Monotheism, Images, Idols - Abdal Hakim Murad

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, Aziz Professor and Dean of Cambridge Muslim College delivers a lecture at CMC's Diploma Programme Class of 2018.
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[@Shahriar.00]

I think this is Skh. Abdal Hakim Murad's best drip till date

[@ismatislamic3621]

MayAllah accept shiekhs efforts and give him his maximum noor and knowdge to shiekh aameen Allahumma aameen summa aameen ya Rabalalameen ya Arhamarraheen

[@najouajones8828]

جزاك الله خيرا وزادك من فضله وجعلك من ناصري الإسلام والمسلمين في ربوع المملكة وخارجها

[@mr.h3737]

This lecture is a jewel. It would be helpful to find the transcription of it for academic purposes.

[@uzairmir4860]

Thank you! Would immensely help if the lectures were subtitled.

[@zarahm43]

May Allah bless us with your long life, health and wisdom for a long time to come Sir! Amen

[@claireb4259]

Jazaka'Allah Khair, Shaykh.

[@afaqjabbar7627]

Ma Sha Allah , doing a great job Shaikh May Allah Bless you give you the life of Khizar.. Fe Aman lillah

[@ubaydmir9233]

God bless Allama Murad

[@Awsumc]

Salam, is this available online as an article?

[@sameednaama]

Assalam Alaikum, Is it possible to get a transcription of the lecture? Thank you:)

[@ConsideringPhlebas]

It's funny that the race-specific "problem" of Christian iconography turns out not to be a problem in practice. In China, Jesus is depicted as Chinese, in Ethiopia, he's depicted as Ethiopian, in the Middle East, as Middle Eastern, etc. I do find it strange though that he claimed the pre-modern form of Islam contained a greater cultural plurality than pre-modern Christianity. For instance, Islam's Arabizing tendency near-eradicated any number of local languages in territories that fell under its sway, given Arabic's preeminent status as the canonical language. No such parallel can be made in Christianity, wherein the Christian scriptures were translated into local languages and these versions continue to be used by Armenian, Aramaic, Slavic, Greek, Coptic and Ethiopic Churches to the present day.

[@kjsouthall252]

You have a good point on Christian iconography as regionally depicted. Conceding that. You have a horrible point on language/cultural plurality however. Putting it nicely you're exaggerating to some degree. Which languages were near-eradicated? For the most part all non-Semitic languages in territories that came "under the sway" of Islam are not only still extant but widespread. The massive diversity of Persinate dialects in Central Asia and Iran, Indic languages in South Asia, multiple Tamazight (Berber) dialects spread all through North Africa, the Sahel and Sahara, the diversity of Malay languages in the far east, etc. Coptic in Egyptian eventually died out as a common spoken language but remained a liturgical one. Aramaic dialects also mostly died out but it took literally a thousand years. But it points to a pattern - linguistic Arabizing only occurred in areas - as a natural phenomenon - in which the people already spoke something incredibly similar to Arabic. Or why else would you think Aramaic mostly faded in Iraq but right next door in Iran Persian and Iranian dialects continued to be massively spoken? The leap from Aramaic to Arabic wasn't that huge, 1400 years ago they would have been somewhat intelligible anyway, many Arabs already spoke forms of Aramaic as well as Arabic in Hira, the old Nabatean areas in Trans-Jordan, on the edges of the Syrian desert and a diglossic situation already existed long before Islam. It's a natural leap for people who already speak Aramaic or Aramaic -like Semitic dialects to gradually switch to Arabic when it became the culturally dominant language. That said forms of Aramaic lingered for a very long time, centuries, far longer than many people generally believe. And the 'Arabic' vernacular spoken in much of Syria and Iraq anyway, before the 19th century, was largely heavily Aramaic influenced anyway. What sealed the death kneel for Arabic's pre-Islamic linguistic cousins, I believe, wasn't the coming of Islam early on, but rather Arab nationalism and the push to hyer-correct regional 'amiyya dialects to correspond with fusha in the 19th and 20th centuries. Mainly for Muslims, Christians continued largely in more remote areas to speak these dialects. The same thing happened over 2000 years before when the region Aramzied - Aramaic was not the indigenous languages of most of the people in the regions, rather they had older pre-Aramic Semitic dialects that they also, naturally, simply stopped speaking due to Aramaic's immense cultural weight. A very similar process as Arabic - Canaanites stopped speaking local languages and started speaking Aramaic, Chaldeans and Akkadians and Assyrians and so on, a myriad of people, gradually shifted their spoken local vernacular to Aramaic which was an easy natural process because what they already spoke was similar to it. Arabic's no difference. Again look very carefully at a map of the "Arabic world" it's largely corresponds to areas that have been speaking sister or cousin languages to Arabic for a very long time, in which the fundamental basic vocabulary (the core 1000 or so everyday life words) are not just cognate but functionally identical to Arabic anyway (open a Hebrew, and Aramaic lexicon, open a good copy of Lisan al-Arab or Taj al-Arus, and compile a high frequency core vocabulary for Hebrew and Aramaic, then hunt and peck those words or their close cognates in both Arabic Lexicon - a massive amount of the core of Hebrew and Aramaic is extant in Arabic. A smaller amount of Akkadian is but if you look closely you'll find close cognates, with various transformations on various radial phonemes.. A good exercise is to compare the words for chair/throne/seat in all of these languages, core words for food, parts of house, family relations, and so on... Notice then, EVERYWHERE outside of this core Afrasiatic/Semitic speaking zone people retained their languages. Inside of that Zone even when people sparted speaking forms of amiyy Arabic and dropped their "original" local languages (which is a joke if it refers to Aramaic because Aramaic too could be seen as a linguistic usurper in a sense) the Amiyy or Darija they now speak is pretty similar to the older languages they dropped. Witness the frequent use of the article Dy- in Iraqi Arabic - a clear Aramaic influence. The Arabic of Latakia Syria is pretty close to some late dialects of Aramaic influenced Akkadian The exception is the Sahel, Sahara, and Barbary - basically the whole Maghreb and Bilad Sudan. Arabizing took place in the Maghreb but much later, even in the 19th century there are vast swaths of what's not Arabic speaking Morocco and Algeria that were "Berber" speaking. Even now there are substantial populations that aren't I have Berber friends who only learned Arabic in their adulthood. The most likely reason is that the core languages, though distantly related to Arabic, were sufficiently dissimilar that there was no real overlapping. Except on the coasts, which were Canaanite/Punic areas. Tunisian Darija "Arabic" overlaps with Punic about 65% according to some linguists.

[@ConsideringPhlebas]

@@kjsouthall252 So in summary, Arabic did displace other languages, you just wouldn't go as far as I would in evaluating its extent. As I stated, Christianity maintained greater cultural and linguistic pluralism within the Christian world by enabling Christian nations to translate the Bible into their own languages and to use those languages as liturgical ones, unlike Islam. And culturally, Christianity does not impose anything like the Islamic sunnah, which can only serve to further homogenize social and behavioural customs in nations under the rule of Islam. Further, Christianity prohibits neither the production of images, religious or secular, nor does it prohibit music, unlike Islam. Quite the contrary in fact. And as such, Christianity allows for a far greater breadth of cultural, religious and aesthetic expression than one would expect to find under the comparatively restrictive Islamic cultural regime. Indeed, it wasn't even possible for Christianity to impose such uniformity even if it wanted to because, again unlike Islam, it did not impose, nor seek to impose, a unified supranational polity under one law and ruler (the caliphate). This is a curious contrast that sharply differentiates the Islamic and Christian traditions at numerous levels, i.e.: that Christianity has been characterized by decentralization, whereas centralization and homogenization is the tendency of Islam.

[@shafiqsha9875]

@@ConsideringPhlebas Islam doesn't have balck & white church problem like christianity. Islam beleive in One way. There is a difference between culture & religion. Culture is ok as long as it is not against Islam.

[@annisanazzahra2672]

The importance of preserving Arabic Language when it comes to studying Qur’an or other Islamic Textual Sources, come to the importance of understanding the Anthropology of when those scriptures were revealed or made. So through times these scriptures won’t be taken out of context.

[@saimbhat6243]

I am a kashmiri muslim, kashmiri is my mother tounge. Islam is 900 year old in kashmir. I can speak 5 languages and write in 7 scripts, although I am moderately religious but i cannot speak and write arabic. And a 100% of people here speak more than one language yet almost no one can speak arabic yet this is a quite religious place. All muslims i have met in my life in indian subcontinent were able to speak more than one language and most of them more than two. Because of british rule all educated people here speak english but i dont find same case with persian even though persian was court language of countless muslim dynasties that ruled for almost 7 centuries. So, right from the kurds in iraq to malays in malaysia to turks in turkey to berbers in morroco and to muslims in Maldives, pre islamic languages have thrived and keep on thriving. Quite surprising for some people but pretty mundane fact for me.