Update

As-salamu alaikum,

As followers and supporters of MFAS, the Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies, you are certainly due some updates on its status after a hiatus of almost a decade. A number of initiatives are afoot, and even if they largely amount to curating the remarkable material in the form of lectures our fellows and guest lecturers delivered, they are not inconsiderable.

At the suggestion of Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley, MFAS' Rector, we are embarking on publishing a goodly number of our lectures under the general rubric of “Islam &”, starting with a volume that is almost ready for publication on Islam & Education, and over the next year continuing with volumes on Islam &: The Politics of Power, Technique and Science, Society Through Literature, Economics, and Psychology and Psychiatry.

This series deals with our world situation in all its dimensions, not just the political and economic, and the need to make sense of it and survive it. The writers have emerged from lived community life, from learning communities, in which finding answers to the issues we face is urgent rather than merely a theoretical or academic matter.

Thus the Islam &… Series brings together authors who examine our situation from Muslim and non-Muslim, classical, pre- and post-modern, scientific and humanist, academic and everyday experiential standpoints that converge in startling and productive ways. They draw on the Book and the Sunna, science, the arts, philosophy and metaphysics, and history, to make sense, and they call on Imam Malik, Carl Schmitt, Aisha Bewley, Malcolm X, Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, D. H. Lawrence, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Heidegger, Antonio Damassio, Thomas Arnold and pre-eminently Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi/Ian Dallas as witnesses.

The range of topics in the series – Education, The Politics of Power, Technique and Science, Society through Literature, Economics, and Psychology and Psychiatry – help us to understand where we are, how we got here, where we would like to be, and how to get there, a far from abstract desire.

Furthermore, we are collecting the best of the three modules on – The History of the Khalifas, The Madhhabs of Islam, and Early Madina, and possibly material from our Muslim Residentials – in a separate volume.

In a parallel development, the video recordings of the lectures themselves, which are hosted on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/themuslimfaculty, are now also on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@themuslimfaculty.

Our thanks for your interest and support over the years, in particular those who delivered lectures, involving a great deal of preparation and research.

We hope the above will be of use and benefit to you.

Warmest regards was-salam,

Abdassamad Clarke (Dean)