My greatest worry is Islam will be seen as irrelevant. If our scholarship stagnates, we struggle to understanding contemporary problems from our own principles and people begin to abandon our religion…

As many of you know, I have been working with a number of scholars, medics, non-medics and business people to establish the first dedicated research centre looking into contemporary medical problems in the west. It is the first step towards the intellectual revival of our faith, establishing dedicated, academic research centres to look into contemporary problems from an Islamic ethical perspective to try and understand and answer them.

In the long term, we want to establish research centres for every subject areas to address things like:

• Finance: What does a viable and ethical lending system look like?
• Economics: How do we achieve unemployment and manage fiscal policies in an Islamic, ethical model?
• Politics: How do Muslims engage in a political system where certain components differ from our own ideals?
• Social care: How do we develop an islamically ethical method to search for spouses in the face of an increasingly globalised world & abreakdown of traditional communities
• … etc

This friday, we hope to 2 special guests with over 30 years of experience between them. Both are qualified Islamic scholar and work in medicine as a doctor/chaplain, and have spent years researching such questions. The seminar is called ‘Understanding End of Life’, and to give you an idea of what we will cover, think about the following:

• How do we know when a person is really dead?
• How do we know when the soul leaves the body?
• How do we deal with patients at end of life or with severe illness?
• How do we reconcile Islam’s understanding with modern Medicine?

Before you say it, you dont need to be a doctor to be interested! I’m not even a doctor myself! These are ethical questions more than simply medical ones, and scenarios many of us could and have faced!

I encourage you all to come to the event below on Friday 20th February 2015 @6:30pm. For more info and to purchase tickets, visit www.thecim.org.uk/eol. See this event as the first step to developing our own future in this country – and to do that, we need your support!

…And for those who cant come, you can always donate via http://www.bit.ly/CIMdonate (to set up a regular payment, you need to make an account first!)

http://www.thecim.org.uk/eol