 Fe fydd hon o'r ddyleniwch hanfodd. Mae dechrau oedd drosall mae oedd yn eu bethu am eu syniad lleol ar roi. Mae'n sgwrdd fan hyn o'r bod y ddiweddau gweld ffantastig ymddangos arall. Mae gennym yn ysgrifosio sy'n i gyrwybeth yw i, llwyddo d käyttau i'r cenderfyniaeth a'r cyfrofiadol a'r llwyfydd alumnau. Mae'r ddiffwys i'r lleol i'r mam blwyddyn yn ystafell, ac yn yna yn y mwrw i'r eistedd. A blwyddyn i'r ddwy cyfrofiadol. I would really like you to put your hands together for two fabulous women and their teams and join me in thanking them for tonight's event. I would also like to thank the SOAS alumni and SOAS South Asia Institute for sponsoring tonight's annual lecture. And a special thanks to our musician Morgan Davies for his beautiful piece that was available to all of us to listen at the start and to our colleagues in the AV and Coms for their continued support. With a thank yous over. As Deborah has mentioned, CSP is at the heart of cutting edge research on Pakistan. We are always aware that Pakistan as a nation is a relatively recent creation, so our understanding extends back prior to partition to think about the various legacies and traditions which inform contemporary Pakistan and its diaspora in ways which sometimes get overlooked. One of our aims is to look beyond the stereotyping frames of a good and bad place as reported in the media and delve deeper into the complexity and diversity of cultural and political elements that make up Pakistan. The rich heritage of the Pakistani diaspora draws in elements, ancient and modern, Islamic and hailing from the pre and non Islamic traditions of South Asia. This is often forgotten in the rush to stereotype. In the centre we are keen to explore all areas of cultural activity because it seems to me that any attempt to understand this or any other minority community has first to understand the way it imagines itself and that comes through the art, culture and literature of the people as much as if not more than from political theorists, nationalist politicians and many others. I have had the opportunity to bring to the centre's research activities my collaboration with the UEL SOAS Research Project, Muslims Trust and Cultural Dialogue, funded by the Research Council's UK. Looking back to the early days, the project director, Professor Peter Morey, asked me how I saw issues of trust affecting Pakistani communities in Britain. I started by thinking that it's often suggested that Pakistani communities are insular and don't engage with other communities around them. In fact, Pakistani communities have a vibrant culture and interact daily with others. Those instances where there is a ghettoisation are really to do with patterns of poverty and comparative deprivation rather than any instinct to seal themselves off. These musings then sparked off deeper conversations about the nature of trust itself and how it is established in society. The MTCD project in collaboration with the centre sponsored two major international conferences on Muslims Trust and Multiculturalism and Beyond Islamophobia in 2013 and 2014 here at SOAS. In February 2015, we held a literature festival on cultural confluences supported by our in-house professorial research associate, the novelist and short story writer Army Hossein and endorsed by the award-winning British playwright Howard Brenton for being at the cutting edge of contemporary literature festivals. This was followed by a major photography exhibition held at the Brunai Gallery on the Art of Integration, Islam in England's green and pleasant land by the internationally acclaimed photographer Peter Sanders. For the first time, we also offered school visits to the exhibition. However, the highlight of the UEL, SOAS Muslims Trust and Cultural Dialogue project, has of course been our collaboration with Professor Akbar S. Ahmad. The idea to work together emerged from a conversation after an event at SOAS celebrating his successful journey into America project. We invited Professor Ahmad and his team to conduct field research on Muslims in Britain and that then snowballed into the journey into Europe. Professor Ahmad, who never sleeps at night, was unstoppable in his quest for peace, building narratives in Europe. He attracted further funding and made it into a much bigger project. To have been part of the journey into Europe, Islam, immigration and empire experience has been simply phenomenal. I have learnt so much. The findings from the project also formed the basis of a monograph with Brookings that Professor Ahmad is working on and have led to his new documentary film journey into Europe that Deborah spoke about, which is being screened tomorrow and to which I hope you will return. So, I am so grateful to both Professor Ahmad and to Professor Bikuparik for travelling long distances to be with us today and for their generous support of our research. And for tonight's annual lecture to begin, I would like first to invite Professor Ahmad to come and kick off the conversation on ISIS, Paris and Pakistan, the search for peace. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much Dr Amina Ykin. You are such a star on campus and I congratulate you for the centre and the work you are doing with the other star, Zeba Salman. My friend Peter More, you really are at the cutting edge of knowledge as far as our subject and discipline, these are concerned. It's really an honour and I'm thrilled to be back to this campus. I've spent some very, very happy times here many, many years ago. And I am conscious that my wife Zenith and my colleague Frankie Martin, who's come with me from Washington DC, they are equally grateful. Thank you so much. Now, I see so many friends, colleagues here. I don't dare name them because I cannot name all of you, there's so many of you. But I will single out two brilliant individuals connected to the University of London, so there's a logic. Young Mina, who's at the LSE, and young Dr Moyn Bose. He teaches at SOAS, Mina's at the LSE, Mina's my granddaughter, Moyn is my nephew, so a bit of nepotism. You'll forgive me, remember these are Asian habits, we can't get out of them. Now, my friend from the Pakistan High Commission asked me about the title. He was concerned that I had placed Pakistan alongside ISIS. And this was an interesting, Jatoisa, where are you? Where are you? There we are. Now, this was an interesting comment because he's a young diplomat. I was an older diplomat. To me, Pakistan means something entirely different perhaps to what it means for my young colleague. To me, Pakistan means Jinnah, Jinnah's Pakistan. And I'm going to talk about that and that is what the message I want you to carry back to the High Commission and to the Foreign Office. Do not forget Jinnah because you forget Jinnah and there's nothing left in Pakistan. Then you have ISIS left. That is your battle and I'll build that in my talk. I do want to thank my friend, Lord Biku Parik. You perhaps don't know this, but he is not only one of the leading social scientists. We go back many, many decades. But he's had a family tragedy. He came all the way from Hull. He was due to fly back to India to attend to a family tragedy. And he postponed the visit back to India simply to be with us this evening. So, Biku, double gratitude. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for coming. So, with that, let's plunge into my few remarks. So, when we are preparing for this talk, Zeba, Amina and myself, you're talking about the title, what could convey the vastness in the Muslim world, the chaos, the violence, the different points, Paris at one end, ISIS at the other end, Pakistan, which for me represents something in the Muslim world. What relates these to each other, these points on the compass? How do we explain the connections? Is there a grand theory? How do we promote peace in these societies that these different points represent? Now, these are the kinds of questions that I have been asking over the last few decades. Those of you who are familiar with my work may know that in the last decade or so, I've been involved in four major projects, four major field projects. And Frankie Martin is very intrinsic to that, those projects. So is Zenith, my wife. We've travelled for years in the field, we've written, we've interviewed thousands of people, and then come to conclusions. So it's not just me giving opinions. These are opinions based on investigation. And over the four projects, we came to realize that the clearest way of understanding Islam which is such a complicated subject, paradoxical, ironic, changing, baffling, controversial, is not to fall into the trap of using all these neologisms, new phrases that are constantly coming out of the experts, Islamists and jihadists and radicalists. I'm not even sure what the latest is, but these terms which add to the confusion, they do not really clarify anything, but to simply try to categorize the categories of Muslim, social and political action. The three broad categories. Understanding Max Weber's caveat that these are ideal types, ideal types are not a substitute for reality. There's simply something to allow us to grasp and try to allow us to try to understand. So ideal types allow us to construct something in our minds in order to understand the complexity of societies. They are not societies. Understanding that these are the three different categories. And remarkably, we saw these face to face confronting us in India. And where in India? Ajmer. Who is an Ajmer? One of the greatest saints in South Asian history, Hwaja Ghariburnawaz. Mwynuddin Chishti. Aligarh. Who's an Aligarh? Who started Aligarh? Sir Sayyad Ahmad Khan. Sir Sayyad Ahmad Khan creates Aligarh in the middle of the 19th century. The third great category, Deoband, also in India. And I was astounded neatly we have these three contrasting three distinct categories. Again, my warning, there's overlap. There's borrowing. There's changing. You may be part of one category when you're a young man. Later in life you may belong to a different kind of category. But these broadly define Muslim political activity. And invariably the clash is taking place between the mystics and the literalists, which is Deoband. So you have mystic Islam, Ajmer, modernist Islam, Aligarh, and literalist Islam in Deoband. Again, overlap, changing, not ironclad, but allowing us to think of these three broad categories. Why India? Because India for a thousand years was a land where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs were able to interact and nourish each other, challenge each other, and really create a society which in some ways was quite unique even in the Muslim world. And you will see that South Asian Islam begins to take shape primarily because it is constantly interacting with Hindu civilization. So it must compete. If there's a Congress there, there must be a Muslim league here. If there's a Gandhi there, there must be a Jinnah here. So you're constantly in South Asia faced with a very advanced, sophisticated civilization, which at times is friendly, at times is tension, at times there's overlap, there's alliances, there's conflicts, but it is there. No other Muslim society in the world has this, I would say, privilege. The result is that what came out of India was really cutting edge in terms of Muslim thought, so it's no surprise that Aligarh happens to be in India in the 19th century. Alama Iqbal is produced in India, not in Pakistan, he dreams of Pakistan, but he is born and lives in India. Gwydde-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah is born there. Amir Ali, you've got a whole series of people coming out of that environment. What that environment also does is creates a further synthesis between British culture, British civilization and South Asian civilization. That in turn gives another dynamic to the Muslim identities coming out of South Asia, which again is missing in the Middle East or North Africa. That goes back to Lord Macaulay himself in 1835. Now, I don't think Lord Macaulay had in mind that one day the mayor of London is going to be Muslim and there'll be lords and members of parliament who will be Muslim. I don't think that's what he was aiming for, but that became the unintended consequence of his promoting an idea of Indians who would be Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, morality and intellect. So here's another way emerging in the 19th century in terms of responses to modernity. If you take a look at the rest of the Muslim world, at the same time, you'll see the Sanusi in North Africa, great Sufi saint, mystic figure in North Africa. And the Sanusi fight, they fight the colonial Italians, they'll fight the colonial French, they'll have bitter battles. And the French will not be as reasonable or as kind as the British colonialists. And by the way, I'm not advocating Nicholas with all due apologies, I'm not advocating imperialism or colonialism. I'm just pointing this out. So Nicholas Barrington says, why not? So compared to what was happening in North Africa where the French literally believed that Algeria was an extension of France, any opposition, any distinction was to be completely exterminated. I'm not using the word loosely. Out of three million people, two million were killed by the French. Two out of three million, the mind boggles. Here we had on the other hand colleges like Aligar, you had Diobann, Diobann is a creation of the time of the British. You had Ajmer flourishing at the time of the British. So there was an opportunity to maneuver and to grow. And I want to be very careful here when I say Diobann, I'm not talking in terms of Diobann equals violence. We have to be very careful about this. This is a slippery slope. They believe that Islam is under attack. The boundaries must be created around Islam. They must be defended. They're not advocating violence. But there are people who can then take from them a line and begin to say, we have to fight back and that can then turn into a form of confrontation can lead to violence. So you're seeing how those lines then get caught up with what is happening in today's world. So the Sanusi in North Africa, you have Muhammad Wahab in Saudi Arabia, the previous century. You have the Wahabis called the Wahabis, they don't like to be called Wahabis, but Wahab's descendants then teaming up with the Souths, the creation of Saudi Arabia in the early part of the 20th century. The oil, the world coming to Saudi Arabia to trade, the power of oil and very soon you have Saudi influence in the Muslim world and the impact. Now in the meantime, this is the Arab world, North Africa, in the meantime what's happening in South Asia. In the meantime you have the modernist version of Islam in Aligar producing generation after generation of scientists, statesmen, politicians, prime ministers, presidents and an idea of a modern Islam. This is vital to understand. And Jatoshab, this is the biggest lesson that Pakistan has to give because Pakistan's vision, not what we've done to Pakistan, but Pakistan's vision of Pakistan as depicted by Mr Jinnah, the founding father was of a modern Muslim nation, a nation which gives rights to women, to minorities, respect for the rule of law, complete condemnation of nepotism, of corruption, of any kind of neglect, of poverty, of the poor. His whole focus was on the poor, social justice. These are almost a passion with Jinnah. If you read the speeches which I did for the film I made on him and the books I wrote on him, they're almost a passion with him. He's ill, he's dying, but this is a passion with him. And that culture allows an easy interaction with the larger Hindu culture so that when he and Gandhi trade political barbs at each other, there's a good humor about it. There's almost a schoolboy humor about it. The famous exchange when Gandhi and Jinnah meet and the Mahatma says, Mr Jinnah, you have mesmerized the Muslims. And Jinnah looks back at him and says, Mr Gandhi, you have hypnotized the Hindus. Now this is schoolboy alliteration, I admit that, but I can't quite imagine Mr Modi and Mr Navashri pulling this off. I'm not sure how they would use this alliteration. So there was this sense of confidence and this came from the South Asian milieu and we need to understand this. This also created an idea of a modern Muslim in terms of modernist Islam, an idea of balancing faith and modernity. Something that goes back a thousand years to the time of Andalusia, the time of Bethel Hikma and Baghdad, when Muslims could balance living in the world with confidence, with their respect for illm and knowledge, their respect for compassion, God's names are Rahim and Rahman, be Muslims and be part of the world. Something that they lost over the centuries. This modernist Islam was what people imagined the Muslim world would be heading towards when the independence movements began. So if you look at the 1950s and 60s, you will see Jinnah in Pakistan, Tenku in Malaysia. You will see even the kings in the Middle East, King Farooq or the King of Morocco or the King of Jordan. All of them are depicting a modernist Islam. You get a sense that there's a struggle between the three categories but modernist Islam will prevail. It is into the 70s and 80s when the Muslim world begins to fall apart. You have revolutions, you have chaos, you have foreign powers involving playing games and you have a sense of turmoil out of control, not being able to control this turmoil. Modernist Islam begins to take a hit because in the meantime, the modernist structures of these states begin to show signs of decay, of corruption, of nepotism, of dynasties. More interested in making money than in serving people. So the result is that the promise of modernity begins to fall apart. And in that vacuum, in that vacuum, nature of bhoz a vacuum, in that vacuum you begin to see the emergence of marginal groups. So whether it's the Taliban or Al Qaeda or Boko Haram or Shabab, they begin to emerge and they emerge literally from tribal societies who are not part of modernist Islam and they are not prepared to accept modernist Islam. And you can see immediately you have a contradiction in society because they're not prepared to accept parliament, bureaucracy, the structure school. Their targets are the symbols of modern Islam. So the Taliban will attack the army public school in Peshawr and kill 150 people on campus including about 140 children, kids. Why? Because that is the symbol of the state. They're rejecting it. And ultimately to me that is the battle in the Muslim world. So trying to wind this up and just present some ideas because Dr Amina has given me some very dirty looks. Peter you can interpret those looks but I suspect they are dirty. He's agreeing. If that is the case then we have to ask ourselves how do we help the Muslim world help itself? By making the Muslim world understand the tensions, the structures that exist within it and helping it move in a certain direction. Now if we in the Muslim world are not even aware of our own features and our own strengths and our own characteristics how are we going to move towards resolving the tension that exists? That is the challenge. In this project Journey into Europe and I hope you'll come and see the film tomorrow you'll be astounded at the contribution that Islam has made to Europe. You'll be absolutely astounded. Science, architecture, literature everything. I mean I'm constantly my mind is blown and I talk to Muslims and they have no idea. I talk to Europeans they have no idea. Dante, the inferno, Robinson Crusoe, Cervantes, Don Quixote all this is coming from directly Muslim literature. How many people know this? The first person to fly to take flight, Ibn Farnas in Cardova a thousand years ago. How many Muslims know this? The saying of the prophet, the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. How many Muslims know this? How many Muslims know that the second most used word in the Quran after God is ill knowledge. So God is telling Muslims God is not saying go and blow yourself up. God is saying seek knowledge, seek knowledge, seek knowledge, seek knowledge. Second most used word and now take a look at the Muslim world and I mean I'll finish with this. Cardova a thousand years ago, the main library. Please remember this statistic especially for Muslims, especially for scholars. Cardova a thousand years ago, 600,000 manuscripts in the main library. 600,000 manuscripts a thousand years ago. The largest library in Europe, 600 manuscripts. 600,000, 600. That is the Muslim world. There is no Oxford then, there is no Cambridge then. The Bishop of Oxford sends scholars to Spain and says what do we need to do? They come back with these blueprints for these things called colleges and quads and dormitories and tutorials. And that is set up first at Oxford then at Cambridge and that is how Oxford and Cambridge start. So the Muslim world is implementing its vision of a society. And then recently, the contrast for you, Harvard University produces more scientific publications. Harvard University, one university than the entire Arab world put together. Now just think of what I'm telling you. Nobel prizes, Muslim world is about 25% of the world population. How many Nobel prizes do Muslims win? 0.3% or 2%. The Jewish world population is 0.0% or 2% or 3%. And they, the Jewish population has earned 25% of the prizes. Something is going wrong in the Muslim world. And I as a Muslim, as a very proud Muslim, as a Muslim father, as a Muslim grandfather, I'm not satisfied. I would hope that young Mina in the third generation, Moin in the second generation will accept this challenge and revive the notion of Ilm within Islam, of Rahim and Rahman within Islam that is compassion and beneficence and reach out to others in the way that God has wanted in the Quran, genuine plural acceptance of others. Reach out to them. The famous Judaic saying is tikun olam, which means heal a fractured world. And to me a good Muslim must heal a fractured world. And that should be our challenge. Thank you. May I invite now Professor Lord Pikkuparek who needs no introduction. He is the author of several widely acclaimed books including Rethinking Multiculturalism and recently Debating India Essays on Indian Political Discourse. He is also the recipient of the Sir Asaya Berlin Prize for Lifetime Contribution to Political Philosophy, the BBC's Special Lifetime Achievement Award and Padma Bhushan from the President of India. Welcome, Professor Parek. Well, where do we start? That was a fascinating talk. I think there can't be a dialogue unless I can provoke some kind of disagreement with you. And I should certainly try to do that. But before that, I want to make one general point. You talked about South Asia and South Asia's distinctive contribution to Islam. And I remember saying this, I think about 25 or 30 years ago when your book Anthropology and Justice had come out and there was a panel discussion involving myself, Christina Lamb and somebody else. And I asked you at the time and I'm going to ask again when one talks about Islam, I think one is making a category mistake because there are Islam's. There is no single Islam. Islam has already become part of a particular society, a particular tradition and therefore you can't simply equate one Islam with another. Islam of Indonesia has absorbed so much of Hinduism, is quite different from Islam in Malaysia, which is different from South Asia and all that. And the question I had then asked you was, is South Asia, Middle East is making all the noises, which it was in the 80s, as you say, is South Asia capable of making a distinct contribution to Islam, South Asian scholarship? And I think you said at the time, if I remember correctly, that perhaps one day it would, but wasn't doing so yet. And I would want in the light of what you said, since those memories came back, I thought I would tempt you to or draw you out on saying something more because you were saying here was India in response to Hinduism, although there is no reason why you can't have some other interlocutor in response to which you are constantly asked to identify yourself. But Islam in South Asia responding to Hinduism, which was itself eclectic and all that, feeling much more relaxed, not a kind of another monolithic religion forcing it to change and therefore Islam much more relaxed, giving rise to Sufism, giving rise to all kinds of blurred boundaries and from that you had Saibam Khan and lots of other people. I wonder if those regenerative sources are still there in South Asia and Islam, in India in particular. I mean there will be one question I would like to raise with you. The other point I want to raise with you was about Jinnah very briefly. I think it will come up in questions later. But Jinnah I think is a very complex man. At one level he is somebody who is thoroughly secular when Pakistan becomes independent he says we are all Pakistanis not Hindus or Muslims but then on way that leads up to it he talks about Hindus and Muslims as totally separate, nothing in common, they can't live together, therefore they can't form a single nation. Now with that kind of thinking you begin to see that there are two Jinnahs. There is Jinnah that leads up to the secular Jinnah but there is also the Jinnah that has picked up a lot of ideological baggage. And the question is in Pakistan's anatomy today there are these two Jinnahs gesturing to each other without being able to come to terms. One is a Jinnah the secularist, the other is Jinnah which had said that the Hindus and Muslims can never be together, Muslims are always going to be under threat and therefore should deserve a separate Pakistan. So may be that it wasn't a question of lovely time when Qaidaeism was absolutely wonderful and then things began to go downhill, may be the seeds of ambiguity were there from the beginning. I think at that point I should stop, you talked about figures about Nobel Prize and all that but I would take that a little easy. I wouldn't worry too much about Muslims not getting Nobel Prize. I mean in India we have the same kind of talk. Here is a country of 1.25 billion people. Why can't we have more Nobel Prize than this? Well, I mean it has a history, it has a backdrop. Once a community begins to acquire a certain momentum it throws up people of its own accord. But nevertheless I think you are absolutely right that in the Islamic world you give the example of Harvard. The example I saw was the Spanish University that Spain, single country Spain produces far more books than all the Arab countries put together. Shame, why does this happen? We need to be thinking about it. And I think you are absolutely right to raise your agonized voice against that trend. But on that point I better stop and allow you to respond and then maybe we can carry it a little further. Thank you because you do know I write poetry so a poet must have anguish. Anguish is what I think a Muslim poet feels when he looks at the plight of his community. In terms of your questions about Islam in South Asia, India especially and Pakistan, Bangladesh. I really see again the three categories. When you look at you, we talked about Ajmer, we talked about the Sufis, the Mystics. It is amazing because even today the strength of Islam particularly in the rural areas in terms of mysticism is very very strong. If you go to Sindh, rural Sindh, the great Sufi saints there who are like great scholars of Islam go to Punjab again similar, again in the frontier you have the same. I lived there, I worked there. You are also seeing a clash directly between the militants, the militant groups whatever term you want to use for them attacking these centres. So they become also targets. Traditionally in South Asia I have seen that it is these mystics who have played a critical role in preserving Islam and preserving a very compassionate, inclusive Islam which is very significant. You know that Mia Mir, the great Sufi saint of Lahore actually placed the foundational stone of the great Golden Temple of the Sikhs in Amritsar. See this effect. And if you talk to the Sikhs they have very high regard for Mia Mir, the Sufi saint. Again a lot of people don't know this but that allows you to cross these boundaries and cross them through love, through compassion. Now in terms of Jinnah, Kaidhe Azam for Pakistan, he is a fascinating character because as you are right he is coming from a very different perspective. He starts life very much as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. He is very conscious of that and paradoxically when you talk of Jinnah you must talk of Gandhi because he is criticizing Gandhi for using religion as you know. He is saying you mustn't bring religion in because once that happens it is difficult to control and that is what begins to happen as Gandhi becomes more popular. Religion begins to spread in his followers and very soon you have the tension between the communities. Into the 1920s you are seeing Jinnah still resisting that. To the point that Alama Iqbal, the voice of the Muslim community and his poetry, he criticizes Jinnah and he says you are not really connecting with the common Muslim. And at a point Mr Jinnah is disgusted, he is fed up with local politics and he packs up and comes to London and he has to be persuaded to come back in the 1930s and that to me is a very dramatic conversion in his life. You know we are talking about the ironies and paradoxes of individuals, men and women and why people do what they do but I find that those last years of Jinnah and I have studied this in great detail and you could say well he is being cynical, you could say that he is a politician and so on but he is undergoing a transformation because he is wanting to give voice to his people. He is becoming the symbol, the living symbol of his people and he is connecting with them in a way Biko and I studied this through pictures. You know as a scholar I said he is getting a reception, the Beatles would envy. He is an old man, he is almost 70 years old, he is not very outgoing, he is not very gregarious, not very social, he is a bit reserved, he is very anglicized and yet the reception he is getting is of mob hysteria and I asked myself what is going on, what are these ordinary Muslims seeing in this man and they are seeing in him a counterweight to the great stars that are rising in the Congress. Nehru is a great star, Gandhi is a great star, the Muslims have no one except for Jinnah. So Jinnah is now being elevated to the level where Muslims can say we have a heavy weight too and we are proud of this heavy weight and I have got quotations from people who are alive at that time who heard his speeches and Jinnah couldn't even speak Urdu, he spoke in English and they listen to his speeches and they say we don't understand what he is saying but whatever he says we agree with because we trust him. So here is Jinnah being converted from a politician into some sort of almost a mystical leader of people who have faith in him because they have faith in him. This as you know is Max Weber's classic definition of charisma. Now what happens when Pakistan is made you absolutely right, he is giving his legal, his logical reasons for a Pakistan for the preservation of Pakistan and so on and the preservation of the Muslim minority. But what Pakistan does he want to be good, this is the question I want to bring to your notice. Read his speeches very carefully, especially the speech he gives in August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly when he says that in this Pakistan Hindus will go to their temples, Muslims will go to their mosques, Christians go to their churches. You are free to worship as you want to, that has nothing to do with the state of Pakistan. So he is giving an idea of Pakistan, a modern Pakistan where everyone must feel part of the state and have their rights protected, of a cabinet of seven, one of them is a Hindu. His first Christmas, his only Christmas December 1947 is spent in a church with the Christian community. Not many people in Pakistan knew that, but he actually spends the whole day with the Christian community. So he is constantly reaching out to the minorities, there is a famous scene in which he is proceeding, I think it is a state bank opening or something and along the way he sees a riot. He stops, the Anturait stops and he gets out of the car and his ADCs, his military escort, they become very nervous. They say, sir, there is a riot, these Muslims have just come from India, they have lost everything, they are very emotional and they have surrounded some Hindus and they are beating them up and he is furious and he just jumps into the crowd and of course that is the nightmare for his staff, they follow him, they are panicking and they try to get him out, but he is right in the midst of it and he declares, he says, I will declare myself the protector general of the Hindu minority of Pakistan. This is on record. So Jenna to my mind never loses this cosmopolitan idea of society. Now that he is head of state as governor general, he is going to try to express that vision. He doesn't live long enough to translate that into society but he expresses it for us to understand the kind of Pakistan he had in his mind. It doesn't quite work out, why doesn't it work out because of society, society is at a very different level, he is at a different level, he dies very early, very quickly you have a series of political crises followed by martial law, followed by the break up of Pakistan in 71, back to martial law and you are seeing where you have got to. But Pakistan has a vision and this is what I have maintained that of all the Muslim countries Pakistan is the great advantage and that is why we get Pakistan in the title that it has the great advantage of having an idea of a modern state, an idea of a modern society. Not quite developed but it is there, there is something to start with. No other society has that because if you take a look at the Muslim world, they are starting, the Arabs are starting with 400 years of the Ottoman colonization, followed by European colonization. So you see we have that and that is the significance of the Muslim presence in South Asia. Why does it not take roots? The idea that Gina was proposing of a modern state, modern secular state, why does it disappear with him? One thing entirely disappears. Apart from occasional appearances. Because this is also something interesting, I have thought a lot about this. You see when given a choice and again we are talking of scholars, we must base everything in facts. When their elections, it's very interesting, when their elections you would assume commentators would say well already Pakistanis are known to be very religious and of course they are going to vote for religious parties but every time there is an election in Pakistan they will vote for either the Muslim League or the PPP. They will not vote for the Jamaat-e-Islami J, you can check up the figures and the religious parties may get 5%, 6%, 7%. When Benazir Bhutto comes back to Pakistan in the 80s and elections are held, she sweeps elections. What is she standing for? She is standing for an idea of Jenna's Pakistan and I found this very moving when you say why is it, it's not completely disappeared, it's a struggle but Pakistanis are very conscious of this and that allows them to stay on the path of democracy. When Benazir Bhutto, again I'm not making a political statement, I'm not making a statement for against a politically but when she arrives in Karachi, I was in Washington and I was asking myself, now this is the test for this young lady, she's arriving in Karachi, she's got two fathers, she's got her own father who was killed, martyred and she has Mr Jenna. Whose mausoleum will she go to first? You know to pay respect as a daughter of South Asia and the instinct in South Asia very much is to go to your own father and pay homage, place flowers at the grave and so on and she arrives at the airport, we go and she heads straight for Mr Jenna's tomb, where she's attacked and almost blown up, then she goes to Pindi and she's of course killed there. So the instinct in her is to come back for democracy even at the cost of her life and I think that instinct is the instinct for democracy planted by the modernist vision of Islam. Jenna is one of the figures but there are many many figures fighting for that idea of modern Islam. So again go back to the categories that is the modernist Islam and if that succeeds then automatically your extremism, militants etc will if not disappear will certainly be checked. If modernist Islam continues to falter, the extremists will continue to dominate and play havoc. Well let me come back to the next question that you had raised on your talk. When you talk about the modernist Islam, Islam ready to respond to modernity positively and all that and things begin to go wrong in the 70s and 80s. Why do they begin to go wrong in the 70s and 80s? Not before and by 70s and 80s what are the major events? I mean after all many people would say that Iranian revolution played the same role in the imagination of the world over as the Russian revolution did for the left or the French revolution might have done earlier. That here was an event where the Muslims were taking control of their own destiny and standing up to the West. How would you locate this shift in Muslim thinking? Again exactly the three categories. The 70s and 80s are seeing the world changing. You've identified the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan in the 80s, the emergence of the Taliban in the 1990s, the world is shifting, Pakistan's neighbourhood is shifting. We are not only talking Pakistan, we are talking of the larger Muslim world. Now in those shifts, the shifts are not towards modernity in terms of our three categories. They are towards literalist Islam. So Khomeini's revolution is actually saying we are going to implement Islam. Islam demands this and it is literalist Islam. So the compass is now veering away from modernist Islam and suddenly it's not very fashionable to be like Jinnah. In fact for the Taliban, Jinnah is the single symbol of absolute anti-Islam if you like. There's a famous example I give in my book when the Taliban delegation comes to Peshawl and wants to have a negotiation with the Chief Secretary of the Frontier province. In those days it was the Frontier province and they walk in and they see a portrait of Mr Jinnah behind the desk of the chair of the Chief Secretary and they look at the portrait of Jinnah, turn around and walk out and they say unless that is removed we won't talk to you. For them Jinnah is the, and I remember quoting a paper that they used to bring out in London in the mid-1990s in which they said they had a whole article on Jinnah and they said Jinnah is the ultimate enemy of Islam. The reason is because, they mention it to answer your question, number one he believes in giving women their rights, number two he believes in giving minorities like the Hindus and the Sikhs their rights and that is according to them against Islam. So again you are veering away from modernist Islam. So the 1970s, 80s you are saying what began to happen, you are seeing the shift in the Muslim world and a lot of young people growing up at that time are fascinated, they are seduced, they feel maybe these new leaders have the answers to the world and modernist Islam is simultaneously failing. If modernist Islam had continued, if the courts were just, if the bureaucrats weren't corrupt, if they were efficient then modernist Islam would have continued to hold its own, but it doesn't. So you see a simultaneous downfall of modernist Islam and you see the emergence of literalist Islam. Mystic Islam almost disappears. See it's very interesting the correlation between these three. While this is happening in terms of real time, Mystic Islam is almost fading away because it has no place in this world. To assert yourself, you are able to go in and blow yourself up in an office or in a school. Where does Mystic Islam come into this? Mystic Islam speaks of love, of universal love, of tolerance and that's the challenge. Why does Islam turn so violent? Why does Islam, I should rather say Muslims rather than Islam, why do Muslims in certain parts of the world turn so violent and so much so that Islam has come to be equated with violence and horrendous images of behaving and things of this kind. I mean all in the force of violence one can at least get a mental grip on, but this kind of violence one can shut us. No it's absolutely shocking and believe me it's more shocking to Muslims. I don't think any Muslim would condone the violence, particularly the kind of violence you're seeing today in the Middle East and so on. Women, children, I gave you the example of the Pakistan Army Public School in Peshawar where 140 or 50 children were shot in class, Muslims killing Muslims, so I don't think any Muslim would condone that. But because we have to be very careful here, we cannot make statements like why do Muslims have more violence because I can give exactly the same kind of violence among Christians, among other religions, among Hinduism, you know what's happening in India. You've got mobs going around lynching people who they suspect, maybe eating beef and so on. Now that is not the norm that's happening because conditions have been created and those kinds of actions are taking place. So we have to be very sensitive if you are equating the actions of 50, 100, 5000 people to a population of a billion and a half people then you're really not understanding that billion and a half people. This violence, I'm repeating this, is essentially those groups who are off the rails in terms of Islam and would be condemned by the mystics, by the modernists and by the literalists. The scholars of Diobann, the scholars of Al-Azir, the scholars of Islam would not condone this kind of violence and you see this every time there's some outrage, you'll see the scholars condemn it. Now the paradox is, you know you say that this is an image and you're right, it has become the image of Islam. The paradox is that you will not hear that condemnation in the media. So if you have a lot of ulema religious scholars actually condemning the violence, you will not hear that in the media. You'll simply see the action and that's it. So people are not seeing how horrified Muslims are in terms of what took place. And we have to deal with this because the media very often is not sympathetic to Muslims. So very often the image of the Muslims is violent. Muslims are not usually able to explain themselves. There are not many Muslims in the media. I mean I'm constantly amazed for a public. That's why these figures are important in terms of the Nobel Prize, etc. Because they're not out there. So you don't hear very much, you don't see them on TV, you don't see them in the newspapers, you don't see them in the columns. And the result is that other people are then able to speak for them. And other people then begin to explain Islam in these different terms, using terms like Islam as a jihadist, etc. And therefore further confuse ideas of Islam. That's why I say that there is a challenge because that's why I say there is a crisis and Muslims have to correct it, Muslims have to correct it internally. And that's why it's critical for Muslims to understand that they have the resources internally to correct it. And when I go back to modernist Islam, I point to the tradition that began in the middle of the 19th century. It's a very solid foundation for Islam. Scholars, great minds, great thinkers, and there's a whole list of people who come out of that tradition who can once again revive that tradition. That I think is a challenge for the young generation. In terms of understanding Muslim anger, I wonder if one should try to disaggregate the role of various factors, the Western foreign policy, taking different forms and different parts of the world. Second, internal feudal forces and reaction against that, modernity, ideas of gender equality and all that, and feudal elements within Islam or within Muslim society resisting those things. I would like you to say something more about this. How do these various factors? In some cases violence occurs because powers that be would not want to share their power with others, or there are reactions to Western foreign policy, or there is an international coalition between feudal forces within Muslim countries, powerful Western countries. And those alliances fighting against that. I wonder if one can understand Muslim anger and violence within that framework and make it more intelligible. It is, and you'll very often hear that. Muslims are vocal about this. They'll talk about these alliances that you're talking about. They'll point out that a corrupt dictator, for example, may be supported by Western powers. They do support them because it's easier to deal with one strong man. Very often these strong men do not deliver. The trains don't run on time. Schools don't function. The family of the dictator very often monopolizes wealth. And nothing is solved in society. So that anger is genuine in a Muslim. And Muslims are very conscious that they did have a history, that something is going wrong, and they're not quite sure how to put it right. And that is causing the anger and the frustration. And as I said earlier when I was travelling in Europe and I came across these examples of what the Muslims had done, literally we were stunned when you go to the Alhamra Palace in Granada. And I'm not sure how many people have been here. But I recommend you go and see it. It's the equivalent of the Taj Mahal here in the Western world. You're just stunned. You just look at it and you gap and you say, my God, we did this. And you look at what's happening today in terms of what we are doing today. So for me that forces me to begin to ask the question what happened. And if something happened which explains my downfall, then what would need to be done to get me back on my feet? This is the great challenge which I think Muslim scholars must grapple with. And the first step is to understand that something positive was done by Muslims. It also ties up with politics here in Europe. As you know a lot of the right wing parties, right wing movements in Europe are constantly blaming Muslims for two things. They say the Muslim community is not European. They don't belong here. And number two, that Muslims have not contributed anything to Western culture. They haven't contributed a blank. They've just parasized. They come here. They feed off us. They take our social services. They haven't done anything. Now there again because one ordinary trip in Europe will disprove both these points because Muslims have been in Europe since the 8th century. The 8th century means over a thousand years. So they've had a long, long period living here. Christians only came here before that. The Jewish community came before that also from Asia. They didn't come from North America. They acted. Both these religions came from Asia. The Muslims followed. So they are very much European and they are indigenous Muslims in Europe like the Balkans, the Bosnians. They are from that area, from the soil. In terms of contribution, the contribution of Muslims to Europe are really very, very vast and complex. And that, I think, Muslim scholars, is a challenge for Muslims, need to work on that and bring that out. It's a challenge for centres like this to constantly bring that out. And I'm really, really so grateful to my friends and colleagues like Amina and Peter and Zeba who have worked in this project of theirs. They've been working for years to bring out precisely this that what Muslim culture, Muslim society has been doing. Because ordinary people in Europe who are, as you said, the image is very negative. Islam is a violent religion that has little to offer. That can only be corrected through scholarship and knowledge. If they're able to stand in the Granada Palace in Alhamra and look at it and say, my God, this is a contribution, it's the number one tourist site of Spain. This is what Muslims have done. When they were able to see the first man to fly as a Muslim, what proof have you got? The main bridge of Cordova is actually in the form of wings in honour of Ibn Farnas. There's a crater on the moon named after Ibn Farnas. So these are acknowledged achievements. We need to get this to the public. So people understand and with that there's more understanding of Muslims and therefore a less distorted picture of Muslims. And before I take the audience's questions, which I have, just one last question. Since IS is in the title, I'm sure people would want to ask me, want me to ask you about IS. What I find absolutely completely disorienting is to understand why within Islam you should have a movement looking for Khalifa wanting to set up in certain parts of the world and people from different parts of the world, young people being attracted to it. How do you understand this phenomenon, both the sides of it? Why should a Khalifa, Khalifa set up and having set up, whether it's another thing that puzzles me, that if one looks at this millenarian movement, like the kind of thing that you had in Christianity, those millenarian movements had a left wing orientation, sharing things, community and all that. Here many of these movements are largely concerned by the exercise of power, patriarchy and all that. There is no sharing spirit. So I want to understand why these movements of this kind appear and why does it seem to attract people in the West? ISIS is a phenomenon that obviously has captured the imagination of all of us because it's such a really frightening and ugly manifestation of society. Now first of all, we have to understand, again, because we have to be very, very careful, because again, a lot of people actually say, well, this is coming out of Islam, he's called a Khalifa. Now first of all, the leadership, the aims, the behavior. I'm not sure which Muslims, certainly the Muslims I know would even agree that any of that reflects Islam itself. Who are these leaders of ISIS? They're all coming out of the prison camps of Iraq, modern prison camps. They've been leaders in the prison gangs. They've been thugs, very effective thugs. They're all coming out of tribal politics and tribal society in Iraq and in Syria. So they're coming out of some system and that system is completely broken down. We build this picture up. It's a tribal society which is in the state of throes of breakdown. They're implementing a very nasty form of tribal code of revenge, which they're implementing. You know all these brutal punishments and things, coming straight out of the tribal code. And they have power. Why do they have power? Because the state of Iraq is just in a condition of collapse. Yes, disintegrating. So they take one village, another town, another city, suddenly they have oil fields, suddenly they have money and the West says who the hell are these guys. In fact, they're coming out of the very invasion of Western troops into Iraq. It's a product of that. So please understand that. Similarly, Shabaab in Somalia, Boko Ram in West Africa, the TTP in Pakistan, they're all coming out of specifically tribal societies. Tribal societies which themselves are breaking down. Tribal leadership, religious leadership and central government authority in those societies. Now, are they Islamic? They claim to be Islamic. Again, with all religions, you can interpret the religion any way you want. Where do we place them in our categories? They're not modernists. They're not mystics certainly. Their targets are very optimistic. They would like to ally themselves with the kind of littlest form of Islam. And they're not. If you talk to Islamic scholars, which I have, they'd be horrified at this kind of Islam. Islam above all because you know you're a scholar in the social sciences. Islamic scholars will assert the fact that Islam stands for justice, for balance, for knowledge, for tradition. It doesn't stand for someone who says, I am the Khalif. And I'm going to now command this. And these women are my wives and they are your wives and so on. This is chaos. It is really like coming out of some comic book. And because we're in the 21st century, we accept it. We sort of say this is like Marvel comics now. He's the Khalif. Who's the Khalif? I'm just like a joke. Why can't I be the Khalif? Why can't one of my Muslim friends, why can't Justice Drabu be the Khalif? He probably knows much more and he's a justice also. So you have... Why do some people accept that as Khalif? Of course they do. Of course they do because human nature being what it is. We are working within what sort of societies are these. These are largely illiterate societies. So you put a hat on a dance and you say he's the king of Japan or he's the king. People say yes, they all hail to you. I mean this is Shakespeare. Don't you read your Shakespeare? Suddenly everyone starts hailing them. The whole Julius Caesar thing leading to saying people begin to accept that he's going to be emperor, he's going to be one king. Then the Democrats head back. So societies have the tendency to begin to fall behind a strong man. And that's what you're seeing. These are societies that are disintegrating. And for the Sunnis, they're providing a kind of leadership. So we are legitimising our tribal leadership plus our religious leadership. I'm the Khalif. And I go back to Abu Bakr, the first Khalif. And a lot of illiterate villages are going to say yes, yes. With Mr Jinnah. Now you were talking of Mr Jinnah. Who as you know is very, very... He was an Orthodox. He didn't say his prayers five times a day. He was a Muslim but not an Orthodox Muslim. And yet with Jinnah, Abu Bakr, people started saying and they say today, they say Rahmatullahi, they respect him so much. They have elevated him almost into a saint. That's how people begin to project their religious ideas of a leader onto that leader and their own imagination. So a man like that or any other leader, they begin to build him up in their societies, particularly in societies that are undergoing a crisis. And these societies are going through all of these. Somalia, I mentioned. Iraq, Syria, the Taliban, that whole Afghanistan built. These are societies in flux. You wouldn't trust them with democracy? I would trust democracy with them, which means sooner or later democracy will prevail. Well, I think on that point, I have been asked to read out to you some of the questions that the audience has asked. And by and large, I think the audience is very interested in the two or three questions. One is the Saudis funding mother's house. And isn't it the case that much of the conservative element comes from mother's house? Would you agree with that? Yes, a lot of the mother's house especially in the tribal areas of Pakistan, when I was serving there, a lot of them were funded by sources outside Pakistan. And a lot of these schools, we must remember the nature of these schools. Madrasa simply means a school where children who normally would not go to school, because there are no other schools available, would sit under a tree and it would be educated. So along comes a Saudi or an Iranian or some better off Muslim country representative and says, I'll give you a school, I'll give you two rooms for rooms. But with that very often they say, here's a syllabus also, here's a book. Now that is where I think the government of Pakistan can be much more vigilant, much more active and begin to really reform, update and change the syllabi in these schools. Because you need those schools. If you stop the madrasas per se, as madrasa just means a school, simple as that. If you close the madrasas you'll close, I don't know how many, there may be a million, million and a half kids in school. You'll have them out in the streets and they are fodder for any kind of religious war that is available. They'll cross the borders or they'll go into the rest of Pakistan and they'll be troubled. You need them to be in school and you need to improve the level of education. Bring in computers, bring in teachers, bring in cross school visitations, conferences, debates. Get them involved in the world that we live in. Make them aware of their inheritance as Pakistanis or as Muslims of their culture, their history. I don't think they have access to a lot of this. That's what I would want. The young student called Sami Lame who I think asked an interesting question. Sami Lame asks an interesting question. The kind of discourse which looks at everything from an Islamic point of view in Pakistan. And why is it that the whole society has got used to thinking in religious terms and expecting religious answers? Again, Biku, I think whoever asked the question, is he a Pakistani? Is he a Muslim? Samuel? Lame. Samuel here? Samuel who asked this question? Well he asked the question and disappeared. Thinking I'll do his job for him. Well, the answer to that is that it's simply not correct. I was in a Pakistani school, Bernhol. My class fellow sitting here, Hasan Aftar. We were together 60 years ago in school, up in Pakistan, Abtabad, north Pakistan. Excellent school. Still run by the government of Pakistan. So it's still functioning to the best of my knowledge. Produced a lot of very distinguished people. We had one of my class fellows was Wasim Sajadu became acting president of Pakistan, chairman of the Senate. Mehmood Ali Durrani was general in the Pakistan army and so on. So I don't think this is correct that only Islam. I wish that we had been taught a bit more of Islamic history and culture and so on. I feel that was something that was missing. Don't you agree, Hasan? Ali, I hope you're noting all this and you're going to make up for this, yes? There is also a question about why has the British government not succeeded in connecting with the Islamic youth? Because this is a challenge, I think, not only for the British government. It's a challenge for the German government, the French government, wherever Muslims are living, because this is also a challenge for Muslim elders themselves. We found on this journey, and Frankie, I'm sure you'll agree with this, that a lot of the young generation here in the West is disconnected from the older generation. That communication is breaking down. Not completely, but it is breaking down. So you'll see a lot of the youngsters now working in the basement on a computer. And that's the danger they're in touch with horizontally with the whole world. The parents are thinking something else. They're thinking that they're still in a kind of bubble of their own culture. And the result is that very often they begin to lose the young generation. And the values that should have come, they should have lived in and then begun to share the larger values of society that hasn't quite happened in some cases. We studied some of these youngsters who go off to the Middle East, and you have something like 5,000 people who've gone off from Europe. And that is just too many numbers. The fact that they're going to join a band as crazy as ISIS means there's a double failure. There's a failure of what those guys are doing, and a failure here of Muslim families who have created conditions where their own young generation is wandering off. Something has gone wrong somewhere, and someone needs to do a lot of serious thinking about it. If the Muslim community is not in contact with its own younger generation, there is a breakdown of communication, not in all families thankfully, but in society as a whole, which in fact means that the third generation. And you'll see some of this in our film tomorrow. We talked to a lot of youngsters, we talked to elders in the community. They all complained that the communication system is broken down. And that means that very often the values that the third generation needs to carry on in terms of their own culture are not there. They simply don't exist. They're very confused. Are they Pakistanis? Are they British? Are they Scots? Are they Irish? Are they Muslim? Are they Muslim? What kind of Muslim? Are they Deobandi? Are they Barelvi? These are questions we go that they would like to talk to. If you're a Jewish boy, you go and talk to your rabbi. If you're Christian, you go to your priest. A lot of these youngsters have only their local imam or the local mulla. And unfortunately, we found this throughout Europe, a lot of these mullas and imams very often, well-meaning, but very often they are complete strangers to this culture. So that in Germany, most of the imams are from Turkey and they don't speak German. Now, if you're 18 years old and you come to your imam and you say, look, these are my problems, like an 18 year old, their problems are going to be drugs, sex, gender, dancing, you know all the problems that kids have. They can't talk to their parents. So they're going to go and talk to the mulla or the imam. The imam will say, what are you talking about? Aren't you ashamed of even raising these issues? So they're not going to talk to them. What happens then? You know, they're blocked. And here, of course, I think it's changing, but in my time, most of the imams were from Pakistan. So again, there was a communication, a cultural communication gap. In France, the same thing, a lot of the imams are from Algeria. Again, they're not tuned to French culture. So this is a challenge. This is a challenge. And again, the point about government, I think the British government can do a lot in helping a better culture. They're making a better communication between religious and Muslim political leadership and administration. Much, much better communication. And I think efforts are being made. I know that the Muslims now in high places in the administration here, I know I was part of Commander Chishiti's attempts to get Muslim leaders and the administration together. Last time I was here, I attended one or two sessions. So there are attempts to be made, but they need to be made much more vigorously and much more frequently. On that point, I think I'm going to take some questions from the audience. What is the religion of the military industrial complex? Because I suspect that the religion of Taish and military industrial complex is the same. I would like to be educated that what is the religion of military industrial complex, whichever was responsible for World War I, World War II and the war continues. Thank you for asking that very penetrating question. Now, when you say military industrial complex, are you referring to the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower referred to in the 50s and 60s? So you're talking about the United States or the UK or Pakistan or Middle East? Which military industry? Sir, you are a professor based in the capital of knowledge and which has been in the Islamic world too. But I think that the military industrial complex is a continuum and it has never expired, it has never died, it continues. And now maybe it travels from Earth to the Mars. Maybe I'm rather overstretching. But what I want to know, what is the religion of military industrial complex and the religion of Taish? Because Taish, a monster, has come from the same bottle, you know. I want to know the religion of military industrial complex. Well, Amano Lachan is a good question. Let me think about it next time, Dr Amina invites me to, so as I'll give you the answer for that. Shall we take a few questions? Yes, I'm going to take three or four questions. Shorter the questions and shorter the answers, the better it would be to finish it by eight o'clock, which we must. Come what may. So, who would like to ask questions, please? Raise your hands. Yes, please. I don't know, is it just the propaganda or they don't have names? The leadership. It's a state, but there is no names about who is leading this state. Why is it? Okay, let's take a few questions then everybody can answer them together. Yes, please, gentlemen here. Very warm. Next to you. Professor, you talked about the three trends of Islam, Sufistic, Modernist and the Nutrace. But what happens after physical independence of Muslim countries, those who were the leaders, many of them didn't have any link or touch with Muslims, Islam. There were secularists. Highly secularist means to the extent of anti-Islam and criminally incompetent and corrupt people. So there was no modernist Islam phase in my opinion. What do you say? Yes, please. Right at the back. The lady over there. Thank you. My question is, you have already said that violent movements such as ISIS do not embrace literalist Islam. And it has often been argued that these movements are rather political movements than religious movements. Do you think that the element of religion can be fully extracted from such violent movements? Last question. Yes, please. There are three hands going up. Could I select one of them, please? Just here, right in the centre. Yes, here. We were talking about the wholesale refusal of Muslims of violence. And interesting, you cite the example of Al-Ashaar in Egypt, which from personal experience I feel very much encapsulates a lot of the problems facing a religion today. Al-Ashaar is currently facing a massive identity crisis in that a lot of the younger clerics are very much preaching a Wahhabist ideology. And this is gaining traction among young, educated and well-read Muslims. So treating Al-Ashaar as the gold standard of liberal Islam is very problematic. And we're not looking at some of the theological precedents that embody, let's say, ISIS or much less extreme examples as well. I've got four minutes to answer those questions. Four minutes, four questions. First question. Leader of ISIS, you feel that there is no recognisable leader on the country, Baghdadi, is not only very recognisable, but he's very possessive about people challenging his leadership. So I'd be careful if I wasn't. He's very, he says, I'm the Khalif and there can only be one Khalif. Dr Bari, you talked about modernist Islam being corrupt and not practicing and being secret. But that's exactly what I'm saying. That's what I've been saying, modernist Islam has not lived up to his ideal. The third question was about religion and extracting religion from ISIS. Well, that is the challenge of ISIS. I believe sooner or later, all these movements, unless they legitimately move towards mainstream central Islam, the notions of central Islam, they will fall by the wayside and remain very marginal. Fourth question about Al-Ashaar. I think you misunderstood. I didn't say that that was the gold standard for liberal Islam. On the contrary, I said that was literalist Islam. Modernist Islam is Aligar. So you're confusing Aligar with Al-Ashaar, two very different universities on two different continents. That's the question. Shall we end with a woman asking us? Yes, of course. We'll have the last question, please. Specially recommended. So basically in the title of the subject written in Paris, so we talked a lot of Pakistan, a little bit of ISIS, let's say. But we didn't talk about Paris and basically I want to say that because I guess the Muslims, they don't have the same history. And when you say that the youth have a problem of communication with their parents, I think probably also because their parents don't have that knowledge in Islam. So they have not been able to transmit that to their children. Like let's say for example, Algerian people. It's one of the history which is different from other countries. And also on the top of this lack of communication, maybe there is also identity crisis, which is not resolved by the society, especially the Western societies. So I would like you to comment on that. My friend Lord Bicoparek has a train to catch, so I'll try to keep it very brief. The reason we didn't comment on Paris was I was being guided by my friend here, but Paris is again a symbol of something. And we have studied Muslims in France, Belgium, the continent, and there's a very different dynamic at play there. For example, I'll be very brief on this, but it's fascinating. Abdus Salam had a joint in one hand and a beer in the other hand when he watched ISIS videos. To me that's not a classic Muslim going to do jihad for the cause of Islam. Something else is driving him. Something else that was driving him is the relationship of that community with the state and the society within which he's living. And we can go into that. Another factor is that Abdus Salam and the groups involved in Paris came from the Riff region of Morocco. So here we have tribal Islam and yet another factor involved in this relationship. That's very far from South Asian Islam. South Asian Islam would not even know what a riff is, but those are the riffs who are involved in the Madrid bombing in Paris and in Belgium. And we talk about it at the reception. Well, thank you very much indeed. I'm sure you'd like me to thank Professor Ahmad for a fascinating discussion. And I'm sure you'd also like me to thank Amina for organising this lecture. And a big thank you to Piku for being available at a time of a family emergency.