Why the Muslim Crisis Is Philosophical Before It Is Political | Hasan Spiker

In this wide-ranging and philosophically rigorous conversation, we speak with Hasan Spiker on what he identifies as the most pressing crisis facing contemporary Muslims today—not merely a political or constitutional crisis, but a far deeper ontological one.
Spiker argues that Muslims increasingly inhabit someone else’s philosophy: modern categories of reason, ethics, and knowledge that quietly shape how reality itself is understood. While this crisis is often misread as a problem of statehood, nationhood, or law, he insists it is fundamentally a crisis of metaphysics—a loss of the intellectual and social mechanisms that once transmitted, preserved, and actualised an Islamic worldview.
Drawing on Greek philosophy, classical Islamic metaphysics, kalam, and critiques of modernity, the conversation explores why formalism has proliferated amid deep confusion, why traditional kalam may be insufficient to diagnose the present moment, and why modern thought cannot answer its own first principles without recourse to metaphysics. Spiker also reflects on whether a renewed metaphysical synthesis—faithful to tradition yet responsive to modern problems—would necessarily transform the nature of fiqh itself.
This episode is an invitation to think beyond surface-level diagnoses and confront the deeper philosophical conditions shaping Muslim thought, practice, and confusion in the modern world.

#IslamicPhilosophy #MuslimThought #Metaphysics #Ontology #CrisisOfMeaning #Modernity #CritiqueOfModernity #Kalam #Fiqh #IslamAndModernity #PhilosophyOfReligion #IslamicTradition #IntellectualHistory #Worldview #EthicsAndReason #NousNetwork #MuslimIntellectuals #ContemporaryIslam

00:00:00 Bumper
00:02:26 Introduction
00:03:26 The Ontological Crisis of Muslims
00:09:55 Borrowed Philosophies and Their Impact
00:12:12 The Crisis of Objective Morality
00:15:03 The Tension between Freedom and Tradition
00:17:14 Understanding Existence and Essence
00:19:18 The Nature of Modernity and Its Consequences
00:23:44 Metaphysics and its Importance
00:26:22 The Role of Revelation in Knowledge
00:29:40 The Five Severances in Western Thought
00:32:05 The Disconnect between Faith and Reason
00:44:19 Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Epistemologies
00:53:11 Understanding Aristotelian Immanentism
01:07:37 The Aporia of Immanentism
01:18:52 The Role of Form and Substance
01:25:40 Faculty Holism in Islamic Thought
01:32:18 Haqīqah Muḥammadiyyah and Its Implications

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