#4 Spiritual Healing and Transformation in the Islamic Tradition with Dr Abdallah Rothman
Podcast Summary
Leader in the field of Islamic psychology, Dr Abdallah Rothman shares his journey into Islam and what it means to heal the heart and psyche from an Islamic perspective; the way to relieve the suffering that is a part of the human condition, as taught by two prominent and influential Sufi figures in the Shādhulli ṭarīqa, and experientially understood.
Despite world travel to explore spiritual communities in search for truth; it wasn’t until his encounter with saintly Sufi teacher ...
Sidi Shaykh Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Jamāl ar-Rifaʿi that his life’s trajectory changed. Captivated by the science of the soul from the Islamic tradition and drawn to this notion of healing and spiritual development, Dr Rothman experienced first-hand the incomparable healing power of love.
He later studied with Shaykh Nooruddeen Durkee in effort to quench his thirst for knowledge. Virtues of wisdom, humility, patience, and diligence were given space to grow under Shaykh Nooruddeen’s care, guidance and ‘tarbiya’. A disciple-teacher relationship integral to the heart and soul’s processing, purification and healing.
Dr Rothman further explains that both secular mindfulness and non-secular spiritual modalities appear, at surface level, similar in reward and benefits to the Islamic approach of going inward and cultivating presence. Consistent, diligent inner-work and practice will improve emotional well-being, energy, and tranquility. And yet, intention makes all the difference—seeking the annihilation of the self to then be unified with the One, with Allāh; to realize, actualize, and embody being.
The Islamic tradition honours Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ as an exemplar: the epitome of high moral standing, good character and being. To emulate and take on the Prophet’s traits and conduct as one’s own is to strive and draw closer to Allāh; the heart of spiritual training, tarbiya, in one sense; and, the connection of a purified heart to wisdom and witnessing Truth.
To bring home the message of Islamic spirituality, Dr Abdallah Rothman draws upon key aspects in the Prophet’s life, ʿalayhī as-ṣallātu wa-salām, highlighting the significance in certain acts of worship, linked to the objective and actualization of Oneness, tawhīd. Distinctly, the retreats to Cave of Ḥira and the daily practices of night vigil, qiyām al-layl.
Relatable to every wayfarer, this podcast connects spiritual training ethos, the role of the heart in personal and emotional well-being, and purification to honing presence and witnessing the One. Concepts of islām (surrender), amāna (trust), tawakkul (reliance), and baraka (blessing) remind us that we are not responsible for the outcome of events, but rather, our responsibility lies in intent and action and ultimately, our alignment and submission to serving the Divine Will.
About the Guest
Dr. Abdallah Rothman is the Principal of Cambridge Muslim College, founder of Shifaa Integrative Counseling, co-founder and Executive Director of the International Association of Islamic Psychology, and visiting professor of psychology at Zaim University Istanbul, International Islamic University Islamabad, and Al-Neelain University Khartoum. He holds an MA and a PhD in psychology and is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and a Board Certified Registered Art Therapist (ATR-BC), licensed in the United States and currently living in the UK.
Dr. Abdallah was a student of the late Professor Malik Badri in Islamic psychology and in addition to his academic training has studied privately with a number of traditional Islamic scholars throughout the Muslim world. His clinical practice as well as his academic research focus on approaching counselling from within an Islamic paradigm and establishing an indigenous Islamic theoretical orientation to human psychology that is grounded in the knowledge of the soul from the Islamic tradition. He is the author of the book Developing a Model of Islamic Psychology and Psychotherapy published by Routledge, and co-editor of the book Islamic Psychology Around the Globe, published by the International Association of Islamic Psychology.
SPEAKERS
Host: Saqib Safdar
Guest: Dr Abdallah Rothman
Saqib Safdar
Greetings, as-salāmu ʿalaykum, welcome everyone to another podcast, and today I'll be talking to Dr Abdallah Rothman on تربية (tarbiya) in the Islamic tradition. Dr Abdullah is a newly appointed principal of the Cambridge Muslim College, the Executive Director of the International Association of Islamic psychology, and founder of Shifa Integrative Counseling. He's a licensed professional counselor and a Board Certified registered art therapist and holds an MA and a PhD in psychology. Dr Abdullah’s clinical practice and his academic research focus on counselling from an Islamic paradigm and establishing an Islamic theoretical orientation to psychology. We have a very exciting discussion in this podcast, in which he shares his journey to Islam, having travelled the world and having met various spiritual communities from the Rastafarians to being a shepherd, and everything in between, until he finally meets a saintly figure, Sufi teacher, Master, قاضي (qāḍī), and ʾImam of مسجد الاقصى (Al-Aqṣā Mosque) in القدس (al-Quds) in Palestine, Jerusalem: سيدي شيخ محمد سعيد الجمال الرفاعي Sidi Shaykh Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Jamāl, and that transformative experience that the شيخ (shaykh) gave him and how that led him to studying with other الشيوخ (shuyoukh). We speak about transactional and transformational Islam, his work at the Cambridge Muslim College, and also addressing disenfranchised youth and raising children in the 21st century in the digital age.
السلام عليكم (as-salāmu ʿalaykum)Dr Abdullah, welcome to the Ḥikmah podcast.
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Thank you, وعليكم السلام (wa-ʿalaykum as-salām), it's good to be here with you.
Saqib Safdar
Absolutely, I've been really looking forward to speaking to you and I’ve got a number of questions. So to fire a way: Could you tell us about some of the shuyoukh you studied with and what it is that you learned from them?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Well, so I've studied with several different shuyoukh. The first shaykh that I studied with was Shaykh Muḥammad al-Jamāl from Palestine who was the caretaker of Al-Aqṣā Mosque and what originally drew me to him, I wasn't Muslim at the time, and what I was seeking was an understanding of the soul that was rooted in spiritual knowledge that I could incorporate into my sort of approach to psychology and healing. So I had just recently finished my master's degree in psychology and I had always studied different spiritual traditions, and so my approach to psychology was really rooted in this notion of the soul, and the development and the healing of the soul. And that understanding of our psychology and bringing that into balance is very much intertwined with this notion of spirituality and spiritual attainment. And so I was sort of primed to be looking for, almost as a practitioner, what is a spiritually grounded deep understanding of healing on a spiritual level. And I found Shaykh Muḥammad al-Jamāl, who was a Shaykh, like he was a qāḍī and you know he had all of this knowledge in terms of, you could say, scholarly academic knowledge, but he was at the time that I met him, he was in the US, he was teaching people how to heal themselves and other people with this science of the soul from the Islamic tradition. And it was all about the heart. It was all about recognizing that the core of the human being is not our thoughts.
When we talk about psychology conventionally, it's a lot about identity and cognition, this notion of, I think, therefore I am. And what he was guiding people toward is an experiential orientation towards the heart, as the center of the self; and then from this attunement to the heart, that this is where you unfold all of the sort of knots in your psyche, to not only heal trauma, and heal sometimes even medical ailments, but ultimately, to have this spiritual mastery and spiritual attainment. Now, so there's this development and so I was really, from the beginning, just drawn to this notion of healing and spiritual development. And this is what I saw happening and this is what I—الحمد لله (al-ḥamdulillāh) got to taste with him, and see him, you know, guiding people and teaching people how to get in touch with the heart and actually clear blockages on the heart. This is my experience and it was then when I,through that experience of having these profound experiences of my own healing,of my own sort of heart opening experiences, where, you know, things that I had struggled with my whole life in terms of, you know, things that we get hung up on, or patterns that we have, relationship things, these started to really almost like dams breaking and my heart's really opening. And at that point, I was like, this is it, you know, this is deeper than anything that I have found in my own spiritual seeking, but also anything that I've learned from psychology and healing, in terms of really doing the work of trying to help people move through things.
Basically, it became very clear to me that it was Islam; because the Shaykh, Shaykh Muḥammad al-Jamāl, even though he was giving people this healing that they wanted, especially in the West, I think there's a lot of like people were drawn to it because of almost like New Age healing movements, but really, what I understood, and it's pretty easy to see in his writings and his teachings the whole time, he's talking about Islam. He's not saying, well, I'm teaching this and I happen to be Muslim, it's the entire—Islam itself is about the heart, it is about this journey of the soul and really coming into presence in your heart is how you witness God and that is the core of Islam, sort of philosophically, but evenالشريعة (ash-sharīʿa), that the sharīʿa is actually to put a container in place to help somebody be able to develop in this way. And I think, for me, it was very easy for me to see, okay, I understood this spiritual heart approach, what I was missing, what I just didn't know up until that point was Islam, and I saw that the foundations of knowledge of the دين (dīn) but also, like the sharīʿa, were really necessary in order to really take this further and go deep. And so this is how I came to Islam; I embraced Islam, I became Muslim, took theالشهادة (ash-shahāda), and I was ready to just you know absorb and drink from this well of knowledge and at that point, Shaykh Muḥammad al-Jamāl said, you know, he instructed me to go study Shaykh Nooruddeen Durkee as sort of an extension of his own teaching to get this grounding knowledge in, you know, even just فرض العين (farḍ al-ʿayn) to begin with. So then there's this whole other trajectory of how that تربية (tarbiya) happened and that development in studying with the Shaykh that sort of rounded out this education and this approach and this is really my journey into Islam at that point.
Saqib Safdar
So, that's amazing. So for the benefit of our listeners, just to put this into context, you had obviously been meeting with various spiritual communities around the world and traveling and from the Rastafarians to your shepherd; and so you've experienced all of these different spiritual modes of being but yet Shaykh Jamāl gave you something completely different and when you said, for example, this was Islam and nothing outside it, this was essentially the Islamic teaching, was it, experientially: Was it like Reiki? Was he channeling energy? What sort of practices were you doing with him?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah, so it was first a focus on the physical area in your chest as the physical location of the spiritual heart. And I think the first thing that he would do is orient me towards having that experience and recognizing that not only that this is the core, this, the center in our chest, is where we need to identify the self, versus the head, right, and so there was a physical orientation to an energetic experience of the self; and then, once he helped define and develop that awareness of being present, being present in harmony, we do that through the ذكر (dhikr), but also just in terms of like, sitting, putting your hand on your heart, you know, maybe it's doing dhikr and saying Allāh, while having the hand on the heart and being still, to just sort of orient to, okay, this is where the core is, this is where the center is, and then once we do that, it becomes very clear, actually, that all of this emotion starts bubbling up, like you know how when you get nervous, you feel butterflies in your chest; when you start to pay attention there and bring awareness there, then also, the stuff that you need to work on shows itself, it starts to come to the surface. And so then, really what he's doing is, is reading آيات (ʾāyāt) in that place, right. So connecting with the remembrance of Allāh in the heart. So you said Reiki, so a lot of other energetic healing or New Age healing, it'll be similar in the sense of getting in touch with the energetic reality of the sort of light body or energy body, but then, if the person doesn't have (a) belief in the one God and isn't connected to a lineage of understanding how to actually invoke remembrance of that one God, then it can be pretty amorphous and can lead into lots of other places and it can be relatively dangerous in the sense it's not grounded and held in something. And so what he's doing is connecting that experiential orientation of the self that's beyond just our thoughts and our skin and then bringing into it, what any Muslim knows, like reading the three Quls (المعوذات الثلاثة: قل), you know, everybody knows that these are protections سورة (sūras). But it's like the orientation and for most people as well, you read this āyatfrom the Qurʾān and it's either a practice of recitation, or, you know, people understand that there's like an aspect of رقية (ruqya), where these sūras provide protection, but it’s vague, right? It's okay, well, I'm gonna read this sūraand ʾinshāʾllāh it’ll do something.
Whereas what he is doing is very, I would say, specific to the place in your heart where the blockage is, or where you've covered up the remembrance of Allāh in your heart. And so this is why paying attention, being present with the heart, and then when those things come up, like when the the anxiety comes up in your heart, paying attention to how does it show up? What does it feel like? And then when you can pay attention to how it shows up, that means you've identified a specific thing that needs to be healed, not just this sort of vague notion of like, 'Oh, ʾinshāʾllāh, I'll heal'; but we actually have specific blockages that need to heal from our life experiences. And so it's taking, opening those very specific things in the heart and bringing in these āyat or these, you know, maybe it's a specific name of الله (Allāh), it's all from the القرآن الكريم (Qurʾān), and it's all knowing how to sort of… well he had the knowledge or he knew exactly what the heart needs and it would be in the form of either a دعاء (duʿāʾ) or maybe a series of āyat or a name of Allāh in a specific way, but it's pointed into the heart, not just sort of a recitation of it, and then a cognitive vague understanding that that is healing. But it's like, if you can imagine, it's almost like an injection into a wound of medicine, rather than somebody just sort of rubbing the medicine around or near them, if you see what I’m saying.
Saqib Safdar
And I know he's a Shaykhin the الطريقة الشاذلية (Shādhulli ṭarīqa) who had a profound understanding of Ibn ʿArabī and Akbarian metaphysics and some wonderful, absolutely universal teachings, as well as you said, being the caretaker of Al-Aqṣā Mosque, and a deep knowledge of the ḥadīth and certified in various Islamic sciences. So, really a very profound, man. How was it when you met him? Did you realize you're in the presence of a saintly being?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yes.
Saqib Safdar
What what sort of memories do you have of him?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
I mean, I had before that time spent a lot of time with spiritual masters of different traditions and so, you know, it wasn't foreign or unfamiliar to me to be around somebody who's in a really high station. And so it was clear that he is one of these types of spiritual masters, but what was different about him... you know, in a lot of other groups or gurus or spiritual masters that I’ll be around like, they're kind, and they're loving, but there is usually some sort of barrier, in terms of you need to be doing something in order to receive their approval, perhaps. Maybe doing what they're doing or being on a certain path or having access. With Shaykh Jamāl it was like this unfettered well of continual mercy and love to whoever came near him, to the point where if somebody came to him and wasn't Muslim and was even, like, not trying to be Muslim, or you know, hostile towards Islam, it wouldn't phase him one bit; he wasn't invested in anybody else being a certain way or doing anything in order for his love and mercy to be available to them, it was just complete and unconditional. That doesn't mean he wasn't—his name, his name is Shaykh Jamāl so he had this جمال (jamāl) quality of beauty, but there were times when he had جلال (jalāl) come out too but usually it was with somebody he loved and cared about. But his real, I think character and quality was just an enormous ability to emulate pure love. And people who experienced that, who were around him, were profoundly affected by it because this is what people need and this is what often people don't get to experience in life, to be truly not only loved by a person, which he was, he was a loving person who you could feel this love, like, as a grandfather type of love, but at the same time he was, he was really a conduit, and like, transmitting, Al-Wadūd—the love; like this—this experience of God as love. It really was something that you could not deny by being in his presence. And so what that did is it really, it could like really feed your soul and your heart. So that even just sitting with him, you would feel healed to a degree, or you would feel more whole than usual. Right? And he just had this real ability to make people feel like they are accepted by God. He really embodied mercy; and I think this is why a lot of Westerners were attracted to him, especially people who weren't previously Muslim, is that, you know, everybody has a problem with religion, and all kinds of things that box you in or that you're only accepted under certain conditions, or perhaps there's a rejection; we reject ourselves, we judge ourselves, so as soon as we, you know, have that experience with somebody else, it exacerbates the whole situation and I think this is how people experience religion and very much so experience Islam; it's like it's very rule oriented, and you're only accepted if you're doing these things and this notion that well, Allāh is not going to love you if you're doing these things that are حرام (ḥarām) and you have to, you know…
Whereas, what he was helping people experience is that, the reality that you know Allāh says that his mercy is —there's no way we can even understand how deep it is. And so he really embodied that and really helped people to see that they were accepted first, and then once you feel accepted and loved and okay, then you can start to work on the things that you need to work on. Right? Instead of like, well, you need to work on things, you better start there first; I think his approach was you’re okay, you deserve love, and you're accepted as you are; and it's like, no matter what you're doing, you're okay. And for some people, they took that message the wrong way and they maybe felt like, ‘Oh, that means I don't really have to do anything—I'm okay’; and what he was saying is, ‘You're okay, but if you want to improve, you have to do these things that are in line with sharīʿa because that's what's going to help you. Not because you have to, but because you get to—you need to.
Saqib Safdar
That's interesting. So I believe he was a qāḍī, a مفتي (muftī), a judge, and who could give rulings in Islamic law. So obviously, he was very steeped in the Islamic tradition and the Islamic legal tradition. When you were with him, what was his approach to فقه (fiqh) or the sharīʿa.
Dr Abdallah Rothman
It was different for different people; like so in his own life and for himself and for people who are there ready to take that he was very strict with the sharīʿa because he knows all of the rulings and he knows the wisdom and he believes it and he guides people to it. But he also had a large following of people who were not… if he would have approached them that way, would have not embraced Islam—would have left, they weren't coming—the sharīʿapart of it was sort of scary for them or would turn them off. And I think he understood that and so I see it as like he was almost like this net, what he’d cast is a wide net, and he’d bring people on so he could show them the real truth of the matter. But then, I think he seemed to me to be focused on bringing people in, but when it came to focusing on like the specifics of fiqhhe would.. in my case, he passed, I wanted more of that. I was like, ‘Okay, I get it, I get it’. Because there's a lot of other people around at that time who actually didn't want that; they're like, ‘Just give me the حقيقة (ḥaqiqa).' Right? I'll just take the ḥaqiqa, I'll not take the sharīʿa’, and because he was so merciful and accepting, they got the message that wasn't necessary, when that's not what he was saying. He was saying, ‘When you're ready, this is necessary.’ But you can be ready, you know, like, he's not gonna scare you away. And so for me, I happened to be ready pretty quick. Because I saw it. And I said, ‘Okay, I get the ḥaqiqa.' I've understood that actually for a long time. And this is where it's more complete I found in Islam, but then I quickly realized I need the details of the container to contain all that. And so instead of him teaching me, he assigned me Shaykh Nooruddeen Durkee to learn those things. And I think Shaykh Nooruddeen had a much different approach. He's a different type of teacher, a different type of Shaykh. He was still the same ṭarīqa same, same Shādhulli ṭarīqa, same, you know, belief and knowledge, but I think he was a bit more focused on: you have to do these things in sharīʿa and you have to be grounded in this knowledge in order for that to be in balance.
Saqib Safdar
And so with the healing tradition that Shaykh Jamāl was teaching, just to be clear, was that essentially the Shādhulli ṭarīqa? Or was this a different sort of lineage or tradition, from an Islamic healing tradition, that he was conveying?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
I think there's some crossover but I think what he was teaching in this is beyond just Shādhulli ṭarīqa. You find it in... all of the shuyoukhand all of the ṭarīqa; the real shuyoukh when it comes down to it it's much more than understanding the حكمة (ḥikma) and understanding the wisdom and understanding and teaching people how to be present and do dhikr but it's, you know, ṭarīqa. Like when you are with a shaykh and you make بيعة (bayʿa) with a shaykh, that shaykhis responsible for the development of your soul. And the process of the development of the soul is very much a healing, almost, you could say, a shaman type of situation where the person is walking that person through the difficulties that they need to go through to put their soul into balance and to actualize their potential. And so that is a deep level of what a shaykhdoes with his مريد (murīds), moves them in that way. And that is a healing process. I mean, they do it on the heart, they heal the heart. And so I think what he was teaching was a lot of this, sort of in some ways, secrets of this; usually in a lot of ṭarīqasthat wouldn't be taught to as many people as he was teaching it to; you know, it'd be only for the sort of initiated or the type of people who have reached those stations. But I think he was doing it because I think he recognized that it was a different time. And that there is going to be a time very soon, which we are seeing now, where the shaykh—these type of shuyoukh, are no longer, there is very few of them, and so in instead of letting that die he's passing it on. And so yeah, it was part of the Shādhulli ṭarīqa but also beyond that. It's more of a universal reality of the ṭarīqa.
Saqib Safdar
I know, some shuyoukh of ṭarīqa would say that, yes, there is a sort of healing process; you whose Name is medicine, and dhikr is a healing. But at the same time, they would, some shuyoukh would say, on the level of the soul, that's essentially, you know, bringing it into wholeness, that part's fine, but if a murīd has psychological issues, whether it's depression, anxiety, phobias, well, maybe not phobias, but in some certain psychological issues where, you know maybe the GP would give antidepressants or there's some psychological work there to do, I've heard one or two shuyoukh who might turn around and say, 'Actually, we're not your psychotherapist, we're teachers of a ṭarīqa, but we're not there to heal you on a psychological level.' But I know others that might actually see the psychological as part of this inner work. Could you say something about that?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah, I mean, a couple things. One is that, you know, different shuyoukhsare at different stations, and have different things that they... where they're at, in terms of their their level and ability, but also in terms of their sort of path and how they teach in their specific way. For some shuyoukh they may not have the ability to do that, or they may not see it as part of their path. But the reality is that there have been in the past shuyoukh who have this level where they can heal, they can heal the psychological imbalances as well as teach the fiqh and teach people about dhikr and the path of تصوف (taṣawwuf) but also on a deep spiritual and psychological healing.
Now, within that realm though, there is a reality that there are some psychological imbalances or diagnoses or ailments that are not necessarily able to be healed through spiritual work, because they have a physical cause, and from a real deep spiritual perspective, sometimes they aren't meant to be healed. And there may be wisdom in the illness being there. And so, there's a notion of endogenous depression and an exogenous depression. And one of the… well actually, the first person to talk about this was was أبو زيد البلخي (Abū Zayd al-Balkhī) in the ninth century, Islamic scholar, who wrote a detailed about this notion that there are some things that are, because of external factors in life, like either traumatic events or relationship things or, you know, which causes depression, which can be worked on through self awareness, and through sometimes cognitive behavioral therapy, which he also talked about in the ninth century, and spiritual work where you can transcend these or put into balance these exogenous sources of depression. But then endogenous depression is something that there can actually be a chemical imbalance, there can actually be a physical cause to somebody's experience of that mentally and in that case, many shuyoukh will say, ‘We'll treat that with a physical remedy.’ That may be herbs, an herbal remedy, or, you know, in our day and age, there's this whole psychiatric thing, which didn't exist back in the day but they still had physical remedies, you know. So, Islamic medicine, there's all kinds of remedies that are to put these physical ailments in balance that heal psychological things. And so, I know shuyoukh who can heal somebody spiritually, on any level, on a deeper, but he'll tell somebody to take psychiatric medication or tell them to go see a doctor to get this thing sorted out because it’s a physical thing. And he doesn't want to misguide them to think like ‘Oh, well, all ailments can be healed through spiritual work.’ No there's a reality, so sometimes we need to do, you know, sometimes these things have physical causes. Now, the other element aspect of that, though, is that even if the thing can be healed, whether it's a physical thing, or even if it's a spiritual thing, there are times when somebody has, a, what we would call a mental illness, and are in a certain state that we would say is either abnormal or dysfunctional, and the shuyoukh will say, 'Actually, this is not meant to be removed from this person because this is a mercy from Allāh; because had this person… because when you are in that state, you are not مكلف (mukallaf), you're not responsible for what you're doing.' Right? And if this was removed from that person, this person Allāh may know that this person would do something that would bring harm on themselves or that they would be responsible for. And so putting this sort of veil over them, or this station over them, is actually a mercy in what will be good for them in the الآخرة (al-Ākhira). So that's a really deep level of understanding the reality of people's states.
Saqib Safdar
So you mentioned also Shaykh Nooruddeen Durkee. Was it simply the outer sort of practices of Islam that he taught? Or was he also teaching within a healing tradition of Shaykh Jamāl and is he a student of Shaykh Jamāl?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah, so, depends who you ask. So formally speaking, Shaykh Nooruddeen Durkee had a different Shādhulli Shaykh, but before that time, when Shaykh Jamāl was first becoming a shaykh, he was qāḍī, they met in, al-Quds, when they were younger, and from that time, Shaykh Nooruddeen always had a relationship with him of learning and just pure reverence. So his whole life anytime Shaykh Jamāl asked Shaykh Nooruddeen to do anything, he would do it, as if he was his teacher, right. And if you ask Shaykh Jamāl, he told me specifically then that Shaykh Nooruddeen was his first student. There's sort of a spiritual reality, you know, who knows what the reality is underneath, but the thing is that Shaykh Nooruddeen his whole sort of last part of his life was all at… Shaykh Jamāl pulled him to come back to the US from Egypt, and instructed him to do these things and then asked him to sort of be there to support his students, which he did.
My interaction with Shaykh Nooruddeen, I came there to learn my farḍ al-ʿayn and I expected that that would be reading books and studying and learning in this, you know, memorizing texts. And what it really was was a very integrated experiential learning where I lived near him, I would stay the night at his house, I would cook, eat with him very often, I would do chores around his house, I built aزاوية (zāwiya) for him, and part of his teaching was through, like tarbiya in a way that is physical activity and teaching me about annihilation of the نفس (nafs) through instances where I would kill my nafs. So for instance, while I was building the zāwiya for him, and I was painting the beams; he wanted the beams on the ceiling painted green. And it was freezing cold and there was no heat and I was spending all day and night painting these beams green, my hands were all cold and I was proud of myself because I was like, 'Oh, the Shaykh is gonna be very happy with me. I've completed this job and done well' and he came in and I was ready to receive the praise from the shaykh, you know, my nafs was like, 'Ah, yeah, he's gonna be so proud and happy with me. And I've done this thing. I built this zāwiya for him.' He comes in, he says, “It's the wrong color green. Paint it again”. And that was it, you know, just in that moment, it seemed harsh, and my whole experience was, oh, you know.. my heart was broken. I was looking for praise from him and he seemed disappointed and he's making me do this whole thing again and I had to then go and repaint this whole thing in the cold and all this effort. And as I'm doing this the second time, it's now dawning on me experientially, that 'Oh, this is… this is breaking my nafs' and so the teaching that I had with him, you know, maybe earlier that week about killing the nafs while we were sitting around eating, now he's teaching me. So my actual will is involved and I'm learning it in a way that will actually sit rather than just a cognitive, you know, he's telling me a concept—he's actually teaching me the concept. And so this is what most of my experiences with him (were like) because I was with him for many years, and I would drive him places, I would drive him to give خطبة (khuṭbahs) in different مساجد (masājids) and we would go into prisons to teach; he would teach the prisoners to read Qurʾān and lead جمعة (jummʿa). We'd be driving, I'd be driving and he'd be correcting how I'm driving and he'd be like, he’d tell me to stop driving and I’m like, ‘Okay, he told me to stop, I’m gonna stop’. He said, “Get out of the car” and he said, “Remove this”—there was a log in the road, he told me to remove it. So I was like, 'Okay, take the log out'—I put it away, he tells me how to do it, I get back in the car, he's silent. We're driving for another while to silence and then he starts telling me about how one of the paths of knowledge is removing obstacles in the way for other people. Right? And so then this became the lesson and I had just done this physical act of movement, removing an obstacle and now that knowledge was impressed upon me in an experiential way. So this is the notion of tarbiya and building معرفة (maʿrifa); not just just telling somebody a concept, but actually teaching them and in getting there will involve this; that’s how you actually learn on a deep level.
Saqib Safdar
Dr Abdullah, you mentioned a word called presence, حضور (ḥuḍūr), and I would imagine that a Buddhist monk would have no trouble sort of understanding that, especially with modern terms like mindfulness. Others may wonder where it fits in within the Islamic tradition that they may encounter in the mosque and elsewhere; could you say what ḥuḍūr—presence is, and its importance to the religious practices, whether it's ذكر (dhikr) or صلاۃ (ṣalāt) and the other pillars?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah, you know, the essence of what we're trying to do in this life, is to come back into this place of being a شهيد (shahīd) of being a witness to Allāh. In our pre-existence in this life, Allāh said, ألست بربكم (Qurʾān 7:171) Alastu bi Rabbikum?—‘Am I not your Lord?’ and all of the souls said, قالوا بلى شهدنا (Qurʾān 7:171) Bala shahidnā—‘We witness’. Now, this wordشهدنا (shahidnā), is not testify, it's not I recognize something and I cognitively get, but it is a experiential feeling of Allāh. I witness that Allāh is one and that witnessing of Allāh being One is an experience of ﺗﻮﺣﻴﺪ (tawhīd) and you cannot experience that in any other place other than in this moment. It is not in the past, it's not in the future, it is in the now. And so presence is what is necessary to come into an actual witnessing of tawhīd. Allāh exists in His reality and the reality only exists in this moment. We have this notion of time, where we get stuck in the past and the future because of our orientation to cognition, we're remembering things in the past, and we have we have anxiety about things in the past and we fear things in the future, and what that does is it takes us out of being able to be present in the moment. And then what it takes us away from is being able to actually be in the state of witnessing tawhīd, of witnessing the reality of الله سبحان و تعالىٰ(Allāh subḥānahu wa-taʿālā) as a visceral reality in the now rather than a theoretical concept in a book. And so the fact that for a lot of people presence is not their experience of Islam is actually a tragedy, because it is the fundamental way to actually know Allāh. Otherwise, it's just a theoretical concept of what you think Allāh is.
Saqib Safdar
And a belief system.
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah.
Saqib Safdar
So in your experience, was presence part of the earlier Islamic community? Has it always been there? Or is it something only the Sufis have stressed?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
No, of course, it's been there from the beginning. I mean, when we look at the—the best way to understand, you know, looking back is to just look at the life of the Prophet ʿalayhī as-ṣallātu wa-salām. We look at the daily life of the Prophetﷺ and the sort of seasons of the Prophet’s ﷺ life, there is an impossibility to avoid the fact that presence was a huge part of his life and his teaching. So, you know, anybody who knows the سيرة (seera) and the السنة (sunna) knows that the Prophet ʿalayhī as-ṣallātu wa-salām every month, or every period of time, maybe a couple months, throughout his life all the way up until, you know, غار حراء (the Cave of Ḥira), he would go out into the wilderness and be alone in a cave. You know, regularly, this was a regular practice of his. And so what people may not have a detailed account of what he was doing in the cave, but if you can imagine, like he wasn't reading because he didn't read. Right? There was nobody else there; he wasn't socializing. We know that he wasn't going there to hunt. He was just going to sit and be with himself and his Lord. And this is on a seasonal basis but then on a daily basis he was doingقـيـام الـلـيـل (qiyām al-layl), every night; he would get up in the middle of the night, and he would pray, and he would stand, and he would be with his Lord. This is very different than just ṣalāt. Ṣalāt is, you know, farḍ, and he would do it with the community and he would do it during the day, and it was relatively short; and even in that, we know that when he would sit inالجلوس (julūs) position, he would be still, he would be in a state of presence, right. And we know this concept of الخشوع (khushuʿ) that everybody's always trying to have more khushuʿ in their prayer but the reason why people have a hard time attaining that, people always saying I don't have good pleasure in my prayer, because you're not practicing being present. I don't mean that it's something you have to practice, you can't suddenly, if you're only praying five times a day, suddenly expect for—in that moment when you have your head on the mat for that five minutes to be able to be fully present. It's something that you have to train, it's like a muscle that you have to train. And so you have to be, you know, monthly going away from people and practicing being present and nightly waking up in the middle of the night and practicing for long periods of time, standing still, being still, being present with your Lord. It's all these things that are all building and practicing to be able to have khushuʿ in prayer, yes, but also to be in a constant state of witnessing, tawhīd, not just having it be a theoretical belief.
Saqib Safdar
Dr Abdallah you mentioned another word, a really interesting word tawhīd. And for any of our listeners who maybe acquainted in non dualistic traditions of say Taoism or Vedanta, hatwhat does tawhīd mean? Is it a non dualistic understanding of reality?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah, it's oneness. It's the notion that everything has one source and that is God and that because God is the source of everything, everything is interconnected. Everything is from this Source and therefore everything is under the power of that one God. There is a lot of depth of understanding what that then means in terms of the concept of tawhīd, but it is that, essentially, everything is one. And so our experience of duality, we experience duality, we experience separation, we experience, I'm over here, you're over there, I have my thoughts, you have your thoughts, we have, you know, linear experience of time but this is all paradoxical and it's all specific to our plight here as human beings in this realm of دنیا (dunyā). And so there is no way to understand tawhīd without embracing the notion of paradox within our existence because we do perceive things and experience things in a duality, but in the reality that it is those dual things where we see the balance and where we can actually access the reality of oneness.
Saqib Safdar
Beautiful. You also mentioned how it's sad that presence, khushuʿ, ḥuḍūr, sometimes not people's experience of Islam, and I know in other sort of talks that you've given, you've mentioned transactional vs. transformational Islam. I know growing up Muslim, that the fundamental narrative that often gets taught and is accepted is that the prayers or the actions are done in order to gain paradise in the hereafter. And so you're essentially accumulating pious actions or ثواب (thawāb) and making استغفار (ʾistighfār) or asking for forgiveness for your sins, in order to enter Paradise, and this is the central narrative. Some people become more stricter in fiqh, assuming that a more stricter approach is going to give them more thawāb or more good deeds; or bring them closer to God. And often, I have to say, anything outside this paradigm, which is often heavily rooted in a legal understanding, or, you know, it's a lot of stress is payed on the legalism because it's all about actions and how you perform them, you know, etc. that anything outside this that challenges it, is almost seen as either un-orthodox or not truly Islamic and yet Islamic scholars throughout history from al-Ghazālī, Rumī, Ibn al-ʿArabī, are actually writing about a transformational Islam or one that has more than just a one dimensional legal system to it. Could you say more about that?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah I think this is a… this is the state that humanity is in and unfortunately, the state that the Muslim أمة (umma) is in, that we have been cut off from the heart, we have been cut off from the experiential witnessing of Allāh, and therefore, this inability to recognize and experience the heart as the center of our being. Because we're cut off from that, what we identify with is our, separate individual bodies, and what we perceive as the sort of brain up here that is moving us around and is oriented to the world, in this very one dimensional outer realm, right. So if I perform these actions, then I will be in line with the formula that will make me be okay, and I can just sort of move over, you know, I can put everything in a line on the outside so that I can just sort of dot the i's and cross the t's and follow the formula to be saved, or to be okay, or to be entered into, you know, paradise. And what's missing… so that's a very transactional thing: If I do this thing, I'll get this other thing. But the reality is, is that Allāh doesn't need us to do these external things. This notion that if I pay my dues and I do this transaction, then Allāh will then be happy with me because somehow we need to just sort of go through the motions; but what these things are for, if you have a heart, if you are aware of the heart, is what they do is they provide a container and a grounding for your spiritual reality of your soul to get by in this dense experience of being a separate human being in this dunyā world. And so we need our bodies, and we need the sharīʿa to maneuver in this world in a way that keeps us safe. But what are we keeping safe? Why are we going through the effort to eat حلال (ḥalāl) and to pray five times a day, and to follow the moon cycle, and to do all these things that are aligned with فطرة (fiṭra) of our bodies, for protection and alignment of what? It’s of our soft, light, spiritual nature, that is the true essence of who we are, ourروح (rūḥ). The rūḥ, is who we were before, and who we will be after, it is the thing that we carry with us and it is still deeply connected to that place of ‘Alastu bi Rabbikum?’—of witnessing Allāh. And we have to recognize, tap into, and develop and deepen an orientation to that spiritual being and identify that as our identity and recognize that all this other—and that's where the transformation comes from. These other transactional things that we do, are in essence, there not for—Allāh doesn’t need us to do them. Allāh has given us these things as a cheat sheet to understand how we need to put ourselves in alignment for the development of our soul. And the development of our soul requires more than just bending and bowing because you know, a chicken can do that. What the bending and the bowing and the washing the hands and the doing—is one part of putting ourselves in alignment, so that we can then do the work on the heart to turn the heart towards Allāh. And the turning of the heart towards Allāh is something that we as individuals with our will have the responsibility to strive and struggle for, right.
The striving, the struggling is not just waking up and making الوضوء (wuḍūʾ) at a certain time. It is what is it about you internally that's resisting getting up? Right? What is it about you internally that's resisting being generous? What do you need to let go of and actually be conscious and aware of, in your heart, to understand where the resistance is that you need to work on and let go of and heal and open to. That is the work of being Muslim; of actively surrendering to the will of Allāh. Actively surrendering to Allāh and actively putting yourself in a state of witnessing, that requires more than just following rules and transactionally doing what you're supposed to do. It's more than that, you know, anybody can do these things. And we know this because we know there's plenty of people who do the outward actions perfectly, exactly how it says to do them in the book, they do them; their beard is the perfect length, their pants are the perfect length, they, you know, have the rightمسواك (miswāk) and they have memorized the Qurʾān and all these things that can be taught to anybody; anybody can do these things. But we know people who do those things perfectly and have hatred, and jealousy, and enmity and do evil things. So that's not the whole picture. That's part of the picture. It's a very important part of the picture, but it's in order to allow for the heart to be healed, and to be cleaned, and that takes more than just, you know, that is a transformational process. So the transactional things; so transactional versus transformational means don't just do the things because you think that you have to. Do them because they're there for the purpose of transforming your soul.
Saqib Safdar
If I'm listening to this and say I’m a practicing Muslim and I feel I’m actually—I'm doing my, you know, I fast in Ramadan, I pray, I give زكاة (zakāt) but my nafs is still getting the best of me, how do I transform? How do I move from a transactional to a transformational experience of doing these outward practices? What advice would you give people, especially as you've said, that people like Sidi Shaykh Saʿīd al-Jamal, far and few, in this time?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
The first and foremost thing is self awareness, to have self awareness; and that seems relatively simple but it's very difficult because for most people, they don't even know what the self is. They have a very shallow notion of who they are. They think the ‘I’ that they identify with, is, you know, who their family told them they were. I'm Bangladeshi from South London, or I'm from this village in Pakistan and my father was an engineer and I like football and I, you know, aspire to be a doctor, or something like that. That's not actually who you are. That is the sort of trappings of the specific path that you have found yourself in this dunyā, but underneath that, the self is the part of you that has ultimately, your reality is to witness Allāh; to be in a state where you're constantly recognizing your dependence on Allāh, and anything that's keeping you from that is what has covered over that truth. And though the work that we need to do to uncover that truth is the self awareness, bringing conscious awareness to what is inside of you, and then working to change what is inside of you. And that means… that's why presence is important. Because ultimately, our goal is to be present with Allāh; but you can't do that until you're present with yourself to get through all the crust on your heart. And most of us don't even take a second to be present with our heart. We're constantly trying to distract ourselves from that place of presence, because it's scary; because we don't know how to deal with it; because it feels dark and unknown. And so what do we do? We keep people around us, we watch movies, we find all kinds of distractions, to not just sit with ourselves. And this is really problematic, because all you're doing is kicking the can down the road because ultimately, you have to do that before you leave this world. And if you don't, you will be stuck in being held responsible for all of what you didn't uncover and what you don't remember, right. Right? So we have to come back into remembering our—our true state of witnessing Allāh. And so that takes some some work of self discovery, self awareness.
So what that means is, yes, learning to be present. So that means like, actually, having a practice of sitting still, on a daily basis. Breathing helps, because the breath essentially brings you into the moment; you have to breathe, to survive in each moment, and you’re breathing in every moment. So that really can help regulate your ability to stay present. And then once you cultivate a basic sense of just being able to be still with yourself, then you can start to take account of your thoughts, take account of your actions, take account of your impulses; doesn't mean judge them, just means notice them. Why did I just judge that person? What does that mean about me? I noticed I was annoyed right now by this person and their actions. Why should I be annoyed with this person? What is that? Where does that come from? What is it that that person was doing that made me annoyed? Maybe I should pay attention to that so I can unlock and uncover where there is a sickness in my heart. And that's how we do the work of transformation, and ultimately, opening our hearts and healing. And we can do it, we can do it ourselves; and we can do it and other people can help us; this is what shuyoukh have always done is helped, not just teach people knowledge from books, but actually help uncover the knowledge in their heart. You know, this, the real knowledge is when you know because you are in a state of توكل (tawakkul), علم التوكل (ʿilm al-tawakkul), knowledge that comes from surrendering and trusting in Allāh.
Saqib Safdar
I'm just thinking from somebody who might not be steeped in the Islamic tradition, they might say that this, being present, being aware of your thoughts, sounds very much like Jon Kabat-Zinn's work on mindfulness for example; Eckhart Tolle, his Power of Now, be present in the being; and then Byron Katie does some fabulous, very interesting work about, you know, turn it around and judge your neighbor, then turn it around and see how that works, and who would you be without your story; then Thich Nhat Hanh, in you know, in the Zen Buddhist tradition has a lot of mindful breathing, walking, speaking, etc. At that point, when you do this inner work, what is it that Islam and the practices say dhikr, say you're doing the dhikr of Allāh, how is that any different? Or what is that doing to the state of mindfulness or presence that you’re in? What’s the extra?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah, so the extra things is some of the practices can feel similar and can feel like they're ultimately getting, not ultimately, but getting this person to the same place. But the fundamental difference from an Islamic approach is that the entire purpose of doing that practice, the entire purpose of coming into presence, is not simply just to be in a state of calm, and not simply just to be in a state of peace with yourself where you're more happy, but it is to… it has to lead back to Allāh. And not just saying, 'Okay Allāh, I believe in Allāh' but actually, where, once you're in this state of presence, and you're in a state of witnessing Allāh, the fundamental thing that we're doing and why we want to do and what we do when we get to that point, is to surrender your soul to Allāh. Meaning, your essence of who you are, as a human being from an Islamic reality, for all human beings, is that you are a slave to Allāh. And so you, basically, once you open your heart, and you recognize this thing, you are surrendering that to Allāh. You are plugging your heart into the Source, which is the one God and that your ultimate destination and the ultimate place where you're going to go and what's good for you and what aligns you with truth and what keeps you safe, is not in your hands, it's in Allāh's hands. Whereas somebody can get to a place of presence and feeling calm, and being detached from their ego, even. So even people can be like annihilated, the self can be annihilated, but then at the point of annihilation, then what? Then it sort of folds in on itself, then it's the self surrendering to the self; it's the self folding in on the annihilation of the self. And for us, for Muslims, this—the annihilation of the self is to then be unified with the One, with Allāh, with tawhīd. And then in that submission to Allāh, and your recognition of your slavehood, is where you elevate your existence. And then therefore, Allāh can actually guide you and be with you because it’s Allāh, we recognize that Allāh is the source of everything, not us. So that's a fundamental difference from just being in a state of detached, being detached from the world and being in a state of ecstasy or Nirvana or being in a state of peace, where it's that sort of floating on its own in a place of okayness, nothingness, happiness, love. But ultimately, we don't know what anything is for or what anything is; it's all in Allāh's hands. And so what what we're doing at that point is completely putting our life, our safety, our existence, in Allāh's hands. And that's where the ultimate realization, and elevation comes with humanity is that you are, you know, getting beyond you, and you are giving over your existence to Allāh because it's His.
Saqib Safdar
This brings up a really interesting point, I believe it wasأبو الحسن الشاذلي (Shaykh Abu Hassan ash-Shādhulli), who said that, ‘Ours is a way of surrender, complete surrender to the Divine.’ At the same time, when you see examples of that, in the Islamic world, of people who had reached a very high degree of servanthood, they were also very, very active, whether I mean عبد القادر الجزائري (ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī) orالغزالي (al-Ghazālī) orابن عربي (Ibn al-ʿArabī), prolific sort of writers and thinkers, but they were in a complete state of surrender. And it's evident that the majesty of their work was not from their own egos, it was from something higher. And some of them even write about how it's inspired work, etc. But on the other hand, you also have in the modern era, this idea of self development, taking ownership into cultivating your will, and sometimes that can be interpreted as being the master of your own fate. And I know in the Islamic tradition, I'm sure our listeners will be aware of theحديث (ḥadith): do your work, and then you know, and then tawakkul, rely on the Divine. Andعلامة محمد إقبال (ʿAllāma) Iqbāl, one of my favorite poets, has a lot to say, around spiritual development or Khudi or self as not some passive ego, but one that's dynamically active in the world, but again, the one interpretation of that or a misinterpretation might be that somebody is, rather than being in a state of surrender is trying to determine their fate or is trying to, you know, design their own life story or is trying to take, you know, is making these decisions to do X, Y, Z rather than completely surrendering. So, it can be a fine line and could you say something around that or draw more light into: somebody in a complete state of surrender to Divine Will, but is very active, these, say this modern or secular concept of being very active from your own will.
Dr Abdallah Rothman
So if it's like, you know, in the case of theأولياء (ʾawliyāʾ) or saints or people who are really on a level of... literally have surrendered their own self to Allāh, then people at this high of a level become the hands with which Allāh does work in the world. And this is to a certain degree like inتصوف (tasawwuf) is known as (baqaʾ). So, when the self is annihilated, and there's no longer an ego propelling it forward, Allāh basically guides this person, and so they become a conduit for doing Allāh's work. And so they can be seen as being really active and busy in the world. But if you ask them like, ‘Oh no, the thing you were trying to do didn't work out!’ they'd just smile and be unfazed because it's not their thing that they're trying to do, it's they're just serving their Lord, and so they're completely detached from the outcome. You say like modern notion of this like build your own destiny or you know, you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and do, you know, take control and even manifest your destiny, right? And what we would say is that, or what Islam is guiding us to do is to be active in the world, like we're not supposed to sit back and be inactive like there is no monasticism in Islam. We're not supposed to sit on top of a mountain and reach a state of peace; you're supposed to come back, you're supposed to go to the mountain but then you come back down and you'd be with the people and you serve the people. And if you have done…if you have achieved an annihilation of the self, then often what happens is you can do a lot more in your life. People tend to be more active because they have مدد (madad), they have a push from Allāh, Allāh is working through them. So therefore, the limitations that we have in our own selves are no longer; they're no longer bound by those things because you have the power of the One, you have the power of the One whose plan the whole thing is, and who is not bound by time and space and energy and sleep, right? And so when you're gone, and you're not really concerned with what you're doing, but you're just serving your Master, you have actually powers that are beyond the ability of the human being.
So that's on a pretty high level, but even on a level that we can all cultivate is that when we tether our camel and trust Allāh, I mean do what Allāh has given you to do, take care of the world that is around you take care of what has been put before you, and completely divorce yourself from what's going to happen from it. That's not your concern. It's not your business, you never had control over it, you never will. But what you do have control over, which is anأمانة (ʾamāna) really, a trust that Allāh has put in your care, is the things that you have control over; which, are very small. Ultimately, the only things we really have control over are: our thoughts, our intentions, our feelings, and where we place our foot, one in front of the other. Meaning where you decide to direct yourself, not where you decide or what you decide to do and accomplish, even. So I can say, I'm going to set out to build a city. What's in my control is the intention and then starting to build a city. Whether it's going to get built or not, is up to Allāh. And if I approach the work with that notion, and I purify my intention from the beginning, most likely, the whole endeavor will be blessed, there’ll beبركة (baraka) in it, because I'm not doing it for myself, I'm not attached to it, I don't even care if it gets done. I'm doing it because I feel like Allāh has guided me to do this. And if that's true, and it comes to fruition, it will be because it had this baraka in it, not from my own, not from my own greatness or power or ability even.
Saqib Safdar
Wonderful. Dr Abdallah could you tell us about your role at the Cambridge Muslim College and what sort of work and projects you're involved in?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yes, so I'm the principal of Cambridge Muslim College, which means I'm in charge of the whole endeavor, academics, programs; and, you know, this was a conception of عبد الحكيم مراد (Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad) and he had the vision of having a college that is, in this space where it’s honoring the traditional approach to learning while embracing academia. So he is now,he's the Dean of the College and he basically, he is our sort of spiritual guide and our theological grounding in how we approach everything; he keeps it very tight in terms of making sure it is balanced in our approach to Islamic learning; it’s balanced in the traditional knowledge of Islam and in the Islamic way. And so my role is to really help deliver on this vision and take it forward. And so, my background being in psychology and this notion of development, we have a history in the College of having real grounding in academics and Islamic knowledge. I mean, Shaykh Abdal Hakim is known to be I mean just impeccable, his intellect is enormous and it's incredible.
And so we have a real incredible program BA in Islamic Studies; we have a diploma program; and so, what I'm trying to really bring this and round out this thing is to make it really reflect the Islamic notion of Islamic education. And instead of that just being a descriptor of what we're teaching, so instead of education about Islam, it's actually an Islamic approach to education, as well as being taught about Islam. So they're learning fiqh, they're learning Qur’an studies, they're learning كلام (kalām), but what I'm really trying to build on is this process of tarbiya that I learned from my shuyoukh, where it's not just sitting and memorizing text in a book, it is transformational, that the real knowledge is about the illumination of the heart. And that, you know, we need to learn the knowledge in the books, you have to study these things, but that can't be the only thing. And what we have right now is we have a lot of scholars, we have sometimes you know, really put on a pedestal, the scholars who have memorized texts, we talk about people who have إجازة (ʾijāza) in a book, and what that means is they have memorized the book and they can teach the theoretical knowledge that is in the book. And traditionally, there are elements of that, but you know, in a real holistic sense of what an Islamic education is, and tarbiyais that you would get an ʾijāza in once you not only understood the knowledge, but you are experientially understanding it and living it. And that means being able to demonstrate it in the world, through your character, through actions of serving people.
So what we do at the College is that we have a whole system ofخدمة (khidma), the students are actively serving the community, they have a rotation of doing dishes in the act of cleaning up after themselves, we serve them food. Just today, matter of fact, I had a group of students and we are out in the forest land on our campus, on our property, and doing work like clearing some brush wood and hauling things off and creating a space for them to learn building. They're building a fire pit and building benches around so that they can have—but they're building it themselves so that they could then have their درس (dars) and things. And the idea there is for them to be active, just like my shaykh taught me like move the branch off the road and this is what really set in for me, so this is what I'm trying to do with the students really, you know, I teach them martial arts, and we're doing, we're talking about, you know, things like lifestyle and diet and sleep and, you know, praying together and havingصحبة (soḥbet) with each other. This idea of learning heart to heart and having transmission happen is really a fundamental aspect of an Islamic education and I find, unfortunately, that it's really missing in a lot of the—even دار العلوم (Dār al-ʿUlūm) where you would think of as being traditional educational institutes, but it's really still just focused on memorization. And this is not what this is. We need people to preserve the knowledge in that way. But we also need people who are able to embody it, and whose character is a demonstration of that knowledge. And we need people who understand that the heart knowledge, you know, the true knowledge means it will impress upon the heart, that means the heart will become illuminated from the knowledge. And this is the type of approach to education I think we direly need in the Muslim world, in the Umma and really, in the world, at this day and age to really move forward, this idea of transformation versus transactional.
Saqib Safdar
Dr Abdallah as I understand the Cambridge Muslim College is training the next generation of scholars and thinkers. We also have a lot of youth who may not have this opportunity to become scholars or have for the lifestyles or the academic appetite to, you know, go through that educational process. And some of them may be disenfranchised they may… I was speaking to my cousin, in fact recently, a very intelligent young man just finds the narrative of the Islam that he's been presented with that transactional narrative, quite limiting and not quite adding up. It raises questions. How do I know I shouldn't be a Buddhist or a Jew? And if I was born in that sort of household, I would have grown up, and my conditioning would have been such. You mentioned the taribya you experienced from your shuyoukh and we have a lot of youth who might be disenfranchised from the Islamic community who might see Islam merely as an identity, who might not have access to a community of ṭarīqa, of people who are doing this inner work, how can we reach out to them? What sort of work can we do, to answer not just the intellectual academic questions, but to reconnect them with the Islamic tradition, and hence the Divine?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
I think it's about coming to their level, and approaching them from their perspective. What makes sense to them? What is important to them? And having people that know how to come into their world, respect them, accept them, and then make Islam relevant to what makes sense to them in their world and that usually doesn't happen. Usually, what you have is the older uncles who don't get it and think that they're just gone astray, because it's not how they did it back home, and they're completely ignorant of the fact that they actually live in a totally different world. And then trying to make sense of things from back home, for people who aren't back home, and didn't grew up here, grew up in a different generation, different world, different paradigm, different influences, you can't, you have to take that into consideration. Islam is a religion for all times. That doesn't mean that you teach it, and you talk about it, and you do it in exactly the same way through each generation and each place. It has to adapt to what makes sense to the people.
The Prophet ʿalayhī as-ṣallātu wa-salām was the first one to do this. When he would spread Islam, he would go to the people, and he would adapt their previous culture into Islam. He didn't say, stop doing what you're doing, and do this. Never, he never did that. He said, ‘Oh, this is beautiful, what you're doing. Just add this to it.’ You know, this is why you go around the world today, the Muslim world and you see, diversity, you see the beauty of diversity, people do the the Islamic things very differently, it looks very differently, because they've adapted their own culture.
And what people have to understand is the youth who grew up here, this is their culture. You can't say that their culture is a place that they've never been. Culture doesn't get passed in the blood. You know, this is very much about a locality, it's a geography, and so we have to take into consideration. So if it's a British, young British Muslims, the British experience needs to be part of their way of understanding the beauty of Islam. And that means that it needs to be made relevant to their lives. And we don't need to tell them to stop doing what they love, or what they're interested in, we need to help them see it through this different lens. And that's the key. And I think, we just we need more people who understand that approach. And then programs that are in place and community support for this type of approach. And it's a different paradigm. It's not going to work by coming in and saying these kids are gone astray, what they're doing is bad, we need to change them and have them do something else. Well, it won't work, it doesn't work for that developmental age.
The Islamic pedagogy is you play with them for seven years, you teach them for seven years, and you befriend them for seven years. So the youth usually that we're talking about here are at least in that third seven, if not beyond. So trying to tell them to do something different will backfire. You have to befriend them, you stay with them, side by side on the path and say, ‘Hey, I know how it is. I'm here with you. We're going to look at this together. Tell me what's important to you.’ You know, you respect them like you would a friend you don't go around pointing your finger at a friend telling them they should do something different. Right? That's the approach we need to take.
Saqib Safdar
And my final question, what advice would you give to parents who are Muslim and are faced with this challenge where you've got a generation emerging on technology, it’s just a given, the way of thinking the millennials is very different to the generation before, and obviously, in the Islamic tradition, there are sayings such as, you know, ‘Do not raise your children in the way you've been raised because they were born for another time.’ And yet this time is unpredictable even by the experts, where there's education and what sort of, you know, the exponential change we're experiencing. And so amidst all that, they're trying to reconnect with their Islamic tradition and finances, and we've had some good examples, Fons Vitae produced al-Ghazālī series of books, but then the question is about actually embedding that and making that part of your family or your home. And I haven't seen anything, and, you know, I may be wrong, but I haven't seen anything that has been written in comparison to John Kabat-Zinn's book on mindful parenting, where he deep dives and goes through examples of his own life and how it's an inner work that you've got to do not just a system of providing, but you know, it's a lot more meaningful and deeper. So what's the Islamic paradigm for tarbiya in the modern world? What sort of advice would you give to parents?
Dr Abdallah Rothman
I mean, like you said, unfortunately, you can't teach somebody to be in a way that you're not; right? And so it sort of has to start with what you're doing first, and so this is the most powerful way is to do your work on yourself. In order to really be a good parent, you have to be a good human being, you have to be self aware, you have to be recognizing what your relationship to your parents was; and that takes self awareness; that takes revisiting, ‘Well, why are you the way you are? How did that either…?’ You know, some of that is beautiful, some of it was definitely damaging to your heart. And so you have to come to terms with those things. And recognize that you're probably passing that same torch on to your children, if you're not aware of it. And so it takes some deep reflection, and it takes some self, not only self awareness, but self accountability, and being able to humble yourself before your children and to say, ‘I don't know everything’ and ‘that I'm working on myself too’ and what you do is you demonstrate for them, you've give them permission to do the same. But if it's always pointing the finger and saying you need to do this, you point one finger at somebody else, you're pointing three back at yourself. So that is how it has to be.
And then in addition to that, I think it's again, I think parents need to understand the seven, seven, seven. It's very fundamental, like you can't be trying to direct somebody that is not in line with their developmental stage, it just won't work, it will backfire. And so if you're not aware of these things, you're going to just get constantly frustrated, and you can do more damage. And then also all the other things I was saying about meeting them at their level. It depends on the age of your children, if they are still under seven, you've got to stop teaching them and get on your knees and play with them. And if they're past seven, then you need to teach them but teach them in a way that's like, be self aware, you know, not pointing the finger but like exploring the world with them, asking questions with them, being curious and loving, you know, if you're not loving, they're not going to trust you and they're not going to want to listen to what you say. So, you know, it's the big responsibility raising children. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with a manual and unfortunately, most people aren't aware of them themselves and aren't doing their own tarbiya, to much less be able to know how to deal with another person. So I think the most important thing is start with yourself.
Saqib Safdar
On that note, Dr Abdallah it's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you.
Dr Abdallah Rothman
My pleasure. Yeah, we covered a lot of material, al-ḥamdulillāh.
Saqib Safdar
Yeah, absolutely. I've actually got more things to ask but I think I'm gonna leave that for another podcast,إن شاء الله (ʾinshāʾllāh).
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Yeah, ʾinshāʾllāh.
