Abdul-Rehman Malik shares a character-building experience from childhood.

Character Building (Pause for Thought on 26th September 2014)

Abdul-Rehman Malik recalls his childhood introduction to Top 40 music, while in search for Hayey's comet.

A Comet's Pilgrimage (Pause for Thought on 3rd October 2014)

Abdul-Rehman Malik shares moments of sleeplessness and ponders the important things in life, on the Chris Evans sho.

Sleepless Nights (Pause for Thought on 24th October 2014)

The Malik Hop (Pause for Thought on 28th November 2014)

Abdul Rehman Malik considers how he hopes his son will surpass him in wisdom, generosity & love.

"Are they a London species?" (Pause for Thought on 30th January 2015)

Abdul-Rehman Malik considers his ambivalent relationship with Valentine's Day.

Finding True, Eternal Love Beyond Mere Shades of Grey

Spring - as one book closes, another is opened (Pause for Thought on 10th April 2015)

"We were kindred spirits negotiating the angst of our young lives."

Writer Abdul-Rehman Malik on Chris Evan's Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2

Far From Madding Crowds (Pause for Thought on 17th April 2015)

"We are not measured by the opportunities given to us, but what we make of them."

Writer Abdul-Rehman Malik on Chris Evan's Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2.

Grandma Betty (Pause for thought on 27th March 2015)

Monday 15 August 2011
Early Breakfast Show, BBC Radio 2 with Vanessa Feltz (sitting in this week is Richard Allinson)

Note: The sound capture caught the end of the song preceding the piece... let it finish and then listen on. 

Transcript:

Most of us still remember the trepidation and slightly sickening thrill of that long moment just before we receive our exam results.  Promise and peril lie equally before us. For the conscientious, hardworking and lucky, it’ll be a moment of excitement, the beginning of much dreaming and planning.  The coming temptations of youth will be squeezed in between heady college days, gap year promises of self-discovery and university admissions. And for the rest, there’ll be some disappointment, maybe even anger. Some will shrug and swear; others will try harder. Most will muddle through. 

My friend Hala never got his exam results. I don’t think he even had a chance to take his exams. 

The first time I met Hala, it was on the basketball court. Not that it was much of a match-up – I had neither the physique nor the proficiency to give proper competition. Hala showed unusual skill and intensity as he careened up and down the boards. His game persona was full-on, six-and-a-half foot, sixteen year-old bluster. Not the type of guy I was going to become friends with, I thought at the time. 

Off court, he was something entirely different. He was charming and genuine with a can-do attitude and an inquisitive mind that comfortable alongside his streetwise manner. Hala’s parents had come to Canada as refugees from war torn Somalia, holding their family together against the odds. They passed on their quiet tenacity to their son. 

Whether we were sitting in a study circle or at the coffee shop chomping doughnuts, Hala was good company. 

When he calmly told us he’d been diagnosed with aggressive spinal cancer, we could’ve mistaken it for a remark about the weather. He smiled. It would be, God willing, ok. In the months that followed his light never dimmed, but his future did. While we prepped for exams, he began chemotherapy. 

I visited him after a particularly tough round. It was blue skies and sunshine outside and he was determined to come out with us. The opportunities of a beautiful afternoon were not going to be scuppered by his disease. We helped him look for his belt.  He felt incomplete without it. He wanted to look good. He wanted to make it the best day possible.  

Watching the scenes of my beloved London burning last week, I thought about what Hala might have said to the angry young. Having become something of a teenage sage towards the end, I think he would have quoted the Qur’an: “Vie with one another in doing good works. Wherever you are, God will bring you together.”

We helped bury Hala shortly after we got our results. But he passed an even greater test. Seeing the end, he made every last measured moment count.  


"Every last, measured moment...", Pause for Thought, BBC Radio2 (with Richard Allinson)

A reflective anthology which considers the impact of 9/11, ten years after events in Manhattan stopped the world in its tracks. Sound tracked by music from across the genres, Faith And 9/11 combines personal reflections - past and present - with news archive.

Journalist and Pause For Thought contributor, Abdul-Rehman Malik guides listeners through the montage, which includes an interview given to the BBC by the Archbishop Of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, shortly after the terrorist attacks.

Contributors include the architect, Michael Arad, who witnessed the attack from the roof of his apartment and won the competition to design the World Trade Centre Memorial; former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, who has written a new poem reflecting on the events of 9/11; Major Molly Shotzberger, who was the Salvation Army Grief Counsellor stationed at Ground Zero; and Elizabeth Turner, author of The Blue Skies Of Autumn, who was seven months pregnant when her husband died on a business trip to the World Trade Centre.

We also hear from the singer/songwriter Yusuf Islam; New York-born singer-songwriter Gerard Kenny; poet Michael Symmons Roberts; The Rt Revd & Rt Hon Richard Chartres, Bishop of London; Imam Ahmed Saad of Finsbury Park Mosque; and Baroness Neuberger, Senior Rabbi of the West London Synagogue.

Producer: Rosemary Foxcroft 
Presenter : Abdul-Rehman Malik
A TBI Media Production for BBC Radio 2

Faith and 9/11 - A Special Programme for  BBC Radio2 (Presented by Abdul-Rehman Malik)

Transcript: 

Tomorrow marks the feast day of St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment, so this week on Pause for Thought we reflect on all creatures great and small.

I was brought up to pray. My earliest memories include the sight of my parents carefully washing up, rolling out colourful rugs with images of gardens and crescent moons woven into them and standing for the five times daily ritual of reciting, bowing and prostrating. Prayer was the spiritual clock that measured our day. A lesson I try to remember nowadays when I get lazy.

On days when my father made it home early and the weather was nice, we’d all go outside and pray the sunset prayer in our garden, standing together in a straight line under the trees: two crab apples, a few Canadian maples and a towering pine.

Ayman Ahwal knew something about prayer and trees. Much of his life was dedicated to connecting the two. Ayman found faith in the 1960s while wandering the Moroccan desert. Living with local tribes, he experienced the interconnectedness of life, death and the nature. He was transformed.

Living on the edge of poverty, driven by passion and devotion, he spent the rest of his life trying, as he would later say, to love the Earth. Whether it was promoting cycling when it wasn’t fashionable, or declaring a holy war on garbage and waste in Britain’s inner cities, Ayman belonged to a special group of people from whom faith, action and life were one seamless, blessed endeavour.

For the last few years, Ayman’s heart was in the Indonesia province of Aceh. Devastated by the 2004 tsunami, ravaged by decades of war and clear-cut by greedy multinationals, the prognosis for Aceh’s threatened rainforests and the eco-system they sustained was dire. Ayman helped establish eco-villages and train an army of tree-planters. 

“Even if the Day of Judgment should arrive and you are holding a sapling in your hand,” the Prophet Muhammad said, “plant it.” 

Tradition tells us that trees bear witness to the good or the evil done under them or, indeed, to them.

This past Ramadan, I joined a group of friends one night to once again pray with the trees. In an East London park we laid down our prayer rugs. The sounds of traffic nearby meant we weren’t very far away from the metropolis, but for an hour the rustle of leaves and the smell of long grass transported me to my childhood.

That night, Ayman lay peacefully at a Sufi hospice in Birmingham. A few days later he died. Most of his possessions were in the room with him. Friends paid for his funeral service. At the burial, mourners remembered how fondly he spoke of seeing God’s garden.

Far away in the forests of Aceh, the trees wept.


"The trees wept (for Sidi Ayman Ahwal)", Pause for Thought, BBC Radio 2, 3 October 2011

After being present at the death of a friend, journalist Abdul-Rehman Malik has been thinking about what - if anything - comes next. In many faith traditions, death is just the end of the beginning and is the doorway to the eternal. It is the soul that carries us forward.

From the visions of an itinerant Baptist preacher and the reflections of James Baldwin, Abdul-Rehman looks to the urgency of understanding something of the mystery of death while we are alive. The world's most enduring mythologies and beliefs describe a supernatural drama and kind of unseen theatre. Whether it's Virgil writing about crossing the River Styx, or the Prophet Muhammad explaining how the angels surround the soul after death, Abdul-Rehman takes us into this grey area between life and life everlasting.

Richard Thompson captures the comedy of what purgatory might look like, and theologian Dave Tomlinson offers a reinterpretation of the Christian narrative which has resonance with some enigmatic words from Einstein.

Abdul-Rehman seeks solace in the belief that his friend's soul is somewhere full of "life", dancing with the angels nourished by a truer reality. His eternity is just beginning.

Presenter: Abdul-Rehman Malik
Producer: Jonathan Mayo
A TBI production for BBC Radio 4.

Music Played

Carly Simon
Life Is Eternal
HAVE YOU SEEN ME LATELY?. ARISTA RECORDS.
 

Lloyd Chandler
A Conversation With Death
HIGH ATMOSPHERE: BALLADS AND BANJO TUNES FROM VIRGINIA AND NORTH CAROLINA. ROUNDER RECORDS.
 

Richard Thompson
Song of the Keepers
CABARET OF SOULS. BEESWING RECORDS.

Nina Simone
New World Coming
HERE COMES THE SUN. RCA.


Steve Acho
Lightening Crashes (Acoustic Cover)
THE LAST BIG THING. SELF RELEASED.

Readings

Title: Fire Next Time
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Penguin Classics

Title: I am a Bird of Paradise
Author:  Rumi, trans. Hakim Archuletta
Publisher: Unpublished

Title: Aeneid, Book VI
Author: Virgil, trans. Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Faber & Faber
 
Title: Zohar: The Book of Splendor
Author: Gershom Scholem (editor)
Publisher: Shocken

Title: Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife
Author: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, trans. TJ Winter
Publisher: The Islamic Text Society

Title: The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 22, Text 2
Publisher: Penguin Classics

Title: The Discourses of Swami Adiswarananda
Author: Swami Adiswaranananda
Publisher: Rama Krishna

Title: Does Death Exist? New Theory Says ‘No”
Author: Robert Lanza
Publisher: Huffington Post

Something Understood: The End of the Beginning (BBC Radio 4)

Abdul-Rehman Malik - Journalist, Educator and Dad in search of inspiration. 

Dissident Folk

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