The Nightingale

The Silent Book Club is a commitment to devote an hour on Sunday morning to silent reading.

It is in this spirit that we embark on the book club for 2022. We want to learn about the modern world, its secular underpinnings and historical pathways, not to mock or engage in name-calling, or to stoke the flames of indignation. Rather, we seek to understand because we recognise that there is a metaphysical commonality that binds all human beings: that we are all created out of love by the All-Merciful.

For 2022, we will be looking at the following subjects: the European Enlightenment, Secularism, Colonialism, Worldviews, and Morality, and how these impact, entangle, disrupt, and create opportunities for Muslims today to clarify our purpose and role as Ummatun Wasata (a balanced community).

The Wardah Books Calendar

In the past socially distant year, so many of us met with A. Helwa and got acquainted with her words of encouragement to walk the path towards Truth.

For 2021, the theme of the book club is Islam and Other Civilisations. The aim is to understand and appreciate how wasaṭiyyah (balance), revelation, and the ‘aql inform and shape Muslim interactions with other civilisations.

The Islamic tradition's dynamism has within it continuity, yet a latitude for disruption; unity, yet a regard for difference.

Emotion does not have to be a force that pushes us apart and disperses us into separate cells.

It may be cheaper, more convenient, easier and faster to destroy knowledge than to appraise, catalogue, preserve and make it available but to abandon knowledge for the sake of short-term expediency is a sure route to weakening society’s grip on truth.