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 churchgoing anglicans hello and welcome to the sacred my name is Elizabeth Oldfield and this is a podcast about the Deep values of people from a WI range of political metaphysical and professional perspectives my guest today is Dr Tim winter who is also known as Shake Abdul Hakim morat and he is an Islamic Theologian Tim I am G to kick off by asking you what is sacred to you I suppose uh there is the objective sacred which is what human beings since the upper Paleolithic have experienced something mysteriously inhering in the beauty of nature relationships the human face just the the Enigma of being uh which probably all human beings just by virtue of Being Human have experienced um probably quite frequently in their lives even if they don't have the right vocabulary to explore it uh and the subjective sacred which is how we from our particular culturally specific um class-based gender based education based uh mental cultural formation actually receive and interpret that so uh my own experience of the Sacred has been I suppose an attempt to interpret that Universal and probably most important of human Sensations that be behind the surface of the world there is something that gives sense and meaning and direction to the world uh for me has always been most easily interpreted in the language of traditional Semitic monotheism uh the the sacred principle the light the goodness the beauty the experienced truth behind things uh is an enigma that is least bafflingly articulated in The Limited net of human language in terms of there being uh a kind of analogy to a person uh who rather than what is the origin and the end and the purpose of everything and that's the most of my limited Western mind can Encompass I think I have enormous respect for other Traditions which are less personalist some of the Buddhist traditions and 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 uh the sacred as being interpreted in terms of their being personal life as the author and the ground of being you use this phrase Semitic monotheism could you unpack that a little bit for me well uh monotheism as historically expressed uh through the the Hebrew prophets uh and articulated in ter terms of the abrahamic idea of a personal God a God that in some mysterious allegorical way weaves stories that uh enable us to pick up on the fragments of light and meaning that we see in our in our lives uh and to see a greater purpose stories which are often moral so I suppose by Semitic monotheism I mean uh abrahamic religion the belief in a single personal Creator God uh who creates uh in time uh and to resurrect 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 uh and the Divine is mediated in more complex ways yes I really like that phrase you used who who not what as a way of um gesturing towards that personalist understanding of God with with all the paradoxes that that generates of course yes yes I yeah I can hear your the the care and I I love that when I'm when I'm sort of trying to write or speak about this hugely semiotically dense three letters God have sometimes put it in square brackets to acknowledge that we are we are talking with something that needs you know um we need not to fling it around as if everyone knows what we're talking about or as if it is uncomplicated um as a concept okay we're going to try and locate you in your story and and how you came to um 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 8 or nine what was your world and what were you like well uh no Adventures really middle class mediocre middle of the road middle England uh brought up in a leafy North London suburb uh 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 Becket play uh and everybody was terribly taxed by the latest articles and the times literary supplement and in in in some ways it was artificial and sudy but in other ways it did actually um confirm our sense that the life of the Mind was interesting that education is not just about pointing one like a a gun at the stock broker belt from an early age whatever parents might have intended uh but was uh an attempt to explore albeit it was a very secular School the the Deep mystery of human consciousness and the fact that we are capable uh despite our humble origins of uh quite enormous profundity uh the the 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 is itself although we tended to regard that as a rather uncool way of arguing is a kind of pointer towards the existence of kind of guiding meaning Laden principles in the universe that despite the tendency of matter to be entropic and to wind down into greater 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 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 um 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 go my goodness you're reminded me of an interview I did with you Miguel Christ who spoke about his he went to Winchester College as similarly very very formative on his world view as were they were they the rivals um yeah well in cricket you know that was just an ongoing issue I see I see it's the sharks of the Jets transposed to Public Schools but it um it I think for you know 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 were that what kind of world were they forming for you uh my father was regarded as one of the leading uh exponents of architectural modernism in the UK so he got his gong from the queen and was president of the Royal Institute of British AR Architects for a while and member of the royal Fine Arts commission so I was brought up with kind of art and architecture remember at the age of about six being taken to my first David hawne exhibition I think it was the White Hall gallery and looking with some legitimate sort of six-year-old perplexity at some of H's images uh but um we were certainly immersed in that world of modernism excitement of 1960s 1970s that the old ways were being kicked away the dusty Gothic kind of repetitiveness of the old England and we were 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 sort of Showcase of modernist domestic architecture which is a house in the middle of Highgate Cemetery uh which is still kind of a a point of pilgrimage for a lot of modernists and is listed building and and so forth so I was brought up with the windows and the steel he designed it yeah yeah um so I was brought up in the middle right to The Cutting Edge of 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 uh but one really needed to move on into the world of Steel and glass and lausier and Mis vandero and so at our dinner table we quite often have leading modernist Architects um Norman Foster was a kind of rival back in the 1970s they competed against each other competitions uh various other sort of leading names in the modernist movement would float across my sort of skeptical teenage radar uh 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 you know the gothic traditions of Mary England and am I right in thinking you had some quite um committed ministers in the generation above you is that your dad's parents who were who were in Ministry well uh the deeper family history was uh a little Street in Norwich and I did the research once uh to see exactly whether there had been anybody in my family tree who' ever done anything of any interest whatsoever won a medal perhaps or built a bridge and I found silence uh yes so we live for about 200 years on King Street in in in Norwich we had a Drapers shop and we're kind of prosperous working class I suppose and we live more or less opposite what is now known and celebrated as the shrine of mother Julian of Norwich um but of course as as devout congregationalist calvinist uh Chapel folk we 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 poery so that's a kind of but the the the chapel congregationalist world was uh really the center of everybody's life until certainly my grandfather's generation when everybody would take the pledge um my grandfather would walk up what was the Pledge The Pledge was to to to lay off the demon drink forever and you would go up to the altar put your hand on the on the Bible and swear off drink forever more um right uh 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 uh uh it's actually become a mosque so I now tell my family in Norwich you know I'm the only one who's keeping up the family tradition I still go to that place and I still don't drink I 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 they taking the step into something like Islam is not visiting uh Mars or some some remote elsewhere it's a different variation on the same principles of Semitic monotheism so yes that that that sanctuary of my family going back I suppose at least 200 years is now is now a Mosk very busy mosque lots of converts very active place there's an irony and do you think your dad was reacting against that World In His Kind of Bertram Russell 1960s modernist world yeah I I think he was I think that if you brought up in the 40s and 50s in a English provincial town everything must have seemed extremely mediocre and dull and monochrome this is before M multiculturalism before the sexual Revolution before the Beatles uh and if you had any kind of intelligence and I've inherited his library and he was reading you very extensively and interested in art and architecture from his early teens it must have seemed extremely disappointing kind of a waste of one's life the sort of Edwardian preoccupations with uh 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 uh 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 was seeing a wider world uh so I think the T formed part of that uh and his reaction was to look to where he thought the life and the Vigor and the the sincerity was in the Western World which was uh in the United States he loved America he did his Masters at Yale then he drove across the continent in a converted uh I think it was a funeral wagon or something I guess petrol was cheap in those days he drove all the way to California work for a leading architectural firm there called Skidmore built his first skyscraper uh and he experiences America as a land of uh possibility of openness uh of friendliness and of a lack of the kind of uh forensic class differentials which were the Great preoccupation of of England at that time hi I wondered if I could ask for your help you may have noticed that we've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to make this channel more beautiful more enriching more thought-provoking and more lifegiving but 87% of you watching on this channel are not yet subscribed so I wondered if you would just hit the little subscribe button it means that you'll get these really thoughtful conversations in your feed and it will also help other people find us thanks very much so given that background it would have been very easy for you to just default to atheism but it sounds like you know 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 I think that there was something so non-conformist about Westminster School in the 70s encouraged by its Maverick Headmaster John Ray uh 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 uh he kind of actively promoted this this world of of intellectual exploration that uh the conventional sort of disregard for uh the idea of religion was perhaps slightly less common and there were a few Earnest Christians uh at the school uh in a sense it was uncool to consider religion to be uncool unlike many uh school kids and every morning we were praying at Westminster Abbey and experiencing the beauty of the building and the Liturgy even though the Headmaster it was just as likely to read a rather disturbing Kafka short story as he was to read something from St Paul uh it was that kind of place uh and of course girls arrived when I was there which was another kind of uh strain on the traditional sort of public school ethos but we had a chaplain Willie Booth who then went on to become Queen's chaplain I think for a while a kind of mild-mannered sterman who put up with our endless sort of jering um and uh gave us an example of somebody who is living a kind of humble Christian Life uh that we noticed even though not many kids went up for confirmation or went to compain in the Abbey it was it was a very secular Place uh but he did encourage us to think not just about is there a god uh but also you know about the historical doctrinal claims of Christianity which he took seriously so uh he exposed us to the doctrine of the Trinity uh to the vicarious atonement to the Dual nature of Christ the history of the uh the church councils this was in a rather kind of vague God slot which still existed 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 mocked around in ways that satisfied a certain intellectual curiosity um but it has to be said uh 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 uh in the English press there was a scandal Abra book called The Myth of God incarnate which was edited by radical theologians like John hick um uh 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 uh 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 that kind of for me segwayed into a certain skepticism that had come out of those rather ill- fated and competive div Unity classes uh that had punctuated my teenage years so you became a Unitarian for a while I gather through sort of part of that Journey what was drawing you there well I had always retained the conviction through various uh Maverick personal experiences that the least absurd explanation of the the great mystery the Enigma of being is that there is a uh a Divine principle behind it I never lost of that um although I was tested on a few occasions uh usually in moments of tragedy uh 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 Abby as Faithfully reflecting the lifestyle the beliefs the purposes of that amazing Jesus of Nazareth whose teachings kind of shine through as something that can't be interpreted just as a kind kind of interesting product of first century Palestinian Jewish hdic piety but somehow transcend time and space and do speak to us of of the Sacred of universals that there was a disconnect between the uh Christ of faith and the Jesus of history and I I found reading things like John Hicks stuff Dennis NM people like that theologians who are active uh at the time Don cupit that actually the the historical Jesus is more attractive and speaks to us more more than the kind of glorified pantr or uh Christ raised in heaven judging the quick and the Dead uh so it seemed to me to be like a choice between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Faith uh and that didn't sort of punct trigger some kind of total meltdown for me but an option for the Jesus of of History the the amazing wandering Rabbi of first century Galilee with his very uh uh radical but deep and intuitively moving teachings The Parables um the the ethos of early of first primitive Christianity as opposed to the kind of golden Byzantine Splinter and heniz doctrines that came after several centuries so that was if you like my first semiconscious religious decision that I wanted to learn more about the Jewish Jesus yeah and I have heard you speak about um going up to as a as a Unitarian and ending up studying Arabic because you wanted to make a lot of money in the Gulf was yeah Westminster clearly hadn't uh left you solely with uh you know High intellectual aspirations there were other aspirations going on it was it was the the the the roote into studying Arabic and learning about Islam was more accidental than deliberate by the sound of it yeah I mean by that stage all of my friends who in their teenage years were listening to kind of cont temporary Opera and Harrison Bert whistle and going to the tape Gallery every week uh they'd kind of emerged from the chrysis and they were working in the city or of getting proper jobs and actually joining The Establishment uh I suppose um my trajectory at that time was in 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 uh particularly imp pable so my options uh I took the entrance exam to Cambridge in economics and then I decided to switch to do Arabic uh which for various extraneous reasons I'd taken an interest in um in my uh mid teens uh so looking at the rather intense Hot House economics then being doled out in the economics faculty in Cambridge I thought my God this is three years of statistics and uh economic projections that will never turn out to be true uh okay I'll get a job with City Bank at the end of it but so I kind of chickened out and and went back into the hard Humanities and and chose the uh Arabic studies tripos with a small number of um almost necessarily uh like-minded unusual uh uh students and didn't regret it all the Arabic is difficult it wasn't necessarily an easy option yes and another part of your journey that I've um 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 I suppose this also is something which is important to people who come out of the 1960s the 1970s when the traditional kind of Dusty puritanism that was normal in England really throughout the 1950 is um sense of Shame and uh uh the problematizing of something which is the most Elemental aspect of our biological Humanity uh was the main thing that people were rebelling out about in the 1960s uh 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 um a lot of news coming out about cults in California free love communes and so forth and usually it was the women who um were on the receiving end of most of those free love experiments uh but certainly I believe that uh we are designed whether by Evolution or Providence or both to be uh 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 or and reverence for the processes whereby life comes to be is 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 uh and it it struck me that the type of religion not just Christianity that problematizes that uh that emphasizes for instance clerical celibacy that assoc I Ates iros with some primordial fault in creation the idea uh that reproduction is a consequence of original sin uh once we became mortal we had to reproduce ourselves obviously these are nowadays hotly contested topics in in Christianity but looking at the normative medieval even very recent s of Chapel Christian attitudes 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 and that most religions fact certainly not just Islam uh but Judaism uh many schools of Hinduism and so forth actually have a very positive sense of sacred sexuality and the leading thinkers produced pillow books and uh the the that natural uh 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 um that Christianity in many 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 a space in which it can be celebrated and sacralized rather than treated as a kind of sort of concession to human nature yes it it was really interesting reading that to to because it's not something I think in the public perception of Islam that um is is you know and part of the reason I like to talk to PE to interview people is 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 what what pushed you over the edge to not just becoming interested in Islam but committing your life to it there wasn't a kind of road to Damascus moment I suppose or any sort of angelic intervention uh it was rather a slow process of migration from a sort of PES of Westminster Abbey to a sort of rather thin perhaps Unitarian inter interpretation of Christianity to uh a survey of different religious options because this is the 1970s and people were following uh reaj Nish and uh Hari Krishna all over Central London it was an interesting time when uh the Rebellion against the hard edges of modernity was actually frequently expressed in religious and sacred terms uh which has almost been completely lost sight of now kind of Extinction Rebellion uh is largely a secular uh organization as far as I can see that tendency is has joined the secular bound Dragon but act in the 70s it wasn't the case people genuinely interested in the sacred in realistic or or 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 uh and then perhaps a slight this experience of being underwhelmed by the Unitarian Chapel in Cambridge uh 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 the charismatic repository of final truth to me uh and because I'd started to learn Arabic for quite extraneous materialistic reasons the penny started to drop that I seem 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 um um I've 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 it in a strange way tends to situate them more strongly in their of local identity some of the most English people I've ever met um 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 sort of uh dervish but um 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 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 sort of yellow Peril the antithesis of everything that we hold de in the west and of course we saw that um dangerously on our streets just last week with with the riots are a lot of polarities at the moment across Europe in particular uh once you get into the reading you see that actually Islam is probably the closest religion to uh to Christianity and it may well be that because of our conservatism uh 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 churchgoing anglicans that would be my guess I find many of them because I talk to church groups sometimes are 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 uh as judge uh which is not the case for if you're moving to say the har Krishna or into DSM to some new age group uh and of course when Islam emerged in the 7th 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 is a kind of Christianity it's really weird Stranger Than The arens and some of those other groups that came to be defined as as heretical um I don't see Islam as a Christian heresy clearly as a separate religion but the fact that uh it has frequently been perceived as such indicates that actually the 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 uh Bolt from the blue a sudden changing of my personality and worldview and how did your family react well again we're talking about 1979 the hey day 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 and 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 the Muslim groups main convert groups that I was associating with the time and I think looking at my mother's diary because she wrote all of this down she wrot 80 volumes of diary so I have a kind of window into her mind um I think she was quite reassured when she saw that there were plenty of others sort of middle of the 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 uh animal sacrifice on the front lawn um even then there was a lot of what we now call islamophobia and misgivings and this is even before Ki before the whole fundamentalist horror had burst onto people's uh awareness uh so I think that after a year or so um 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 still believed and respected the old stories that have been important to uh my ancestors those stories are basically there in the Quran uh so it took a bit of persuading to explain to them that this is actually a kind something that's in continuity with the other monotheisms rather than something from planet Neptune that is entirely unrecognizable and rather frightening yes you've touched on a few things that um you know some of the stories that are told about Islam about sexuality and about you know 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 some I've 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 Maran party very important in the Islamic world just yesterday I was translating a uh a text about the death of the Virgin Mary from an A 12th century Central Asian scholar writing in what's called middle turkic so even in that remote place years ago eight centuries ago Muslims considered it important to write devotional poetry that would be Ed uh in devotional settings about things that Christians often think are kind of uniquely theirs uh it's important to recognize uh that uh the religion is very family oriented in terms of what we call the organic rather than the nuclear family so even today uh 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 uh there is also of course the prayer five times a day uh starting at dawn uh we Face the the Abraham's house in Mecca and bow to the the lord of the universe and that is something that is really the most characteristic watch word of Islam and mosques everywhere are fall uh because people actually love these practices an important thing to realize is that Muslims actually continue to be religious because we actually love what we do we love our Prophet we love God it's very love based um if you look at classical Muslim devotional literature you'll see the principle of Love is foremost everybody now reads roomie for instance who's kind of made the leap into the new age world and is actually the bestselling religious poet in the United States now um even though he was an Imam from uh what's now Afghanistan so the height of the war of Terror 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 are all about lots of complicated rules like the nasty old rabbis allegedly criticized and abrogated by uh 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 is essentially an anti-semitic Trope because Jewish literature is full of ecstatic uh references to the god that one loves and the dancing rabbis for instance famili phenomena rabbis seem to dance a lot more than Church of England Vicor do we need to overcome that binary to see that there's a lot of joy happiness love in those Semitic traditions and I I certainly found that to be the case in Islam as well that throughout its literature I'm lecture in Islamic Studies I spend my life in the libraries and I find yeah that joy that love that preoccupation with human and natural beauty to be something that is uh a constant for Muslims and is often not understood by Outsiders yes thank you that's beautiful um and I kind of want to ask you about key differences as well one of my one of my um 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 um and only focus on and there are huge commonalities um but I'm thinking particularly of um something I read where you were talking about your early encounter with Muhammed and through a text that wasn't particularly um you know helpful about him but the the sense of Muhammad as someone who stood up against oppression and you use this phrase like a Chay gavara with God would you like to I I wonder if there is something not that there's necessarily a threat in it but 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 for those of us looking on at the religion to help to understand that figure better well it's complex of course because the debate is ongoing about exactly what 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 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 uh and perhaps uh Christ when he overturns the tables of the money changes in the temple is making that kind of statement must have been quite a major operation I guess um looking at the 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 uh in ways which seem to be commendable but know when it's somebody else's cheek that's being smacked you have a basic moral responsibility to intervene so that pacifist portrait Christ in the gospel sometimes seems a little bit thin and morally disappointing um I remember actually going back to my school days our Headmaster speaking from the ppit Westminster Abbey um was talking about the Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's um uh 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 uh 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 religion the uh Mass crucifixion the the horrors of of Roman occupation I remember that uh so there is something in the sort of idea of the sort of hippie Christ wandering around Galilee with a 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 Nam Namibia that a gospel response to that didn't seem to be quite right to us and there something a little bit more militant seem to be morally appropriate which is after all what we've always done as a country whatever has been uh the message of the Gospel preached in the churches we've always had a doctrine of just War uh 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 uh morally impressive ideas about just war that you can defend yourself you can defend the weak um 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 ter you can defend yourself which is what he did so I found that story I don't know if it's Jake wear but certainly a liberative story something that that spoke to me um rather more than the somewhat bloodless and faint message on politics that seemed to be conveyed by the gospels yes that's helpful thank you I wanted to ask you know we started with hearing about the trajectory of the Cong kind of congregationalist Ministers of your grandparents generation and this modernist kind of midcentury um 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 I am feeling this um certainly from when I took over at Theos uh 12 13 years ago to now this huge shift in how open people are to talk and think about spirituality and to even kind of um Express metaphysical yearnings and we're seeing you know there's I still don't know where we are but there's this question about whether the few big public conversions particularly to Orthodox Christianity um but others are happening and tracing that to is there a new desire for tradition right is there a desire for rootedness a reconnection with ancestors one I wanted to ask if you're seeing it in Islam as well is there a kind of Spike conversions and if if not generally where are we in this moment with the spiritual landscape I think that I mean it even seems to be a scientific view that religiosity is kind of normative to human beings and that its absence is almost a dysfunctional 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 and to flourish and to have children uh if we believe that there's a meaning behind things and that relationships are sacred that the dead are honored and so forth since you know the old stone age we've all been religious and we've all perceived the kind of deep Transcendent mystery in virgin nature in particular uh I don't think that can be extrap from human beings I think there's a deep disillusion with established religion uh and sometimes that's almost a kind of prophetic desire to turn over the tables of the money changers and to say you reverence talk about something real please you have so many amazing things in your scripture that can Inspire us while you're 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 countercultural I think the young in particular look to religion as being uh prophetic uh troublemaking and disruptive because they can see that the modern world is in deep trouble it's unstable hasn't delivered on many of the promises of humanism we have a major war going on now in Europe in which unfortunately rival you know Church hierarchies are deeply implicated we have worsening calamities in in the Middle East we have the rise of various forms of dangerous religionization in the Islamic World in India among many Trump voters nobody is really and off the hook when it comes to the political Mis instrumentalization of religion that puts a lot of people off um but there's also a sense that you know we we we are failing as a species even the the the population crisis is an example of that you know 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 teacher 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 it's a profound dysfunction going on at the moment and this all seems to be part of a larger a larger problem the desacralizing of nature can't be separated from the climate crisis artificial intelligence uh raises very alarming questions about 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 mindboggling things are being chocked at young people in particular and there's a deep skepticism about the modern project there there are too many existential threats and none of them are coming from religion really uh so there is a sense yeah people do need to get back to that primordial Paleolithic sense of the imminent sanctity of nature uh which is evoked in 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 movement of the solar system the Sun and the Moon dictate the times of our services and our our fasting month so yes I think a lot of people are 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 and Cambridge uh we had 205 conversions registered last year which is twice as many as the previous year and since know 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 are a significant part of of the British Muslim Community now that maybe 150,000 or more active converts um and I suspect that they form part of a larger pattern of people moving into traditional forms of religion you you mentioned the uh the growth in baptism Ms in the the Orthodox Churches um it may well be that something analogous is happening in Islam and quite possibly in other Traditions as well I don't know but the other is a a sense of secular crisis which is making people think more respectfully about faith yes I want to end by asking what is the key thing you've learned about how we do engage with people who are different from ourselves and whether it's from your Islamic uh teaching or just from your experiences in life for those listening thinking gosh we 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 well some of those old religious Stories the idea that we have common ancestors Adam and Eve is really important everybody's a sibling uh several times removed uh the idea which is shared by the monotheisms that we made in the image of God conveys a certain what in Islamic theology is called is Adia the inviolability of adamic descent people are intrinsically inviable they may then go on to create commit mass murder or whatever but in themselves they partake of the inviability of the nobility of adamic descent uh 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 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 to B not in the Quran uh 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 the uniqueness of every individual is something that and again Muslim poets like roomy 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 the Deep mystery of the presence of a soul which is conveyed in the the formation of the human face uh and I think that kind of uh that kind of sacred humanism uh is something that is 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 uh that we need to return to that idea of the sanctity of human beings and the inviability of everybody who is created in God's image I think that theology needs to be resurrected as As a matter of urgency Tim Winter thank you so much for speaking to me on the sacred thank you it's been an honor well what a fascinating an unusual man I found um trying to get inside Tim world really interesting because so many different parts of it are worlds that I don't know very well the first thing it's left me thinking about is formation I'm almost always thinking about formation as some of you know but how are childhoods in particular but really um our whole lives the thing we pay attention to the relationships that we're in how they shape us and form us and I wonder if part of the reason that Timothy feels such an un unusual kind of person to me is that he had two different quite unusual um formative cultures in his childhood you know it was brought up in this famous modernist house in Highgate Cemetery we've put a link to it in the show notes so you can go and have a look in it's glass and um a box it's really very symbolic of that high uh High modernist mid 20th century you know intellectual optimism about reason and this move away from you know the sort of superstitious deadening oppressive uh dark ages of religion and that was very much uh what was going on in Timothy's home and then at school you have this strange sounding moment in a British public school and bear in mind this this school is in the grounds of Westminster Cathedral it's literally part of the quadrangle of the church and they go to Westminster Cathedral every day um not Westminster Cathedral West westmin Abbey Westminster Cathedral is the Catholic Cathedral and being living and studying within the Abbey must have had this um historically dislocating effect I can imagine and then you've got the church C uh the school culture saying you know difference is great basically it sounds like a breeding ground for old school British eccentrics um you know difference is really celebrated intellectual Independence and those two things uh shaped his childhood and that really helps me make sense of this both this intellectual mystical Quest and he used this tantalizing phrase which I really wish I'd been braver at pushing him on but it felt a bit private he used this phrase various Maverick personal experiences you know which is one of those like understated um sociologically appropriate terms for I imagine religious encounters right he had that that in his childhood and he also had this encouragement to pursue quite niche interests um the combination of which led him to this uh position that he's in now so formation how it makes some choices seem um more possible and some less possible for us I wonder what your formation uh what Market left on you what uh your imaginative possibilities are now because of that formation the second thing I really noticed in this interview was it was really pushing my buttons about Jesus and not you know um Dr winter was very respectful and uh this is exactly the point of this projects for me to listen to people coming from different perspectives who disagree with me on various things but because Jesus is really very close to my close to what's sacred to me and very precious um I I was surprised to find myself really wanting to argue back with him you know really wanting to say you know that's not the only way to read Jesus what he sees is sort of morally disappointing in Jesus's pacifism is one of the ways that you can frame it I find the most morally beautiful teaching that's ever been written so that was helpful for me to have one of those moments of like oh gosh you can really see very different things in this text um and similarly with his understanding of the Christian sexual ethics just not my read at all but so helpful um to get that view from the outside and just listen not argue just listen and seek to understand and the final thing I'm left with is really um a concept that I've been playing with really for the last years that I wrote about in the Roth chapter of fully alive uh using the phrase from John Yates people like me syndrome this deep-seated tendency in usle to preer prefer people that remind us of ourselves and how um anything that strikes us as other you know foreign different not like me has a tendency to trigger us into feeling uncomfortable or even hostile or unsure and I think for a lot of us um individually and collectively Islam has played that played that role at different points down the centuries you know there's peaks of it around particular historical moments it's interesting that's at the moment around the Christian nationalism conversation it's really there and some of these high-profile conversions seem to be uh to Christianity seem to be placing themselves in opposition to Islam um and other groups have played this role down the centuries you know Jews tragically and too often Catholics in the UK different points but Islam is often one of those um symbols ciphers stories that um those outside that Community see as really not like me you know really triggering their people like me syndrome and I could really hear Dr winter wanting to complicate that and say it's not that different right that he doesn't consider himself having to having leapt a million miles away from Christianity that he sees continuity and similarity and connectedness between these um abrahamic faces they called them Semitic monotheisms which was one of various new terms that I learn in this interview um and again I think I think that's really helpful for us and I heard it again um that people like me think playing out when I asked him about his childhood um about his parents and how they reacted to him converting to Islam and he said basically my mom was okay with it when she realized other mid of of the road middle class men were converting and that's exactly how this works in us that something can seem very different possibly threatening because it's very different but if we see someone like us who reminds us of ourselves involved in it it's like a bridge we can say oh maybe it's not so strange after all maybe it's something I could at least listen to and seek to understand rather than Retreat from or attack it was just one of those classic um demonstrations of the way people like me syndrome works oh there's someone like me maybe it's not so bad lots more I could say but I'm going to leave it at that thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Sacred my name is Elizabeth Oldfield and our production team is Lizzy Harvey Dan Turner and Amari yron the sacred is a project of the think tank Theos and there is loads of brilliant work from our colleagues going on so please do do check that out and particularly reading our times which is our sister podcast I really like hearing your thoughts you can find me at my substack which is more fully alive. substack do.com on social media uh although I'm trying to dial down my presence there I probably will see it eventually or you can reach us on the sacred email which we'll also put in the show notes until next episode I hope you can be reflecting on who function as people like me and people not like me in your life and how you could approach them a little bit more curiosity and see what happens [Music]