Conflicted Community – Aimen Interviews Thomas
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Hello, dearest listeners. Eamon Dean is here. Yes, you're hearing it right. Eamon Dean's here, welcoming back our conflicted community. Hello, Thomas. Hello, Eamon. How fun for you to be in the driver's seat this time. Of course, I'm enjoying it. I'm savoring every last moment of it. Dearest listeners, I'm sure you are wondering why I am taking Thomas's place and taking the lead here.

Conflicted started with Thomas interviewing me about my time in Al-Qaeda.

But today I am flipping things on its head to ask Thomas about his life and his own spiritual journey. That's right, dearest listeners. I mean, Eamon, I must say I'm very nervous about this episode because I actually hate talking about myself in this way. I've always enjoyed being just the mysterious voice prompting you to tell us about yourself.

But because, dearest listeners, I am launching a new podcast over on Substack, which I think many of you will be interested in, I have acquiesced to our producer's idea that we devote an episode to telling you about my strange, not as strange as Eamon's life, but my strange and interesting life, I suppose. Yeah.

Well, Thomas, can you tell us a little bit about the Substack? I certainly can. The Substack, which is called Life Sentences and can be found at wisdomreadings.substack.com. That's wisdomreadings.substack.com.

The Substack is my attempt to introduce to the world, or at least to the people that come across the Substack, introduce them to the church fathers. As everyone who has followed Conflicted for a while knows, I, as a young man, converted to Orthodox Christianity during a time that I was living in Greece, and I have been pursuing Orthodox Christianity ever since.

And part of that pursuit has involved me really luxuriating in the church fathers. These are writers, Christian writers, theologians, mystics, divines, etc., who wrote, let's say, more or less in the first 1,000 years of Christianity. And I have found a tremendous amount of insight in the church fathers, and they have aided me tremendously in my own spiritual journey. So I thought, I'll launch a Substack podcast.

podcast where I read out the texts of the church fathers and comment on them as I go, making them relevant to today. I think it's going to be really interesting, and I'm fairly certain people will find the church fathers as fascinating as I find them, but

And so, yes, Life Sentences at wisdomreadings.substack.com. God willing, I will launch the new podcast on Sunday, 14th July. That's just a few days after this episode airs. Fascinating, Thomas. Absolutely fascinating. So, dearest listeners, let's jump right in. ♪

Thomas, I think one of the most important milestones in your life, and I would say maybe it is the most important milestone in your life, is the day you met me. So would you like to describe it? Would you like to describe how we met our dear listeners? I wondered how long it would take before this episode about me became about you, Eamon. But...

Yeah, I can't remember if we ever covered this on the podcast, how you and I met. It was quite by chance, really. I mean, back in 2013, 2014, I was writing a book called Path of Blood, a history of Al-Qaeda's war inside Saudi Arabia, which I was writing along with my co-author, Jonathan Hacker. And Jonathan...

heard an interview with you, Eamon, on the BBC. I think this was when you first came in from the cold and revealed to the world that you were this double agent for MI6 inside Al-Qaeda. And he heard this interview and he thought, oh, we must contact Eamon Dean and talk to him about this history that we're writing. And this was all part of a

a film we were also producing, also called Path of Blood. And we thought, well, we need to get Eamon's input into this film to make sure that we've got it correct, that the facts are right. And so I can't remember exactly how, but he contacted you, I guess, through the BBC and you very kindly replied. So we had you in, we showed you the film, we showed you the book, we talked to you, we interviewed you to make sure that all the T's were crossed and all the I's dotted, etc. And

And somehow, and my memory is a bit vague about this, somehow, Eamon, you and I became friends. I don't know exactly how. What is your memory of that? How did we become friends? I remember you said to me, oh, my God, I have an intellectual crush on you, man. Oh, did I say that? Oh, wow. Gosh. How incredibly forward of me. Oh, my God, you forgot it. I feel heartbroken now. Well, I mean, I think what I was initially struck by, Eamon, was someone...

who, like me, had an intensely personal but also quite sort of intellectual fascination with interest in commitment to religion, you know, because that's the thing that has always characterized me. I don't know why. It's something temperamental, probably. I've always just loved religion, my own religion. I've also loved reading about other religions. And I studied Arabic and Islamic studies at university. I've always found Islam interesting.

tremendously interesting. And with you, I felt that there was someone, you know, a Muslim with whom I could speak extremely frankly about religion, about the differences between Islam and Christianity, about the similarities. You were always an open-minded listener, open-minded conversational partner, but you also taught me a lot. So I think that was it. It was a kind of intellectual, you know, union of minds. Thomas, I'm so pleased that you described me as a good listener. I think...

The definition of a good Muslim listener is someone who doesn't strangle you, like, you know, basically, when you contradict, like, a pillar of the faith. Well, one thing I liked about you, Ayman, is you never really tried to convert me to Islam. I must admit, often when I talk about religion with Muslims, they're not really listening. They're waiting for an opportunity to convert me, which I find slightly frustrating. But with you, you were always more, you know, you were always open-minded.

Yeah, but why would that convert you? You're already on the right path. Oh, sweetie, that's nice. You see, dear listener, how could I not have an intellectual crush on Eamon Dean? Indeed, we're all the people of the book. And I think this is why I find in you a kindred spirit, because for me, I always had a fascination with Christianity and Judaism. And in reality, my thirst to understand Christianity is

and understanding the scripture and understanding like many of the difficult concepts that I was grappling with and I was fed this in a simplified way was about the Trinity, if you remember, we talked about it so many times.

You know, we talked about the question of purgatory, we talked about many aspects of the Christian faith and the disciples and the question of the Holy Spirit and the question of Jesus, the human nature and the divine nature. I mean, goodness, I loved all of these long hours of discussions over delicious steaks most of the time. Yes, delicious steak, that's right.

Steakhouses in London or the scene of our theological conversations. Eamon, actually, you know, you say you had an interest in Christianity, which I know you have. But I'm wondering, when you were in Al-Qaeda, how did that sit with that sort of phase in your life? Because obviously, that strain of Islam is not very Christian friendly. You see, like, I mean, for me, it's not about being Christian friendly. It's about being intellectual, you know, and there is a pursuit here.

Christianity existed. It is the largest religion in the world. Why is it so? Why is it that the whole new world, from Alaska all the way to Patagonia, I mean that the majority of the people there living are Christians. Why is it that somehow this faith spread and it was more or less the faith that sustained monotheism in the period between Jesus and Muhammad?

You know, it sustained monotheism. And in fact, like, I mean, it was the story of martyrs, you know, who were slaughtered during the Roman persecution of Christians. All of these, like, fascinated me, and I wanted to understand more about it. Not just sustained monotheism. I have to say, you know, Christianity really paved the way.

for Islam's monotheism to take hold in the regions that Islam conquered. It's funny when you read the Quran, because the Quran is pitched to the Arab tribes of the Hejaz at that time. The Quran is very interested in disproving, if you like, or speaking against polytheism. And then Muslims spread out of the Arabian heartlands and ended up conquering much of the civilized world.

And so there's this idea that where they went, they brought monotheism. But actually, it was the Christians who had done all the hard work of overturning idol worship, destroying pagan temples, replacing them with temples to the one God. So in a way, it was Christians who paved the way for the Muslims. And then the Muslims said, thank you very much. We'll take this now. Well, since Christians paved the way to Islam, I must ask, Thomas,

What paved the way to your own faith? So I want to know more about Thomas the Child. Oh, Thomas the Child. Gosh, I'm immediately nervous. I hate talking about myself, but I will. I will do it because it's good to promote yourself. This is what I'm told. Well, I grew up in California, born initially in Orange County in Southern California.

and spent some time in Colorado, in Colorado Springs, and eventually ended up during my teenage years in the suburbs of San Francisco. So I'm a Western American, a West Coast guy,

I grew up in an evangelical household. My father's family were Nazarenes, which is a sub-branch of the Methodist denomination. So we don't have to go into the details, but at some point, I think in the early 20th century, some Methodists felt that the Methodists had become too liberal. So they split off and they started a new group known as the Nazarenes. My father grew up in that tradition. It was quite strict, so he wasn't sort of allowed to dance.

He wasn't allowed to, I think, watch television except for sports. My grandfather loved sports, so they did watch sports. So it was a slightly more culturally constrained sort of upbringing than is normal.

He eventually, when he was a teenager, kind of rebelled against this, became a bit of a hippie, ended up spending some time. In fact, interestingly, he spent time in California in a kind of Christian hippie commune for a few years, about which I know very little. He never talked about this. I only found out about it after he passed away. So yeah, so my father's family were sort of Nazarenes, let's say strict, low church Protestant Christians. My mother's family were Irish Catholics.

When my mother met my father, she agreed to become evangelical like him. And we grew up in more or less normal evangelical, middle-of-the-road evangelical churches in

And that was my upbringing. We went to church every Sunday. And beyond that, Christianity didn't inform our lives that much. I mean, we weren't like Bible beaters. We didn't obsess about it. So you were not a Jehovah's Witness or something like that? Well, certainly not. We were very middle of the road. But we were fundamentalists in the sense that we were taught that the Bible was the literal word of God, literally true in every way. My father, in fact...

He taught a Sunday school class at our church. He taught a creationism class to teach us that evolution was wrong. The world was 6,000 years old. Dinosaurs and humans once cohabited, things like that. So that was the sort of world that I grew up in. So I would say it's sort of ideologically wrong.

fundamentalist, but morally quite relaxed. We lived normal American lives, watched television, I loved Star Wars, I had friends. It was a normal life on the outside, but let's say inside, in the mind, it was strict fundamentalist evangelical Christianity. But somehow I can picture you being young, but also I think

you must have been a nerd. This amount of intellectual depository that is in your mind must have started from a young age. A massive nerd. I mean, I don't know. I didn't actually really have a friend, properly speaking, until I was in high school. I was quite a loner.

I read a lot. I mean, I also watched a lot of television. I watched a lot of movies. In fact, what I really wanted to be when I was a teenager was the next Steven Spielberg. I had a great desire to be a Hollywood director, which is kind of crazy to think now. But on the side, I loved writing.

religion. I don't know why. I read as much as I could. I read a lot of books that now might, to me, seem a bit silly, you know, a lot of apologetic works trying to justify fundamentalist Christianity, evangelical Christianity, but also the works of C.S. Lewis, his, you know, like Mere Christianity and Miracles, very famous 20th century books that most Christians read today with great profit, I think, and certainly pleasure. I devoured such books.

I read the Bible a lot. I got to know my Bible very well. And I always had, I just had an instinctive interest in religious things. And that was sustained when in my mid to late teenage years, 15, 16, I started distancing myself from the evangelical tradition that I was following.

Raised in I'd caused it. It was around the time that we moved to the San Francisco area and for the first time You know, I was in I know I was in high school now I was making friends really for the first time and most of my friends were not religious, but I loved I liked them very much They were clever. They were smart. You know, I was sort of exposed to the first time to a broader kind of cultural framework and

And it made me question the evangelicalism that I had until that point been inside. It seemed narrow and, frankly, a bit ignorant. I was growing increasingly embarrassed by the creationism, embarrassed by the anti-intellectualism of that tradition. I mean, frankly, amen.

This might be a controversial thing for me to say, but I'll just say it. You know, the evangelical tradition, if you can even call it a tradition, it's great at raising the next generation, but it's not great at keeping them evangelicals. People tend to stop. They tend to leave evangelicalism once they're adults. I mean, I come from a large family. I'm one of seven children.

You know, none of us is an evangelical. No, we've all stopped being evangelicals. In fact, with the exception of me and one other sibling, we've all stopped being religious. So evangelicalism does not actually lay down very deep roots in the soul. It's quite superficial. You might feel the same is true of various strains of religion.

of modern Salafism, in fact, because there's so much similarity there. Your description is exactly like what I feel about strict Salafism. I mean, the Salafism that is, you know, anti-scientific. You know, there is, unfortunately, I mean, a minority of Salafists who are actually also having this tradition of anti-modernist

would include also anti-science and denying science, denying the Earth is round sometimes. Even a smaller minority than that think that Antarctica is just one great giant ice wall around us. And there are many other worlds beyond and all of that. So, of course, unfortunately, anti-scientific selfism exists.

And it's gaining traction right now, you know, on Twitter, unfortunately. But nonetheless, it shows like that many of the people like in who I grew up with also who were cellophists, they have more or less abandoned the tenets of strict cellophism. No music, no watching TV, you know, no dancing, no nothing like that, basically into far more moderate things.

a version of Salafism when they were starting. And I think, Lakini, you're right. Yeah, and when I say strict, I want to just make it clear. My upbringing wasn't morally very strict. It wasn't like that. It was more ideologically strict. So we were trained...

really through my father to, as I said, be fundamentalist. You know, my mother, and I credit much that is good about myself, if there's anything good about myself, to my mother, who is a much bigger-hearted person than my father was. And she had been raised Catholic. And, you know, she went to the evangelical churches with us because she loved my father. But, you know, she, I don't think, was instinctively ever on board with

the fundamentalist thing because her family, big hearted Irish Catholic family, they like to drink, they like to smoke, they like to have fun together. And they, you know, they went to church to the mass and stuff. In fact, I was always very attracted to that side of my family because they just seem to have a lot more zest for life compared to the more waspish sort of Protestant family of my father's, my father's have. And one thing that happened that was very important is that, you know, my, my dad,

who has passed away and may God have mercy on his soul. In the end, he actually left evangelicalism. Indeed, he left my mother. He abandoned the family at one point and he became a Scientologist.

which was very weird. I mean, we were all shocked when this happened. Is that the faith that Tom Cruise follows? Yes, that's right. He actually became an enormous fan of Tom Cruise. Oh, dear. But what it revealed to me, you know, this happened when I was in my late teens and early 20s. So what it revealed to me was that the religion that he had raised us with, the evangelical tradition that he'd raised us with, was just extremely skin deep and monotonous.

mainly was for him at least a way of expressing a kind of innate paranoia, a kind of narcissistic paranoia that he thought that the world outside was scary and bad and needed to be held at bay, but that he himself was destined for some kind of spiritual greatness.

The evangelical tradition, I feel, can trade in this kind of narcissistic paranoia. So it makes you feel scared of the broader culture. It tries to sort of

shield you from the broader culture and creates a subculture of its own. While at the same time, the worship is mainly self-flattery. I have been saved. God loves me. I am loved by God. I don't think that this is very spiritually fruitful. And certainly in my father's case, it was not because he ended his life as a Scientologist, not in a happy place. So all of these things together conspired to make me

drift away from evangelicalism, but not to drift away from religion. Unlike my siblings, unlike most of the people that I knew in most of my generation, I still, like you, Eamon, I still just had faith. Yeah. And this is why I wanted to just understand, while you were drifting away from evangelical Christianity, but you retained the faith, is that...

The moment in which you were looking for something else that would fill in the void. Well, definitely. I don't know. I mean, I'm really interested. Definitely. So the history is slightly vague in my memory, but through a few very influential on me instructors at a community college that I went to after high school.

And through this community college, I was attending classes at the University of California in Berkeley, comparative religion classes, etc. I had some instructors, some professors who I opened my mind and heart to and who sort of guided me a bit.

towards more intelligent forms of religion. They themselves were California hippie types. I think one of them was a Buddhist or one of them was like a kind of neo-Hindu. But nonetheless, they exposed me to what I could call something like universal metaphysical kind of religious speculative philosophy, often called the perennial philosophy. Let's say a kind of vague platonic philosophy

way of seeing the world.

They exposed me to several books, very important to my personal intellectual development. To simplify it, exposed me to Platonism. And the exposure to that kind of philosophical structure was very life-changing for me. It was like someone had taken a corkscrew and bored a hole into the top of my mind through which light was just flooding. And I felt I just could sort of understand or perceive that.

The structure behind the world. It was a very weird experience, and it caused all sorts of egotistical, rather grandiose thoughts in me. I mean, I know you know what I mean by this, Eamon, because we've talked about it a lot. Of course. You went through something very similar. But-

Through those books and through that experience, I was initially exposed to and very intrigued by Sufism. And weirdly, it was through Sufism that I came to Orthodox Christianity. But that's interesting. I mean, the fact that you found your way back into Christianity, I would say, through an Islamic Sufism detour, I would say. Yes, I mean, it is interesting. There are, I mean, a lot of Westerners who become engrossed in this sort of

traditional Platonic, Neoplatonic philosophy end up as Sufis? Because as you know, Eamon, Sufism itself was highly influenced by Platonic speculative philosophy and the simplicity of Islamic theology and metaphysics with the one God who transcends the created order but also stands at its pinnacle and

from the one God in various degrees come emanations of the divine being through all the way down to the bottom. And it's a very appealing, quite rational structure that I think a lot of intellectuals find attractive, including myself. And it was through reading books on Sufism that things like the way in which contemplative prayer, which is to say the way in which praying

with a focused mind, the name of God with faith in the heart. You know, this sort of idea, direct, passionate, focused, contemplative prayer on the name of God. It was through Sufism that I was first exposed to that very idea, the very possibility of that. And then,

when through these Sufi books I found, in fact, in a footnote of one of the books, I found mentioned a book called The Greek East and the Latin West by a writer called Philip Sherrard. And the title intrigued me. I thought, oh, The Greek East and the Latin West. What does that even mean? Having been raised a Protestant, I vaguely knew about Roman Catholicism through my mother's family, but that was very, very vague. I knew nothing really about Eastern Christianity.

So I went to the Berkeley University Library and I found that book and I read it. And that really is the moment. That's the watershed moment for me, reading that book, which clearly...

It's not a long book. It clearly expressed or revealed to me how the Greek Christian tradition was a thing. It was different in some integral key ways from the Latin Western Christian tradition. And that at the heart of that Greek tradition was something called hesychasm, an ancient contemplative prayer practice.

that focused on the divine name, Jesus Christ, and basically was a program of penitential contemplative prayer that slowly purified the soul of its passions so that the mind might in time through the grace of God be united to the divine. When I realized, oh my Lord,

there's a tradition of contemplative prayer like this in Christianity, I thought I needed to know more because I always instinctively remained a Christian. I had a instinctive love for Jesus and just a deep-rooted faith in his divinity. And obviously, Ayman, as a Muslim, this is something that you do not

affirm and we have talked about this a lot. But in me that was just always there. I could never get rid of it, which is why I could never be a Muslim because Islam required me to denounce the divinity of Christ, which I just cannot do. I will not do. And so that's what led me, aged 20, to leave America and travel to Greece.

where I hoped to be initiated into this tradition. Well, Thomas, this is all fascinating, and that's why we should take a break, and then we come back in order to talk about your life in Greece and how you were wolfing all of those souvlakis and saganakis and all of the wonderful, delicious Greek cuisine. Oh, sorry, like an eye digress. But anyway, see you after the break. ♪

Dear listeners, we're back in order to chart the spiritual journey of Thomas Mull. So Thomas, before the break, we were talking about you traveling to Greece.

Now, as you know, there is no monastic tradition in Islam. So this is all Greek to me, as they say. Pardon the pun. So therefore, can you explain to us, I mean, what happened when you first landed in Greece and then made your way into that monastic order? Well, when I first landed in Greece, the first thing that happened was that I had a tremendous...

shock. It was like a bucket of cold water was poured down my back. I didn't mention it in the first half. We have talked about it before on Conflicted. Part of my movement towards orthodoxy through reading into Islam was a growing hatred of the West.

and a growing hatred of modern life. You know, Eamon, you and I shared this as young men. We were those kind of young men who had been seduced to a vision of things which said that everything in the past was good and modernity was bad. And that book that I mentioned, The Greek East and the Latin West, was to some extent interested in arguing that

that all of the problems in the modern world can be laid at the foot of Latin Western Christian theology and everything that came from it. So that is what had influenced me to leave California, which as far as I was concerned was about as West as you could get and go East as you know, starting East. So I ended up in Greece and,

And I had in my mind, because I was tremendously ignorant about the world, I had in my mind, you know, Athens. I thought I was going to see, you know, marble colonnades and men in togas being extremely philosophical. I promise you, Eamon, I kind of literally thought that was what I was going to find. Goodness. So imagine my shock there.

When I landed in a very modern Balkan, Eastern Mediterranean concrete jungle, and within hours of arriving in Athens, within hours, I had met some guy on, at first I'd gone to a Byzantine chapel,

that I just noticed. I went into the chapel and that was like, oh, this is more like it. You have to go down several steps because it's such an ancient building. And you go into this little tiny church covered in frescoes, very dark, very little light, some candles burning. You see the saints on the walls. It was so atmospheric. And I thought, oh, this is what I'm after. This is what I'm after. And I come out and a man comes up to me and says, oh, I see you are interested in Greece. Are you? Oh, well, I have a traditional pub. Would you like to come to my pub?

And I thought, this is what I'm after. This is a Greek. This is the salt of the earth. This is a Greek. He's going to show me the delights of the non-modern way of being. So I went to his traditional pub, which turned out to be really, I mean, a whorehouse, I have to say. It was basically a seedy den.

dive bar at the back of which were lots of women just sort of hanging out. One of whom came up to me accompanied by a huge bouncer who said, wouldn't you like to buy me a drink? I think she was from the Ukraine or something. Wouldn't you like to buy me a drink? And I didn't know what to do. So I thought, okay, I'll buy you a drink. And the bouncer handed me, handed me a bill for something like a hundred dollars for the one drink.

So within hours, the noble non-Western, non-modern Greeks had swindled me out of much of the money that I had in my pocket. It was a very racing introduction to Greece.

But that didn't characterize my entire time there. Eventually, I mean, the next day I got on a train, I went up north to Thessaloniki, and from Thessaloniki, I took a bus to a city called Ouranopolis, a little town, Ouranopolis, the city of heaven, and there boarded a boat and sailed to Mount Athos, a peninsula that stretches into the Aegean Sea on which are 20 ancient Byzantine monasteries.

It's called the monastic Republic of Mount Athos. Women are not allowed to visit and really Amen. I mean, if you could see these monasteries, you would be enchanted, blown away as indeed I was. They are huge medieval Byzantine castles, really castles sometimes in the sky built high up on these rather precipitous rocks and cliff faces.

It's almost like in the Lord of the Rings terms, it's like ending up in Rivendell, someplace that seems out of time, you know, where the traditions that have ever wells have died are being maintained.

And so that's where I ended up. I went to a specific monastery there. I spoke to the abbot eventually and said, "I'm interested in Orthodox Christianity. I may even be interested in becoming a monk. I don't know, but what I really want to do is to learn a hesychastic prayer. I want to learn this tradition." And so he said, "Well, you can stay." And so I became what's known as a catechumen. So I was preparing for baptism.

And I stayed for six months initially in that monastery as a catechumen.

living the life of the monastery just like really any young monk and being taught how to pray in the athonite fashion, in the way of Mount Athos. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. And can you tell me about your feelings at the time, about your inner spirituality? How was it? Did you feel like that as if

You stepped into heaven and earth, I think. I felt that way, but I mean, I'll be completely honest, Damon, and I know that this is something that you'll understand. I mainly felt humanness.

hugely narcissistic in my mind. I mainly thought that I was coming to this great center of spiritual learning where any moment they would realize that what they had in me was just a man destined for religious greatness, that I understood everything. And in fact, sometimes I even would think, no, no, they're going to learn from me.

I mean, I was really enthralled to that kind of youthful religious narcissism, which I know as a young jihadist, Salafist, Ayman, you felt too. It's so common. We talked about it on the show. Exactly. Yet, can you say that this narcissism, you know, if we can't call it this way, is what then, you know, more or less led you towards, you know, some sort of disillusionment?

You know, with the way of the monastic way. No, no, I don't think so. I would say the opposite. In fact, I can remember quite clearly a moment, about three months maybe, or even less, two months into that first stay in the monastery, where actually what happened was like a blinding flash of a humiliating light. My narcissism was made extremely clear to me.

There was an older man from Sweden, actually, was visiting the monastery really as a pilgrim. And he was very old and quite poorly. So he asked me if I would walk with him to the next monastery just to accompany him because he was a bit frail. So I agreed to do that. And halfway on the journey, I just...

suddenly realized that the whole time throughout the journey I had been congratulating myself on how incredibly kind-hearted I was to be helping this man. I just realized how incredibly

How insufferably smug I was inside. Every thought of my mind was congratulatory, was self-aggrandizing. Every thought. It came like a flash of light and it totally demolished me. It was like a vampire being exposed to the sun and beginning to burn. I felt this shame, this deep shame, this true shame.

vision of how proud I was. And I just began to weep. And I went back to the monastery in tears. And I just sort of tried to express how abject I was, what a terrible experience

insufferable narcissistic asshole I was in my mind and I still am you know really it's it doesn't go away and I was just it was terrible and the monk that I was talking to said aha you see you have taken a big step on the way towards the truth you are seeing yourself so in fact the narcissism was setting me up for that vision of

that humiliating vision, without which, you know, I don't think the soul can progress on the way, frankly, on any way, but certainly the Christian way, which is all about ultimately, you know, being humiliated. It's not so much about being humble as much as it is being humiliated. I think, Minou, the vast majority of our listeners, and of course myself, are ignorant of the monastic tradition and monastic life. Could you just describe what is...

You know, the living day-to-day, like, you know, how is it, you know, to live like a monk? What is it like? Like, just describe it. Well, I can describe it from my experience. And in the end, so just to make it clear, I spent six months in the monastery as a catechumen, after which point I was baptized. I left the monastery. And then for a year or so, I was traveling around Jerusalem.

visiting other monasteries, at which point I realized I really wanted to be a monk. So I came back to that monastery on Mount Athos and for seven months was a novice monk there thinking I would be a monk.

But in the end, I decided to leave that monastery. And I, again, started traveling around a bit. I went for four months to the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai in Egypt, thinking I might be a monk there. I went to a monastery outside Jerusalem, thinking maybe that would be the place for me. So I was always sort of looking to be a monk and in the end decided that the monastic path was not for me. So that's my exposure to monasticism.

But during those first months on Mount Athos, the day started at 3:00 AM and it begins, you're woken up by what's called a simandron, which is a big wooden plank that one monk's job is to take and go around the monastery beating. To wake everyone up and to tell them it's time to go to the church. And they say actually that that was the way that Noah

alerted the animals to come into the ark. That's what they say. And we're like the animals and the church is like the ark. And we go in and save ourselves from the flood of passion and ignorance into the church. So being woken up by the simandron, I went into the church.

And then really for five hours, there's church, which means in darkness at the beginning with just a bit of candlelight here and there, standing more or less standing throughout as these monks were chanting this Byzantine chant for hours and hours and hours and hours, which I could understand nothing, of course. And you're just standing there and you've been instructed that your job is to sit there

attentively praying the Jesus prayer, praying the Jesus prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, over and over and over again. While the service, which was ornate and complicated with priests with incredible, beautiful vestments and candles and candelabras swaying and incense and kind of totally mystical, ancient, like it felt like a veil was drawn and I was

Again, in Lord of the Rings terms, it's like I'd left the third age and gone back in time to the first age, to the Silmarillion age, you know, the age when elves dominated Dothraki.

dominated Middle Earth. It was just so incredibly magical. But I was just there standing, saying the Jesus Prayer over and over and over again. I had an obedience in the monastery, a task which I was given to do, which was to work in the refectory to prepare, not to cook. So I wasn't in the kitchen, I was in the refectory, washing tables, laying tables, sweeping floors, preparing salads and things, things that didn't require cooking.

And so at some point in that first morning service, I and the other people in the refectory would leave the church, go set it up for breakfast. We'd come back. Then there'd be the liturgy, you know, let's say the mass. And after that, we'd have breakfast followed by a few hours of work. And then you go back to your room where you get a little bit of sleep. And then you have evening prayer. And that's two hours. And then you have dinner and you have another prayer. And then you go back to your cell where then the cell rule begins. That's when you by yourself pray.

in your room, pray. And again, it was the Jesus prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, over and over again. And in fact, the monastery that I was at practiced a tradition of saying the Jesus prayer all the time. So we were told, everything you're doing, from the first moment that you wake up to when you go to sleep at night,

you're just constantly saying under your breath the Jesus prayer constantly, constantly, constantly. And for weeks and weeks and months, I was doing this, just saying it constantly.

And, you know, to the point where sometimes you feel like you're being driven crazy, you know, especially since at the same time, you're only sleeping four hours a night and you're eating very minimal, minimal food and a purely vegetarian diet. And when I arrived at the monastery, it was Lent. So it was extremely minimal, the food. We were fasting quite rigorously. And you're in church for hours a day, hearing this chant, smelling the incense. It

It was heady, intoxicating, a little bit deranging, but I can say, dear friend, amen, and dear listener, that it was an authentic and truly spiritual way of life that actually did have an impact on me. And I can't explain it except that religion is real. God is real.

Spirituality is genuine. And if you follow these ancient traditional ways, certainly if you follow the ancient Orthodox Christian way, your being is slowly transformed. Your mind is slowly transformed.

You understand more about yourself. And it's an often humiliating experience, but it is often a joyful experience. I can't explain it. In fact, it makes me uncomfortable even trying to explain it. But it was a remarkable time, a truly life-changing time. In terms of text, you must have been really learning, reading, writing.

certain texts, I mean, in order to understand the religion that you are following. So was there any kind of intellectual study within the monastery? Well, in fact, that's a good question. So there is a collection of Eastern Christian monastic texts. This collection is known as the Philokalia, which is a Greek word that means love of the beautiful.

And it's a big, massive five-volume set. The earliest text is from, I think, the late 4th century. And the most recent text is from the, I think, early 18th century. So it spans 1,300 years.

And it is organized chronologically, but also thematically. And I had left California with this in my backpack, the Philokalia, and I had been reading it, not understanding it a lot of the time, and sometimes even being rather put off because it focuses a lot on ascetical practice, on fasting, on vigil, on not sleeping. I kind of thought at some times I thought it was a little bit sort of

overwhelmingly negative in its attitude towards the world. You know, this is very monastic, of course. But I was reading the Philokalia, and this was my first exposure to the church fathers, because the writers included in the Philokalia are all church fathers. But in the monastery itself, I wasn't really doing that much reading. There wasn't time to read, and also, there were rather strict rules about what I could read.

I was allowed to read the Gospels and some patristics, some texts by the church fathers that were prescribed for me to read. But beyond that, I wasn't really allowed to read. They really did emphasize obedience on doing things.

doing the tradition, both prayer, going to church, fulfilling your obligations to the brotherhood, your duties, etc. They didn't really emphasize the intellectual tradition at that level because I was very young. I mean, I was given to understand that if I were to have progressed further, then more and more and more of the intellectual tradition would have been made open to me. Since leaving the monastery and since deciding not to be a monk, I have continued to...

read the Church Fathers to some

you know, to some degree, and they have very much influenced me. And, you know, for that reason now, I'm launching this Substack, hoping to expose other people to the Church Fathers, because I honestly believe that despite the antiquity of these writings, they remain very relevant to the modern age, to the extent that we're still human beings. And obviously Christians especially will get a lot out of them, but I think even Muslims would find

These writings fascinating because, you know, frankly, I mean, Muslims don't know that much about Christianity. Often they think they know more about it than they do because they've been told they've been given their talking points about how to contradict Christian doctrine. But I think a lot of Muslims would be shocked.

to see just how similar Christian spirituality is to Muslim spirituality. I think they would be amazed. And it's no surprise since to some extent Muslim spirituality, especially in its Sufi tradition, is directly linked to the Christian monastic tradition that preceded it. You know, Thomas, when you talk about the monastic tradition and when you talked about your daily life in the monastery, it was extremely reminiscent of

of our daily lives in al-Qaeda camps as men, only men, waking up an hour or 90 minutes before dawn in order to pray

And then after that, the dawn prayer. After the dawn prayer, there's a lesson. After the lesson, there is a morning training in terms of physical training. And then after that, we have, you know, the training on weapons. Then a lesson. Then lunch. Then one hour sleep. And then after that, a religious lesson. And then after that, a...

military lesson, military training, theory or practice, and then after that another religious lesson, the prayers of Maghrib and Isha, the dinner, and then you sleep, and then you wake up five hours later to repeat all of this again.

This is why they used to call us, you know, Ruhban al-Layl for Sarn al-Nahar. Monks at night, warriors in the day. You know, it's like monks of the night and knights of the day, in a sense, like knights. Oh, yes, of course. That's even better. Exactly. Well, I mean, on Mount Athos, we were monks of the night, monks of the day. There was no weapons training. Indeed. And yet...

I left that warrior monastic tradition. The question is, why did you leave? Everyone knows why I left, but the question is, why did you leave? Well, this is, you know, this is, I mean, I'm going to say, I'm very...

I'm self-conscious about this because this is a very personal question. Why did I decide to leave that monastery and in the end decide not to be a monk at all? But I'm just going to tell you, and the listener might be shocked to hear. As I said, I was baptized on Mount Athos. I went away traveling, and then I came back as a novice monk. And about four months into my novitiate there, it was Christmas Eve, in fact, and I was in my cell there.

my monastic cell, it was late at night, I was doing my prayer rule and I was in total agony, I would say. I'm sure I was sort of crouched on the ground, my forehead on the floor, crying snot all over my face because I was totally torn inside. Because having been raised an evangelical Christian in a fundamentalist religion, a fundamentalist form of Christianity, and then having in my teenage years been exposed

to a more intellectual mode of understanding religious truths, a more universal mode, which revealed to me how the literal meanings of the scriptures, the literal meanings of dogmas, the literal meanings of the world,

are just windows unto a deeper, profounder, truly and wholly spiritual meaning that is universal. And that leads the mind all the way up to the truly universal one truth, etc. Having had that experience and based on that experience decided to go and learn hesychastic prayer on Mount Athos. When I was there in the Greek monastery, in an orthodox environment,

I increasingly began to think that in its own way, that environment was also quite fundamentalist, which of course was a broader realization that even though those books that I had read that had influenced me to go to Mount Athos, even though those books had created in me this sense that the West is bad, modernity is bad, the East is good, pre-modernity is good.

The truth is that that way of thinking is in itself very modern and Western. And that when you go to any traditional religious environment, the people there are...

more or less fundamentalist in the sense that they believe in a simple way what their tradition have given them to believe. And this is not a bad thing. They just believe it. They have not subjected it to the same degree of scrutiny as a modern person is forced to do. Since a modern person comes to traditional worlds

with a whole different set of assumptions about the nature of reality, a scientifically driven, rationally based understanding of society. So a modern person is forced to subject traditional religion to certain scrutiny that the traditional people themselves are not. And so I found there was a kind of tension in me about this. And weirdly, and I'm sure Christian listeners will find this extremely weird, what was primarily at the front of my mind on that Christmas Eve night was

was that I had this belief and in my own heart it seemed like it could coexist with my Christian belief. I just believed something which I knew the abbot of the monastery and that the brotherhood did not believe and would not accept me believing. And so I went to the abbot's door and I knocked on it and I said to him, I have to confess this thought and

I had been told, it's part of the monastic tradition, to confess your thoughts to your spiritual elder, because he must know what's going on in your mind. I must confess a thought, and the thought was, Muhammad was a prophet. Goodness. I said to this Greek monk, who was a Cypriot Greek monk, whose father had been murdered by Turkish soldiers during the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in the 70s. I said, I can't hide it anymore. I just believe that Muhammad is a prophet.

This did not go down well. And for the following three months, it became harder and harder for me to stay in the monastery. And so I left. Now, it's not for nothing that I ended up on Mount Sinai for a few months later.

It was while in Mount Sinai at the monastery of St. Catherine there that I was working in the garden of the monastery alongside Bedouin laborers, first exposed to Arabic speakers, first exposed to Muslims, deciding to go back to London to study Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of London. I was always sort of haunted by this question. Why Islam? Why does Islam exist?

I think intelligent, informed Christians must ask themselves this question because Islam, from a strictly Christian point of view, was not supposed to happen. And it doesn't make sense to us because we feel that the revelation of Christ and the tradition that the church maintains is enough. It is a full truth. So why did Islam happen? The church has said, well, Muhammad was the Antichrist.

foretold by Christ. An antichristic character will rise and will subject the world to slaughter and delusion. Okay, that's the Christian view. When I was a young man, it just didn't sit well with me, that story, especially given that it was 1300 years later. Islam had

conquered the civilized world, had created a civilization of its own, which I knew from my reading had resulted in great sanctity in places, some great saints, some great spiritual masters, men who were purifying their souls through repentance and prayer. So that has been the whole movement of my intellectual life. How can I be a Christian and understand why Islam exists? And it was that that eventually led me to you, Eamon, and to this podcast. Indeed.

What a wonderful journey, I would say, but also like an Amin Yaseeh. You know, there is a saying in Arabic, that seeking knowledge starts in the cot and ends in the grave. There is not a moment that you can say that you are not learning something new all the time. And just by listening to you, Thomas, now,

I feel like I have learned something more about myself. Oh, wow, Eamon, that's very kind of you to say. And I think many listeners will find this, I believe that many listeners will find the same experience. I'd like to end the episode really with this, and this is in a way harder for me to say, Eamon, because I wouldn't wish to offend you, but ironically, age 21, telling that abbot, I believe Muhammad is a prophet, and for that reason, ultimately being compelled to leave the monastery.

going to university, studying Arabic and Islamic studies, living in Damascus, working as a documentary filmmaker, making documentary films in the Arabic language for Arab broadcasters, writing a book on the history of Al-Qaeda. Now, I would be less certain that Muhammad was a prophet. And I just want to, you know, full disclosure, Eamon, my exposure to Islam, especially in its most modern modes, has rather

shaken my feeling that maybe there is something in it. And sometimes I think, oh, maybe that abbot was right all along and that in his providence, God has allowed Islam to exist and to push back the borders of the church in the places that it does exist, etc.,

for a reason that we don't understand that will be revealed at the end of time, etc. So now I'm way more on the fence about that, Amen, than I was as a young man. Full disclosure, I don't know what I believe anymore really about it, but it's harder for me when I see the things we talk about on Conflicted, you see the way in the modern period certainly that Islam is used, both in terms of terrorism, but also in terms of the way I see Islam.

Islamic societies embracing untrammeled materialism in terms of the development of their societies today. I don't know. Anyway, that's sort of a rather awkward thing for me to say. I hope you don't feel offended. No, I don't feel offended at all. I mean, Thomas, I deal with many people who would tell me to my face, you know, how could you, you know, as an intellectual person, follow the teachings of a pedophile?

You know, they mean like the Prophet Muhammad. So, of course, I get this question to my face. I don't respond by strangling them and, you know, strangling the life out of their eyes or whatever. What I do immediately is to say, okay, look, sit down with me here. I'm going to explain it to you. And then I explain it to them rationally that actually...

The book of Hadith got it wrong, the historians got it right. As simple as that. Aisha wasn't six, Aisha was 18, you know, when the Prophet married her. And that's it, because of all the historical evidence, not because of one single text in a book. I see, that's interesting. You know, so for me,

When people tell me, to my face, you know, when I tell you in all honesty, when a victim, you know, someone whose son died in one terror attack in Europe, when she confronted me in one of the talks I gave, like, you know, basically, and she told me, like, you know, how could this violence be? How could this? How could that? I had to sit her down and to say, well, look, just remember that the vast majority of the people killed trying to bury this fundamentalism are Muslims themselves.

In other words, we are not only just trying to end this violence, but we are trying to shield you out of this violence in order to really sort out that civil war within Islam. Because, you know, imagine any monotheistic religion, you know, will descend no matter what into Islam.

the battle of who's on the truth, me or you. It's up to me, no, it's up to me, no. And everyone starts to battle it out. And so for me, when you tell me that somehow you're confused by Islam the state and Islam the community, which is, this is the difference, like Islam the faith and Islam the state or the community. What is...

which one is the right? And the reality is for me, Islam, the spirituality, trump either the state or the community. Islam, the faith, and the spirituality. Because at the end of the day,

Muhammad did not come to start an empire. Muhammad did not come to start a dynasty. Muhammad came to start a movement of faith. That's it. And what he said, "Innama bu'istu li utammimamakarimal akhlaq" that I came in order to purify manners, in order to install manners as the means of which humans can live righteously on earth. And that's it.

So I understand totally, you know, the predicament of many people finding themselves in when they see the bloodthirsty, sadistic violence that could, you know, come out of this faith. But can you believe it that even Muhammad himself foresaw that?

when he said about the khawarij, they will come, the first people who will come, you will think they are the most biased people on earth. They pray more than you do, they fast more than you do, and they recite the Quran more than you do, and yet they will be the first to go into hell. Why? Because of their zealotry. Well, I mean, this is the real question, isn't it? I mean, my substack,

which I'm launching and which will be at wisdomreadings.substack.com and it's called Life Sentences, will not be about this. The Substack will be very kind of, it's quite medieval really. I'll read through a text, an ancient Christian text, stopping every sentence or so to offer commentary to help explain it because they're not easy to understand. But I think

There's great value in having someone just read it to you and explain it to you with that immediacy. And it's going to be entirely about Christianity, but ancient Christianity that still is being practiced today in the Eastern Christian world, especially in its monasteries. So maybe some of you dearest listeners will be interested in that.

So please, if you are interested, go to wisdomreadings.substack.com and subscribe. Indeed, even take out a paid subscription. That would be extremely good. Being a podcaster is a lot of work. And now that I have two podcasts under my belt, I will need a bit of remuneration for it. So I hope you'll find yourself moved to take out a paid subscription.

To access the new Substack podcast, go to wisdomreadings.substack.com and sign up. You'll receive instructions on how to access the podcast itself on your preferred podcast app. I will be the first, Thomas. Okay.

That's all for today. Thank you, Eamon, for flipping things on its head and asking me some questions for once. Yeah, I enjoyed being the interrogator this time. I know. I'm just in the good cop mode. Just wait until my bad cop mode comes in. Oh, dear. And actually, I think, if I'm not mistaken, we got through a whole episode without a single dad joke, which is quite refreshing for me. Thank you, Eamon.

Dearest listeners, thank you, dearest listeners, for subscribing. A bonus episode for the Conflicted community will be coming to you in two weeks. And in the meantime, Conflicted Season 5 returns next week on July 17th.

Season five is going to focus on Africa. And in the first episode, we'll be giving you an overview of Africa, explaining its history, the security situation there today, the geopolitics of the continent to set us up for the season to come. We'll see you then. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle. Music