I. Preparatory Strolls

It’s to the credit of this magazine’s editor that when he asked for essays inspired by Nietzsche’s programmatic love of hiking, and I emailed back offering accounts of urban hikes, at that point not yet walked, among Muslims in south Glasgow, and among Evangelical Christians in London, that he didn’t immediately torpedo the idea. In walking that first walk, and in writing the first travelogue, the Islam dimension proved so enthralling that this alone became the two-part article; the Evangelical Christians will have to thole it on my notebook’s pages until the signs cry out that it’s ripe for their revival.¹

As Nietzschean scholars do, my editor also knows the Nietzsche-Islam intersection is bountiful, but one that those involved professionally with the philosopher usually give a wide berth. Ian Almond’s outstanding and brief introduction to this field, which wishes to alter this trend, notes that ‘[d]espite well over a hundred references to Islam and Islamic cultures ([the Persian poet] Hafiz [c.1325-1390 CE], Arabs, Turks) in the Gesamtausgabe, not a single monograph’ existed on the subject as of 2003.² Even at his time of publication, Almond’s assertion could be seen as truer in the spirit than in the letter. Arguably the article on Nietzsche and the celebrated thirteen century poet Rumi, published in 1917 by the Indian-Muslim philosopher and poet Muhammad Iqbal, constitutes an earlier study that delves deep on what Islam and Nietzsche have learnt from each other. Yet Iqbal wrote this work to advance specific causes: to introduce Nietzsche to a wider Islamic readership and to invoke him in galvanising an anti-nihilistic variety of Sufism.³ It cannot give the dispassionate, bird’s-eye view that Almond’s intervention seeks to further. Commendably, Peter Adamson in his currently eight-volume-long history of philosophy devotes a whole 500-plus pages to ‘Philosophy in the Islamic World’. But despite this series’ completionist subtitle, ‘a history of philosophy without any gaps’, gaping holes reveal themselves, around Nietzsche’s pulsating corpus. The single reference Adamson provides is to Iqbal’s early twentieth-century avowal of the stateless Prussian thinker. But Roy Ahmad Jackson’s Nietzsche and Islam (2007) should be mentioned here, for all its imperfections, as should Peter Groff’s astute response to the same (2010).

Wanting for my part to write a street-level narrative from streets riddled with external suspicions, it’s best I come clean with my disclaimers, and state my positionality. I’m a Scottish white non-Muslim agno-atheist, unfulfilled by my nominal agno-atheism, and thus a serial flirter with faith, even when these waves of belief seem to arrive and depart in ever shorter loops.⁴ However I apply myself, I fail to emit any susceptibility to real piety: when I occasionally take time to chat to Jehovah’s Witnesses, they don’t bother to give me their proselytising spiel, as if sensing I’m a grand waste of time. From age four-and-three-quarters, when I started primary school in Edinburgh, the Muslim quotient in my class for the next seven years remained stable at around twenty-five percent: Shiraz, Asharif, Zahir, Samir, and a single girl, Javeria, being the humans behind this statistic.⁵ We, and yes, the white Scottish kids felt like a ‘we’, played playground football almost daily with the Muslim boys, the teams of course selected on grounds of ability and no other, and I remember at least one invite to Zahir’s birthday party. But by the final years of primary school my peer group had solidified into three or four other non-Muslim, white Scottish boys. This invisible barrier was built as much of class as it was of religion, or colour. Our school was where the eastern fringes of Edinburgh’s neoclassical New Town, with its self-trumpeting middle-classness, met the western fringes of what were then the working-class districts of Bonnington and Leith: the Muslim children I knew were mostly growing up there, in working-class homes. I’m not in contact with any of them now, but it’s these people I have to thank for my lack of fear of Islam. For how the far right’s incessant drum-beat about how Muslim culture will swamp non-Muslim culture in the coming decades — the slavering about Sharia-law dictatorships already being with us in Europe barely meriting repetition — catches my attention fails to persuade me.  

Such culture wars are surely not about demographic facts, which are difficult to dispute, and rather about the religiosities and political intentions such facts are tied to. As noted in Ed Husain’s Among the Mosques, a liberal Muslim’s troubled alarm call to policy makers about the state of ‘ Muslim Britain’ today, the fifteen years to 2016 that saw England’s population growing by around eleven percent saw England’s Muslim population growing at almost ten times that rate.⁶ Scotland’s Muslims are numerically more marginal than in the rest of Britain, with Muslims making up about 1 in 70 of Alba’s inhabitants, compared to around 1 in 20 of the UK population as a whole.⁷ Nonetheless, Muslim populations’ higher fertility rates compared to non-Muslim populations⁸ mean that Muslim numbers will continue to rise in all parts of the UK, with Muslim majorities expected in some London boroughs and areas of Birmingham, Leicester, Bradford and several other English towns by 2031.⁹ A couple more decades would be needed before this happens anywhere in Scotland, but already now over one in four of the inhabitants of the electoral ward of Pollokshields, on Glasgow’s southside, are Muslim.¹⁰ So it is to Pollokshields and its surrounds that I decide to head on my hike. Statistics inform this journey rather than motivate it. My desire, to find out first-hand how Glasgow Muslims are seeing the world, combines with an unexpected YouTube encounter, to see me on to the 9.45am train, departing Edinburgh Waverly to Glasgow Queen Street.

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II. Pre-Hike Reads

Around a year ago, and bobbing among the usual incongruous swell of affect-hungry clickbait and 1990s’ indie bands, my feed washed up something I wasn’t aware existed: a recent keynote lecture given by Prof. Timothy Winter — alias Abdal Hakim Murad — on Pierre Klossowski’s ‘reading of Nietzsche from an Islamic viewpoint’. The name of Klossowski (1905-2001) might ring bells for people truly smitten by French Theory. As both visual artist and author, he contributed in the 1930s to the avant-garde review Acéphale under the helm of Georges Bataille (whose philosophy has been introduced to POParts readers by Jenny Kellner). Later, his 1969 book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle moved Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other grandees of the Paris intellectual scene to revisit and rethink their attitudes towards Nietzsche. Winter’s treatment of what Klossowski and Nietzsche tell us and each other is virtuoso. It wades appealingly into the big tent of theory, modernism, religion, and ethnicized politics in the Global North and in the coming centuries, leaving the intellectually less able, i.e., most of us, with the chore of digging out what might constitute its small print. In my personal imaginary of Deleuze-era Paris, Klossowski is marvellous because of his artistic rather than his philosophical genealogy. He was the elder son of Baladine Klossowska, a painter; worshippers at the temple of modernist poetry will know her as the final lover of Rainer Maria Rilke and inspirer of his late masterwork the Sonnets to Orpheus. His younger brother was the far more acclaimed painter Balthus, whose paintings now hang in the MoMA and in Basel’s Foundation Beyeler; a late arrival, it seems he’ll hold his place in the twentieth century’s visual canon. ‘Balthus’s Brilliant Brother’, by contrast, has yet to find his place.¹¹ Although also astonishing as a translator, authoring the first published French translations of works by Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski still ranges mostly among cultural history’s footnotes. If you’re a specialist or theorist with an uncommon passion you’ll have heard of Klossowski; there’s no reason you otherwise would have.

As Winter’s bearing of alternate names hints at, he’s a convert to Islam, but one who’s lived all his adult life in this faith: he became Muslim aged nineteen, in 1979. Winter also mentions Klossowski’s conversion to Islam in late life, describing it as ‘an ambiguous event, although witnessed explicitly by his brother Balthus’.¹² Ambiguity, we should note, has a strong positive connotation in Winter’s iconoclastic take on political and religious current affairs. More telling, it is suggested, than the details of Klossowski’s personal faith is what he has to offer on the ‘pathology of modern subjectivity, derived in large measure from an unusual cohabitation of Nietzsche with Saint Teresa of Ávila [1515-1582 CE]’.¹³ From here, Winter moves to caress what many in the West experience as an almost untreatable wound and loss — and to indicate how Klossowski could help reconfigure this. Wielding the antinomies of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the loss of balance between which Nietzsche laments in The Birth of Tragedy, and invoking the ‘highly original interpretation’ that Klossowski gives to ‘Nietzsche’s experience of the Eternal Return’,¹⁴ Winter’s diagnosis of the Occident’s malaise is worth quoting in its fullness:

Across Europe now and to the alarm of nativists, non-migrant birth rates are in free fall. This we might term the bio-pause, an evolution which seems to follow two stages. Firstly, post-industrial secularizing humanity ruptures the symbiosis with other orders of nature, prompting their rapid collapse, and this is followed by a second episode in which humanity itself turns away from self-replication. The sexual revolution of the 1960s, detached now from the Haight-Ashbury spiritualities which sought to sacralise it, has simply generated a declined, nonproleptic libidinal, which has perfectly inverted the Augustinian ideal of procreation without desire …Towards this bio-pausal Europe sails a flotilla of flimsy Arks carrying migrants who mostly bear the charism of Ishmael and Hagar, archetypal exile people.¹⁵ These new Europeans are not only pre-biopausal in their fecundity, but remain rooted in traditional cultures, with high and even rising levels of religiosity, as suggested by the Fifteenth Arab Youth Survey this year. Or by Michael Robbins of the Arab Barometer,¹⁶ who … says that youth aged eighteen to twenty-nine have led the ‘return to religion’ across the Middle East and North Africa over the past ten years. Against this there is Europe’s Eternal Return to its dichotomy of self and other, and the new sub-Christian nationalisms emerging across the continent, the reappearance of a chronic immune reaction against the Semitisms, pitch Apollo against Dionysus, the linear and the closed against the biotic and polymorphous, a perennial theme of European self-definition since the time of Euripides. But some are asking James Baldwin’s question: do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?¹⁷

Readers suspicious that I’m plugging Winter could check his credentials. Committed secularists might be disturbed by what they find. Jacob Williams considers Winters to be a central node ‘in the [Islamic] traditionalist network in the West’, alongside two other thinkers who are also converts to Islam: Hamza Yusuf (aka Mark Hanson), and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (Larry Gene Weinman).¹⁸ Setting out to explore these thinkers’ relations ‘to several currents in Western thought’ in how they explain and represent Islam, Williams also wishes to lay bare how these thinkers relate to ‘the Traditionalist School’.¹⁹ His definition of this as a ‘Western esoteric movement initiated by René Guénon [1886-1951 CE] that calls for the retrieval of a spiritual wisdom found in all religions but lost in modernity’²⁰ tallies with the prevailing scholarship. Julian Strube defines ‘Traditionalism’ as ‘an umbrella term for diverse authors who share the conviction that a primordial truth has been preserved at the core of various traditions’, but focuses instead on how, through the peculiar twist leant it by Julius Evola (1898-1974 CE) – himself an avid Nietzschean, as documented in countless publications. Strube contends that Traditionalism ‘has been an integral part of the New Right’ since the New Right’s earliest development in the 1950s.²¹ Evola’s notorious politics, epitomized in his ‘self-designation as “superfascista”’,²² are confirmed by recent critical research that records political positions ‘more extreme than the [Italian] Fascist party line’ in the 1930s and 1940s.²³ But it would be a wonky short-circuit to thus equate Winter’s politics with Evola’s, and counterfactual to disqualify Winter’s worldviews as rejecting modernity. In flat contradiction to Evola’s anti-democratism, Winter singles out research by Sobolewska and others to highlight that when Muslim immigrants ‘achieve citizenship they generally take it seriously: in the UK, [mostly Muslim] individuals of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage are more likely than their white compatriots to affirm the duty of every citizen to vote.’²⁴ I pack my rucksack for Glasgow still musing over Winter’s rebellious and genuinely espoused prophecy about Islam’s role, as personified by Ishmael and Hagar, in Europe and the world’s future.

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III. Charity Shops, Book Shops, Restaurants: Ishmael on Albert Drive

Although it’s my first time back in about a decade, Glasgow retains its powers to work its magic on me. It’s the red sandstone the city built in from the mid-nineteenth century, which hews itself into scruffy tenements, proud Scottish Baronial, and all manner of cut-stone forms in between, that has me reaching for language I’d like to call biblical: ‘If thou hast eyes to see, then see!’ If fate had laid other plans for me, instead of the genteel upbringing I enjoyed between the Church of Scotland and the Episcopalians, I’d perhaps want to call such language qur’anic. Nietzsche pondered a similar ‘what if’ question in a letter to his sister from 11 June 1865:

If we had believed, from our youths on, that all salvation for our souls would flow forth from someone other than Jesus, from Muhamed [sic.] for example, would we not surely still have been party to the same blessings?²⁵

I’m catching Pollockshields on a particularly hot late summer’s day. St. Albert’s Catholic Church half-way down Albert Drive reminds readers of what feels like a fading Christian past, but it’s present-day Islam that catches the eye. Islamic Relief and Ummah Welfare Trust are two evidently Islamic charity shops that you’ll pass when walking into the area from Pollokshields East station. A sign in the window of the first announces that: ‘We no longer accept Qurans, Islamic texts, or picture frames with your donation bags’. Just as print bibles are in low demand in Christian and post-Christian milieus, Islam faces the challenge of being a text-transmitted religion in a mostly post-literate age.  

While window shopping, I’m still rehearsing words in my mind that I hope will get me talking to the district’s inhabitants. If the aim is to get them talking frankly about their faith and their Prophet, will it help to mention Nietzsche, a figure who means as much to most people in these streets as Leana Deeb does to me?²⁶ Still undecided as to strategy, I see that Ummah Welfare is advertising an old-school, print introduction to Islam in its window, yours for only two-pound-fifty. I go in, and ask the shopkeeper for a copy, and although a subsequent call to the proprietor informs us that said introduction is out of stock, at least we’re getting talking.  

Atta Ali is a convivial and hospitable guy in his early thirties,²⁷ who leads me out to the pavement, sensing rightly that I may feel more comfortable chatting there. Atta wears a full, longer beard, is dressed in salwar kameez topped by a thick, green lumberjack shirt, as if unruffled by the rare twenty-six degrees outside his shop, and tells me how he just comes to Pollockshields to volunteer but actually grew up in East Renfrewshire eight miles to the south. Which is better known as a Jewish area. He seems to want to signal his religious tolerance, a necessary prophylactic, perhaps, in an age where accusations of anti-Semitism against Europe’s Muslims are unremitting. On me mentioning Winter, Atta admits to admiring the ‘literary prowess’ of omnipresent influencer Sam Harris, even though Harris possesses his internet name largely because of his earnest representation of Islam as the insupportable Other.²⁸  

Atta then asks if Winter is a ‘revert’. Confused, I reply that Winter is indeed a convert to Islam, and Atta fills me in on what has become a popular theological take: people consciously becoming Muslim, as children or adults, are simply ‘reverting’ to the faith they’ve had all along, underneath: ‘we were all Muslim once, you know’ as Atta puts it. Wrong-footed by this bizarre assertion, I leave it to stand, although of course I’m curious. When was this then? During the Prophet’s lifetime (c. 570-632 CE)? Before the Prophet even incarnated?

Linking this fact with the Pakistani heritage of most of Pollockshields’ Muslims, Atta explains how this legacy is predominantly Sunni.²⁹ He’s not friends with Shi’a Muslims, or Muslims from other ‘sects’, but says Shi’a come to pray at the local mosques, including the one one-hundred-yards down a side street, and simply don’t announce they’re Shia. Afterwards, they dress and leave quietly to avoid conflict. Atta’s use of ‘sects’ alerts me to what should have featured in my fieldwork preparation. Jarring with how twenty-first century Christians mainly perceive other churches and confessions, most Sunni Muslims, whether in Glasgow or worldwide, do not regard Shi’a, Sufis, or other Muslim minorities as co-religionists worthy of respect, but as heretics. They might, now in the UK, be left to pursue their alternative observance and theologies in peace: mostly. But they are not seen as equal partners in ecumenical debates.

A too narrow focus on Muslim sectarianism would fail to see Glasgow’s other recent and bigoted history. I immediately remember the anti-Catholic hatred in the city in the 1980s, when my brother and I were kids, and which has lasted a long time after that. Living in Edinburgh, one step away from the epicentre of the malice, my brother was nonetheless a Glasgow Rangers fan, a club grounded in Protestant isolationism, and regularly got tickets for Ibrox stadium. Discerning enough aged thirteen to not approve of the songs he heard there, they of course impressed him: raw, affective phenomena, a kind of extra-brutish will to power. Up into the 1990s, we heard, live when Robert took me, Rangers’ fans singing goading and besmirching songs about Bobby Sands, the IRA member and Catholic, who died in prison aged twenty-seven, in 1981, after a sixty-six-day hunger strike. Jim Slaven and Maureen McBride, two of a team of sociologists who have written on racism in Scotland, even reject the ‘notion of “sectarianism”’ in understanding such behaviour as it

draws a false equivalence between the attitudes of Protestants and Catholics; both [Slaven and McBride] are equally clear that the actual issue here is racism towards people of Irish Catholic descent and that this was an indigenous Scottish development rather than one imposed by the British state.³⁰  

The August sun has too much force for me to dwell on this inglorious past. In any case, I’m getting hungry. Café Reeshah at 455 Shields Road fulfils its promise to serve ‘authentic Asian cuisine’, in this case authentically Lahore-ian cuisine, from the Pakistani part of the Punjab.³¹ Of the two inside tables on offer, I manage to get the one out of the sun, and I attempt to eat the huge plate of vegetable pakora I’m served, officially a ‘starter’, as a portent. Nietzsche was so much the chronicler of own diet, particularly in letters and unpublished fragments, that unorthodox scholars claim his implicit food philosophy can unlock previously obscured quarters of his work. Rereading these nuggets, they tend as much towards comedy as universal stomach laws, given Nietzsche’s pressing awareness of what his café meals are costing him. Reporting back to mother and sister in Germany from Italy, in April 1881, the food guru exclaims that

Genoese cuisine is made for me. Will you believe me that I’ve now eaten tripe almost daily for 5 months? Of all meat it’s the most digestible, and lightest, and cheaper; and all the different kinds of little fish, from the common people’s cuisines, do me good. But no risotto at all, no macaroni until now! You see how changeable diet is, depending on locality and climate!³²

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IV. Deep-Fried Plenitude and Literalism

With the chana masala, the chickpea curry that follows as generous as the pakora, I’m wanting to claim that Glaswegian cuisine is made for me. Understood in its deep-fried plenitude and global diaspora internationalism. I’m happy to discover later that there’s a halal fish and chip shop just a little to the south in Queen’s Park. As far as the owner and staff of Café Reeshah go, nothing suggests that these men in their fifties aren’t also Muslim. But they dress western, and give no signs of adhering to the literalist tenets that Atta from Ummah Welfare signals allegiance to. Ed Hussain concludes that literalist interpretations of the Quran and the hadith³³ now dominate in life choices among British Muslims — and that the hadith compendium most referenced in the twenty-first century UK may be that of Muhammad al-Bukhārī, written in the ninth century. Beards self-perpetuate, but literalist Muslims are also influenced by the teaching of the second caliph, Omar (ruled 634-644 CE), that beards should be trimmed but once a year.³⁴ Facial hair, in itself, cannot harm: but other forms of literalism can. Al-Bukhārī conveys a Q-and-A between the Prophet and a group of unnamed interlocutors, in which the Prophet reports that ‘the majority’ of dwellers in ‘the Hell-fire’ shown to him ‘were ungrateful women’. Pressed for more on iniquitous women by his audience, al-Bukhārī even has the women among his listeners agreeing with Muhammed that ‘the witness of a woman [is] equal to half of that of a man’, with Muhammed explaining that this ‘is because of the deficiency of a woman’s mind’.³⁵ Saqib Qureshi, in his recent Muslim intervention on ‘Reclaiming the Faith from Orthodoxy and Islamophobia’, calls this ‘rampant misogyny’ a concept ‘entirely foreign to the Qurʾān’.³⁶ With such arguments, Qureshi allies himself with minority intellectuals at the Oxford Institute for British Islam, who want ‘a progressive and pluralistic Muslim faith that is based on the exclusive sovereignty of the Holy Qur’an’.³⁷  

Paigham Mustafa, a Glaswegian Muslim and Oxford Institute member, has had to endure almost a quarter-of-a-century of threats of extreme violence, for publicly taking this Qur’an-centric road. After publishing articles questioning mosque teachings, a committee representing twelve Glasgow mosques issued a fatwa (religious ruling) against him in 2001. While not explicitly threatening death, the document compared Mustafa to Salman Rushdie, thus inciting severe violence against him.³⁸ Evidently an unorthodox free spirit, and uncowed by clerical bullying, Mustafa followed up in a letter about Ramadan published on Facebook in 2018: ‘Contrary to popular practice, ritual fasting is not prescribed in the Quran’.³⁹ Long may pakora be savoured, at every possible hour. Chatting to the boss as I leave Café Reeshah, we find common ground in the Indian and later Pakistani localities where my great-grandfather and grandparents lived and worked for decades, and where my father was born: Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta. What unites and divides the descendants of the colonised from the descendants of colonialists is one and the same.

Nowhere near versed enough in Islamic theology to dispute the finer points in person, I’m coming down in favour of a journalistic approach, giving the interview partner the non-judgemental space to come out with what they really think. Hoping this might serve me at the confidently titled Islamic Academy of Scotland on Maxwell Drive, just minutes from Café Reeshah, I make my way there. I marvel at the ornate Victorian entrance arch to what used to be Pollockshields Bowling Club, but finding the drab, prefab buildings that house the Academy closed, I head back towards the Madni Islamic Book Shop on Maxwell Road. Alongside wedding dresses and lifestyle accoutrements, the literature the friendly shopkeeper offers comes in gaudy colours, reminding me of Catholic devotional tracts. I start to feel queasy. I select Understanding Islam by Maulana Khalid and Sayfulla Rahmani, which restricts itself to using Islamic green, and white. But when I come to pay the seller slips in another ‘Brief Illustrated Guide’ for free. It’s cover depicts ‘one million Muslims’ gathered at night in prayer at the Masjid al-Haram, Mecca’s great mosque, the faithful illuminated in dayglo colours. In the starry sky above them, a flying Qu’ran sends out a Milky Way of light to lasso our globe, which orbits large, and counterintuitively, over the crowds and the city’s high-rises.

My other two purchases also beam their messages in a different universe to the liberal and unorthodox Islam with which I prepped my trip.  My eyes light upon The Need for Creed — Jinn: Beings of Fire. This popular demonology is printed on thick card and written in over-long rhyming couplets that don’t scan. Illustrated with sickly AI graphics, it proclaims a weird theology: ‘Jinns are very advanced and were on Earth before us: but caused harm, / they live a parallel life, they vary in belief but some have chosen Islam’.⁴⁰ Menacing rather than merely weird is the title Emergence of Dajjal: The Jewish King, a slim, large-type treatise, in which chapter headings including ‘The Annihilation of Jews’ make unmistakeable who is being aimed at.⁴¹ Apocalyptic literature, this large-print tract features Imam Mahdi, a key end-time figure, but one that Shi’a and Sunni Muslims have an utterly different understanding of. Only later do I discover that comparative researchers see Dajjal in a rough correspondence with the Antichrist of Christian tradition: and wonder again at the coincidences my journey has laid out for me. And I slip into detective mode and want this evidence — best not to address its contents head on with the proprietor. Unprompted, the shopkeeper responds to me buying this title (price three-pounds-fifty) by telling me how, as children, they had often heard stories about Dajjal, whose Arabic name translates as ‘the deceiver’, back in the Ivory Coast.  

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V. Keeping the Faith Regardless of the Violence You Encounter

The Jewish King is that kind of anti-Semitic literature that’s not at all concerned to cover its tracks. Casual anti-Semitism amongst Glaswegian and British Muslims today is probably as common as casual anti-Semitism was amongst Europe’s Christians, for centuries until the latter half of the last century Passing St. Aloysius’ College, the Jesuit day school in central Glasgow late in the day, a picture comes to me of Glasgow’s twenty-first century Muslims being as unquestioning of the superiority of their faith as, regarding their belief, the Jesuit fathers were who set up the school on the current site in the 1860s. Yet when secular European intellectuals in the 2020s insist upon anti-Semitism as definitive for Muslims and in Islamic culture, they choose to be blind on one eye. Saqib Qureshi demonstrates brilliantly that in the global history of anti-Semitism, Muslims have been but minor players.  

Throughout the middle ages and early modern era, church leaders lent theological support to anti-Jewish politics, which was enacted through mass forced conversions, expulsions, murders, and other atrocities. Jews were persecuted and burnt across Europe from 1347-1349, after being blamed for causing the Black Death through poisoning water in wells; many conversions accompanied these deadly scenes, both ‘forced and “voluntary”’.⁴² With anti-Jewish violence also spreading across Spain, up to a third of that country’s Jews were killed, while up to a half were forcibly converted, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.⁴³ Exact numbers are disputed, but Jewish eyewitness accounts, such as that given by Reuven Gerundi, who survived the 1391 massacres and stated that 140,000 Jews were forcibly converted in their wake, must be taken seriously.⁴⁴ Historian David Nirenberg argues, without necessarily accepting the accuracy of such figures, that the ‘mass conversions’ of Jews in the Iberian peninsula in this period were primarily of people ‘converted by [Christian] force’: and that this violence ‘transformed the religious demography’ of the region.⁴⁵  

Qureshi contrasts this bloody legacy with the ‘close to none’ forced conversions enacted by Muslims at the time of the Prophet, and in the century or so after his death. Contending there is ‘no evidence of Muhammad forcing any conversions’, Qureshi draws on scholarship by Asma Afsaruddin and Heather Keaney to add that by 750 CE, ‘fewer than 10 percent of the non-Arab populace’ conquered by the nascent Islamic Empire had converted to what was then a new religion.⁴⁶ This standpoint is backed up by Sarah Stroumsa, who calls ‘forced conversions’ in medieval Islam ‘not the rule, but rather an aberrant exception’.⁴⁷ As Qureshi points out, it is ‘funny’ that popular wisdom associates forced conversion primarily with Islam, when is the Christian-directed Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834 CE) that represents the largest violence-based conversion drive in human history.⁴⁸ Much evidence suggests that both Jews and Muslims suffered massively under this violence. Despite it, tens if not hundreds of thousands of forced converts refused to forget about their old faiths and used skilful subterfuge to continue practicing crypto-Judaism and crypto-Islam.⁴⁹  

There is an allegory in this history crying out to be heard. However much the populist and far right cook up anti-Muslim resentment, and demand levels of assimilation that they know themselves won’t be achieved, Muslim populations in Pollockshields, Madrid or Leipzig aren’t responding by converting to secularism or by packing their bags and going anywhere. To the wilful deafness of some political leaders it bears repeating: Muslims, rightly, know Pollockshields and places like it as their homes. In this essay’s concluding part we turn to Nietzsche’s unexpected engagement with Islam and to Pierre Klossowski’s artistic and Muslim responses. Beyond the vitalness of red sandstone and seagull-visited pavements, there are reminders here that homes are also intellectual, spiritual and, for some, proudly religious places, not apart from but expanding purely physical realms.    

Part 2 will follow shortly.

All pictures are photographs done by the author. The article image shows the showcase of the Islamic Relief Shop on Albert Drive.

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Sobolewska, Maria, Stephen D. Fisher, Anthony F. Heath, and David Sanders, ‘Understanding the effects of religious attendance on political participation among ethnic minorities of different religions’, European Journal of Political Research 54, no. 2 (2015), 271-287.

Staudenmaier, Peter, ‘Evola’s Afterlives: Esotericism and Politics in the Posthumous

Reception of Julius Evola’, Aries 25:2 (2025), 163-193.

Stroumsa, Sarah: ‘Conversions and Permeability between Religious Communities’, Schriften des Jüdischen Museums Berlin (2014), 32-39.

Strube, Julian: ‘Esotericism, the New Right, and Academic Scholarship’, Aries 25, 2 (2025): 304-353, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02502006.

Swindon, Peter: ‘‘You will get your head chopped off” – Scots Muslim writer threatened by extremists’. In: The Herald, 3 June 2018. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/16266154.you-will-get-head-chopped-off---scots-muslim-writer-threatened-extremists/.

The Pew Research Centre: ‘The future of the global Muslim population. Projections for 2010–2030’, Population Space and Place, 13(1), (2011), 1-221.

Williams, Jacob, ‘Islamic Traditionalists: “Against the Modern World?” ’, Muslim World 113, no. 3 (2023), 333-354.

Winter, Timothy: Klossowski’s Reading of Nietzsche From an Islamic Viewpoint, [Unpublished manuscript, shared by Winter with Henry Holland in October 2025, with a text similar but not identical to Winter’s lecture recorded for YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8YJfyOkOY], (2025).

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Footnotes

1: Editor’s note: This second report it scheduled to appear in June next year.

2: Ian Almond, ‘Nietzsche’s Peace with Islam’, 43.

3: On Iqbal and Nietzsche, see: Feyzullah Yılmaz, ‘Iqbal, Nietzsche, and Nihilism.’ Particularly on the 1917 article on Nietzsche and Rumi discussed here, see: ibid., 4 & 10-13.

4: This blunt neologism should communicate my own religious positionality: too much the atheist to puff myself up with the title of agnostic, I’m nonetheless unimpressed by my mind’s arguments for my atheism. They appear to serve just one version of my ‘self’ rather than a more universal truth. Hence the term: agno-atheist.

5: Children in Scotland start primary school aged between 4½ and 5½ depending on when the child's birthday falls.

6: Husain, Among the Mosques, Introduction.

7: Alba is the Scottish Gaelic word for Scotland. Cf. Khadijah Elshayyal, ‘Scottish Muslims in numbers’, 8.

8: Documented in a detailed study described by Ed Husain as ‘non-partisan’: The Pew Research Centre, ‘The future of the global Muslim population’, 15.

9: Husain, Among the Mosques, Introduction.

10: Khadijah Elshayyal, ‘Scottish Muslims in numbers’, 8.

11: For more on Pierre Klossowski’s biography, see: Ryan Ruby, ‘Brilliant Brother of Balthus’.

12: From Winter’s YouTube lecture, at 40:16 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8YJfyOkOY&t=356s.

13: Ibid., at 2:46 minutes.

14: From the precis of Klossowski’s involvement with Nietzsche given by Klossowski’s translator, Daniel Smith, in his translation of The Vicious Circle, viii.

15: ‘The three great Abrahamic religions’ agree that Ishmael is Abraham’s son by Hagar. It is significant that, according to the Torah, Hagar is (at first) non-Jewish: a ‘concubine’ or sex slave purchased in Egypt to serve as a maid for Abraham’s childless wife Sarah, then given by Sarah to Abraham to conceive an heir. On becoming pregnant, Sarah treated Hagar so harshly that she was forced into the desert, and was finally instructed ‘by an angel of the Lord’ to return to her Egyptian home, where she gave birth to Ishmael. This scriptural source (Gen. 16:1–16; 21:8–21) is one basis for Winter’s understanding of Ishmael and Hagar as ‘exile people’. Cf. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Hagar’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, October 22, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hagar-biblical-figure, and ibid., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ishmael-son-of-Abraham.

16: Michael Robbins, ‘MENA Youth Lead Return to Religion’, Arab Barometer, 23 March 2023, https://www.arabbarometer.org/2023/03/mena-youth-lead-return-to-religion/.

17: Winter, ‘Klossowski’s Reading’, at 3:11-5:21 minutes.

18: Jacob Williams, ‘Islamic Traditionalists: “Against the Modern World?”’, 335-336.

19: Ibid., 335.

20: Ibid., 333.

21: Julian Strube, ‘Esotericism, the New Right, and Academic Scholarship’, 305.

22: Cited from Williams, ‘Islamic Traditionalists’, 333.

23: Peter Staudenmaier, ‘Evola’s Afterlives: Esotericism and Politics in the Posthumous Reception of Julius Evola’, 170.

24: Sobolewska’s research as referenced by Winter in an unpublished manuscript of the aforementioned video lecture, that Timothy Winter generously shared with me in October 2025. The text of the manuscript differs slightly from the text spoken in the video. See: Timothy Winter, Klossowski’s Reading of Nietzsche From an Islamic Viewpoint , 2; cf. Maria Sobolewska, Stephen D. Fisher, Anthony F. Heath, and David Sanders, ‘Understanding the effects of religious attendance on political participation among ethnic minorities of different religions’, European Journal of Political Research 54, no. 2 (2015): 271-287.

25: Letter 1865, 469. This and the other translation from a Nietzsche source given in this essay are my own.

26: Deeb is a successful, young, female and Muslim influencer, with over 1.5 million subscribers to her YouTube channel. Here’s her July 2025 video on ‘what really happened at the oxford debate’.

27: I have changed this name and the name of several other speakers in the text, to protect the speakers’ identities.

28: Video debates Harris features prominently in, with titles like “How to Defeat Islam’, speak for themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpWN1lOM1fE. But his most successful critics, including Jonas Čeika who had been featured on POParts (here and again, here), gain greater purchase, at least in their own communities, in their critique of the scientism they see as at the heart of all of Harris’s polemics. C.f. Ceika’s video A Critique of Sam Harris' ‘The Moral Landscape’.

29: More of Scotland’s Muslims have their family roots in Pakistan than in any other country, see: Scotland’s Muslims Society: Politics and Identity, edited by Peter Hopkin, 6-7.

30: Neil Davidson & Satnam Virdee, ‘Introduction’, 2.

31: The philosophical question of authenticity, particularly in relation to Nietzsche, is contested and convoluted. We’re grateful that Paul Stephan has devoted a whole doctoral dissertation to this question.

32: From a postcard to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche, written 6 April 1881 (link).

33: Literally meaning ‘an account’ in Arabic, the hadith refer to the initially oral histories of Muhammad and his close circle, which were first compiled into distinct written collections, beginning one or two centuries after the Prophet’s death. Ed Husain discusses the present influence of the hadith of Muhammad al-Bukhārī (died 870 CE) at several stages of his book Among the Mosques, including chapter 1.

34: Husain, Among the Mosques, chapter 5.

35: Muhammed al-Bukhārī, ‘52 Witnesses’, Sunnah.com, accessed 29 November 2022, http://sunnah.com/bukhari: 2658. Cited from: Saqib Iqbal Qureshi, Being Muslim Today: Reclaiming the Faith from Orthodoxy and Islamophobia, 100-101.

36: Ibid., 100-101.

37: OIBI website, https://oibi.org.uk/, accessed 1 October 2025.

38: Peter Swindon, ‘“You will get your head chopped off” – Scots Muslim writer threatened by extremists’.

39: Musatafa, cited from ibid.

40: Moazzam Zaman, The Need for Creed — Jinn: Beings of Fire, pages not numbered.

41: Matloob Ahmed Qasmi, Emergence of Dajjal: The Jewish King, 66.

42: Christine Ames, ‘Christian Violence against Heretics, Jews and Muslims’, 476 & 467n17.

43: Cf. Qureshi, Being Muslim Today, 214.

44: Gerundi, cited in: David Nirenberg, ‘Mass conversion and genealogical mentalities: Jews and Christians in fifteenth-century Spain’, 9.

45: Ibid., 10 & 3-41.

46: Cf. Qureshi, Being Muslim Today, 216-219; Afsaruddin, The First Muslims: History and Memory, chapter ‘The Age of the Successors’, ebook location 13.3; and Heather N. Keaney, ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan: Legend or Liability?, chapter ‘Conquests’, ebook location 7.30.

47: Sarah Stroumsa, ‘Conversions and Permeability between Religious Communities’, 34. Cf. Yohanan Friedmann, on how both Sunni and Shi’a legal schools allow Jews, Christians, and some other religious groups to retain their religious identity, giving them protected status: Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition.

48: Qureshi, Being Muslim Today, 214-215.

49: Crypto-Judaism is a major theme in Benzion Netanyahu’s The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. For an introduction, see this book, xvi-xviii. On crypto-Islam, see: L.P. Harvey, ‘Fatwas in Early Modern Spain’.