Usama Hasan

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For Egyptian footballer, see Osama Hassan
Usama Hasan
File:Usama Hasan speaking at Army and Navy Club, Saint James, London.jpg
Born London, United Kingdom
Ethnicity Pakistani
Citizenship British
Occupation Theologian, author, lecturer
Organization Quilliam
Website unity1.wordpress.com

Usama Hasan is a British astronomer, lecturer and theologian who is currently a senior researcher in Islamic Studies at the Quilliam Foundation.[1]

He is a former senior lecturer in business information systems at Middlesex University,[1][2] and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.[3][4] He has argued in favour of a compatibility between Islam and human evolution.[5]

Career

He has stated that he fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation.[6][7]

Hasan was a member of the United Kingdom’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Projecting British Muslims delegations to Egypt in 2008[8] and to Afghanistan (Helmand) in 2010,[9] was a Keynote Speaker at the Anglo-Syrian government-sponsored conference "The Message of Peace in Islam" in Damascus in 2009,[10] and is a Patron of both the Forum for the Discussion of Israel and Palestine (FODIP)[11] and Friends of the Bereaved Families Forum.[12] Usama was also a speaker at the Google Ideas/Council on Foreign Relations Summit Against Violent Extremism (Dublin, 2011).[13]

He is Senior Researcher at the Quilliam Foundation.[1] He has appeared on television programmes, including BBC Hardtalk,[14] CNN,[15] and has also written various columns for The Guardian[16] and The Washington Post.[17]

Controversies

Evolution controversy

Hasan has argued that Islam is compatible with the theory of evolution, describing the story of Adam and Eve as "children's madrasa-level understanding" of human origins while pointing to antecedents of the modern theory of evolution among medieval Muslim philosophers like Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Miskawayh.[5] His lectures have been disrupted by hecklers and he claims to have received death threats.[4][18]

Hasan later retracted some of his views on evolution.[4] Several British Muslim writers, including Inayat Bunglawala and Yahya Birt, backed his right to free speech.[19][20] On 5 January 2013, he was featured in a debate against Yasir Qadhi titled Have Muslims Misunderstood Evolution?, in which he argued in favor of human evolution.[21]

Power struggles at the Masjid al-Tawhid

Hasan has complained about "extremism" at the London Masjid al-Tawhid mosque and in May 2012, as part of the arbitration process, he and all other trustees voluntarily stepped down from their positions as Trustee of the masjid.[22] In June 2012, the new Trustees of the Trust changed the locks of the Mosque doors and employed security guards.[23] According to the website of the Masjid al-Tawhid, the Hasan family "want to ... regain personal control of the mosque".[24][25]

Al-Shabaab video threat

In October 2013 Hasan was alerted by anti-terrorist police that he and other Muslim figures in the UK who had spoken out against Islamist extremism had been targeted by a propaganda video created by Al-Shabaab, the terrorist group responsible for the attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya.[26] [27]

Views

Fatwa against ISIS

In 2014 he and others issued a fatwa condemning British Muslims fighting for the “oppressive and tyrannical” Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Their fatwa ”religiously prohibits” would-be British jihadists from joining the Islamic State and orders all Muslims to oppose ISIS' “poisonous ideology”.[28][29]

Summer fasting times

Usama believes that Muslims should fast shorter hours rather than the sunrise-to-sunset hours that most Muslims do as the day can run for 19 hours.[30]

References

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External links

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