The Mizan Narrative

Having studied the violin from early childhood, at the age of 14, Ali became immersed in the study and recitation of the Qur’an. In his early 20s he travelled to Syria to study Arabic and the Islamic sciences, eventually specializing in tajweed. After several years of study, he received his ijaza for Qur’an recitation from Shaykh Abdur Razzaq Bahlawan. After settling with his family in Granada, Spain, Ali founded the music group Al Firdaus Ensemble, which has toured all over the world and recorded three albums. He has translated several books from Arabic into English, including the Aqida Muyassara (The Creed made Easy) , and The Tafsīr al-Tustari , in collaboration with his mother Dr Annabel 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.

Ayman Abdel Haleem completed his BA in Arabic at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London with first class honours. Following a period of study in Egypt, he completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Economics from Birkbeck College and an MPhil in Theology at the University of Cambridge. Ayman then went on to work for many years on different academic, cultural, and historical projects focusing on the Middle East and the Islamic world. For over a decade now, his work has mainly involved working as a teacher of Arabic and a translator of Islamic literature, and more recently as a narrator of Islamic books in English.

Dr Yusuf Chaudhary is an historian of Islamic intellectual history. He is a researcher at Mizan Research and Education in Cambridge, and studied the Islamic sciences traditionally for a number of years. He holds a PhD in Islamic intellectual history from the University of Cambridge.