Free Thinking - Mecca, Qur'an, Islam
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2014
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mona Siddiqui talks to Philip Dodd about her book called My Way: A Muslim Woman's Journey. The scholar Ziauddin Sardar has written Mecca, The Sacred City which explores the history of the birthplace of Muhammad and his own pilgrimages to it. And Navid Kermani has written God Is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Qur'an which considers the manner in which the Qur'an has been perceived and experienced from the time of the Prophet to the present day.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.2 | On tonight's programme, one of Britain's top intellectuals on Mecca, the city of his imagination, |
| 0:38.2 | and the complex reality that has been the city's history. |
| 0:41.7 | Not least, they all rich Saudi's determination to turn it into Disneyland, the author's own words. |
| 0:48.8 | Also, if God is beautiful, what kind of book does that make the Quran? |
| 0:53.2 | And what did Osama bin Laden's way of reciting the Quran tell us about his version of Islam? |
| 0:58.9 | Plus a memoir by Mona Siddiqui, professor and thought for the Dea, |
| 1:02.8 | which takes us from growing up as a Muslim in West Yorkshire to reflections on religion and the public space. |
| 1:09.6 | And she's with me now. |
| 1:10.8 | But we begin with Zia Dan Sada's new book, Mecca, the Sacred City. |
| 1:17.0 | Mecca is the heart of Islam, the birthplace of Mohammed, |
| 1:20.7 | and in his new book, Zia traces the city's history |
| 1:23.8 | and its role in the political and cultural life of Islam, from its origins as a barren |
| 1:29.5 | valley in the desert, through its emergence as the religious centre of a world empire, to its |
| 1:34.9 | present incarnation as a modernised city in Saudi Arabia. The book begins, though, with the author's |
| 1:41.5 | memories of what Mecca and the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the city enjoined upon every Muslim, meant to him as he was growing up in Pakistan and in London. |
| 1:52.2 | He joins me now, and Zia, I want to start by asking you about your boyhood imagination of this city in which you would one day work and worship. |
| 2:01.2 | Yes, I think my strongest memory of childhood |
| 2:05.0 | are the photographs of the Kaaba. |
| 2:08.4 | I mean, wherever I went, whatever I saw. |
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