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Is modernity destroying the human mind? This is the question I ask my guest this week, Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad. Many of us are fortunate to live in a world where every desire we have are met yet curiously our ability to process these blessings leads many to a dark place, a state of mental anguish. It seems the more we have the less happy we are. The more we live in concrete jungles the more anxious we become. This begs a larger question, is there a fundamental problem with the way we live, is there a problem with modernity? I explore these ideas with Dr Winter and ask him how do we escape the ideological, spiritual and physical maladies of modern living.

Dr Timothy Winter is Founder and Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, Aziz Foundation Professor of Islamic Studies at both Cambridge Muslim College and Ebrahim College, Director of Studies at Wolfson College and Lecturer of Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at University of Cambridge. He has translated classical works including a translation of two volumes of the Islamic scholar al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din.

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The Thinking Muslim Podcast Episode 70

00:00 Your support is appreciated
00:55 Introduction
02:06 Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad
02:44 Why have modern humans become so emotionally fragile
04:35 Islam recognises the historiography of progressive social and spiritual decline
05:00 Western intelligentsia espouse a pessimistic view of human historical evolution
09:18 What has sapped away at the strength of character of the modern youth
11:50 Modernity seeks to abolish the innate fitrah of the human mind and psyche
14:08 How much does the modern consumerist culture contribute to the unravelling of the human mind
16:50 The modern human suffers from a deformed fitrah and is detached from his natural habitat
17:45 What is the Fitrah
21:43 Modern urban living is anti-fitrah
23:26 The more modern human lifestyles become, the more distanced they get from their fitrah
24:22 Towards an “Islamic-Modernism”? A contradiction in terms
27:42 Prescriptions Islam has for treating the malady of modernisation
31:27 The need to rediscover the transcendental nature of the prophetic sunnah as a link to the primordial self
32:48 What exactly does it mean to embrace the prophetic sunnah
34:36 The Muslim reaches heaven by going through the world
36:50 Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s “holy wandering” and what that means for modern living
39:30 How does Ramadan and fasting help us to navigate modernity
43:30 Ramadan gives lie to the enlightenment premise of centering the human by exposing our human fragility
47:00 Building formal institutions of learning for the development and instilling of “sunnatic” character in Muslim individuals in modern societies
54:00 There is hope yet for the Ummah of Muhammad
55:50 Muslims should learn to not panic so much
58:48 Conclusion