uh ladies and gentlemen welcome to another episode of The Pinnacle and uh as we promised last time we are going to have another meeting with Dr Chris haa this is uh the second in a series of meetings in which we are discussing the similarities commonalities and also some areas of conflict between uh the three abrahamic faiths Islam Judaism and Christianity uh why are we doing this I believe it is extremely important to to do this because interacting with others understanding with others appreciating with appreciating others is extremely important in an inter welcome Dr chisa you were in Australia how was your trip well I'm very pleased to say that the travel in both directions went well and that uh people seemed happy enough with the contributions that I made to conferences and also to speaking in uh uh in mosques and in husia and such like so welcome back and uh we hope that you are well rested and where are you right now with City in the UK at this moment I'm actually in the Republic of Ireland and not in the UK but uh we're very close neighbors uh Dr before I go to my um my questions uh related to theology uh I was reading in your profile that you were advis to the bishop of Birmingham on interpersonal inter uh Faith relations so first and foremost what is a bishop what what what does the bishop of Birmingham do and what was your role as his advisor you need to understand first of all that Birmingham is a city let's say of approximately a million people but it has a hugely diverse population many people came to Birmingham to work in factories there uh during the time um in the late 50s and 60s so we have people from all the islands of the Caribbean we have people from the subcontinent we have people from several Arab lands uh and in recent times we've had Vietnamese people and so on so a very diverse population one of the things that makes Birmingham particular is that there is no one minority Faith which is dominant yes the Muslims are the largest Faith Group after the Christians but there are significant communities of siks and Hindus and Buddhists and Jews and many other minority Faith groups too so the challenge in Birmingham was how do we together build a society that draws from The Good the insights the wisdom of all those different Faith communities in order to make a city in which all people from whatever Faith group or from no faith group should feel not only at home but also that they could flourish now that was the The Challenge then um in in Birmingham now the Church of England understands itself to have a a concern for the spiritual well-being of every person who lives in the country whether they are Christian or not whether they are a Believer or not so England is literally divided into different dases as we call them presided over by a bishop so that no person no house that alone a village in the whole of England is outside of a church of England Parish now this could well mean in parts of Birmingham that um I remember one um local priest saying to me I have 30,000 parishioners uh the Christians are about um 1,500 in other words all the rest were Muslims but nevertheless he felt that he had a spiritual concern for all those people and it was for me very important that whenever there was a difficulty in the area whether it be something happening on the streets whether it was that there was an accident somebody was taken ill local Muslim people would come to him and come to the church for help and support and can you arrange so and so so this is the relationship then of the Church of England with the whole populace of England now the bishop of Birmingham then is the bishop of the Church of England so it's his responsibility to help to create that sort of society that sort of relationship with all the people who live in the area and in that context then um before my time there had been appointed a particular post post for advisor on Interfaith relations and the the task of this post was first of all to make good personal relations with all the different Faith communities of the city in all their diversity so if I give one example we had 2,700 Buddhists in Birmingham at that time uh but we had 14 different schools of Buddhism and they would have uh um considerable differences between them so my job was first of all to make those relationships myself secondly to promote better relationships between those different Faith communities and the establishment whether it be the church whether it be the government whether it be local business also to promote better relations between the different faith communities not just between Christians and Muslims for example but between Muslims and sik and and Hindus and Buddhists and Jews and so on so this was the uh the the task that I had as advisor on Interfaith relations excellent very very enlightening and a very useful task uh I've just got someone in the comment section who is uh saying that uh ISL if I can read it out Islam is not an abrahamic Faith Abraham and his family never visited Mecca okay s maybe we can address that question some other time because right now I have other questions so uh last time we were speaking about uh the evolution of Christianity over the over the centuries when we come to the 11th century we read and hear about something called the great schism within Christianity so if you could explain to us what the great schism was and I think it happened around the year8 what were the circumstances surrounding it and what was the impact of that so I think you are still mute first of all we need to go back in history and to see that from the beginning from the early Decades of Christianity uh there were different centers um which uh which formed units around which local areas gathered so we can think of Alexandria in Egypt of Antioch in Asia Minor as it then was Jerusalem itself and later on constant Constantinople or Byzantium uh and then also Rome so we have then five of these major geographical centers we call them patriarches presided over by a patriarch now there are considerable differences in in temperament in life experience in context in Outlook between these different parts of the the countries that surrounded the Mediterranean which is really what we're talking about here the idea first of all was that all these different Patriarchs should be seen as being equal in terms of their relationship to each other um and that they were the heads of the local christian community over time of course as politics started to enter into things Rome begins to become much more important politically than some of these other groups so that the patriarch of Rome later to be called the Pope the patriarch of Rome begins to think of himself as being well the technical term is used first amongst equals so he was the one who as it were should preside over the meeting of the Patriarchs and the other Patriarchs could see that well this was this was the way that that the politics had gone now alongside this then there were some theological issues that were coming up between the different groups because as I say the culture was different the languages were different the way of doing religion let's say was different so both politics and religion um brought certain tensions into this relationship now what finally happened was that the the patriarch of Rome wanted to say something more than to be the first amongst equals and to say instead that he had a universal patriarchate in other words um the others had smaller territories but he had the whole Global Community now this was a kind of tension then that the other patriarches could not tolerate they couldn't live with that because it would have meant that he had jurisdiction over them not just as the the the chair of the cabinet when it met but actually as um uh really rather in a dictatorial role as one who could direct the entire universal church that was the kind of political situation then that ended up into this tension which grows into the grism now there were theological issues as well running alongside that but eventually in 1054 there was then a a separation and this SE reparation meant that Rome went one way and all the other patriarches who now come under a family name of the Orthodox they went another way and um Rome because of uh the the European expansion around the world and so on becomes by far the largest of all the Christian churches the Roman Catholic Church um and the Orthodox churches take on in Russia and in Eastern Europe uh very substantial communities there but nevertheless they are really the peoples of the East Eastern Europe and to the east around the Mediteranean so that's the basis of this separation and if we fast forward that uh fight 500 600 years later uh this is my reading maybe you can correct me but uh as the church uh especially in the context of Western Europe or in the case of England uh because the church was powerful in the sense that it had territory it had land so were political considerations the primary factor in uh um Henry VII converting to Protestant Faith or because Henry VII is definitely uh the man who has had the greatest influence on Christianity in England uh if not in in in the rest of the world so uh will you say that similar political consider considerations were there or were there religious overtones to that as well because most people say that his conversion was brought about by anell and his wife so what is your reading there were were there similar circumstances political circumstances yes well things don't really begin with Henry VII at all he's a fairly small figure in this story things really begin and take off in Germany with Martin Luther and Martin Luther was um a highly intelligent Theologian he was a Catholic PRI priest he was a monk and he comes to a real crisis in his Christianity in which he says that the church has gone astray it's gone astray in some minor things but also in some major things in understanding uh the the the deposit of faith that Jesus left the Revelation that he brought now when we talk of the church here we are talking of the western church so that would have been called the Catholic church and now from the Reformation onwards it becomes called more often the Roman Catholic church so he sees the need for reform and this is the origin then of the Reformation it is first of all a theological a religious a spiritual movement nobody ever brings a about a revolution when they are couldn't care less revolutions come about when people are deeply passionately concerned and involved and this is how it was with Martin Luther where he was deeply concerned to bring people back to what he would have called the Fidelity of the teaching of Jesus and that is then the origin of the Reformation now in this process there was quite a lot of interaction between Germany and Britain for example as there was in other northern European countries this was a time in which religion cannot be separated from the state so it was the German princes who called the meetings at which the theologians had to debate discuss and come up with Solutions so State and religion cannot in this sense be separated and indeed the the great resolution because there was physical fighting there was Warfare between some of these religious groups in Mainland Europe the the resolution of that was that each local Prince should have the right to determine the faith of his community so you would have Catholic princes you would have Protestant princes you would have Lutheran princes and so on and each Prince had that right and responsibility and of course in Mainland Europe some of these principalities were very small and if you didn't like it here you could always go and move elsewhere now as far as England was concerned Henry VII as the King as a a ruling Monarch over the land would have had that same uh responsibility for the uh the faith the if you like the stream of Christianity that became predominant in his land now Henry was a committed Catholic indeed one of the titles which has been borne by Christian monarchs ever since his time was to be defender of the faith and this was a title given to him by the pope because of the way that he defended the Catholic tradition against some of the elements of protestantism however um family life and political life and religious life all coales together and that was because one of the things that Kings felt it was crucially important for them to do was to produce a son or more than one son so that there would be somebody to inherit after him and his wife bore no sons and this was for him critical it was crucial and so the question was what should he do should he um divorce his wife now divorc was completely unacceptable in Christian circles at this time or should he take a second wife and become uh bigamist uh what should he do and into this tension then came a tension between this part of Henry's life and the pope and the teaching of Rome so we have a combination of a need to reform the theological the spiritual life of the church with a political element I am the king and I have to to decide on on which way we're going with a family element that said I need a son and Heir and this eventually ended up with um a split coming between Henry and the pope and I say that deliberately rather than between Hen Henry and the Catholic church because although Henry leaves the body of the church headed by the pope he remains very Catholic in his Outlook and in his practice um however that is the foundation of the Church of England in our own times to be called the Anglican Church uh there is one uh difference uh between uh Christianity and Islam because when I was growing up I found it very difficult to understand uh that a lot of uh Christians because in Islam what happens is that the Quran constantly says read the Quran try to understand the Quran reflect the Quran now it is for everybody it's not just for a class but uh when we used to read the history of Queen Mary or uh you know of of that uh Reformation era uh we found that a lot of people were punished for reading the Bible for trying to understand the Bible uh until uh and I I believe tendale wrote the Bible and then he was punished as well so just help us understand what was the convention at in those days why were people being punished especially because around that time the printing press had come out and it was natural that copies of the books will be circulated so why were people punished in the Christian world for just reading their holy book uh the difficulty wasn't that they were punished for reading the holy book what happened was that from about the um 4th Century onwards the the major Western churches all used the bible translated into Latin now you remember that the Bible is written in Hebrew and Greek and then it's translated into Latin but Latin becomes the common language of the western church so in the the decades or centuries before the Reformation the scriptures could only be read by educ people clergy and others who'd had the kind of education that meant that they could read Latin now what happened at the Reformation was that Martin Luther said everyone every Christian every believer every person has the right to read their scriptures in a language that they can understand and so it was Martin Luther from let's say the 1520s onwards who begins the process of translating the Bible from Latin into English sorry into German in his case now the same process then comes about in Britain where in the 16th century the Bible is translated into English now still only a minority of people can read at all in any language language so still you are opening up the window of accessibility to to a wider group than those who could read Latin certainly but but not to everyone however uh as you will have noticed also in Islam the difficulty is that whenever you have a translation all translations are necessarily interpretations you know we have the the very strong principle that the Quran is only the Quran when it's in Arabic and that all translation all translations are interpretations now the same is true with the Christian Bible so you have moved from Hebrew and Greek into Latin and then into the languages of the people in different countries German French Dutch English and so on now once you start opening up those interpretations because that's what a translation is then you are open to people slanting the translation in such a way that it supports their theological position and certainly when we look at English translations of the Quran we can see that certain passages have been translated in such a way way using English words in such a way that they reinforce a certain position so this is naturally the case with translation now it meant that people for the first time were beginning to hear the scriptures the Bible because they could be read in church by somebody who could read and people could hear and understand then of course they think I have heard therefore I can interpret it and then we have all the problems of people interpreting things out of context interpreting verses without knowing the the background the linguistic background in the original languages without knowing how it all fits together into a faith context and so we have a splintering and one of the things that happens in the 16th and 17th centuries is that Protestant Christianity armed with translations of the Bible shatters into many many different groups because each of these groups is interpreting different parts of the Bible in their own way to suit their own agenda so this is where the difficulty comes in now it's one thing for example for me to um translate and to understand and to believe one thing but if I am going to teach that to other people if that is judged by the community whether it be by the um the AMA or whether it be by the church to be erroneous I am then the one who is leading people astray and therefore this is the context in which we see that some of those people would be punished because their interpretation of the scripture was actually leading people away from the truth instead of toward it uh this is so nicely explained by you and I can actually relate to it that uh now if we go after the Advent of the internet now if we go to a Quran website so it's it's like the polyglot or it's like a higher version of the polyglot there there's one translation by pical there's one translation by unist there's one and sometimes those translations can be violently different from uh from each other uh one final um I want your view on one final thing uh from that era and how we related to Islam uh Imam Ali says in praising Jesus he says that Jesus led such a simple life that the floor was always his bed and the sky was always his roof he never ate ever uh so much that his belly became full uh that is that that is true of uh John that is true of Muhammad sallallahu alaih Al wasallam that's true of all great people But as time progresses what we see is that in the name of these great people who had so little or who who who could have had a lot but they connected very little with this world because they were more concerned with the with the next world but in their names huge ecclesiastical bureaucracies are created one example is Rome uh but as we move on and we come to the 20th century we see the Khalifa of the Ottoman Empire we see the Shar of Mecca today we see the uh the wahab family in Saudi Arabia and of course a very strong clergy in Iran uh led by the ayas so when you look at the Muslim world do you feel that we are moving towards a qu quy papal system and are we now moving in the same direction that Christianity moved in during the Reformation where there were violent uh disagreements on interpretation of religion and then those were not settled peacefully those were settled by spilling the blood of people who were very dear to God himself you are unfortunately right that many of these disputes were only settled uh By The Sword and that is one of the great tragedies of Christian history you also right to say that over the centuries the church churches plural became very rich very comfortable and there there were some people who entered into a luxurious lifestyle and you know money possession combined with a high position the admiration of people all these things can lead individuals to have too great a an assessment of their own importance therefore they begin to think that they are entitled to all these various trappings of power you know if so and so can have a private jet why shouldn't die if so and so has to be chauffeur driven around or has to have um uh lovely houses for some vacation why shouldn't I this is always a Temptation which is there for human beings when you add to that in a religious context in which there is a tendency to say my way of interpreting things is the only way or the only correct way then then you can enter into an agod driven situation now it is very true that all our great early religious leaders lived a very simple indeed an austere life and um it's always noticeable for me for example that the prophet is noted to have given away every day all that was put into his hands in that day he is deliberately not uh building a fortune for himself and he dies without as we would say a great bank account however this sort of deviation from those original times tends to come into religious communities and that is what happened in Christianity I was a very impressed when the pictures came out of the present Pope going to visit AA sistani in Naf because here is someone who's standing within the Shia Community is enormous amongst Shia all over the world and yet he is living a very simple life uh without the trappings of of power and luxurious living and so on and I'm sure that if we were to ask him he would say that this is a deliberate move in ammunation yes of the prophet of Imam Ali and so on but also in a way to stop him getting into that sort of agod driven world of saying I am so important now we have seen in the course of the last let's say years vast fortunes of money coming into the hands of various Muslim groups uh political groups religious groups Etc often through oil and through the exploitation of Petro dollars as we say and that has had a corrupting influence in the lives of some people and when you combine that kind of corruption with huge amounts of money and power and political power and then the ability to promote a certain School within the the the worldwide um as though that were the only acceptable school then we have one picture of what's happening in the um today uh and of course uh now we have come to a situation where there are two Powers within the umah and each is trying to Pedal its own point of view violently and let's hope we do not have more destruction than we have had uh my understanding from my understanding of History what I uh I understand is that most wars are not fought over disputes they're actually fought over Egos and um and I and I think that that uh if you look at the first world war the in the first world war on all sides all the kings were basically descendants of Queen Victoria but they uh they had the egos or they had whatever uh problems with one another and they tried to settle it in a way the the ramifications of which are being felt in this World till this day 100 years after that so uh let's uh let's now go to um my next question uh the Quran says relating the book The Story of Mary how she withdrew from her family to a place in the East how we sent to her our Angel Gabriel who said I'm a messenger from your lord to announce the birth of a holy son to you many Christians don't know this but there is an entire chapter in the Quran chapter 19 which is dedicated to Mary there is only one woman who is named in the Quran and that woman has been named 69 times and that woman is Mary and the Quran says that we have picked Mary from among all women in the world to be the leader of all women and the purest among all women how important can Mary be in bringing about better understanding and better Interfaith relations at least between Islam and Christianity the importance of Mary first of all is that she is the mother she bore Jesus into the world world and so her importance is drawn from him secondly she is in both Faith traditions an archetype of total faith and trust in God if we think for a moment of the situation of a young girl a young woman who is pregnant with no marriage with no man on the scene then um this in those days was even more of a a great challenge a great shock in society than even it is in our own times so Mary goes through with that Duty that responsibility she accepts that call from God so in that sense she is an archetype she is a great role model for all believing men and women of total commitment and dedication to whatever God is calling forth in our lives and sometimes that can be a comfortable thing to which we are called and sometimes it can be a very uncomfortable thing now for Mary sociologically it was a very uncomfortable thing because she was a pregnant unmarried mother in in our common terminology and of course the Quran tells us that she had lived really a very Pious and privileged life being sent up to the temple being allowed to remain as a temple servant and so on in ways that were quite exceptional in her own time so she was in the eyes of her Village People um local girl made good as it were and then this local girl made good comes back to visit them with baby in arms and we know the way in which they received her now in this way then the absolute Center of all religious Faith whether it be Christian or Muslim is a commitment in belief that is I have faith God has called me to this faith we know that the the Arabic word Dean is often mistranslated as religion doesn't of course mean that at all what it means is a complete way of life so the life of Faith requires that everything I do and say and am everything I have everything I work for must come under the guidance of God in submission to the direction of God the free acceptance that this is what God has called from me this is what we see in Mary her whole life is consumed in her Divine vocation to be not just the mother of Jesus but a role model for Faith for all subsequent Generations so in this way she can be a figure that draws together um Christian and Muslim men and women because we are all bound together by the demand of faith and its total response in our lives and it's very nice that you spoke about her uh uh her internal virtue because it's not enough to be related to somebody it's not enough to be somebody's mother or Somebody's Daughter uh we gain a standing in God's eyes by the virtues that we bring to our lives so that is uh a very important thing otherwise Noah's son would have been the most honorable of people in the world but actually he's not uh So speaking about Mary if we turn to early Islam a little bit uh we see uh that uh the prophet sallallahu alaih wasallam very emphatically spoke to the Jews and he tried to establish the position of Mary and there were no or there was no tension in the early um years between Islam and Christianity but that sort of began to change towards the end of the prophet's life especially when the Battle of Z salasa took place 2 years before his death why do you think that changed and uh what were the reasons behind it was it interference from the bantine Empire or was there consternation in the Arabic Arabian Peninsula well we have we have both things going on here we've got as we would say today global politics that is um t ion between Empires the Byzantine Empire the sassanid Empire and so on and then Islam is coming into that conflict but we also have the local the regional because if you have a large empire on your doorstep one of the things you can do is to go into an agreement with them and um and in that way you have a privileged life now what then happens is that there are some Arab tribes Clans if you like in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula Who Have Become the well we probably should say The Mercenaries they have become the co- Fighters with under the direction of the Byzantine Empire because these Arab Clans had become Christians at some stage in history so there was a natural affiliation there so when we're talking about Arab Christians at this time uh it's much more a question of what is their political allegiance rather than what is their religious Allegiance and when we start to see these tensions in the very early years of the battles during the time of the prophet and soon afterwards they are the local manifestation of these kind of global um problems now we know that the prophet himself writes to the Roman Emperor and writes to many other political leaders to say that I am a prophet sent by God he has given me guidance for how human life should be lived and inviting them to get on board and to follow him to follow the guidance of the Quran so there's a a global issue which is going on there Christianity then is part of as it were the Byzantine self-identity and they are in the Eastern Mediterranean and we know that during the lifetime of the Prophet there is uh uh there are battles there's a tension between the Persian the the the sassanid Empire and the Byzantine the Greek Empire the the the Persians of course were zoroastrians at this stage so religion and politics often are going together but it's the politics that makes for the the tensions and often then the religion Rose in behind them so that uh we can find Christians and Muslims who are work working together have a good understanding it is very significant I think that the prophet actually sends a a considerable minority of his early meccan Community to seek refuge in abisinia why because there was a Christian King there and go and tell them that the prophet of God has sent you to seek Refuge there so at that level the level of Faith there is a good deal of interaction even though there is not by any means complete agreement but at the political level then we know that politics raises its head it causes tension between people and religion can be brought in as a supporter to those political tensions uh and just uh one question if you if the Christian sources have anything about this uh after after the coming of the governorship of mavia in Sham in Syria um it appears that uh the the Christian tribe of bani or bani khib they become very powerful in uh in the politics of uh the Islamic empire and of course yaz's mother Masson comes from there so um what role uh if you have read about this what role did the did bani khalib play especially in their interaction with Maria the first well we know that the one of the the things that made the early omay calefate so powerful and so expansive was that they had a very considerable and efficient Army that was centralized and could be sent into to uh sort out any disputes that were arising within the Empire this was a Syrian Army this is one of the reasons why Damascus becomes the head of the um or the the capital of the omad cipate now this Army had certainly a considerable Christian mercenary element and group groups like The Banu were brought into that Network when they acted as um the Fighting Force for the omay cffs in that sense they have an instrumentality rather than an influence now an influence suggests that you can dictate the way that things happen whereas uh an instrumentality is that when things have been decided you can then help to implement them and this is what as far as I understand this is what these Christian Syriac forces were doing they were the the the foot soldiers if you like they were the boots on the ground that could actually make the decisions the policies of the omad calefate into realities um there might have been some influence on a personal level um in the court of muawiya for example but that would be um an insignificant personal influence the predominant thing would be that um the the foot soldiers were the instruments to uh enact the decisions of the omay cffs as politicians uh and we in early Islam had uh of course not in the earliest Islam but in the uh start of the omayyad Empire we had the chance to build a constitutional democracy because it appears that 2third of what was called the Islamic empire almost 2/3 if at least more than half what was called Islamic empire was actually Christian and non-muslim and later on in the Ottoman Empire which was the Turkish Empire uh more than half of the population was Arab and non-t Turk so uh I don't know when time you have something on hand when you can build it and when you lose that then then the impact goes for a long period of time coming to morality once again uh in today's world again uh unfortunately a world that has become very material and uh where the value of something is judged by how much worldly gain they are able to provide how does one uphold the values of most importantly the thing which is very important to me is humility and honesty uh and equality uh in a world which is marked by commodification of Human Relationships people don't even meet each other these days unless there is a monary benefit to be gain later on so how does one in this environment a young man what will you advise him uh in this world how can he uphold these virtues of humility honesty and equality I think the first thing that we need to say is that you do not create virtuous people through trying to impose laws upon them uh virtue comes from the the human heart from the Naps from the soul of the person and unless we have as it were converted the hearts of people to live in a virtuous just humble um just way a peaceful way an equitable way then we will never have Justice equity and peace so we need to build up the inner strength of people and the difficulty is that in a world that is as you say determined by money by consumerism by capital and so on these are all influences that can be brought to bear on young people why would you take a just and honorable job for a small salary when you can have a huge salary by being unjust and inequitable this is the kind of Temptation that comes into our world and indeed people see that those who are rich and famous often are are not earning their money by um by diligent labor in an upright way they are earning their money by some sort of subterfuge so we have real tensions around this question I think the first thing we have to say is to begin with the understanding of Islam Al de alfitra that is the natural way of life of the human being and we need to teach and to demonstrate that living an upright and a just and a humble life actually ennobles human dignity so it is for our benefit as human beings individually and collectively to live in this way and of course we can we can justify that by saying here is the creator the Creator knows best how the creation should work the Creator reveals guidance to the creation it is then for the creation that is for us human beings creatures to put that into practice so in this way we are building humility and equity and peace uh justice into the hearts of people which not only prepares them as it were for the life Hereafter but also means that they will live in this life in a a just and Noble and honorable way we we often say that if only people only took sufficient for their needs there would be sufficient for everybody to have their needs met it is the over consumption and of course I live in the Northern Hemisphere I live in Europe you know huge overc consumption of the good things of the world of the raw materials of the world of the power and easy life that affluence brings and in order that people in the southern hemisphere should be able to live any kind of a decent life the people in the Northern Hemisphere have to live much more simply and it's very hard to persuade Rich comfortable people to give up their riches and their comfort and to live a simple life uh instead so that others simply can live that's one of our tensions we're not going to address that with laws we only can address that in a deeper Way by changing the hearts of people and you've just hid the nail on the head because here in Pakistan uh every other person I speak to says the pro all our problems ah because the laws are not harsh enough make harsh laws make harsh laws and the moment I try to try to explain to them look actually people don't I think people don't have a proper sense of History the uh the the laws uh regarding segregation were made in the United States in the 1950s in 1964 the Civil Rights bill was passed but the segregation continued to happen to the 1970s because people's Hearts did not change and uh that's that's absolutely the right thing that unless and until we change the hearts of the people nothing will happen that is that is a slow process but that's going to be a very secure plant that's going to that's going to bring long-term changes so uh turning to another question uh depression everyone speaks about depression and everyone is hit with depression to some extent or another uh some people commit crimes others are increasingly turning to meditation uh that is that may be one reason why Buddhism is suddenly becoming Buddhist Buddhist uh ethics are certainly become have certainly become very popular so uh how does meditation differ from prayer and my religion did not teach me meditation it taught me prayer the it's all said the power of the prayer so uh are they the same thing or are they different and if they are different how is prayer more powerful than meditation I think that there are two parts of the same concept the concept of I that is that uh iada is the worship of God with my whole being so that my my economic life my family life my social life all these should be transformed into I into acts of worship now in order that I may do that I need certain inner strengths prayer is one of the roots to those inner strengths because prayer if we think of about Salah for example it brings us into a moment of repentance before God of hearing again the guidance of God in the recitation of the Quran and then of submitting my whole being my best part my my head my hands my feet my knees before God and saying you God are my God and I am your obedient servant now that is a development process it brings us into a sense of TAA and tawa I translate as God Consciousness that is that I should be conscious of God in every moment of my life in everything that I think and do and say and am that I stand before God that God sees me that I am accountable to God Etc Taqua now meditation is also part of that process because meditation for a Christian or for a Muslim is about quietening my inner self alerting my what I might call my listening soul that I may hear the guidance of God in the depths of my being you see often we think as prayer this is what I do this is what I say whereas prayer is actually part of a two-way communication it is not just me telling God what I want or what God should do but it's also me hearing from God the way in which I should live as it were now I'm not hearing this through my ears I am hearing this in the depth of my being and meditation is a way of disposing my heart to hear the message the teaching of God what God is calling to me today and what do we think happens in the life of some of our our great our ideal religious leaders they come to a deep conviction in their heart this is what I must do now that is the process that all of us has been Believers are called to and meditation is a way of softening our hearts to hear that message but meditation can also be uh what we call rumination now you know that if you watch a cow a cow has got a series of stomachs and is constantly bringing food back into its mouth from one of the early stomachs to go into a later stomach and it's rewing it it's going over over it again it's mashing it up now this then is the process of regurgitation and there is an element of this in meditation too that I am turning over in my heart before God an issue a problem a question that I cannot resolve what should I do what does this mean how should I understand that and by turn turning that over deliberately in the sight of God asking for God's guidance I am then disposing myself again to hear how God is guiding me there so meditation can be very important in the in the prayer practice in the iada of a Believer now there's another side to this because of course not all people who practice meditation would have a an active belief in God for example there would be a non-theistic Buddhists who are very deeply involved in meditation but whose whole system does not have a place for what Christians and Muslims would call God now this can be again it's a step in a journey but it can also be a a step of Escape because Faith requires commitment it's more than just a feeling of goodness I feel good because I'm at peace and tranquil I am released from depression um faith is an active thing it requires the total commitment of my life in a spirit of jihad if you like a constant struggling in my life to dispose myself to the way of God so in this way meditation can have a very positive uh aspect in the prayer life of the believer and you're so right when you you said that prayer is actually a two-way communication because we are not just telling God we also listening from God and what he wants and and when I was listening to you talk I my my mind went to the Battle of karbala because there both sides were praying but on Imam Hussein's side they were talking to God but also listening to what uh instructions were being given whereas on yazid side there was only one way communication and I'm talking to God but they were not conscious or got conscious enough to know what God wanted of them and then people who uh do who are not God conscious they end up claiming that God is on their side and God gave them a victory so so that is uh absolutely correct we uh there is one human virtue when we talking about tawa and we're talking about virtue there's one human virtue that every religion has preached uh some religions were actually uh atheistic religions like if you take early Buddhism it there was no concept of God and early Buddhism later on it became Mahayana and hinana but every religion spoke about evolution of the Soul uh in Hinduism Ram went for a banwas and when he came from the banwas then there was a evolution of of the soul and he became a much better being he was a God but he became much better being according to Hindus so uh one thing that comes with the evolution of the soul is the ability to forgive um today we see sorry sorry uh um where people are not just unable to forgive others but they're hellbent on dehumanizing others you've done something to me now I'll make sure I dehumanize you and when happens on a big scale like it is happening in Ukraine or Raza or Sudan then people F find it very um very bad they find it um unbearable but on an individual level they still go go out if someone hits my car by mistake I will go out and I will dehumanize him and I will take him to the police station and I will it was a mistake why can't you just forgive him so uh this trend of dehumanizing others especially when you the history of karbala and when you see uh how her was forgiven uh how can we take lessons from uh these great figures Imam Hussein Jesus Christ Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alh wasallam how important is it to forgive others to make today's world a better world to live in I think the example of wh is a good one to start with because here we have someone you remember when H and his men ride into the camp of Imam Hussein the Imam says to him do you come as Friend or Foe and he replies well we do not come as friends so in other words there is a predisposition there to say we are your enemy now the Imam then has to react to this state and the way that he reacts is the crucial thing because he says to his people bring our supply of water the water that we have gathered for our needs today and tomorrow and give it to these who have just proclaimed themselves not to be friends give it to them that their Humanity may be respected that they may drink and quench their thirst that they may wash and what's more share give it to their horses too now it is this act of goodness that works in the heart of H and changes his life and ultimately as we know H breaks ranks on the day of aora and rides to the side of the Imam to seek his forgiveness for what he's done now again to go back to your earlier example we might well think that the Imam would actually give him a good kick and say you know you're the one who brought us to this place you're the one who brought us to death what do you think you're doing now coming to look for forgiveness and yet that's exactly what we don't find because the Imam raises him from the ground from his humility in seeking forgiveness allows him to stand upright as it were as a human being back into his nobility and his dignity in his forgiveness and what more he allows him to take the highest possible honor and dignity in the community that is to give his life as a martyr fighting alongside Imam Hussein now here we have a model of divine forgiveness God's forgiveness does not leave us crippled it does not say um you are forgiven but I'm going to kick your legs off from underneath you it restores human beings to their human dignity so forgiveness is absolutely Central now there are none of us who have lived a perfect life and who therefore do not stand in need of forgiveness and mercy from other people but also from God so this brings about then a sense of humility a sense of my unworthiness and God's unbelievable goodness and greatness that God can do good to an unworthy person like me and that changes the whole dynamic that's the first thing to say the second thing is that something absolutely Dreadful has happened especially in Western European especially life in the last century and that is the way that we have conducted Warfare has been to dehumanize the enemy you know if you are standing face to face with the soldier of the opposing side you cannot escape the humanity of that person you cannot Escape that that man has got a wife and children and family back at home that woman has got her dignity within her own society and in that sense however awful it may be to have to engage in that kind of warfare one cannot ignore the humanity of the other and we have examples in the the great European War of 1914 1918 in which it times of truce the humanity broke through and the two armies actually were engaging in football on the battlefield and such like now what happens in the 20th century is that we industrialize the process of killing we begin with long range artillery that shoots uh uh Weaponry much further than we can see we have then aerial bombardment we have Miss ises in today's Warfare we have drones so that I can sit imperfect safely and comfort in my own office and a thousand miles away direct a drone to blow up your house now that dehumanizes by its very nature I do not see the consequence of the bomb that I drop from my airplane or the missile that I fire or the Drone that I remotely control and this is a huge problem in our society because it means that we can do unspeakable things because we don't actually see the humanity of the other now it's even worse than that because if you think about training soldiers you are training soldiers to do unspeakable things you know if you go to the Army recruitment office and they say why do you come and you say because I want to kill people give me a gun that's all I want to do in life you can bet your life you will not be accepted into the army they don't want lunatics but they do want people that they can train in order to do things that in our normal State human beings we wouldn't do killing other people is not a natural thing to do this is one of the reasons why all our armies recruit young men 18 19 20 years of age and not 35 40 45 year olds who perhaps might have enough about them to be able to say I'm not going to do that that's not right what we need in our armies are people who will obey orders even if those orders are very distasteful to them now these are real challenges in our society uh in the way that we conduct Warfare and we don't have a solution to this yet the more and more that we see is the more and more distancing between the perpetrator and the victim of acts of violence now we can go on one step from there we celebrated or commemorated just two or 3 days ago the 75th anniversary of the Geneva conventions in Warfare these were developed after the second world war the 1939 45 war in which horrendous things had been done not only the industrialized killing of the concentation camps in Germany but the whole development of these longrange weapons and so on and it was precisely to try to make people remember the humanity of the enemy that the Geneva conventions were developed and we have to accept that they are not honored if you are blowing up uh a school or a village or whatever in order to kill one individual and incurring the loss of dozens perhaps hundreds of human lives and then you dehumanize those people and you say this is collateral damage then you have succumbed to this tendency of removing the humanity from the enemy and this of course is exactly what's happened especially in Western Warfare uh in recent decades um if we think about the Vietnam War what stopped what forced American politicians to pull out of Vietnam was the fact that young American men were being brought home every day by the plane load in body bags they were dead and they had lost their lives and people of America said never again should our lives be lost in this kind of way now this brings about the doctrine of asymmetrical Warfare in which I say one of my lives is worth a thousand of yours and we see that lived out in various conflicts uh over the last number of decades so it's a crucial problem uh to dehumanize the enemy and the final thing to say I often like to remind people of the Hadith of the Prophet which is there in both Sunni and Shia collections which says go to any lengths to keep far away from the HUD in other words you should struggle to find some reason for what we would today call extenuating circumstances why did this person do that because of this disposition these experiences this social context whatever it might be not to say that they should not be accountable and indeed punished for what they've done but go to any length to keep far away from the limits the the the ultimate punishments now that's exactly the opposite of what we often hear in which people call for more and more Draconian punishments and people are prepared to go literally for for the HUD on the basis of very flimsy evidence or they take the law into their own hands we only have to think of some of the instances of mob Rule and blasphemy which have come about in various societies so there's a real danger here of not struggling to live up to the high ideals of God of our Revelations and of our great teachers and Prophets and those who do believe in such vigilantism extreme vigilantism they have not uh actually read this Hades which says that when you when someone makes a mistake make a hundred excuses for him and forgive him and when you make a mistake don't make a single excuse prostrate before God and ask for his forgiveness uh and and the transition that you have spoken about is so right I remember that at the start of the Great War when a young British person used to ask his father why should I fight he used to get the probable answer that he got was that a soldier goes into battle not because he hates those in front of him but because he loves those behind him and in the second world war it just flipped when they were attacking iojima and Okinawa the generals used to tell them uh the purpose of going into battle is not to die for your country but to make sure that the other bastard dies for his and in the Vietnam War I want G dead on the ground I want G dead on the it was all about using Butchery as a strategy and and Butchery is not a strategy and talking of forgiveness I remember I was young uh I was in in a level in 1994 and uh in England they put up a statue of uh bomber Harris the man who bombed dreser and I didn't know much about him at that at that time I'll be honest but uh the queen mother had come to inaugurate it and Prince Charles now the King Charles was also present there and in the crowd there was a woman who was an old woman who was weeping and she was not consolable at all and she was saying people of gden forgive us for that day but forgive us mainly for this day when we are celebrating the destruction of Dresden so that's that's that's what I felt that's what I felt that that lady is actually asking for forgiveness uh even though the Germans started it but for her it was not an excuse one excuse that I hear from the Zionist is who started the Gaza war on the 7th of October yes they started it but at the end of the day they are not a democracy they they did not have election they all the people who started were not their representatives and that's true of Hitler as well Hitler was Hitler was a dictator he started the war in the name of the Germans that did not mean every German had to be punished for Hitler crimes uh so I'll just go to uh the last two questions for today and and uh you can answer them very briefly because I understand I've taken a lot of your time uh Professor Dawkins of Oxford University uh I I I read one of the things that he said and this is what he said he said religion and retribution devotion and destruction go hand in hand how does a Believer respond to such criticism just let me say one word first of all about bomah Harris it was 50 years that the people of Britain refused to put up a statute to bomah Harris because they were ashamed of what they had done and secondly the the Blitz the firebombing of Dresden was deliberately done to create utter Terror in the hearts of people it was a deliberate attack on a civilian population and that was what the British people could not stomach as you say until 50 years later when the government of that time decided that bahadis should be respected now turning to to Professor Dawkins it is in the nature of um Dawkins and other people that they actually Define for themselves the concepts that they attack so you define a concept and you say that's religion and then you attack it and therefore you say religion is of no value or religion is a distortion or a deception or whatever in other words they do not take the high ideals of the definition that the Believers will give they create create instead their own fiction now in that way um when Dawkins uh speaks of religion and says you know that it brings about um destruction it brings about retribution and so on he has a point that is a sense in which religion has been used by people to to go out and to destroy and to kill and to Savage other people and if I can use religion to persuade people that the enemy is evil and that I will be doing a Godly act and that God will approve and that God will love and reward me for doing this act then I'm on to a dead winner that's one of our great problems now that problem we can see extending far wider than just someone like Dawkins very often engaging in for example in Christian Muslim discussion we use a term from our faith tradition the same term is used in the other Faith tradition but is given a quite different definition so the term profit in Islam has a very different meaning to the term prophet in the biblical faiths and so to say why can't you accept as a Christian that Muhammad was a prophet well the first thing to say is what's your definition of prophit here so always many of our misunderstandings are founded in a lack of clarity of definition as to exactly what it is we're talking about and that is part of the the critique um that somebody like Dawkins puts forward as one of my Muslim Professor friends said to me um I actually agree that the kind of God that Dawkins is talking about is a delusion all right uh we have uh reached almost 1 hour 30 minutes of of this interview so I will not go any further and uh we'll stop here but you are going for um ARB uh very soon so when you come back and whenever you have the time I will do one final uh sitting with you if it's okay with you to address the last section and the the topic of that sitting is going to be karbala lessons for Humanity if that is all right with you then we can set a date and we can carry on one session and in that session we will briefly address the question of Evangelical uh movement if that's all right with you sir that's fine by me I'd be very happy to do that um there is still doubt as to whether or not we will actually get in to uh to Iraq because of the tensions in the Middle East area so uh hopefully we are going to fly in in the next few days but um God knows best whether we will or we won't but after that period sometime in September we can get back together again but thank you very much for today thank you very much thank you very much uh for your time and uh when whenever I approach you you are so generous with your time even though you are constantly traveling may God bless you for this and I will just close with uh with one uh sentence from Imam Ali's letter which says that in this world there are only two kinds of people one who are your brothers in faith and others who are your brothers in humanity so that is a very good starting point for Interfaith understanding and bringing about better relations and respect between all people who God created in His image thank you very much Dr cha may God bless you and have a very safe journey Allah us sh