Exemplars for Our Time
On Saturday 2 July 2022, Bradford Literature Festival hosted the worldwide launch of ‘Exemplars for Our Time’ with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, Michael Sugich and Peter Sanders with a capacity audience at St. George’s Hall.
Exemplars For Our Time is a collection of short, photographic essays aimed at introducing a new generation of young people to some of the greatest living Muslim sages of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In traditional Islamic societies, living sages are the embodiment of spirituality and enlightenment, serving as inspirational role models for their communities.
However, the rise of extremism and atheism within contemporary Islam is increasingly being attributed to the loss of connection between these paragons of virtue and the everyday Muslim.
About the Speakers

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf
Hamza Yusuf Hanson is the president of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in the US. Ranked 23rd by The Muslim 500, he advocates for traditional liberal arts education and serves on the UAE’s top fatwa council under Shaykh Abdallah b. Bayyah. As co-president of Religions for Peace, he collaborates on initiatives with the Vatican and the UN. Hanson, a member of the Jordanian Royal Academy for Islamic Studies, works on peace initiatives between Muslims and Christians. He translated The Marrakesh Declaration, promoting rights of other faiths in Muslim-majority societies, and authored Purification of the Heart.

Michael Sugich
Michael Sugich is a native of Santa Barbara, California and studied at UCLA and the California Institute of the Arts. He was initiated into a traditional Sufi order in 1972. Since that time he has studied Sufi doctrine and practice with spiritual masters across the Arab and Islamic world

Peter Sanders
Peter Sanders began his career in the mid 1960s photographing the rock n’ roll icons and documenting the culture of that time. In 1970, he set off for India, cameras in hand travelling for seven months. This trip became a spiritual odyssey that led him onto Morocco and thereafter to the Holy cities of Makkah and Madinah, where he photographed the Hajj, at a time when few professional photographers had access to Islam’s holiest sanctuaries. During the following fifty years he has travelled extensively around the world documenting societies and cultures often hidden from view.
Amongst his published works are: Meetings With Mountains Encounters With the Saints and Sages of the Islamic World, Exemplars (with Michael Sugich) and in 2024 he launched Heaven, Earth and The Ten Thousand Things at the Bradford Literature Festival. Through exhibitions, the Art of Seeing workshops, presentations and his photographic books he encourages broader and deeper interactions between people of different races and faith.
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