to Islam in 2004 and his book, which is a compelling read, is imbued in an indelible love and longing for his Shaykh who passed away in May 2014, for his loved ones and ultimately for the divine. This fascinating work, which is comprised of poetry and prose, reveals Sutherland’s subtle encounters with his Shaykh, the late Naqhshbandi spiritual master, may Allah bless him. See here for more information & tickets.
Following his transformative and popular online course ‘Black Lives Around the Messenger ﷺ’, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Shaykh Adeyinka Mendes presents selected translations from Imam al-Suyuti’s book, ‘The Excellence of Black People’ (Raf’u Sha’n al-Hubshan). The book documents the intimate relationship that thousands of Black African Muslims and Black Arab Muslims had with the Prophet ﷺ, highlights the pivotal roles they played in the early Muslim community, as well as the inspiring lives of other Black Nobles before and after the Prophet’s time ﷺ, and African words found in the Qur’an. See here for more information & tickets.
In this series of essays Abdal Hakim Murad dissects the rise of Islamophobia on the basis of Muslim theological tradition. Although the proper response to the current impasse is clearly indicated in Qur’an and Hadith, some have lost the principle of trust in divine wisdom and are responding with hatred, fearfulness or despair. Murad shows that a compassion-based approach, rooted in an authentic theology of divine power, could transform the current quagmire into a bright landscape of great promise for Muslims and their neighbours. See here for more information & tickets.
At a time when there is increasing need to offer psychotherapeutic approaches that accommodate clients’ religious and spiritual beliefs, and acknowledge the potential for healing and growth offered by religious frameworks, this book explores psychology from an Islamic paradigm and demonstrates how Islamic understandings of human nature, the self, and the soul can inform an Islamic psychotherapy. See here for more information & tickets.
This book shows incredible facility in the nuances of Islamic theology and philosophy and argues for the unique—and overlooked—contribution of al-Māturīdī and his later interpreters. By engaging with this original source material and bringing this tradition into dialogue with contemporary philosophy of religion, Harvey makes important contribution to Islamic Studies, philosophical theology, and the history of Islamic intellectual thought on reason, revelation, proofs of God’s existence, and the divine attributes. What is even more exciting is how Harvey draws on this rich legacy to argue for the revival of Islamic theology in the 21st Century. See here for more information & tickets.
