Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with Islamic Scholar Dr Timothy Winter. 16/10/2024
What is sacred to you? Timothy Winter answers
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about the deep values of people from a wide range of political, metaphysical and professional perspectives. My guest today is Dr Tim winter, who is also known as Sheik Abdal Hakim Murad, and he is an Islamic theologian. Tim, I am going to kick off by asking you, what is sacred to you?
Timothy Winter
I suppose there is the objective sacred, which is what human beings since the Upper Paleolithic have experienced as something mysteriously inhering, in the beauty of nature, of relationships the human face, just the enigma of being, which probably all human beings, just by virtue of being human, have experienced probably quite frequently in their lives, even if they don’t have the right vocabulary to explore it. And the subjective sacred, which is how we, from our culturally specific, class–based, gender–based, education–based mental cultural formation actually receive and interpret that. So my own experience of the sacred has been, I suppose, an attempt to interpret that universal and probably most important of human sensations that, behind the surface of the world, there is something that gives sense of meaning and direction to the world. For me, that has always been most easily interpreted in the language of traditional Semitic Monotheism, that the sacred principle, the light, the goodness, the beauty, the experience, and truth behind things is an enigma that is least bafflingly articulated in the limited net of human language, in terms of there being a kind of analogy to a person who, rather than what, is the origin and the end and the purpose of everything. That’s the most that my limited Western mind can encompass, I think. I have enormous respect for other traditions which are less personalists, some of the Buddhist traditions, for instance, some of the Indic Traditions, Chinese traditions. But I’m very much from the far west of the old world, and I can only see the sacred as being interpreted in terms of there being personal life as the author and the ground of being.
What is Semitic Monotheism?
Elizabeth
You use this phrase ‘Semitic Monotheism’. Could you unpack that a little bit for me?
Timothy Winter
Well, monotheism as historically expressed through the Hebrew prophets and articulated in terms of the Abrahamic idea of a personal God. A God that in some mysterious, allegorical way, weaves stories that enable us to pick up on the fragments of light and meaning that we see in our lives, and to see a greater purpose for stories, which are often moral. So I suppose by Semitic Monotheism, I mean Abrahamic religion, the belief in a single, personal, creator God who creates in time, and who resurrects, and to whom there will be a final reckoning. So unlike, say, the dharmic religions of the subcontinent, where history is more cyclical than linear and the Divine is mediated in more complex ways.
Elizabeth
Yes, I really like that phrase you used, “Who not what”, as a way of gesturing towards that personalist understanding of God.
Timothy Winter
With all the paradoxes that that generates, of course!
Life at Westminster College
Elizabeth
Yes! I can hear your care, and I love that. When I’m sort of trying to write or speak about this hugely semiotically dense three letters ‘God’, I have sometimes put it in square brackets to acknowledge that we need not to fling it around as if everyone knows what we’re talking about, or as if it is uncomplicated as a concept. Okay, we’re going to try and locate you in your story and how you came to have that instinctive underlying logic in your life. So, I’d love to hear about your childhood. Could you just paint me a picture of young Tim, maybe at age eight or nine? What was your world and what were you like?
Timothy Winter
Well, no adventures, really! Middle class, mediocre, middle of the road, middle England. Brought up in a leafy North London suburb, went to private schools. I was at a school called Westminster, which, at the time, was undergoing one of its sort of summits of cultural production. Every evening, some bunch of earnest, slightly nerdy, pupils were putting on some Samuel Beckett play, and everybody was terribly taxed by the latest articles at the Times Literary Supplement. And in some ways, it was artificial, but in other ways, it did actually confirm our sense that the life of the mind was interesting, that education was not just about pointing one like a gun at the stockbroker belt from an early age, whatever parents might have intended. But it was an attempt to explore, albeit it was a very secular school, the deep mystery of human consciousness and the fact that we are capable, despite our humble origins, of quite enormous profundity. The fact that out of the total chaos of the Big Bang, you can have processes that lead to the immense subtlety of Shakespeare, for instance, although we tended to regard that as a rather uncool way of arguing, is itself a kind of pointer towards the existence of guiding meaning laden principles in the universe that, despite the tendency of matter to be entropic and to wind down into greater chaos and greater disorder, nonetheless produces structures which enable greater forms of order to develop, leading ultimately (it was a humanistic interpretation, but quite a convincing one) to the deep miracle of human consciousness, human creativity, the perception of the beauty, the perception that in morality, there is something deep and eternal that touches us, that I think was probably quite a good preparation for many of us. And I’ve stayed in touch with some of my school friends since then.
Elizabeth
My goodness! You’re reminding me of an interview I did with Ian McGilchrist, who spoke about when he went to Winchester College, as similarly very formative on his worldview, were they the rivals?
Timothy Winter
Terrible place! Well in cricket there was an ongoing issue.
The influence Congregationalism and 1970s Modernism
Elizabeth
I see, it’s the Sharks and the Jets transposed to public schools! But it, I think, for me and for a lot of listeners, that was not our experience of school. So, it’s very helpful to hear how early on those questions were live for you, were they live at home? Tell me about your parents, if you don’t mind, what kind of world were they forming?
Timothy Winter
My father was regarded as one of the leading exponents of architectural modernism in the UK. So he got his gong from the Queen and was president of the Royal Institute of British Architects for a while, and a member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission. So I was brought up with a kind of art and architecture influence. I remember at the age of about six, being taken to my first David Hockney exhibition, I think it was at the Whitehall Gallery, and looking with some legitimate sort of six–year–old perplexity at some of Hockney’s images. But we were certainly immersed in that world of modernism, the excitement of the 1960s and 1970s, that the old ways were being kicked away, the dusty, Gothic kind of repetitiveness of the old England. And we’re going to move into a rather more, I suppose, Californian space, where the sky was the limit, entrepreneurship, new forms, new excitement. And I was brought up in what is sometimes regarded as London’s leading showcase of modernist domestic architecture, which is a house in the middle of Highgate Cemetery. Which is still kind of a point of pilgrimage for a lot of modernists and is a listed building and so forth.
Elizabeth
Wow, so your dad designed it?
Timothy Winter
He designed it, yeah. So I was brought up in the middle, right to the cutting edge of modernity with my father, who, at the time was a kind of convinced follower of Bertrand Russell and thought that religion was pretty, nice at Christmas, but one really needed to move on into the world of steel and glass and Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. So at our dinner table, we’d quite often have leading modernist architects. Norman Foster was a kind of rival back in the 1970s, they competed against each other in competitions. Various other leading names in the modernist movement would float across my skeptical teenage radar. So that had a kind of impact in that I was at the sharp end of modernity looking at the steel and glass alternative to the gothic traditions of merry England.
Elizabeth
And am I right in thinking you had some quite committed ministers in the generation above you? Was that your dad’s parents who were in ministry?
Timothy Winter
Well, the deeper family history was a little street in Norwich, and I did the research once to see exactly whether there had been anybody in my family tree who’d ever done anything of any interest whatsoever; won a medal, perhaps, or built a bridge, and I found silence. Yeah so, we lived for about 200 years on King Street in Norwich. We had a draper’s shop, and we were a prosperous middle–class family, I suppose. And we lived more or less opposite what is now known and celebrated as the shrine of Mother Julian of Norwich. But of course, as devout Congregationalist, Calvinist chapel folk, we never darkened its doors. It was regarded as a kind of shocking relic of popery, and it was just as well that it was falling to pieces; who would possibly go there for that idolatrous, rank popery? So that’s a kind of but the chapel Congregationalist world was really the center of everybody’s life, until suddenly, my grandfather’s generation, when everybody would take the pledge.
Elizabeth
What was the pledge?
Timothy Winter
The pledge was to lay off the demon drink forever and you would go up to put your hand on the Bible and swear off drink forever more. And interestingly, that same structure, or the Sunday School attached to it, and I have dim recollections as a rather grumpy child having to go to Sunday school, it’s actually become a mosque. So, I now tell my family now in Norwich, “I’m the only one who’s keeping up the family tradition! I still go to that place, and I still don’t drink. Don’t know about you guys.” And they give me a look. But it’s always been important to me to recognize that the monotheisms are closely intertwined and similar, and that taking the step into something in Islam is not visiting Mars or some remote elsewhere. It’s a different variation on the same principles of Semitic Monotheism. So yes, that that’s that sanctuary of my family, going back, I suppose at least 200 years is now, is now a very busy mosque, lots of converts and a very active place. There’s an irony.
Elizabeth
And do you think your dad was reacting against that world in his kind of Bertrand Russell, 1960s modernist world?
Timothy Winter
Yeah I think he was. I think that if you were brought up in the 40s and 50s in an English provincial town, everything must have seemed extremely mediocre, and dull, and monochrome. This was before multiculturalism, before the sexual revolution, before the Beatles. And if you had any kind of intelligence, and I’ve inherited his library, and he was reading very extensively and interested in art and architecture in his early teens, it must have seemed extremely disappointing and a waste of one’s life, the sort of Edwardian preoccupations with virtue signaling within the Old English class system, where you went to take your tea, which theaters you went to and didn’t go to, where you sat in chapel. All of that was, I think, extremely oppressive to a lot of people, which accounts for the extraordinary explosion that happened in the 1960s that was an energetic, chaotic, in many ways destructive reaction against something that by that time, had become almost unbearable to a generation that had wireless and TV and movies and were seeing a wider world. So I think that he formed part of that. And his reaction was to look to where he thought the life and the vigor and the sincerity was in the Western world, which was in the United States. He loved America, he did his Masters at Yale. Then he drove across the continent in a converted funeral wagon or something, I guess petrol was cheap in those days, he drove all the way to California. He worked for a leading architectural firm there called Skidmore, built his first skyscraper, and he experiences America as a land of possibility, of openness, of friendliness and of a lack of the kind of forensic class differentials which were the great preoccupation of England at that time.
The role of religion in Timothy Winter’s early life
Elizabeth
So given that background, it would have been very easy for you to just default to atheism. But it sounds like, at Westminster School, surrounded by the cathedral and this liturgy, religion was always something you were interested in in some form. Is that fair to say?
Timothy Winter
I think that there was something so non–conformist about Westminster School in the 70s, encouraged by its Maverick headmaster, John Ray, who regarded being different as being part of the individualistic possibilities of the Enlightenment. And he would actively encourage eccentric behavior, as long as it didn’t involve drugs or alcohol. He kind of actively promoted this world of intellectual exploration that the conventional sort of disregard for the idea of religion was perhaps slightly less common, and there were a few earnest Christians at the school. In a sense, it was uncool to consider religion to be uncool, unlike many school kids. And every morning we prayed at Westminster Abbey and experienced the beauty of the building and the liturgy. And even though the headmaster was just as likely to read a rather disturbing Kafka short story as he was to read something from St Paul, it was that kind of place. And of course, girls arrived when I was there, which was another kind of strain on the traditional sort of public school ethos. But we had a chaplain, William Booth, who then went on to become the Queen’s chaplain for a while, a kind of mild mannered Ulsterman, who put up with our endless jeering and gave us an example of somebody who is living a kind of humble Christian life that we noticed, even though not many kids went up for confirmation or went to compline and the Abbey, it was a very secular place. But he did encourage us to think not just about, whether there is there a God, but also you know about the historical, doctrinal claims of Christianity, which he took seriously. So he exposed us to the doctrine of the Trinity, to the vicarious atonement, to the dual nature of Christ, the history of the Church councils. This was in a rather vague ‘God slot’ which did exist back then called Divinity, which didn’t lead to a proper O–Level or anything, so it was a kind of chance to muck around. But given the nature of the school, we mucked around in ways that satisfied a certain intellectual curiosity. But it has to be said that very few of the kids actually bought his kind of presentation of traditional church Christianity, the Trinity didn’t seem to make sense to us. Three into one don’t go, that kind of argument seemed to us conclusive. And towards the end of the decade, when theology still made it to the front pages in the English press, there was a scandal ever a book called The Myth of God Incarnate, which was edited by radical theologians like John Hick, which claimed that the historical Jesus would not have voted the right way at the church councils, that he was practicing Judaism. He wouldn’t have accepted being a person of a trinity. He didn’t believe in the dual nature or original sin, or any of those doctrines that emerged in the early Christian centuries. So, for me, that segued into a certain skepticism that had come out of those rather ill–fated and combative Divinity classes that had punctuated my teenage years.
Elizabeth
So you became a Unitarian for a while, I gathered through sort of part of that journey, what was drawing you there?
Timothy Winter
Well, I had always retained the conviction through various maverick personal experiences that the least absurd explanation of the great mystery, the enigma of being, is that there is a Divine principle behind it. I never lost sight of that, although I was tested on a few occasions, usually in moments of tragedy. But the idea of a Triune God, the idea of the church is currently constituted the kind of bells and smells of high church ritual, or even some of the things that we did in Westminster Abbey, as faithfully reflecting the lifestyle, the beliefs, the purposes of that amazing Jesus of Nazareth, whose teachings shine through as something that can’t be interpreted just as a kind of interesting product of first century Palestinian Jewish Hasidic piety, but somehow transcend time and space and do speak to us as the sacred of universals, that there was a disconnect between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history. And I found reading things like John Hicks’ stuff, Dennis Nineham, Don Cupitt, people like that, theologians who were active at the time that said actually the historical Jesus is more attractive and speaks to us more than the kind of glorified Pantocrator Christ raised in heaven, judging the quick and the dead. So it seemed to me like to be like a choice between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. And that didn’t sort of trigger some kind of total meltdown for me, but an option for the Jesus of history, the amazing wandering rabbi of first century Galilee, with his very radical but deep and intuitively moving teachings. The parables, the ethos of early first primitive Christianity, as opposed to the kind of golden, Byzantine splendor and Hellenized doctrines that came after several centuries. So that was, if you like, my first semi–conscious religious decision that I wanted to learn more about the Jewish Jesus.
Elizabeth
Yeah and I have heard you speak about going up to university as a Unitarian, and ending up studying Arabic because you wanted to make a lot of money in the Gulf. Westminster clearly hadn’t left you solely with, you know, high intellectual aspirations, there were other aspirations going on! The route into studying Arabic and learning about Islam was more accidental than deliberate, by the sound of it.
Timothy Winter
Yeah. I mean, by that stage, all of my friends in their teenage years were listening to kind of contemporary opera and Harris and Birtwistle, and going to the Tate Gallery every week. They had emerged from the chrysalis, and they were working in the city or getting proper jobs and actually joining the establishment. I suppose my trajectory at that time was, in Islam we emphasize very strongly the value of intention. Intention matters more than what you actually do, and probably my intentions have never been particularly impeccable. So my options, I took the entrance exam to Cambridge in economics, and then I decided to switch to do Arabic, which for various extraneous reasons I’d taken an interest in in my mid–teens. So looking at the rather intense hothouse economics then being then doled out and the economics faculty in Cambridge, I thought, my God, this is three years of statistics and economic projections that probably will never turn out to be true but I’ll get a job with Citibank at the end of it. So I kind of chickened out and went back into the hard humanities and chose the Arabic studies tripos with a small number of almost necessarily like–minded, unusual students, and didn’t regret it. Although Arabic is difficult, it wasn’t necessarily an easy option.
Sexuality in the Quran
Elizabeth
Yes, and another part of your journey that I’d love to hear about, although obviously talking about it is reasonably personal, was a sense of the way Christianity relates to sexuality versus how Islam does. Would you mind saying a little bit about that, that moment in your life?
Timothy Winter
I suppose this also is something which is important to people who come out of the 1960s and the 1970s when the traditional kind of dusty puritanism that was normal in England really throughout the 1950s, the sense of shame and the problematizing of something which is the most elemental aspect of our biological humanity, was the main thing that people were rebelling out about in the 1960s. By the 1970s it had become clear that there needed to be some kind of boundaries, regulation, otherwise people were going to get hurt, especially women. A lot of news coming out about cults in California, free love communes and so forth, and usually it was the women who are on the receiving end of most of those free love experiments. But certainly, I believe that we are designed, whether by evolution or Providence or both, to be inhabitants of the Upper Paleolithic environment, in other words, to be part of the natural world we’re physically organic beings. And on that level, the production of life, and therefore, a certain awe and reverence for the processes whereby life comes to be is normal for human beings. And the earliest of all images are images of sort of fertility goddesses or pregnant women. We’re not quite sure what they were, because they go back to 40,000 BC. And it struck me that the type of religion, not just Christianity, that problematizes that, that emphasizes, for instance, clerical celibacy, that associates Eros with some primordial fault in creation, the idea that reproduction is a consequence of original sin, once we became mortal, we had to reproduce ourselves. Obviously, these are nowadays hotly contested topics in Christianity, but looking at the normative medieval, even very recent, little chapel Christian attitude, struck me that quite a bit of damage could be done to human beings by problematizing something which is the most fundamental drive that we have. Most religions, not just Islam, but Judaism, many schools of Hinduism and so forth, actually have a very positive sense of sacred sexuality, and the leading thinkers produced pillow books and that natural process is regarded as something sacred, rather than a consequence of the loss of the sacred. So that again, in the context of the 1970s was something that was quite significant to me, that Christianity, in many of its forms, although the Reformation had allowed priests to marry, had possibly done quite a bit of damage to human beings by trying to suffocate that which sooner or later will express itself. And perhaps some of these abuse scandals that have hit some of the churches in recent years are evidence of the fact that this is a renegade, very powerful instinct, and you need to provide a space in which it can be celebrated and sacralized, rather than treated as a sort of concession to human nature.
The road to Islam
Elizabeth
Yes, it was really interesting reading that, because it’s not something I think in the public perception of Islam, and part of the reason I like to interview people is to understand where their lived experience is very different from the kind of two–dimensional picture that we paint. But the fact that part of what drew you to Islam was your perception of it, having a healthier understanding of sexuality, was very interesting to me. So there was that piece, there was the Arabic course that drew you into this world; what pushed you over the edge to not just becoming interested in Islam but committing your life to it?
Timothy Winter
There wasn’t a kind of road to Damascus moment, or any sort of angelic intervention. It was rather a slow process of migration from a sort of parties of Westminster Abbey to a sort of rather thin, perhaps Unitarian interpretation of Christianity, to a survey of different religious options, because this is the 1970s and people were following Rajneesh and Hare Krishna all over Central London. It was an interesting time when the rebellion against the hard edges of modernity was actually frequently expressed in religious and sacred terms, which has almost been completely lost sight of now. Extinction Rebellion is largely a secular organization as far as I can see, those tendencies have joined the secular bandwagon. Back in the 70s, it wasn’t the case, people were genuinely interested in the sacred, in realistic or dangerous ways. So it was a slow migration, I suppose, from the Trinity, to the idea of kind of pure, Semitic Monotheism as I understood it. And then perhaps a slight experience of being underwhelmed by the Unitarian chapel in Cambridge, the fact that I seem to be about the only person there who wasn’t yet of retirement age, possibly didn’t help. It didn’t look like the charismatic repository of final truth to me. And because I’d started to learn Arabic for quite extraneous, materialistic reasons, the penny started to drop that I seemed to be drawn in the direction of something that originally I hadn’t really had any interest in. I’m not somebody who seeks out exotica or the mystic East. I was never on the hippie trail. I have no interest in something that dislocates me from what I already am in sort of fundamental nature. And one of the things about joining Islam, which I’ve seen with a lot of new Muslims is that, in a strange way, it tends to situate them more strongly in their local identity. Some of the most English people I’ve ever met have been converts to Islam, and that’s one of the interesting, unexpected, unlooked for aspects of it that it doesn’t suddenly turn you into a hand clapping dervish, but relocates you and helps you to see what’s of value in what has been lost in the last 50 years or so, although, of course, with a new set of beliefs. But people in this time where everybody believes in polarities, and Islam is figured as the kind of ‘dark other’ a sort of yellow peril, the antithesis of everything that we hold dear in the West. And of course, we saw that dangerously on our streets just last week with the riots. There are a lot of polarities at the moment across Europe, in particular. Once you get into the reading, you see that actually Islam is probably the closest religion to Christianity, and it may well be that, because of our conservatism, we hold to many things that are traditionally important to Christians, rather more than many churchgoers do. So it’s probably the case that a higher proportion of British Muslims believe in the virgin birth than church going Anglicans. That would be my guess because I talk to church groups, sometimes I’m quite skeptical about some of these traditional stories and miracles.
So Islam is the only non–Christian religion that has an honored place for Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, born of a virgin, bearer of a great scripture, somebody who will come again at the end of time, as Judge, which is not the case for if you’re moving into, say, the Hare Krishna, onto Taoism, or into some new age group. And of course, when Islam emerged in the seventh century, many of the first Christians who looked at it with kind of astonishment said, actually, this isn’t a new religion, this is a Christian heresy. If they believe in Jesus and Abraham and the prophets, it’s a kind of Christianity. It’s really weird, stranger than the Arians and some of those other groups that came to be defined as heretical. I don’t see Islam as a Christian heresy, it clearly is a separate religion, but the fact that it has frequently been perceived as such, indicates that actually the gulf that one jumps is not nearly as yawning and terrifying as you might think. So I experienced it as a slow continuum, rather than a sudden bolt from the blue, a sudden changing of my personality and worldview. It was rather subdued, really.
Elizabeth
And how did your family react?
Timothy Winter
Well, again, we’re talking about 1979 – the heyday of middle–class panic about teenagers joining cults. So of course, they thought, oh, dear, this is exactly what’s happened to our Timmy. And look, he’s not eating bacon for breakfast any longer, but he doesn’t go to the pub, and he doesn’t seem to have girlfriends, and we must get to the bottom of this. So they made some inquiries, and they visited some of the Muslim convert groups that I was associating with at the time. And I think, looking at my mother’s diary, because she wrote all of this down, she wrote 80 volumes of diaries, so I have a kind of window into her mind, I think she was quite reassured when she saw that there were plenty of other sort of middle of the road, middle–class English people at the time who were becoming Muslim and that I wasn’t going to come back with four Sudanese wives and practice some kind of animal sacrifice on the front lawn. Even then, there was a lot of what we now call Islamophobia and misgivings, and this is even before Khomeini, before the whole fundamentalist horror had burst onto people’s awareness. So I think that after a year or so, their anxieties were settled. And then I got married, and they had grandchildren, and things became pretty normal. And I guess it was nice for them to have a child who still believed and respected the old stories that had been important to my ancestors, those stories are basically there in the Quran. So it took a bit of persuading to explain to them that this is actually something that’s in continuity with the other monotheisms, rather than something from planet Neptune that is entirely unrecognizable and rather frightening.
What do you wish people understood about Islam?
Elizabeth
Yes, you’ve touched on a few things about some of the stories that are told about Islam, about sexuality and radical discontinuity with Christianity. For listeners who have very little understanding of Islam, or don’t know any Muslims, what are the key things you wish they understood that might help them when they’re seeking to be people who can listen and engage across these kind of differences?
Timothy Winter
Some have not mentioned already. A lot of Christians don’t know that there’s more about the Virgin Mary in the Quran than there is in the Gospels, for instance. Marian parti is very important in the Islamic world. Just yesterday, I was translating a text about the death of the Virgin Mary from a 12th century Central Asian scholar writing in what’s called Middle Turkic, so even in that remote place eight centuries ago, Muslims considered it important to write devotional poetry that would be chanted in devotional settings about things that Christians often think are kind of uniquely theirs. It’s important to recognize that the religion is very family oriented in terms of what we call the ‘organic’ rather than the nuclear family. So even today, in quite humble accommodation in Muslim areas of Britain, you will find grandparents still cared for in the home. This is a very important part of the traditional Muslim ethic, and they play an important part in looking after children. There is also, of course, the prayer five times a day, starting at dawn. We face the Abraham’s House in Mecca and bow to the Lord of the Universe. And that is something that is really the most characteristic watchword of Islam. And mosques everywhere are full, because people actually love these practices. An important thing to realize, is that Muslims continue to be religious because we love what we do. We love our Prophet, we love God – it’s very love based. If you look at classical Muslim devotional literature, you’ll see the principle of love is foremost. Everybody now reads Rumi, for instance, who’s kind of made the leap into the New Age world and is actually the best–selling religious poet in the United States now, even though he was an imam from what’s now Afghanistan. So at the height of the War on terror, Americans still found themselves opening their hearts to this form of traditional Muslim love–based piety. That aspect of the religion, I think, needs to be better understood, because it’s pretty universal. It’s about beauty, it’s about love, compassion, humor. And those texts are absolutely axiomatic across the traditional Islamic world. So sometimes there’s a kind of improper importation of letter versus spirit dichotomy, that Muslims all about lots of complicated rules, like the nasty old rabbis, allegedly, criticized and abrogated by the New Testament writers and that now we’re supposed to be free in the spirit, and that’s much more spiritual and real. I don’t think that’s essentially an antisemitic trope, because Jewish literature is full of ecstatic references to the God that one loves, and the dancing rabbis, for instance, are a familiar phenomenon. Rabbis seem to dance a lot more than Church of England vicars do! We need to overcome that binary to see that there’s a lot of joy, happiness, love, in those Semitic traditions. And I certainly found that to be the case in Islam as well, that throughout its literature. I’m a lecturer in Islamic studies, I spend my life in the libraries, and I find that joy, that love, that preoccupation with human and natural beauty to be something that is constant for Muslims and is often not understood by outsiders.
The core differences between Christianity and Islam
Elizabeth
Yes, thank you, that’s beautiful. And I kind of want to ask you about the key differences as well. One of my one of my frustrations with some of the way kind of interfaith engagement goes is because I think we have a really faulty theology of difference, we see it as a threat, not a gift. We try and elide difference and only focus on huge commonalities, which there are. But I’m thinking particularly of something I read where you were talking about your early encounter with Muhammad, and through a text that wasn’t particularly helpful about him, but the sense of Muhammad as someone who stood up against oppression. And use this phrase, “Like Che Guevara with God”, and I wonder if there is something, not that there’s necessarily a threat in it, but the figure of Jesus and the figure of Muhammad are different, right? And that’s part of what I think that’s some of the tension is for those of us looking on at the religion to help to understand that figure better.
Timothy Winter
It’s complex, of course, because the debate is ongoing about exactly what Jesus made of the Roman occupation, of traditional Jewish apparent collaboration with the Roman occupation. Some think he was actually a zealot, and that was airbrushed out of the texts later on, for fear of panicking the Roman authorities. And I’m not really a New Testament expert, I can’t comment on that. But clearly in prophetic religion, there is a willingness to stick one’s neck out and to make trouble when confronted by oppression and tyranny. And you see that a lot in the Hebrew prophets, and perhaps Christ, when He overturns the tables of the money changes in the temple, is making that kind of statement. It must have been quite a major operation, I guess. Looking at the Christian scriptures as they exist today, many Muslims confess themselves slightly disappointed that Christ is living in his own country, which is under a brutal foreign military occupation, and he doesn’t seem to be phased by that or saying anything against it. He even says, you know, “Help the legionary to carry his burden”, “Resist, not him that is evil”, “Turn the other cheek”, in ways which seem to be commendable, but when it’s somebody else’s cheek that’s being smacked, you have a basic moral responsibility to intervene. So that pacifist portrait of Christ in the Gospel sometimes seems a little bit thin and morally disappointing. I remember actually, going back to my school days, our headmaster speaking from the pulpit at Westminster Abbey, was talking about the, “Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar’s”, moment in the Gospels, and he actually preached against it. He said, “This is wrong. This is evasive. He’s not being frank. It’s unclear.” And he should speak out frankly, even if he endangers himself against the terrible things that are being done to his to his people: the subversion of their religions, mass crucifixions, the horrors of Roman occupation.
So there is something in the sort of idea of sort of hippie Christ wandering around Galilee with the daffodil, preaching peace and love, that certainly from the point of view the 1970s, which is the kind of aftermath of the anti–colonial revolts and one of the things we were into in school was opposing apartheid South Africa and South Africa’s occupation of Namibia, and a gospel response to that didn’t seem to be quite right to us, and that something a little bit more militant seemed to be morally appropriate. That is, after all, what we’ve always done as a country, whatever has been the message of the Gospel preached in the churches, we’ve always had a doctrine of just war. And I think that’s a tension within some Christian theology, that the person of Christ in the Gospels is unmistakably pacifist, and yet, following Augustine, the church came up with actually quite morally impressive ideas about just war: that you can defend yourself, you can defend the weak, you can fight against oppressors. So that tendency, I suppose, is what the Prophet is already articulating, that if you’re facing extermination at the hands of an evil pagan tyranny, you can defend yourself, which is what he did. So, I found that story liberative, I don’t know if it’s Che Guevara, something that spoke to me rather more than the somewhat bloodless and faint message on politics that seemed to be conveyed by the Gospels.
The shift in the spiritual landscape: Are people more open to Islam?
Elizabeth
Yes, that’s helpful, thank you. I wanted to ask, we started with hearing about the trajectory of the kind of Congregationalist ministers of your grandparents’ generation, and this modernist kind of mid–century, 1960s rebellion against that, and then this 1970s seeking after all kinds of sources of the sacred that you were swept up in. I’m really interested in what you think is happening right now, because I am feeling this – certainly from when I took over at Theos, 12 or 13 years ago to now – this huge shift in how open people are to talk and think about spirituality and to even kind of express metaphysical yearnings. And I still don’t know where we are, but there’s this question about whether the few big public conversions, particularly to Orthodox Christianity, but others, are happening, is there a new desire for tradition? Is there a desire for rootedness or reconnection with ancestors? One, I wanted to ask if you’re seeing it in Islam as well, is there a spike in conversions? And if not, generally where are we in this moment with the spiritual landscape?
Timothy Winter
I think that, it even seems to be a scientific view that religiosity is kind of normative to human beings, and that its absence is almost a dysfunction, or even, I saw a cheeky piece in The Daily Telegraph which said that actually, atheism is a mental illness, because it’s not what the brain is designed for. We’re designed to make sense of the world, to flourish and to have children. If we believe that there’s a meaning behind things and that relationships are sacred, that the dead are honored and so forth, since the Stone Age, we’ve all been religious, and we’ve all perceived the deep, transcendent mystery in virgin nature, in particular. I don’t think that can be extirpated from human beings. I think there’s a deep disillusion with established religion, and sometimes that’s almost a kind of prophetic desire to turn over the tables of the money changers and to say your reverence talk about something real, please! You have so many amazing things in your scripture that can inspire us, why are you giving us this very thin gruel based on various late 20th century liberal ideas which you believe you found in your Scripture? We want something a little bit more spiky, controversial, counter cultural. I think the young in particular look to religion as being prophetic, trouble making and disruptive, because they can see that the modern world is in deep trouble. It’s unstable. It hasn’t delivered on many of the promises of humanism. We have a major war going on now in Europe, in which, unfortunately, rival church hierarchies are deeply implicated. We have worsening calamities in the Middle East. We have the rise of various forms of dangerous religionized nationalisms in the Islamic world, in India, among many Trump voters, nobody is really off the hook when it comes to the political mis–instrumentalization of religion. That puts a lot of people off.
But there’s also a sense that we are failing as a species, even though the population crisis is an example of that, we’re not replicating ourselves. In Scotland now the average woman has 1.3 babies, which is historically unprecedented. In South Korea, it’s even worse, which, even from a secular point of view, has to indicate that as a species, we’re failing. Not only are we threatening the habitat and the existence of countless thousands of other species who also – this is a Quranic teaching – are nations like yourselves and have the right to praise God in their own way. Not only are we guilty of a kind of genocide against other living things, sentient beings, that share the planet with us, but we’re even not good to ourselves in that our own species is in danger. We’re all getting old; we’re not having babies. There’s a profound dysfunction going on at the moment, and this all seems to be part of a larger problem, the desacralizing of nature can’t be separated from the climate crisis. Artificial Intelligence raises very alarming questions about the possible replacement of humanity, and can there be artificial intelligence? What happens if the internet wakes up one morning and says, “Well, I’ve got a lot of information about different religions, and I’ve decided that I want to be Zoroastrian, so please explain how I practice that.” All these completely new, challenging, mind–boggling things are being chucked at young people in particular. And there’s a deep skepticism about the modern project. There are too many existential threats, and none of them are coming from religion, really. So there is a sense that yeah, people do need to get back to that primordial, Paleolithic sense of the imminent sanctity of nature, which is evoked in the Quran in particular, which is constantly telling us to look at God’s signs in nature and to look at the way Heaven and Earth have been created, and the fact Muslim worship is directed by the movements of the solar system. The sun and the moon dictate the times of our services and our fasting month. So yes, I think a lot of people are alert now to the fact that they are naturally religiously thirsty, and we have seen in Muslim communities a big spike in conversions. So, in our local mosque in Cambridge, we had 205 conversions registered last year, which is twice as many as the previous year. And since, paradoxically perhaps, the Gaza thing erupted, we’ve had also a number of conversions coming in from different communities, from every possible background. So converts were a significant part of the British Muslim community now there are maybe 150,000 or more active converts, and I suspect that they form part of a larger pattern of people moving into traditional forms of religion. You mentioned the growth in baptisms in the Orthodox churches. It may well be that something analogous is happening in Islam, and quite possibly in other traditions as well, I don’t know. But yeah, there is a sense of secular crisis, which is making people think more respectfully about faith.
Insights from Islam on how to engage with different people
Elizabeth
Yes. I want to end by asking, what is the key thing you’ve learned about how we engage with people who are different from ourselves? Whether it’s from your Islamic teaching or just from your experiences in life, for those listening thinking, gosh, we are getting more divided, I struggle to see people different from myself as fully human sometimes I think, if we’re all honest, deep down, what helps us?
Timothy Winter
Well, some of those old religious stories, the idea that we have common ancestors, Adam and Eve, is really important. Everybody is a sibling, several times removed. The idea, which is shared by the monotheisms that we’re made in the image of God, conveys a certain what in Islamic theology is called iśmat al–ādamiyyīn the inviolability of Adamic descent. People are intrinsically inviolable. They may then go on to commit mass murder or whatever, but in themselves, they partake of the inviolability of the nobility of Adamic descent. There’s Quranic verses which are important to me, such as the one that says, “Mankind, we have created you male and female and have made you tribes and nations that you might know one another.” That’s an important verse for me, that the diversity of the world is not some kind of Tower of Babel curse, the tower of Babel is not in the Quran, but it’s in fact a sign that God wishes his image to be presented in a rainbow–like diversity of different forms and the uniqueness of every individual. And again, Muslim poets like Rumi, always talking about how much you can learn about the divine just by considering the human face. Not just the beauty of human beings, but also the deep mystery of the presence of a soul, which is conveyed in the formation of the human face. And I think that kind of sacred humanism is something that has to be cultivated in all of the religions, which have all fallen prey to stupid essentialism, and fundamentalism, and nationalism, and Islamism in a way that is very untimely, given the human sacred hunger at the moment, that we need to return to that idea of the sanctity of human beings and the inviolability of everybody who is created in God’s image. I think that theology needs to be resurrected as a matter of urgency.
Elizabeth
Tim Winter, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Timothy Winter
Thank you so much, it’s been an honour.
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