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I'd like to welcome you all to our final session for the term of the Oxford political seminar.

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And we're delighted to have two very distinguished speakers from actually both from across the Atlantic.

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One of them's been kind enough to drop in Oxford and spend a few years with us.

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We have with us Mohamed Fadel and Lena Salima Mohammed will be going first, so I'll briefly introduce him and his lecture.

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I'm Osama Azami. I'm a developmental lecturer at Synopsys College, and Faisal is really the brains behind this.

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We're co-convenor for the political thought seminar facility is professor of history at this college and gives us great pleasure to host you all.

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We want to remind you that this is going to be a seminar where the speakers speak for about 20 minutes each and we welcome people's questions.

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Please type them up in the Q&A and we'll try to address them in the discussion that will make for the last half of the seminar.

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So Mohamed Fadel is a full professor and former Canada researcher for the law

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and economics of Islamic Law at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law,

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where he joined in January 2006. He has a Ph.D. and his Ph.D. was from the University of Chicago on the legal process in mediaeval Islamic law.

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He's also practised as a lawyer in the city of New York and so admitted to the bar in New York,

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but has been a prolific author on the law and at the intersection of Islamic law.

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Also, of course, as we've discussed Islamic legal procedure, but also your engagements are quite wide ranging.

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So you've also done political theory in the history of political theory.

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And today you're here to speak about the protean sovereign of Sunni law.

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So we're very much looking forward to that. Mohammed, if I could invite you to speak for 20 minutes.

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Thank you. Thank you very much. I thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here.

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Feisal and I were classmates way back when in Chicago.

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So it's great to see him, which I could be in person. Then, of course, I've known forever, so it's wonderful.

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And just to clarify the record, Lena as a Jerusalemite, she's not a Native North American, so I just want to make that clear to everybody.

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OK. Nina's also opposed to identity politics and doesn't believe that that should have been stated.

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Let's take that, for the record, very clearly. Yeah, OK.

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The protean sovereign of Sunni law, what, you know, sort of a strange title.

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But I chose it because I wanted to frame what I consider to be really a central feature of the way

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Sunni jurists write about the state and sovereignty and the idea of protean captures that because.

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It's very difficult to capture sort of the locus of sovereignty in Sunni constitutional writing.

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And I think this is very important idea to grasp not only the the ambiguity and legal writing,

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but the reason why there's a principled reason why it's very hard to capture it in a in a clear term in Sunni law.

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So I want to begin by just. Pointing out what that have translation of a lot of these alarmists is on the air, and this is not to pick on her,

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but she translates the first chapter Theakston Imama, as on the appointment of the sovereign, the amount.

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So I think this is a very common assumption amongst writers in the stomach political theory that, well, the Caliph is this is the sovereign.

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And so we are just going to assume that and we will approach writings on public offices from that perspective.

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Right. I think this is a very sort of casual analogy between the caliphate and the king and kingship,

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European kingship or British kingship, which is completely unjustified.

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Once one looks into the details of Islamic law, so as we're probably familiar in British doctrine, you have this very sort of strange metaphysical.

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Theory of the Kings, two bodies and I don't know all the details of the the genealogy,

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the theological genealogy of of this doctrine, but even as late as the 17th century,

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it is fundamental to understanding the authority of the British crown,

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and it's fundamental to very basic cases of English constitutional law that end up being very important in American constitutional law.

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For example, Calvin's case right now, in sunny fact, there is not a problem of the caliphs two bodies.

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And there's a reason for this, which I'm going to get into,

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but the solution just means that we don't have a tangible personalised expression of sovereignty in Sunni jurisprudence.

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That's what makes it protean because it shows up all over the place.

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So if we look at early legal texts and here I'm talking mainly based on my knowledge of my early Maliki legal texts such as the water and the that.

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When you come across all these different terms, you can come across Khalifa.

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Imam Sultan Party, you, Hakim Amir, etc and all of these terms are used in connexion with the exercise of what we would call sovereign power.

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And what I mean by sovereign power is the power to decide something finally and to give a conclusive resolution to something.

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Right? And so Maliki and an early Lebanese legal authorities use these terms interchangeably willy nilly.

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Right. In fact, Khalifa often times is the least political of them.

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So if you do a quick search of Khalifa in the model one,

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most of the occasions I believe are in prayer, where the prayer leader something happens to him.

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He can't complete the prayer cycle, and so he appoints al-Khalifa to complete it.

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Right? But nevertheless, 44 definitely has political resonances, but it's not.

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It doesn't monopolise in any sort of sense, an idea of sovereignty.

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So. I think the equivocal terminology or the variable terminal logical language used

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to describe sovereignty is very nicely reflected in this one very short text,

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right, where you get multiple terms for a very simple problem.

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So Sanborn asks if no calcium in the modern one?

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What's your review regarding the rulings of the governor, the governor of thought?

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So he calls them first and when and what he's doing is hatoyama.

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And then he calls them. And use the law right, which, you know, we might later call the practise map right?

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The sort of the prayer leader and seconds. So then he asks, are they valid and effective to the same extent as the decisions of judges in Maliki?

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So now we get the term cut off your plural of cards.

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And so if Bill Cosby says yes, unless it is manifestly unless his decisions are manifestly unjust,

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in which case the judge can repeal them and on what grounds does it not cost to reach this conclusion?

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Again, it's it's very interesting for understanding the doctrine of implicit doctrine of sovereignty here.

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He bases on analogy to arbitration. Malik was asked about two men who appointed a third to arbitrate between them, and then he did.

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Malik said I believe the judge should enforce the arbitrators decision in their matter and not overturn it unless it was manifestly unjust.

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So what we see here or what I would argue here is that sovereignty is expressed in a legal decision,

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finds its origin in the decisions of individual people to delegate, authority to others to rule on their behalf, to make a judgement on their behalf.

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Right now, this is not a purely positive, distinct allegation in the sense that it's a matter of whatever the ruler decides is proper because.

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Exercise of sovereignty, as Malik concedes, it in this case is regulated by a norm,

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so the arbitrator, the arbitrators legitimate sovereignty is a function of two things.

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It's a function of the consent to his status as arbitrator and a function of his substantive decision not being manifestly unjust.

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And so the same principle consent plus legality, right, regulates.

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All these offices and regulates how all sovereignty is constructed and by implication,

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sovereignty is exercised through this mechanism, and that's why you have multiple offices exercising sovereignty.

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Hence the protein character of sovereignty. Right. And this comes across very explicitly and I think theorise very nicely in the work of Shehab

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the karate that I translated the criteria for distinguishing legal decisions from opinions,

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et cetera. And so he deals with this expressly in his answer to Question three,

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where he says public offices exist across a spectrum of powers with two extremes in the middle.

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The Office of the Caliph, which is the greater imam a.

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That's the office with the greatest power arbitration, which comes into existence by an act of the to the students is the office with the least power.

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And between these are many intermediate offices.

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And he then gives 15 examples, and his point is all these different offices all exercised sovereignty in the sense that I talked about,

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mainly having the authority to resolve disputes conclusively.

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And you can sort of systematically identify sovereign power through this range of what's the scope of?

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Sovereign power that each office has. So the imam and the of the Caliph has the greatest scope.

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And that is reflected in the fact that he can do fatwas.

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He can act as a judge. And then he can act in the public interest.

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But what's crucial to understand in all these cases is that when the Caliph.

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That's judicially.

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He must actually act as a judge because the principle that Malik asserted and or him asserted is that when the wily the governor issues a ruling.

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It's valid and enforceable, i.e. an exercise arbitrary as long as it's not manifestly unjust.

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It corresponds to the substantive idea of law. So although in principle, the Caliph has all the powers of lesser offices.

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In practise, his exercise of that power.

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Transforms him into a judge when he acts judicially, transforms him into a mufti,

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when he acts as a mufti, transforms into a witness when he acts as a witness.

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ET cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So in all cases, there's never any sovereignty attached to his person, right?

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So his body? He does not have a natural body that is of any significance to sovereignty.

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Unlike the English king. So in that case, who is the sovereign right, where is the sovereign in suddenly thought?

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And so my argument is that the sovereign is a non corporeal entity, namely the Muslim community.

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Right. And so we see that expressly in this very interesting text of the Hanafi jurists who's maybe a century before Khadafi as Casani,

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the Casani died at the end of the 12th century. And here he is discussing.

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Why a judge does not lose jurisdiction when the appointing power.

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I like the Caliph dies. Because one might think that the judge is the delegate of the caliphate.

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And so he is a representative of the caliphate and normal principles of agency law state that when the principal dies,

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the agent loses all authority because the principal is gone.

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Now, from a legal perspective, this is just not the rule for the judge, even after the Caliph dies or the pope is deposed.

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The judge's jurisdiction remains valid, and the reason, according to Alqasem,

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is because the judge is not appointed is neither appointed pursuant to the personal authority of the Caliph,

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nor does he act to further the jurisdiction, the personal jurisdiction of the Caliph, rather in both cases.

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He's appointed pursuant to the authority of the Muslim community, and he acts for the Muslim community,

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and the Muslim community does not die, as he says here explicitly.

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They cannot excuse me, when will I see him by the mouth of Khalifa Bashir, the will air of the Muslim community persists after his death.

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So what does that make? The Caliph makes the Caliph an agent.

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But interestingly, he's not just any agent. He uses the term rasool, which in Hanafi fifth, is the lowest form of agent.

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He's the ministerial agent, the agent that has absolutely no personal interest in the transaction at issue.

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So there's no confusion from the perspective of the third party, whether he's dealing with the agent in his personal capacity or for the principal.

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So it's very interesting that for Casani, the Caliph is so unimportant that it's just a ministerial function.

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And in all cases, as he says.

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It's always the Muslim community that is acting when a judges appointed, it's an action of the Muslim community when a judge is removed.

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It's an action of the Muslim community. It's never an act of the Caliph.

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Happy for that. It's just through by means of right, he's just a straw substitute.

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Now, know one of the things I want to try to show that this idea is pervasive, it's not particular to Casani or Gadhafi or whatever.

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And so here is an extract from a fifth century Maliki, a work of positive law, a top Sara the jurist and is an important tairawhiti jurist.

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And he's talking about the idea of the rule of law as being obligatory in combat and helping in this.

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This is a duty Casani, by the way, mentioned the same thing if you think about.

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And so the ruler has a positive duty to establish a system of rule of law.

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And of course, he can do this personally if he has the capacity right.

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But again. It's qualified by having the capacity to actually establish an effective system of rule of law.

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Practically speaking, that's impossible. So therefore, he has an obligation to delegate to others.

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Power sufficiently to establish a rule of law.

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And then finally, what's I think, what's again, what's interesting tying this back to where we started with arbitration?

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What happens if he fails to do that or there's no ruler? Then he says, right,

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it devolves on those persons having good judgement and good character and whosoever they agree is qualified to discharge that obligation.

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They appoint him to the post. Right. So again, here there is this idea that.

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Representing the Muslim community, as I would put it, is.

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Potentially not a stable, it's not stable, located in any particular person.

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It's only located in the person that is exercising the legal duty of fulfilling the legal obligation.

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So what makes the rally a rally is that he establishes a rule of law.

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Right? The Ali, who doesn't establish a rule of law, is not a one.

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So again, you can say this that it's not. Sovereignty is not the right to obedience.

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Obedience is what creates the sovereignty. So sovereignty is constituted through the act of obedience, not the other way around.

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OK, so I will stop here. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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That was intriguing. Fascinating as always and nice to read some Arabic on the screen.

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We will come to those questions that viewers may have and please feel free to type

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them up in the Q&A and we will address them in the final half of the broadcast.

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I'd like to invite Lena at this point to give her presentation.

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So Lena is I'm very happy to say of my colleague this year at St. Anthony's College and our colleague,

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Professor Lena, and she's a scholar who specialises in critical theory in relation to law and history,

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using interdisciplinary and critical methods to ask historically ethical and jurisprudential

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questions of Islamic law and Jewish law in the late antique mediaeval and modern errors.

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And the two of you are wonderful to have on the same panel,

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especially because you are both historians with doctorates in that sort of area, but also legal scholars with shades.

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And so I think this will make for a particularly illuminating conversation,

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especially since your approaches, I'm sure, will be dramatically different.

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And so I did want to highlight Nina's very important first book The Beginnings of Islamic Law Late Antique Islamic Legal Traditions,

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which offers a historically grounded understanding of Islamic law.

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She is also very prolific, and I've noticed you've been publishing quite a bit in the last year or year and a half.

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So, you know, really sort of at the cutting edge of a number of different fields, and her publications are available on her academia page.

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So I could go on Lena, but I'm going to at this point ask you to speak on your topic, which is reconsidering the political in pre-modern Islam.

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So thanks for the invitation to participate in the series, I'm looking forward to the discussion.

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Islamic political thought may be the most deeply politicised area of Islamic studies in the global north,

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an inordinate amount of the scholarship revolves around asking the problematic question Can Muslims be politically modern?

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This question motivates research that examines Islam and democracy, or Islam and human rights, or any number of other similar modern political forms.

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Posing the question is incoherent because it is based on a centralisation of being Muslim and of being modern.

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Consequently, attempting to answer this question is an intellectual trap.

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I do not engage with pre-modern Islamic political thought with the objective of answering this false question or its corollaries.

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Instead, I ask different questions and I would suggest, for instance,

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the question How do Muslims in the modern era use the pre-modern Islamic tradition to articulate their politics?

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Rejecting the conventional question also results in discarding conventional answers.

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A primary conventional answer involves surveying the ideas of specific Muslims.

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Recent scholarship constructs a canon of modern Muslim political thinkers, including with a lot of my duty and more recently,

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I know this great men approach is a gross distortion because it misrepresents political thought as the product of certain famous men.

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And not coincidentally, this approach reflects the misogyny in the field of Islamic studies.

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Researchers who perpetuate the great men mythology misconstrue these prominent men as

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representative of the Islamic traditions past or present in the present in an empirical sense.

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These figures do not epitomise the entirety of the modern Muslim world or its political thought.

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As for the past, these figures do not embody Islamic continuity.

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Too many researchers view the claims of these specific men as facts rather than as interpretations.

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In addition, much research separates theory from action, which is evident in how political theorists construct this canon of named men,

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while political scientists study Islamist groups of largely unnamed men.

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Both the question Can Muslims be politically modern?

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And the purported answer this is how these famous men view moderate Muslim politics are unproductive.

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To understand modern Islamic political thoughtfully, we need different questions and different research mystics.

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pre-Modern Islamic political thought can illuminate both alternative questions and restricts.

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So in my comments today, I will begin to address two interrelated issues.

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First, how do we understand political thought in the pre-modern world? And second, how do we find political thought and pre-modern sources?

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Before we can engage with these two questions, we must be clear on our baseline concept.

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So I am using political broadly to mean matters of governance.

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In considering these two issues, I'm building upon the theories and methods I've delineated in my previous scholarship.

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I am not a political theorist, so I engage with pre-modern Islamic political thought through critical theory and Islamic law.

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Critical theory, of course, intersects with political theory, and law is political,

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so all of my scholarship previously has involved dimensions of Islamic political thought.

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So I want to begin by exploring how pre-modern Muslims conceptualise political belonging in legal texts.

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There is a consensus documented in late,

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antique and mediaeval Islamic sources that all three adult and say Muslims are recognised as subject to the charity tax on their wealth.

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pre-Modern Muslim jurists disagreed about the imposition of the charity tax on individuals without legal capacity,

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such as minors and on individuals with questionable legal capacity and property rights, specifically slaves.

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If the late antique Islamic taxation system was based on membership in the polity, then wealth was the key criterion for tax liability.

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If the taxation system was based on belief, then intentionality to perform a ritual act was the key criterion for tax liability,

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mostly an antique legal authorities obligated miners to pay the charity tax.

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Since Muslim miners were not expected to fulfil ritual obligations because they lack intentionality,

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most jurors viewed wealth as a prerequisite for the tax.

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By comparison, mostly antique legal authorities did not require slaves to pay the charity tax.

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Since Muslim slaves were expected to fulfil ritual obligations, most jurors viewed wealth and political status as prerequisites for the tax.

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Simply put, many late antique legal authorities required miners, but not slaves,

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to pay the charity tax because political belonging, rather than belief or intentionality, triggered the obligation to pay.

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The legal reasoning underlining doctrinal rules about charity taxation reflect political thought.

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Many pre-modern Muslim jurists viewed paying the charity tax as enacting Muslim citizenship.

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I follow Elizabeth Cohen and recognising that citizenship is a gradient category and not a binary one.

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Thus, there is a status in between citizens and non-citizens, which Cohen refers to as semi citizens,

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because these exigencies was from the beginning, a means of taxing those members and pleasing members.

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It corresponded to a political framework for defining citizenship.

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And so my citizenship using the category of citizenship in late antique context is not anachronistic.

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For those of May, maybe thinking it is citizenship like state is not a fixed category, but one that has historically specific meanings.

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Consequently, late antique citizenship in a late antique state is distinct from modern citizenship in a modern nation state.

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Moreover, citizenship is widely understood as a category that is applicable in pre-modern contexts.

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So, for example, few people doubt the efficacy of the category of Roman citizenship.

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The fact that Romans review commonly at citizens and Muslims as believers does not reflect

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concrete differences between what it meant to be Roman or Muslim in late antiquity.

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Instead, the tendency to characterise these groups differently reflects modern presumptions that are incongruent with the historical reality.

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Simply put, in late antiquity, being Muslim was a form of citizenship that established political belonging.

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Methodologically, my article taxing citizens social legal constructions of late antique Muslim identity demonstrates

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how we can use a variety of pre-modern sources to reconstruct the political thought of jurists.

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Late antique legal opinions surrounding the payment of the charity tax reveal how juries demarcated who is a Muslim,

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which in a pretty secular world was a political identity. So if we were to tell a macro story about governance in the pre-modern Muslim world,

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that story would narrate the growing power of the state and professionalisation of the state's

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bureaucratic apparatus because the process of professionalisation was gradual and incremental.

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The late antique period provides historical evidence for styles of governance that did not continue.

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For instance, rulers during the late antique period played a larger role in interpreting and declaring Islamic law than rulers in successive periods.

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Obviously, Muhammad passed judgements over the first Muslim community in both Mecca and Medina.

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Likewise, the caliphs who succeeded him were not merely political leaders because they promulgated laws and shaped normative legal practises.

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There aren't numerous legal opinions associated with each individual Caliph and Caliph.

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Omar is even known to have dismissed judges for implementing substantive legal decisions that differed from his legal opinions.

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Many were made, caliphs had some legal knowledge and were involved in the everyday practise of law.

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So, for example, there's historical evidence that early on, Caliph held their own courts,

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offered judges their legal opinions, tested judicial knowledge and dictated court procedural rules.

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Notably, the relationship between and caliphs and American judges was not exclusively hierarchical.

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So, for example, a modern judge ruled against the governor of Medina, No.

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One. Thus, there was competition interaction and overlap between rulers, judges, jurists and other bureaucrats.

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We need to recognise and understand this historical evidence because it corrects a prevalent romanticisation of pre-modern Islamic governance.

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According to this idealistic projection, pre-modern Muslim jurists were entirely independent of the state.

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This is simply is inaccurate. As I've explained elsewhere, states have been involved in the shaping of Islamic law from the beginning.

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Despite the aspirations of pre-modern jurists, rulers endorsed legal schools,

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appointed judges and have other broad scale influences on the shape and substance of Islamic law.

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Of course, the modern nation state usurped the power of the jurists more extensively,

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but it was not the first form of governance to compete with jurists.

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Moreover, the romanticised narrative is a projection of European history and Eurocentric concepts that is,

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many scholars in plot their narratives of Islamic history in imitation of a European history of church versus state conflict.

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The church is represented as the an untranslated term that distorts the complex relationships amongst different types of scholars,

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jurists, judges and other bureaucrats. This is another example of an untranslated term masking secular assumptions.

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The phenomenon that I identified in my article decolonial translation There are many implications

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for imposing a European model of church vs. state controversy in pre-modern Islamic history.

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I'm only going to mention two here. First, much recent scholarship treat scholars like church clergy.

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And as a result, the scholarship conflicts the Islamic tradition with the orthodoxy of a select group of scholars.

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However, Muslim jurists and scholars are not the functional equivalent of clergy.

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There was no church institution in pre-modern Islamic history, and scholars did not operate in a hierarchical structure.

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Second, this Eurocentric misreading of Islamic history leads to the mistaken classification

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of the pre-modern Islamic State as external to the Islamic tradition.

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In reality, rulers and scholars were competing groups within the Islamic tradition.

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So as we saw with the first historical example,

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an obligatory state imposed tax that derives its legal validity from the Koran confuses modern legal categories.

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The pre-modern Islamic charity tax does not correspond to the modern bifurcation between religion and the secular.

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pre-Modern citizenship did not recognise a notion of religion.

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As we saw with the second historical example, the competition interaction and overlap between rulers,

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judges and jurists defy modern governance is centralisation.

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Conventional scholarship focuses on the scholarly class in ways that I described as a secular translation of the Islamic tradition.

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pre-Modern Islamic governance does not correspond to the secular bifurcation between church and state.

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So when contemporary scholars research pre-modern Islamic political thought,

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they frequently limit themselves to dimensions of the Islamic tradition that the contemporary scholar understands is political,

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rather than to the dimensions of the tradition that pre-modern Muslims understood as political.

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So this is not simply a matter of anachronism. pre-Modern political thought was not secular with these two brief historical examples.

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I illustrated how secular political thought distorts pre-modern Islamic political thought.

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It is important to keep in mind that how one understands pre-modern Islamic

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political thought has direct implications for modern Islamic political thought.

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Secular ideology constructs a problem space in which the secular, modern nation state is constantly demarcating a line between politics and religion.

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This is not a line that can be drawn empirically.

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It is a line that the modern nation state draws and moves in accordance with its particular material and ideological objectives.

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So put differently, the modern nation state differentiates between two secular notions secular politics and religion,

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because it serves its interests to do so. Secular ideology advocates of certain political doctrines.

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First, secular ideology seeks to concentrate power in the institutions of the modern nation state,

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and some of my previous scholarship have demonstrated both.

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How secular ideology defines religion is the non secular and how this secular notion of religion models the pre-modern Islamic tradition.

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One Secular ideology false to demarcate certain aspects of social life.

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A separate and. It alters interrelated spheres such as ethics and politics.

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Second, secular ideology asserts that law can only be positive law because the state seeks to maintain power through a unique vocal state law.

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The secular notions of religion and positive law distort Islamic politics.

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Now, in my experience, the historical theoretical arguments that underlie the critique of secularism cannot be explained in a short talk.

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Understanding the critique necessitates extensive reading in the history of secularism and the genealogy of religion.

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That is the modern history of secularism, because that's the key issue.

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So rather than continuing to explain this critique of secular political thought,

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I just want to suggest the readings identified on the slide and move on.

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So when I began this talk,

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I asserted that much recent scholarship is motivated by asking the problematic question Can Muslims engage in modern politics?

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I want to return now to the question I posed as an alternative.

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How do Muslims in the modern era use the pre-modern Islamic tradition to articulate their politics, as is common in similar contexts?

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When contemporary individuals look to the pre-modern past, they see it through the lens of contemporary ideas and concerns.

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Consequently, many prevalent assumptions about Islam's past are reflective of Islam's present.

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This is not unique, of course, to Islam. Contemporary Islamists, though,

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and the scholars who study them frequently rely on a set of false assumptions about pre-modern Islamic political thought,

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and I presented two historical examples. Muslim belonging and the relationship between jurists and the ruler that defy conventional assumptions.

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In addition, contemporary Muslims often make claims of authenticity or returning to the past.

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That should be challenged because neither authenticity nor return are possible.

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In many cases, instead of authenticity or return, we find hybridity in the specific case of modern Islamic political thought.

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We find what I have called secular Islamization.

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Secular Islamization is evident in how some Islamist groups adopt a modern secular notion of religion and imitate secular,

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legal and political reasoning. I analogise this process to the placing of Islamic vocabulary in secular political sentences.

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This is, of course, again not unique to the Islamic tradition. I hope that it is clear by now that what underlies the conventional question about the

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possibility of Muslims engaging in modern politics is another ineffective question.

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Can Muslims be secular? As I've demonstrated elsewhere, this question motivates much scholarship in Islamic studies today.

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It is an analytically confused question because Islam and secularism are not mutually exclusive.

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It is a misleading question because it directs attention towards a circular path enclosed

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within secular ideology in order to reconsider the political in the Islamic tradition.

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It must recognise that the political thought is neither trends historical nor transcultural.

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Thank you. Fantastic, thank you very much.

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Thank you, Mohammed. I think, you know, we really have two wonderfully rich papers which talk both to each other and in some ways against one another.

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So we are open for questions. Members of the audience can write in their questions and the Q&A box of the chat box or raise their hands,

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and also something I obviously will also ask questions.

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And I just have a couple to begin with.

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One. The one place where these two papers meet seems to be the claim,

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a very interesting claim about the non-linear nature of authority, and this can go in so many different places.

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So I just want to ask both of you, each of you, about that.

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For Mohammed, the fact that there seems to be no real hierarchy in which appeals can be taken from one from,

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you know, a subordinate authority to a superior one.

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Do you think that suggests that sovereignty as you define it is fragmented because it is divided by the field that each authority encompasses?

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You mentioned, for instance, how the Caliph can take on the role of authorities who are normally seen as subordinate to him,

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and in this way his own authority gets to be divisible in feels like ways.

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Is that one way in which you might think about what appears to be a fragmented form of sovereignty?

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Perhaps another way of putting it is the Muslim community,

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as the residual ground of the sovereignty is unable to manifest itself apart from in these varying authorities.

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You also said something about the distinction between.

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Insofar as justice or legitimacy is crucial to the acknowledgement of the sovereignty of any authority.

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It seems to be more a kind of, if you will, ethical or even a philosophical principle rather than the law.

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So three bits of questions, let's join together and then leader, if I might just ask you again,

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this category of the non-linear nature, I think, is, you know, it's really, as I said, it can go in so many different places.

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And I just wanted to ask whether without seeing it as being anarchistic in any way, though, it would be interesting if it were anarchistic.

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You know how you might think about.

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The anti hierarchical or the non-hierarchical nature of of authority and then in a sense, with your first example which had to do with property,

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could you say something more about how property or ownership or wealth ends up configuring citizenship in a way that.

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That has not really been taken into account as far as I know in the scholarship on Islamic politics.

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I find that. Really, just a way of thinking,

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because it might allow you to approach sort of European political theory and its fixation on property in a quite different way.

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So, you know, your critical endeavour addresses not just the question of circularity which you rightly brought up,

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but also that of ownership and property, which defined so much of early modern and modern political thought in Europe.

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So sorry, rather shaggy dog questions, Muhammad. Perhaps you can begin.

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Yeah. I mean, I think I wouldn't necessarily say non-linear.

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That's not how I would describe it. What I would describe it as.

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Shared sovereignty and sovereignty is shared throughout the community to all these different offices that these are coordinate offices,

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each exercising a particular slice of sovereignty.

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But that sovereignty is real in the sense that it doesn't depend for its vigour on the approval of the appointing authority.

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Because the appointing authority is a sort of like the Caliph isn't appointing the judge in the way that I appoint somebody to build the deck for me.

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This is the point of Casady, Casani is saying. Is acting as a messenger of the community to fulfil this function of discharging the rule of law.

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And so that's a real sovereign function that now exists in the judge.

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And so when the judge exercises that lawfully,

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then that's that's just that that's a full act of sovereignty not dependent on the caliphs will in any sort of way.

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Likewise, the kill off has personal capacity to adjudicate these disputes.

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But that's not because he's superior. It's because he's taking on the trappings of being a judge.

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In some sense, he's descending to the level of a judge when he wishes to do that.

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And so I think what's I mean, I'm approaching this mainly from a perspective of a kind of liberal legal theorist here.

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I know I like I have to get that to get Lina upset with me.

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But my point is to try to say that in so many juridical thinking, the law constitutes sovereignty.

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Sovereignty is not above the law the way some sort of crude Australians would view it.

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So you have an unconstrained sovereign, the unconstrained commander. That's not the idea of Sunni sovereignty.

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The idea of Sunni sovereignty is manifested through conformity with law.

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Not. Being above it, that's sort of the the really essential point,

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that's what allows for sovereignty to be shared across all these different offices and have a residual existence in the community members.

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So for example, if the Noujaim,

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who is a 16th century Egyptian hammer who has a very interesting epistle about what happens when when the governor dies and the sultan is done,

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who has not sent a replacement yet? Who takes over?

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Is it the commander of the garrison or is it the chief judge? And it goes back to again, this idea really gets to sort of the idea of, you know,

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the exception, what happens when there's an exception to the regular constitutional order?

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That's why you see the real sovereign right and the real sovereign arises.

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You know, it's Lakshmi says, as James says is back in the community.

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Although if the natural evolution is very clear, it's the judge.

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It shouldn't go back to the the public to elect somebody new.

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The judge should exercise sovereign powers until such time as the Sultan can send his inspection governor.

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But my general approach is to look at the details of the rules of the law jurisdictional and procedural

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to understand how sovereignty in a sense of final decision-making is normal will be constructed.

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Thanks very much, Mohammed.

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The issue of delegation here, because it seems to this endless everyone is a delegate and the sovereign cannot be manifested.

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So anyway, turning to you, Lina, and then I noticed we have questions in the chat as well, and I'm sure Osama has some.

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Yeah. Special thanks, I think that you picked up exactly on what I was thinking is where the overlap is between our two presentations,

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which is this understanding of the pre-modern context is being one in which authority

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or if you want to call it sovereignty is more horizontal and but also more shifting.

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And so it's not a simple, linear vertical relationship between the sovereign and the states bureaucratic

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apparatus that people would understand in the modern nation state framework. So I agree totally with them Hamlet's presentation on those points.

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You didn't talk that much about liberal things today, so actually there wasn't a lot to disagree.

391
00:42:13,590 --> 00:42:19,800
You didn't bring up Rawls for the first time in a long time. So so far, we've been great.

392
00:42:19,800 --> 00:42:22,790
But on the second question, the citizenship issue.

393
00:42:22,790 --> 00:42:29,160
So the parts of the things I discussed about citizenship is based on this article that I published a few years ago on taxing citizens.

394
00:42:29,160 --> 00:42:33,390
And really, the first criterion is political status. It's not wealth.

395
00:42:33,390 --> 00:42:40,290
Wealth only come. So I wouldn't use the concept of property and all of the modern concepts related to it because

396
00:42:40,290 --> 00:42:46,350
property is only secondary to the issue as to whether or not you're liable to pay the tax.

397
00:42:46,350 --> 00:42:54,060
And so the liability to pay the tax is a place where you can see how the jurors are and I believe, constructing political membership.

398
00:42:54,060 --> 00:43:03,120
And the reason why this is significant is because it really changes the framework for how we understand non-Muslims in the Islamic Empire.

399
00:43:03,120 --> 00:43:07,410
So it's not only about what it tells us about political belonging of Muslims,

400
00:43:07,410 --> 00:43:11,820
but also what it says about the semi citizens, these non-Muslims and what their status is.

401
00:43:11,820 --> 00:43:17,010
And the moment you stop sort of projecting these religious ideas that come from

402
00:43:17,010 --> 00:43:22,170
modern secular notions and then rethink governance in terms of citizenship status,

403
00:43:22,170 --> 00:43:29,250
then everything looks very different. But it also looks more historically contextual, which is the point of the Roman citizenship comparison,

404
00:43:29,250 --> 00:43:33,720
because the poll tax is, as we know, was very common in the Roman Empire.

405
00:43:33,720 --> 00:43:43,890
So it's not as if any of these policies that we see in the Islamic Empire vis-a-vis defining citizenship were somehow unique to the Islamic Empire.

406
00:43:43,890 --> 00:43:48,880
And so that's why I emphasise thanks for the question.

407
00:43:48,880 --> 00:43:57,070
Thanks very much, Osama. So I'm tempted to let the attendees go first, if that's all right.

408
00:43:57,070 --> 00:44:03,130
I mean, I know that Ahmadinejad put his hand up Latika, and then we had to question, So, so shall we?

409
00:44:03,130 --> 00:44:09,080
I don't know which one came first. Ahmed Silex hand was up earlier, and so I met.

410
00:44:09,080 --> 00:44:15,540
If you want to make yourself visible and ask your question and I'll allow you to talk.

411
00:44:15,540 --> 00:44:21,870
Hi, first, I would like to say thank you both, because it was wonderful programme event.

412
00:44:21,870 --> 00:44:25,140
My name is Ahmet Gennych. I do jet skis in roasty,

413
00:44:25,140 --> 00:44:36,660
intelligent apartment and I work on my dissertation currently on actually the title of my title of my dissertation is traces of sovereignty,

414
00:44:36,660 --> 00:44:41,430
multiple multiple political layers of Islamic political thought.

415
00:44:41,430 --> 00:44:51,770
Particularly, I focus on Al-Marayati al-Husseini and part of my question I have two questions actually one to Mohamed father, the other, as you know.

416
00:44:51,770 --> 00:44:56,310
And my first question is that based on your presentation,

417
00:44:56,310 --> 00:45:10,680
what I understood is that actually the sovereign power of any kind of ruler is grounded on the law, the Shariah and these Shariah.

418
00:45:10,680 --> 00:45:12,930
When I look at my work and wani,

419
00:45:12,930 --> 00:45:24,180
especially when it's very clear when he says that Islamic polity and Islamic community is possible and can survive when even there is no ruler,

420
00:45:24,180 --> 00:45:29,850
there is no government, when even there is no Khalifa or emir or rally.

421
00:45:29,850 --> 00:45:31,200
So Khomeini can survive.

422
00:45:31,200 --> 00:45:38,640
And he said that the mujahideen, then the mufti and the scholars should take care of the rulership leadership in the community.

423
00:45:38,640 --> 00:45:48,780
So from here and from what you have said, what I understand is that the foundation of Islamic political thought is the common ground.

424
00:45:48,780 --> 00:45:57,090
Well, let's say epistemic and moral ground accepted and embraced by the community in another world.

425
00:45:57,090 --> 00:46:02,000
It is the will and the consent of the community.

426
00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:14,010
And their agreement on certain epistemic way of looking at the world is the foundation of Islamic political thought and Islamic sovereignty.

427
00:46:14,010 --> 00:46:17,090
Would you agree with that or what we think about that?

428
00:46:17,090 --> 00:46:24,170
Would you like me to go to the second can be quite concise with Nina's question just so that everyone gets a chance.

429
00:46:24,170 --> 00:46:32,000
Yeah, sure. Just from afar, the what I read is that actually unlike secular politics,

430
00:46:32,000 --> 00:46:41,750
especially as you emphasise the church versus state in Islamic tradition, religion which is metaphysical until logical assumptions.

431
00:46:41,750 --> 00:46:50,570
Religion is a kind of mediator between politics, power and community and people.

432
00:46:50,570 --> 00:46:57,890
So it's quite not opposite, but so different than the European historical experience.

433
00:46:57,890 --> 00:47:06,890
Would you agree with this role of religion, like mediation between politics and political elites and people and community?

434
00:47:06,890 --> 00:47:10,200
Thank you so much. Thank you very much for your question.

435
00:47:10,200 --> 00:47:15,570
I'll go ahead just because he's directed his question first to me, so I thank you for your question.

436
00:47:15,570 --> 00:47:23,730
I think what you said I largely agree with, I'm going to point out that a friend of mine, my daughter Majid,

437
00:47:23,730 --> 00:47:29,370
wrote a very and just published a very interesting paper about uranium in the European Journal of Political Philosophy,

438
00:47:29,370 --> 00:47:34,920
I believe, which talks about uranium and the exception in Islamic political thought.

439
00:47:34,920 --> 00:47:40,480
And I think he uses the concept of the common sense sovereign as sort of arguing

440
00:47:40,480 --> 00:47:48,060
his ultimate account for how Islam survives in the absence of an organised state.

441
00:47:48,060 --> 00:47:55,650
That there's this idea of the sovereignty of the average person to understand the basic

442
00:47:55,650 --> 00:48:01,560
requirements of all of the law and that it can survive through that common sense sovereign.

443
00:48:01,560 --> 00:48:04,770
Now, I think this is actually a really important theme.

444
00:48:04,770 --> 00:48:14,190
It's something I, you know, I've talked about in other occasions that you see in Khazali, although bizarrely, you know, he he's very protean himself.

445
00:48:14,190 --> 00:48:21,570
But in this argument that he makes in the context of defending the [INAUDIBLE] against the claims of the Israelis,

446
00:48:21,570 --> 00:48:32,080
he he resorts to this idea of a common sense law firm saying that, you know, the Israelis claim you need to have this impeccable imam.

447
00:48:32,080 --> 00:48:37,870
In order to live a life pleasing to God and go, Karzai says, no, you don't.

448
00:48:37,870 --> 00:48:45,250
All you need is to have, you know, a basic sense of moral uprightness, not perfection.

449
00:48:45,250 --> 00:48:49,510
And then you can study the law and live reasonably by it.

450
00:48:49,510 --> 00:48:57,020
You don't need an impeccable imam. You just sort of need sort of kind of what I call tongue in cheek, adequate amount of virtue.

451
00:48:57,020 --> 00:49:01,600
You don't need to have a sort of a perfect or superhero super heroic amount of virtue.

452
00:49:01,600 --> 00:49:08,590
Adequate virtue is more than enough and adequate virtue is present amongst any sort of normal community of human beings.

453
00:49:08,590 --> 00:49:15,250
And so that has its own assumptions about human nature and about God and about what God demands of people.

454
00:49:15,250 --> 00:49:25,060
And, you know, just to rock back, go back to my presentation. It's interesting that when Malik talks about the legitimacy of decisions of arbitrators,

455
00:49:25,060 --> 00:49:30,850
rulers or whatever, he doesn't talk about them being correct in their decisions.

456
00:49:30,850 --> 00:49:35,320
All he says is that their decision should not be manifestly unjust.

457
00:49:35,320 --> 00:49:44,650
So it's the same kind of idea. You know, again, tongue in cheek, I talk about Sunni political thought as a republic of adequate virtue.

458
00:49:44,650 --> 00:49:49,390
That's sort of the the desert gerada adequate virtue, not anything more,

459
00:49:49,390 --> 00:49:59,200
but the belief that human beings are capable of achieving that level on their own, essentially in a post-traumatic world.

460
00:49:59,200 --> 00:50:04,600
This reminds me of Patricia Khronos remark about cynicism, about being, you know,

461
00:50:04,600 --> 00:50:12,250
let's just let's just do the best that we can kind of being the ethos of Sunni political thought, honest.

462
00:50:12,250 --> 00:50:17,560
But I wanted to hand over to Lina, you had a question directed towards you.

463
00:50:17,560 --> 00:50:22,930
You have question directed towards you in the Q&A, so please feel free to we'll get to that in just a moment as well.

464
00:50:22,930 --> 00:50:30,610
OK, so thanks Ahmed, for your for your question. I wouldn't use the word religion to describe anything in pre-modern Islam.

465
00:50:30,610 --> 00:50:41,200
I use the word tradition. So did Muslims, in the pre-modern context, think that the tradition was a way of mediating between community and politics?

466
00:50:41,200 --> 00:50:48,850
Yes, absolutely. I don't think that that's a stretch of the imagination so that it's an easy answer, basically.

467
00:50:48,850 --> 00:50:52,780
Do you want me to answer the next question? You mean Alex Hanley's question?

468
00:50:52,780 --> 00:50:59,710
Okay, so and I also wanted to point out, I mean, a number of your interlocutors for both of you are in the call or the people.

469
00:50:59,710 --> 00:51:03,160
I mean, in the sense of even Noujaim has mentioned some,

470
00:51:03,160 --> 00:51:10,780
you use the question of religion that comes up with Alex is also something that Russia and best he's talked about.

471
00:51:10,780 --> 00:51:15,940
He's in the Andrew much here, obviously sort of for sovereignty and in the modern period.

472
00:51:15,940 --> 00:51:17,710
So I think there's.

473
00:51:17,710 --> 00:51:26,630
I just want to welcome our colleagues and say that if you'd like to interject as well, I'm sure Lina and Mohammed will be more than happy here.

474
00:51:26,630 --> 00:51:30,730
Lina, do you want me to read the question just so that you can respond to it?

475
00:51:30,730 --> 00:51:34,570
Or would you like to read it? Well, I can read it. Please do so.

476
00:51:34,570 --> 00:51:39,790
If religion is a problematic category for pre-modern history because it is a modern secular invention, what about politics?

477
00:51:39,790 --> 00:51:43,030
Do you think there may be problems with talking about Islamic politics? So.

478
00:51:43,030 --> 00:51:50,380
Timothy Fitzgerald very famously has written about this issue, and he rejects the category of politics for these reasons.

479
00:51:50,380 --> 00:51:56,920
This is why, though I disagree with him about this, and this is why I gave a definition of politics as being matters of governance.

480
00:51:56,920 --> 00:52:01,510
So I gave you a trans historical, trans cultural definition of politics,

481
00:52:01,510 --> 00:52:08,290
not an essentialist one, but one that is that functions basically across time and place.

482
00:52:08,290 --> 00:52:12,220
And I made a distinction between secular politics and politics.

483
00:52:12,220 --> 00:52:21,850
Ridloff and what I said very specifically, is that it's secular politics that distorts understandings of pre-modern Islamic political thought.

484
00:52:21,850 --> 00:52:26,470
So I don't have a problem with the category of politics itself.

485
00:52:26,470 --> 00:52:34,150
Can I, if facially allow me to as well if I can just sort of pick up on the point that you've just made, Lina?

486
00:52:34,150 --> 00:52:41,200
I mean, do you have any thoughts on using categories that are indigenous to a tradition like Dean and saying

487
00:52:41,200 --> 00:52:47,560
that this is close enough to influence our understanding of how we should conceptualise religion?

488
00:52:47,560 --> 00:52:54,430
Kind of what Russian Embassy has done in his work as something akin to what I'm trying to do in Detroit as well.

489
00:52:54,430 --> 00:53:00,640
My article, decolonial translation, explains why that translation of Dean as religion is wrong,

490
00:53:00,640 --> 00:53:06,490
and it didn't begin until the modern era, and the usage of the word was understood to mean tradition or law.

491
00:53:06,490 --> 00:53:11,530
We can see this in translations of the Koran into Latin, into other European languages.

492
00:53:11,530 --> 00:53:15,280
In the middle people era was the word religion was not used.

493
00:53:15,280 --> 00:53:22,660
More importantly, the word religion. The concept of religion is a modern concept, and it's defined by secular ideology, which is a modern concept.

494
00:53:22,660 --> 00:53:29,470
So I've explained this in many articles, so I don't really want to go into this issue again.

495
00:53:29,470 --> 00:53:33,790
It's important for us to differentiate between concepts that are trans,

496
00:53:33,790 --> 00:53:39,160
historical and trans cultural and concepts that are actually modern and Eurocentric.

497
00:53:39,160 --> 00:53:45,010
And for me, having studied the history of secularism and the genealogy of religion,

498
00:53:45,010 --> 00:53:52,810
I find it difficult to believe that anyone would take the word religion and think that that can somehow be trans, historical and trans cultural.

499
00:53:52,810 --> 00:54:00,490
When there is an enormous amount of scholarship by very good scholars showing that the word religion, the concept of religion, not the word,

500
00:54:00,490 --> 00:54:05,830
because there's a difference between terms and concepts, but that the concept of religion can somehow be found in pre-modern texts.

501
00:54:05,830 --> 00:54:09,620
It cannot. But that's really not the point of today's discussion.

502
00:54:09,620 --> 00:54:17,030
So I would just say read my decolonial translation article in my blog post on Europe centrism of secularism.

503
00:54:17,030 --> 00:54:23,310
Can I just is I'm just going to gently disagree with with Lina, and I don't want I don't want this to go off the rails about this.

504
00:54:23,310 --> 00:54:27,500
I don't know, but this is where we disagree. Look, I know we disagree with the female artist,

505
00:54:27,500 --> 00:54:32,060
but I'm just going to just throw this out there for just for the benefit of others since this came up.

506
00:54:32,060 --> 00:54:39,230
I think Jeffrey Stout has a very interesting series of lectures that he gave at a British university.

507
00:54:39,230 --> 00:54:43,830
I think the Gifford lectures on natural religion.

508
00:54:43,830 --> 00:54:51,080
This a series of lectures on natural religion where he certainly gives an alternative genealogy of the term religion,

509
00:54:51,080 --> 00:54:55,430
and he makes a distinction between religion and faith.

510
00:54:55,430 --> 00:55:02,240
And he identifies the idea of faith as being born in in that sort of.

511
00:55:02,240 --> 00:55:09,620
As being a particularly Protestant Reformation idea, which he says is a very distinct idea from religion.

512
00:55:09,620 --> 00:55:19,440
And he says religion, you find could go back to. Roman authors like Cicero, and that religion is just considered a virtue that, you know,

513
00:55:19,440 --> 00:55:28,650
and even mediaeval writers prior to the Reformation recognised religion as a kind of civic virtue that is not particular to creed.

514
00:55:28,650 --> 00:55:33,780
Right? It's the Protestant Reformation that introduces this new idea of faith,

515
00:55:33,780 --> 00:55:41,550
which is sort of irrationally tied to conscious that has sort of the radical transformation of these things.

516
00:55:41,550 --> 00:55:45,510
Now I want one one final point in the Islamic context because, you know,

517
00:55:45,510 --> 00:55:56,220
I read I read Lena's essay very carefully to Hamdi and his definition of it in his encyclopaedia a it's allowed to follow in his definition of Dean.

518
00:55:56,220 --> 00:56:03,420
One of the definitions he mentioned is it. So it's not just it's not just law, it's not just practise.

519
00:56:03,420 --> 00:56:06,960
It's also subjective beliefs. But I don't want to go into all of this.

520
00:56:06,960 --> 00:56:12,660
I never denied that. But that's not the point. The point is whether you can divide those into separate categories.

521
00:56:12,660 --> 00:56:18,690
And it's the division that is modern and Eurocentric and a result of secularism didn't exist.

522
00:56:18,690 --> 00:56:24,480
A secular ideology. Any case, I don't want to get to that.

523
00:56:24,480 --> 00:56:30,390
Well, before you sort of moot, I'm going to direct the next question at you.

524
00:56:30,390 --> 00:56:34,090
Okay. I come back to my own questions for both of you.

525
00:56:34,090 --> 00:56:40,680
And if you have further questions, please feel free to jump in. So anonymous attendee in this case, same professor father mentioned.

526
00:56:40,680 --> 00:56:47,850
I mentioned how pre-modern governance was suffering because of its ability to establish rule of law as opposed to vice versa.

527
00:56:47,850 --> 00:56:51,600
Does he likened that to modern the modern state in that regard?

528
00:56:51,600 --> 00:56:57,870
Postcolonial scholarship argues that the modern state typically establishes sovereignty by a monopoly of violence.

529
00:56:57,870 --> 00:57:02,310
How is that contrasted or likened to pre-modern Islamic governance?

530
00:57:02,310 --> 00:57:11,040
Well, you know, if you look at somebody like Mousavi and his description of the incidents to the contract of the caliphate,

531
00:57:11,040 --> 00:57:20,470
he notes that having a monopoly over coercion more or less is a is a necessary incident of the contract.

532
00:57:20,470 --> 00:57:22,650
Now, he doesn't use that phrase.

533
00:57:22,650 --> 00:57:35,250
What he says is that in contracting the caliphate, we agree to divest ourselves of the ability of enforcing the law, right?

534
00:57:35,250 --> 00:57:42,660
And so there is a distinct crime in Islamic law called IFTTT. Which more or less can be translated as vigilantism?

535
00:57:42,660 --> 00:57:47,820
Right? So again, but it's complicated because in some cases,

536
00:57:47,820 --> 00:57:54,750
jurist permits permit self-help if it can be done without a risk of violence where there is a

537
00:57:54,750 --> 00:58:00,270
risk of violence and it's forbidden and it can be punished even if it's substantively correct.

538
00:58:00,270 --> 00:58:05,040
So if you look at chapters on retaliation, the source,

539
00:58:05,040 --> 00:58:11,460
at least the molecules are quite clear that you might have a lawful entitlement to exact vengeance on someone,

540
00:58:11,460 --> 00:58:15,930
but you can't do it until the person is actually convicted and you get permission of the ruler.

541
00:58:15,930 --> 00:58:18,480
Otherwise, you've committed a crime.

542
00:58:18,480 --> 00:58:29,660
So there is this idea that the state has a particular claim to rightful use of coercion and that that's a necessary incident of sovereignty.

543
00:58:29,660 --> 00:58:34,520
But that's not the whole of it, right? Because it's got to be used in a lawful way.

544
00:58:34,520 --> 00:58:43,220
Right. And I mean, this would seem to make a fair amount of sense within the the logic of any kind of political enterprise or

545
00:58:43,220 --> 00:58:51,770
state enterprise that you if once you sort of like distribute those final decision making opportunities,

546
00:58:51,770 --> 00:58:57,590
you've distributed sovereignty to an extent that may begin to divide the identity of the state to a set?

547
00:58:57,590 --> 00:58:59,420
I don't know if you would agree with that,

548
00:58:59,420 --> 00:59:09,050
but it would seem that what we talk about is the monopoly of violence is something that is very much detectable within an Islamic law.

549
00:59:09,050 --> 00:59:12,950
Well, I think what I would say in terms of dividing the and the identity of the state.

550
00:59:12,950 --> 00:59:18,080
I think the whole point of Gadhafi's book is to show why that's not the case,

551
00:59:18,080 --> 00:59:25,820
because when people are actually exercising genuine sovereign authority, that means everybody else has to recognise it, right?

552
00:59:25,820 --> 00:59:29,570
And so when and this is at the highest level on the lowest level.

553
00:59:29,570 --> 00:59:38,540
So when the tax collector collects taxes and that decision is viewed as a valid exercise of sovereign power,

554
00:59:38,540 --> 00:59:43,940
then everybody else in the community has to recognise it and can't contested on the ground.

555
00:59:43,940 --> 00:59:48,290
Well, I disagree with your interpretation of tax law, for example, right?

556
00:59:48,290 --> 00:59:55,460
And so despite the fact that sovereignty is distributed because it is sovereign.

557
00:59:55,460 --> 00:59:59,750
There's unity and universal recognition. At least according to Gadhafi.

558
00:59:59,750 --> 01:00:07,310
That's the whole point of of of of giving it the legal authority of sovereignty because now everybody's compelled to recognise it as final.

559
01:00:07,310 --> 01:00:11,540
Even if you disagree with it, that's what it means to have a sovereign authority.

560
01:00:11,540 --> 01:00:17,190
Your decision is recognised as valid and binding on everybody else. Thank you.

561
01:00:17,190 --> 01:00:20,830
So, first of all, if you would like to ask anything, please feel free. Yeah, no.

562
01:00:20,830 --> 01:00:23,700
I, you know, I was just reminded of some of, you know,

563
01:00:23,700 --> 01:00:35,610
a previous seminar in which leading you are very right made the argument that sovereignty was impersonal in pre-modern Islam,

564
01:00:35,610 --> 01:00:39,060
which seems to align with what Muhammad has said. But. Right.

565
01:00:39,060 --> 01:00:51,260
She also went further. You will recall to suggest that which I thought was very interesting, that one of the implications of this in personality.

566
01:00:51,260 --> 01:00:58,640
Had to do with the fact that even the offices. That can be variously sovereign and mammoth, as mentioned,

567
01:00:58,640 --> 01:01:07,700
the war may not be able to encompass the idea of it so that it is always possible for any individual

568
01:01:07,700 --> 01:01:18,800
to lay claim to a sovereign act in the absence of the bulk of the action of the authorities concerned.

569
01:01:18,800 --> 01:01:27,710
And so I wanted to ask both Mohammed and Lina actually what room they see existing for.

570
01:01:27,710 --> 01:01:29,600
We don't have to use the term sovereignty.

571
01:01:29,600 --> 01:01:43,550
We can use authority political authority outside the designated offices of the Imam Wali, etc. Caliph Sultan.

572
01:01:43,550 --> 01:01:52,670
And this brings me back to my early, somewhat in jest in a way suggested of an anarchistic mode of politics.

573
01:01:52,670 --> 01:02:04,450
It has to it is impossible to think about legitimate but not necessarily legal forms of either sovereignty or authority in this pre-modern world.

574
01:02:04,450 --> 01:02:12,250
Go ahead. Mm hmm. You know, I think this is what actually makes this psychological thought very modern.

575
01:02:12,250 --> 01:02:16,960
So Martin Loughlin in England, I can remember, I think he's in King's College London.

576
01:02:16,960 --> 01:02:19,750
He's a political theorist through constitutional affairs.

577
01:02:19,750 --> 01:02:25,150
He points out that it's an essential attribute of modern sovereignty, that it's always contestable.

578
01:02:25,150 --> 01:02:29,680
That's what makes it modern because it's based on a principle of legitimacy that is always contestable.

579
01:02:29,680 --> 01:02:41,860
And that is what gives Sunni political theory credible and stability because it's always possible to challenge it as being unlawfully exercised.

580
01:02:41,860 --> 01:02:44,740
So a jurist that you know, I've read a lot.

581
01:02:44,740 --> 01:02:51,790
When I was studying Maliki fifth in 18th century, Maliki named the last year who was a very prominent Sufi.

582
01:02:51,790 --> 01:02:57,370
He is extremely anti Ottoman. I mean, it's kind of shocking how anti ottoman he is.

583
01:02:57,370 --> 01:03:03,970
He he certainly in many of his many passages in his work, he says, you know,

584
01:03:03,970 --> 01:03:10,180
these are the rules that apply if there is a vacuum shuddering, but there isn't a hackneyed sharia in Iraq and Egypt.

585
01:03:10,180 --> 01:03:15,640
Right. And so this sort devolves. So this is the rule that applies, right?

586
01:03:15,640 --> 01:03:28,050
And so, yeah, I think. The other commentator is absolutely right that there is always this potential for someone to claim sovereignty because,

587
01:03:28,050 --> 01:03:32,880
as I said, the sovereign is immaterial. It's the Muslim community. That's an idea.

588
01:03:32,880 --> 01:03:36,600
It's not embodied in any person. No person can claim to embody it.

589
01:03:36,600 --> 01:03:40,320
Now, one thing that I would just want to clear clarify this is only one tradition.

590
01:03:40,320 --> 01:03:47,640
This is the juridical tradition. The juridical tradition is impersonal, but at the same time, particularly after the Mongol invasion,

591
01:03:47,640 --> 01:03:55,870
you have a completely different ideas of political legitimacy that are coming from Central Asia that are very personalised.

592
01:03:55,870 --> 01:04:07,250
Right. And I think the Ottomans have a lot of sort of schizophrenia, and they're the tactics of modern legitimation they employ, right?

593
01:04:07,250 --> 01:04:11,870
So Hussein Yilmaz, who's in the audience, was one of our speakers who, you know,

594
01:04:11,870 --> 01:04:17,690
spoke precisely to this, you know, the Ottoman claiming of the caliphate and what it entailed.

595
01:04:17,690 --> 01:04:28,730
But Lina? Yeah. So I think we do agree that political authority was something that was the object of competition interaction overlap,

596
01:04:28,730 --> 01:04:36,950
that there were multiple groups, not only jurists, but other types of scholars who were competing for four forms of political authority.

597
01:04:36,950 --> 01:04:42,470
I wouldn't. I mean, I always get uncomfortable when I hear centralisation.

598
01:04:42,470 --> 01:04:49,280
So the claim that somehow modern sovereignty is contestable as if pre-modern sovereignty was not would for me be

599
01:04:49,280 --> 01:04:56,120
problematic because I think that what we should always do is look comparatively and contextually and historically.

600
01:04:56,120 --> 01:05:02,950
And so nothing that I've said today about the Islamic tradition is specific really to the Islamic tradition.

601
01:05:02,950 --> 01:05:07,310
I mean, there are analogies or comparisons I can make to the Jewish tradition.

602
01:05:07,310 --> 01:05:10,610
There are things that I could say that are similar about other traditions.

603
01:05:10,610 --> 01:05:16,310
And the key issue is the ways in which the isolation of the Islamic tradition as the

604
01:05:16,310 --> 01:05:22,160
contemporary liberal antithesis then imparts the narrative in a particular way.

605
01:05:22,160 --> 01:05:27,950
So part of what I was pushing back against when I made the comments about the church versus state and allotment

606
01:05:27,950 --> 01:05:35,540
of the narrative is that the role map the scholars have become like this kind of cemented church configuration,

607
01:05:35,540 --> 01:05:39,020
and we hear it also with the ways in which we constantly hear the great men there,

608
01:05:39,020 --> 01:05:43,220
like the popes, like we hear the names of these great male scholars constantly.

609
01:05:43,220 --> 01:05:47,990
And actually, the picture in the pre-modern context is far more diffusive.

610
01:05:47,990 --> 01:05:50,750
There's a lot more people competing,

611
01:05:50,750 --> 01:05:58,490
and it isn't the case that it's now where the origin or others who are defining what political thought is for the entire society.

612
01:05:58,490 --> 01:06:02,300
There's actually all of these jurists and all of these low level bureaucrats and all of these

613
01:06:02,300 --> 01:06:07,040
other people who are participating in this process and they have certain claims and the killings,

614
01:06:07,040 --> 01:06:12,140
of course, and they have certain claims of political authority that have to be recognised, I think.

615
01:06:12,140 --> 01:06:19,520
If I can sort of briefly ask Lina yourself a question, but it ties in with something that wants, says Mohammed as well.

616
01:06:19,520 --> 01:06:24,020
And to a certain extent, it ties in with, you know, the work of another of our colleagues.

617
01:06:24,020 --> 01:06:29,960
Andrew marches on the sort of Zoom call, which is that you have, you know,

618
01:06:29,960 --> 01:06:37,640
also the way in which contemporary Muslim to draw on that tradition in order to legitimise certain types of practises.

619
01:06:37,640 --> 01:06:44,630
So. And this is where I struggle a little with sort of a critical theoretical approach or whether it's,

620
01:06:44,630 --> 01:06:47,390
you know, deconstruction or structural ism and so on,

621
01:06:47,390 --> 01:06:56,720
which is extremely useful for poking holes in the sort of like hegemonic narratives or mass narratives that we we are used to hearing and which I,

622
01:06:56,720 --> 01:07:02,480
I, I appreciate, you know, your sort of desire to really take the sledgehammer to whenever possible.

623
01:07:02,480 --> 01:07:12,710
But when it comes to the question of constructing an alternative to in the Middle East, for example, the context where there's, you know,

624
01:07:12,710 --> 01:07:20,450
authoritarian rulers who draw on the Islamic tradition, also to construct their own sort of stories of legitimacy,

625
01:07:20,450 --> 01:07:23,810
what sort of constructive stories are possible to like?

626
01:07:23,810 --> 01:07:34,070
What is your thoughts on the way in which someone like Andrew much provides this great man history narrative and admittedly of the rise?

627
01:07:34,070 --> 01:07:37,820
And you know, this is a question to Mohammad as well.

628
01:07:37,820 --> 01:07:48,380
The invention, as Andrew puts it, of sovereignty, a sovereignty of the people as a modern idea, then legitimate democratic sort of practise,

629
01:07:48,380 --> 01:07:56,600
which many of us would think is very important actually in the sort of in the Muslim world considering certain circumstances.

630
01:07:56,600 --> 01:08:03,650
Although, I mean, taking into consideration the problems that are endemic to democracy as practised in the West,

631
01:08:03,650 --> 01:08:09,050
which, you know, someone say colourfully describes as Western plutocracy rather than Western democracy.

632
01:08:09,050 --> 01:08:10,640
Bearing that in mind,

633
01:08:10,640 --> 01:08:17,300
what sort of constructive projects are possible and what do you think of this kind of narrative of the creation of a sovereignty of the people?

634
01:08:17,300 --> 01:08:23,780
Is that something I actually hear resonances of in what Mohamed, you've said today?

635
01:08:23,780 --> 01:08:27,800
OK, so first, I have to make a comment as a critical theorist,

636
01:08:27,800 --> 01:08:37,520
that this kind of critique of critique is being only deconstructive is problematic when it's not actually based on specific examples.

637
01:08:37,520 --> 01:08:42,110
So all of my work is both deconstructed and reconstructive.

638
01:08:42,110 --> 01:08:47,630
The odd number of chapters of my book are deconstructed. The even number of chapters are reconstructed.

639
01:08:47,630 --> 01:08:54,110
When I talked about the charity taxation, I gave you a deconstructive perspective on this category religion.

640
01:08:54,110 --> 01:09:02,630
And I reconstructed the category of citizenship. When I talked about the macro history, I gave you a reconstructed macro history first,

641
01:09:02,630 --> 01:09:07,130
and then I deconstructed and told you that the church versus state narrative was problematic.

642
01:09:07,130 --> 01:09:13,850
So to begin with, I have to say I think that what happens a lot with audiences and a lot of readers, especially Islamic studies,

643
01:09:13,850 --> 01:09:21,860
is that they become so uncomfortable by the deconstructed aspects that they become blind to all of the reconstruction I'm doing.

644
01:09:21,860 --> 01:09:26,330
And so first, it's there's always reconstruction. That's part of it.

645
01:09:26,330 --> 01:09:35,810
So it is there. And I on the specific issue of how you do the reconstruction when you're talking about modern political thought or modern,

646
01:09:35,810 --> 01:09:41,780
in my case, legal thought, I've done that very explicitly in my article comparing Islamic international laws of war.

647
01:09:41,780 --> 01:09:49,700
I mentioned that in the end when I talked about the category of secular Islamization. So I think that there are very clear ways of articulating,

648
01:09:49,700 --> 01:09:56,450
but the kind of modern dynamics that you're talking about with the articulation of those modern dynamics has to be based,

649
01:09:56,450 --> 01:09:59,960
from my perspective, on analytically rigorous concepts.

650
01:09:59,960 --> 01:10:06,650
And so what I see in the scholarship on moderate Islamist politics is a lot of decentralisation,

651
01:10:06,650 --> 01:10:15,890
a lot of conflation of orthodoxy with the Islamic tradition, a lot of inability to differentiate different concepts and categories.

652
01:10:15,890 --> 01:10:24,980
So when contemporary actors draw upon the tradition, as I said in my talk, they are making interpretations of that history.

653
01:10:24,980 --> 01:10:29,510
They're not necessarily narrating to you historical facts. There's a difference between what we,

654
01:10:29,510 --> 01:10:37,490
as scholars do and what historical actors or historical agents claim they are doing or contemporary actors or agents are doing.

655
01:10:37,490 --> 01:10:41,870
But we have to be critical in our assessment of what they claim to be doing.

656
01:10:41,870 --> 01:10:50,180
So I don't want to I don't know Andrew's work on the invention of sovereignty of people well enough to offer a critique,

657
01:10:50,180 --> 01:11:00,980
but I don't have any specific comments on that. All I'm saying is that for me, what I see over and over again is scholars of modern Islamic politics,

658
01:11:00,980 --> 01:11:06,560
basing themselves on the shaky foundations of misunderstandings of pre-modern Islamic political thought.

659
01:11:06,560 --> 01:11:13,130
And so what I pointed out is certain ways in which they make presumptions about a church state controversy.

660
01:11:13,130 --> 01:11:17,300
They make presumptions about the applicability of the category of religion

661
01:11:17,300 --> 01:11:23,580
that then has implications for how they're assessing modern Islamic thought. Thank you.

662
01:11:23,580 --> 01:11:31,450
First of all, I think all acts of construction. Are Intel creative destruction?

663
01:11:31,450 --> 01:11:39,440
Yes. And you don't even need to be a modern Muslim to see that, and if you look at the work of a 5th century jurist,

664
01:11:39,440 --> 01:11:44,330
the way they read their forebears from three centuries earlier.

665
01:11:44,330 --> 01:11:48,980
I would describe it as acts of creative destruction, right in the Schopenhauer instance, right?

666
01:11:48,980 --> 01:11:53,300
You're you're transforming your material as you're as you're reproducing it.

667
01:11:53,300 --> 01:12:03,200
So I don't worry so much about whether modern thinkers are distorting some kind of historical past.

668
01:12:03,200 --> 01:12:10,400
I mean, I think that's inevitable in in what constructive work is all about, right?

669
01:12:10,400 --> 01:12:21,790
Because you're always speaking to your own moment. And the question is, are you using as know from for the constructive perspective, are you?

670
01:12:21,790 --> 01:12:26,780
Are you working creatively with your materials? Is it something that looks like?

671
01:12:26,780 --> 01:12:30,800
Is it going to be something that at the end of the day, people are going to look and say,

672
01:12:30,800 --> 01:12:35,810
Wow, this is this is a beautiful work of theory, for example, talking about theories.

673
01:12:35,810 --> 01:12:40,850
Or is it like a Frankenstein or is just put together?

674
01:12:40,850 --> 01:12:44,010
You also say think that modern Islamic law was the problem with it?

675
01:12:44,010 --> 01:12:51,270
So it's an aesthetic criticism that it doesn't look like a a well ordered system of law.

676
01:12:51,270 --> 01:12:58,640
That's so there's a kind of repulsion to it for somebody that has a juristic aesthetic, right?

677
01:12:58,640 --> 01:13:04,340
And so a construction is successful when people sort of look at it and see it.

678
01:13:04,340 --> 01:13:09,230
Oh, this is a this is an integrated whole. It seems to work together.

679
01:13:09,230 --> 01:13:14,960
It's not really. It doesn't succeed because it's reflecting accurately the past.

680
01:13:14,960 --> 01:13:24,530
It's succeeding because it transforms the past in a way that the readers find persuasive or the people who engage with it find it persuasive.

681
01:13:24,530 --> 01:13:33,200
Right. And I think that's a that's a, you know, a critical thing for now is that as a Muslim intellectual, it's really important.

682
01:13:33,200 --> 01:13:41,030
I mean, part of being colonised is that you are not entitled to actually engage in re appropriations of your past.

683
01:13:41,030 --> 01:13:45,230
I mean, I'm an American. I'm in a Canadian understated loss school.

684
01:13:45,230 --> 01:13:53,030
My colleagues who do Anglo-American law are perfectly entitled to talk about the common law as you know,

685
01:13:53,030 --> 01:13:59,420
and go back for hundreds of years for finding rule of law, right like the Magna Carta.

686
01:13:59,420 --> 01:14:05,210
I mean, we really believe this myth that our modern liberties come from the Magna Carta five, whatever.

687
01:14:05,210 --> 01:14:12,950
Right? But why is it somehow outrageous when contemporary Muslim thinkers seek to appropriate their own tradition?

688
01:14:12,950 --> 01:14:23,360
Why is that then sort of characterised as the most reactionary project on the planet that must be bombed out of existence?

689
01:14:23,360 --> 01:14:36,870
I mean, literally. Right. And so there is, I think, a real politics to this right that there has to be space for legitimacy, Muslim Constructivism.

690
01:14:36,870 --> 01:14:41,330
Right. I mean, criticise it in the way you would criticise anything else,

691
01:14:41,330 --> 01:14:46,550
but it's just it's just it's kind of crazy when you think about the fact that people

692
01:14:46,550 --> 01:14:54,280
really think you're going to solve terrorism by banning it in this time of year. Seriously, I mean, let's just think about that, right?

693
01:14:54,280 --> 01:14:58,630
I mean, serious people actually believe this. Right.

694
01:14:58,630 --> 01:15:02,680
And so if you re if you take in the time here seriously, you engage with them.

695
01:15:02,680 --> 01:15:09,340
As a Muslim, you are actually taking the risk of being identified as an extremist and a terrorist.

696
01:15:09,340 --> 01:15:17,140
And this is kind of insane. These reflect these sorts of constraints, of course, which we've been working under,

697
01:15:17,140 --> 01:15:22,990
you know, in a very striking way for the last 22 years, 20 plus years.

698
01:15:22,990 --> 01:15:29,290
But in some respects, I mean this, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to highlight that Nina does a lot of work in

699
01:15:29,290 --> 01:15:36,280
decolonial theory that we live in the sort of like shadow of 500 years of colonialism.

700
01:15:36,280 --> 01:15:45,280
And in many respects, everyone here is extremely privileged to have always been a, you know, esteemed,

701
01:15:45,280 --> 01:15:52,070
globally recognised universities, but we're also complicit in that sort of process of colonisation.

702
01:15:52,070 --> 01:15:58,340
I really sort of like I'm heartened by your complaint, Mohammed, that you know,

703
01:15:58,340 --> 01:16:08,040
there needs to be sort of more of a space for thinking about these sorts of things without the security state sort of bearing down upon us.

704
01:16:08,040 --> 01:16:13,650
I had sort of other questions and reflections, but I'm a bit conscious of time, we've got six minutes left.

705
01:16:13,650 --> 01:16:17,940
I did want to ask if anyone has any final questions, please feel free to ask.

706
01:16:17,940 --> 01:16:23,190
I didn't want to hear Gemini's the remainder of the discussion. So really up to you.

707
01:16:23,190 --> 01:16:30,210
What we do next? No, I just think if there are no further questions, I mean, in a way, what do you know?

708
01:16:30,210 --> 01:16:39,770
What's come up in the last few comments is the issue of context and whether it is the great man theory or,

709
01:16:39,770 --> 01:16:46,320
you know, what can contemporary intellectuals actually constructively get from their past?

710
01:16:46,320 --> 01:16:49,110
You know, these questions seem to circle around, if you will.

711
01:16:49,110 --> 01:16:59,520
Quentin Skinner can claim of context being absolutely crucial for thinking about political thought.

712
01:16:59,520 --> 01:17:08,800
And of course, in some ways, this by default renders everything that's non western European even legitimate.

713
01:17:08,800 --> 01:17:17,500
It cannot be described as political thought, because the very often the the intellectual context is fragmented.

714
01:17:17,500 --> 01:17:22,670
People are not reading the same things. There has been a gap. All of those things.

715
01:17:22,670 --> 01:17:26,100
Now, as Mohammed suggests, whether or not actually even Western European political,

716
01:17:26,100 --> 01:17:34,430
what can be understood realistically as being wedded to a context in the way that's going to suggest this is a separate question,

717
01:17:34,430 --> 01:17:43,080
but I wonder whether. Context taken in that sentence might actually prove to be counterproductive.

718
01:17:43,080 --> 01:17:48,760
You know, how might it be possible to think about political pot in a way that is not bounded?

719
01:17:48,760 --> 01:17:57,100
Which is not to say that we don't a historic size or that we don't do what Lena very correctly says we should do,

720
01:17:57,100 --> 01:18:02,740
which is make the distinctions between pre-modern and modern, past and future,

721
01:18:02,740 --> 01:18:09,350
etc. as visible as we possibly can, but rather that even if we are thinking about, say,

722
01:18:09,350 --> 01:18:17,860
either pre-modern or modern intellectual history or political thought without having to translate from one to the other,

723
01:18:17,860 --> 01:18:27,250
the fact that we don't necessarily have a canary and type context of continuous or apparently continuous thinking,

724
01:18:27,250 --> 01:18:30,730
it might pose a problem, but it might actually be an opportunity as well.

725
01:18:30,730 --> 01:18:38,110
And I just wonder sometimes whether some approaches to thinking about great men and they are always men.

726
01:18:38,110 --> 01:18:52,190
Sadly, as you know, voices projecting from a period or a past is in some way a kind of rearguard action of a refit retrofitting context.

727
01:18:52,190 --> 01:19:01,220
In a minimal way around an individual, because it's not so available in a in a more general form anyway.

728
01:19:01,220 --> 01:19:08,240
Just some thoughts lead. I don't know if you have any comment on that. I see there is a question on chat as well.

729
01:19:08,240 --> 01:19:15,530
So there's I take your point completely, which is that there's always a certain amount of danger to contextualisation because where

730
01:19:15,530 --> 01:19:20,420
does the contextualisation end and what contextualisation is included and what's excluded,

731
01:19:20,420 --> 01:19:25,340
right? Because it's actually an act. It's not a passive sort of thing.

732
01:19:25,340 --> 01:19:30,620
It's it's it's constructive in a very clear way when you define what a context is.

733
01:19:30,620 --> 01:19:39,990
But I use contextualisation to mean historicism and in my case, specifically radical historicism as a way of understanding genealogy.

734
01:19:39,990 --> 01:19:45,350
So as I think Faisal and I agree, religion has a colonial genealogy.

735
01:19:45,350 --> 01:19:50,390
We know that the concept of religion was disseminated throughout the world through colonialism,

736
01:19:50,390 --> 01:19:54,380
and so rejecting the category of religion is an anti-colonial move.

737
01:19:54,380 --> 01:20:00,110
This is why decolonial theorists recognise religion like the categories of race,

738
01:20:00,110 --> 01:20:04,840
ethnicity and gender were articulated in colonial contexts in particular ways.

739
01:20:04,840 --> 01:20:09,110
But there is a question in the Q&A that I'm going to try to answer please.

740
01:20:09,110 --> 01:20:11,600
That's OK. We come to the conclusion, Peter. Yeah.

741
01:20:11,600 --> 01:20:19,280
So the question is basically what does that contemporary Western Academy specifically in terms of who works on Islamic legal theory?

742
01:20:19,280 --> 01:20:28,040
What miss when it comes to critical legal critical theory? So I can answer this very simply, which is that scholars who work on Islamic theory,

743
01:20:28,040 --> 01:20:32,480
legal theory or scholars who work on Islamic law basically don't have critical theory training.

744
01:20:32,480 --> 01:20:35,990
So there is no critical theory in the study of Islamic law.

745
01:20:35,990 --> 01:20:39,800
Today, they're there basically isn't anything so missing.

746
01:20:39,800 --> 01:20:46,460
They miss everything. I mean, but that's you know, as you also saw in this discussion, if you're starting from a critical perspective,

747
01:20:46,460 --> 01:20:50,870
then there's going, you're going to reach an impasse very quickly where you don't have a place to agree.

748
01:20:50,870 --> 01:20:59,360
So if, for example, we can't agree that religion is a modern concept in that it's colonial, then the discussion stops at some point.

749
01:20:59,360 --> 01:21:07,880
Thank you. Yeah, that is appropriate a time as any to actually close the discussion with Osama if you do us a favour.

750
01:21:07,880 --> 01:21:17,330
Sure. I really am grateful to both of you for a at times rather spirited discussion and I think all the better for it.

751
01:21:17,330 --> 01:21:22,130
And I look forward to you both sort of joining us in person at some point.

752
01:21:22,130 --> 01:21:25,280
Well, I mean, in the case of, you know, we have the pleasure of having you for a few more years.

753
01:21:25,280 --> 01:21:30,470
And I also wanted to just say that this is the last of this term's seminar series.

754
01:21:30,470 --> 01:21:37,070
We're going to resume with another five seminars next term. These will be advertised, I hope, within the next couple of weeks.

755
01:21:37,070 --> 01:21:38,450
So please keep your eyes open for that.

756
01:21:38,450 --> 01:21:47,090
If anyone is interested in watching the RE recordings, please go to the YouTube channel for the Middle East Centre Oxford.

757
01:21:47,090 --> 01:21:51,950
And if you'd like to be on the mailing list, obviously have a look at the St. Anthony's College website.

758
01:21:51,950 --> 01:21:53,240
The events will be up.

759
01:21:53,240 --> 01:22:01,460
You can register there, but you can also write to to myself, and I will sort of pass your email on if you'd like to be on the mailing list.

760
01:22:01,460 --> 01:22:07,250
But thank you very much and thank you, Faisal, for really sort of bringing this together, suggesting this as an idea.

761
01:22:07,250 --> 01:22:13,280
So is Faisal that he was the evil mastermind behind all of this and very much appreciated.

762
01:22:13,280 --> 01:22:18,140
And thank you, everyone for your attendance and participation. Thank you all.

763
01:22:18,140 --> 01:22:22,340
Very nice to see you, Mohammed Lina and I hope to meet soon. Yes.

764
01:22:22,340 --> 01:22:40,719
Have a great day. Thank you. They kept alive.