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

Ahmed Paul Keeler was the founder and director of the World of Islam Festival that took place in London and the UK in 1976. The Festival was remarkable in that the arts and sciences were presented as a manifestation of the unity of Islam, instead of from the Eurocentric, fragmentary point of view. The Festival was opened by Her Majesty the Queen, and was the most comprehensive exposition of Islamic culture ever to have taken place in the West, having a far-reaching impact both in the UK, the West and the Muslim world.

On April 27th 2014 Ahmed presented his ground-breaking Mizan Thesis at Cambridge University in an Illustrated Lecture, after which the University’s Centre of Islamic Studies invited him to become a Visiting Fellow to continue his work. 2019 saw the publication of his seminal work Rethinking Islam & The West: A New Narrative for the Age of Crises, followed in 2022 by A Life’s Journey: The Story behind a Book, which serves as a commentary on Rethinking Islam & The West. Applying the mizan perspective Ahmed produced Gazan Awakening in 2024 and Breaching the Mizan: From a Sacred to a Secular World in 2025.

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.