Description
In this special live edition of Al Jazeera’s Min El Akher podcast, cultural visionary Ahmed Keeler reflects on a lifetime spent exploring the relationship between Islam, civilisation, culture and the modern world.
From the countercultural movements of the 1960s to the creation of the landmark World of Islam Festival and the development of the Mizan philosophy, the conversation traces a remarkable intellectual and spiritual journey shaped by questions of meaning, beauty, balance and belonging.
Intimate, reflective and wide-ranging, the discussion offers a rare opportunity to hear one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Islamic thought reflect on the crises and possibilities of our age.
About the Speaker
Ahmed Paul Keeler
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.
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