Rethinking Islam and the West Seminar: Mizan and the Narrative of Islam

Ahmed Paul Keeler was born in 1942 and christened Paul Godfrey. He was brought up during the 1940s and 50s in a conservative, upper middle-class, Anglo-Catholic family. A chance meeting with a master musician from India introduced him to a wonderful new cultural realm; in response he formulated and organised The World of Islam Festival that took place in London in 1976, was opened by Her Majesty the Queen, and was the most comprehensive exposition of Islamic culture ever to have taken place in the West. Six months before the festival opened Paul embraced Islam.

He is now lecturing and participating in seminars encouraging us to judge the success of human culture through the criteria of Mizan, which is at the heart of the Islamic unfolding. Ahmed Paul Keeler was Distinguished Fellow at USIM Faculty of Leadership and Management in Malaysia in 2016, was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University from 2014 to 2023, and is presently a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. He has also received an Honorary Doctorate from Bolton University.

Dr. Samir Mahmoud is currently Academic Director of Usul Academy. He is also Program Manager of the Diploma in Islamic Psychology at the Cambridge Muslim College. Recently he was Assistant Professor at the Lebanese American University. He also holds an MPhil in Theology & Religious Studies with a focus on comparative philosophy and aesthetics. He completed a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Dr. Timothy Winter (Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad).

Dr Yaqub Chaudhary holds a PhD in Physics from Imperial College London, where he worked on the Physics of Plastic Electronic Materials and their potential use in future types of lasers. Prior to this he studied Electronic Engineering at the same institution. As Research Fellow in Science and Religion he is furthering his long-standing interest in Artificial Intelligence, and in his current research project he considers recent developments in the fields of AI, cognitive science and neuroscience in connection with Islamic conceptions of the mind, intelligence, human reasoning, cognition, knowledge, and the nature of perception and consciousness.

Yusuf Chaudhary is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Cambridge. After completing his BA in History from SOAS, University of London, he completed his MPhil in Classical Islamic History at the University of Cambridge examining the theological works of the Ilkhanid prime minister Rashīd al-Dīn al-Hamadhānī (d. 1318). His main research interest is in Islamic intellectual history during the late medieval period, the Mongol interaction with the Islamic world, and the Islamisation of the Mongols.

Hasan Spiker is a philosopher and comparative scholar of Islamic, Greek, and modern thought. He is the son of Anglo-American converts to Islam, members of a trailblazing group who in their 1970s communes initiated some of the first experiments in the revival of traditional structures of Islamic knowledge and Sufism within the desacralized context of the modern West.