ABU DHABI // A popular religious affairs show made a successful return to television over the holy month after a 10-year break.
Rihla, which addressed current issues affecting the Muslim world, means "trip" in Arabic. It followed US Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf Hanson as he travelled around the globe to debate topics such as terrorism and Islamophobia.
Mr Hanson, known as Sheikh Hamza, and presenter Eissa Bougary met the public and scholars in places from Cambridge in the UK to San Francisco in the US and Istanbul in Turkey.
He said the show was “obviously targeted to the youth and those who are interested in Islam, or have some desire to do something religiously with their lives but are confused about the current times”.
Bougary, also the director of Rihla, said the series would not make for light viewing.
“I don’t believe in programmes that try to make you change your behaviour but ones that make you change your ideology and question your belief system,” he said. “Like ‘is what I am doing really Islam or is there a totally different opinion?’”
In the fifth and six episodes of the season, Sheikh Hamza condemned revolutions such as the Arab Spring because, he said, they made the situation worse and caused more violence.
He said he was “against revolutions, not because I am for oppression” but because they lead to chaos and “an endless route of blood. How many people became homeless and how many buildings got destroyed?
“It troubles me that there are so many revolutionary minds in our community thinking that you will bring anything better by uprisings. Have those people never read history?”
In another episode he addressed ISIL and cited a hadith that predicted a group would emerge that claimed to be righteous but was not. The hadith accurately describes ISIL, stating that its members would name themselves after cities, they would wear their hair long like women, their hearts would be like blocks of iron and they would claim to own a state.
Sheikh Hamza has received death threats from ISIL.
“They put something in their magazine that I was an apostate and there was a reward for somebody who killed me – a reward with God, not a cash reward,” he says. “They did it twice.”
As to whether ISIL’s threats were authentic, he said: “I think they are hoping what they call a lone wolf would do it. They have bigger fish to fry right now.”
The show also examined Islamophobia, exploring the work of some US groups to distort the image of Muslims. The presenter asks non-Muslim Americans for their opinions.
Bougary said he was inspired to address this issue because of his time studying in the US before the September 11 attacks in New York.
Before that “there was a beautiful curiosity about Islam and Saudi Arabia and Middle East culture”, he said.
This had been replaced by “should we be peaceful and -accepting of those people after all that has gone before?”
Sheikh Hamza is also vice president of the UAE-based Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, based in the UAE.
Rihla broadcast daily during Ramadan on MBC at 5pm.
hdajani@thenational.ae
