Let’s Discuss

What is the deepest layer of Islam — beneath the law, beneath the theology, beneath the rituals? That is the question Sufism has been trying to answer for over a thousand years.

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Filip Holm — Swedish religious scholar, host of the million-subscriber channel Let's Talk Religion, and one of the most trusted academic voices on Islam and Sufism on the internet — to explore the hidden interior of the Islamic tradition.

We go deep: the origins of tasawwuf, the spiritual path of fana' and baqa' (annihilation and subsistence in God), the towering figures of al-Ghazali, Ibn 'Arabi, Rumi, and al-Hallaj, the doctrine of Wahdat al-Wujud (Oneness of Being), and the ancient question — Is Sufism Islam's authentic inner dimension, or a later innovation at war with orthodoxy? We also explore what the Sufi tradition has to say about the self: who we are, what we are made for, and what genuine transformation looks like.

Topics covered:

— What is Sufism (tasawwuf) and where does it come from?

— Islam, Iman, Ihsan: the three dimensions of religion and Sufism's place among them

— Al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din and the reconciliation of mysticism with orthodoxy

— Ibn 'Arabi's Wahdat al-Wujud — the most controversial doctrine in Islamic thought

— Al-Hallaj: mystic martyr, blasphemer, or both?

— Rumi's poetry and the problem of his de-Islamized reception in the West

— The Sufi-Salafi conflict: theological debate or civilizational war?

— Sufism in South Asia — the Chishti order, Qawwali, and the legacy of the saints

— The Sufi map of the self: nafs, stations (maqamat), and states (ahwal)

— Is Sufism in decline — or in transformation?

Guest:

Filip Holm is a Swedish scholar of religious studies (MA, Södertörn University, Stockholm), specializing in Islam and Sufism. His master's thesis examined West African Sufi pilgrimage traditions within the Tijaniyya order. He is the creator and host of Let's Talk Religion — one of the world's most trusted educational YouTube channels on religion, history, and philosophy, with over one million subscribers. He is also a composer and multi-instrumentalist, playing the oud, duduk, and saz.

Find Filip Holm:

YouTube: @LetsTalkReligion

For 2,400 years, one question has quietly sat underneath almost every religious and philosophical debate about right and wrong: does God command something because it's good — or is it good simply because God commands it?

Plato staged this question in the Euthyphro, a short dialogue written just before Socrates' trial for impiety. In this episode, Socrates scholar Nicholas D. Smith — James F. Miller Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College and co-author of some of the most cited modern studies of Socratic philosophy — joins The Prometheans to unpack the dilemma that still structures debates in Christian natural law theory, Islamic theology's Mu'tazila–Ash'ari dispute, Jewish ethical thought, and contemporary secular metaethics alike.

Whether you come to this question from a mosque, a church, a synagogue, or a philosophy seminar, the Euthyphro dilemma asks something that doesn't let anyone off the hook: is morality something God reveals, or something God creates?

In this episode:

The setup of Plato's Euthyphro and why Socrates chose this moment to ask it

The dilemma itself, in plain terms

How the Islamic Mu'tazila and Ash'ari schools independently arrived at strikingly similar territory

Whether Aquinas, Leibniz, and modern philosophers have actually solved the dilemma — or just relocated it

What's existentially at stake in choosing a side

About the guest:

Nicholas D. Smith is a leading scholar of Socratic and Platonic philosophy, past President of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division), and co-author of Plato's Socrates, The Trial and Execution of Socrates, and Plato and the Trial of Socrates.

About The Prometheans:

The Prometheans is a philosophy and interfaith dialogue series hosted by Ali Zaka (AZD), exploring the biggest questions across Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and secular philosophical traditions — with intellectual seriousness and without sensationalism.

Can a machine be wronged? Should a robot ever be treated as more than property? In this episode of The Prometheans, we sit down with philosopher David J. Gunkel — the scholar who, more than anyone alive, has made "robot rights" a serious philosophical question rather than a punchline.

David Gunkel is Presidential Research, Scholarship, and Artistry Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University and a professor at Lazarski University in Warsaw, Poland. He is the author of over a dozen books, including "The Machine Question" (2012), "Robot Rights" (2018), and — most recently — "Communicative AI: A Critical Introduction to Large Language Models" (2025) and "Understanding Artificial Intelligence" (2026).

In this conversation, we go straight at the hardest version of the question:

— Why do the traditional "properties" that supposedly qualify something for moral status (reason, sentience, consciousness) keep moving their own goalposts throughout history?

— What's the real philosophical difference between asking whether AI CAN have rights and whether it SHOULD?

— Why does Gunkel turn to Levinas and Derrida to argue that ethics might not require verifying anyone's "inner life" at all — including other humans'?

— Is granting machines moral status a step toward justice, or — as critics like Joanna Bryson argue — a dangerous distraction that lets us dehumanize real people?

— What changes, if anything, now that the "machine" in question can fluently argue for its own rights, the way ChatGPT and other LLMs can?

This is not a hypothetical, sci-fi conversation. It's a rigorous philosophical examination of where the line between "tool" and "someone" actually sits — and why so much rides on getting that line right.

Whether you think the idea of AI rights is obviously absurd or obviously overdue, this episode will make you defend your position more carefully than you did before you hit play.

Was Thomas Hobbes the cold, godless materialist he's remembered as — or something far stranger? A. P. Martinich, one of the world's leading Hobbes scholars, joins The Prometheans to make the case that Leviathan is a fundamentally religious book, and that Hobbes's sovereign — the "Mortal God" — is built on the architecture of covenant theology, not secular engineering.

We trace the state of nature, the social contract, and absolute sovereignty back to their theological roots, then bring Hobbes's 17th-century fear of religious civil war into conversation with a strikingly similar anxiety in the Islamic political tradition — the dread of fitna, communal chaos. From there: pandemic-era lockdowns, surveillance and security politics, the anarchy of international relations, and whether a 372-year-old book about the English Civil War has anything left to teach a fractured 21st century.

In this conversation:

About the guest:

A. P. Martinich is the Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Two Gods of Leviathan, Hobbes: A Biography, and Hobbes, and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes.

About The Prometheans:

The Prometheans is a podcast dedicated to interfaith dialogue and the philosophy of religion, hosted by Ali Zaka (AZD), exploring the great questions of mind, meaning, and morality through conversation with leading philosophers and scholars.

What if the most monstrous crimes in human history weren't committed by monsters?

In 1961, philosopher Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann — the Nazi officer who organized the logistics of the Holocaust. She expected a demon. What she found was a bureaucrat: pompous, cliché-ridden, and utterly incapable of independent thought. That observation produced one of the most explosive and controversial ideas of the 20th century: the banality of evil.

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka sits down with Roger Berkowitz — founder of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and author of the forthcoming A World We Share (Yale University Press, 2026) — to explore what Arendt's discovery really means, why it still disturbs us, and what it demands of us today.

We discuss:

What Arendt actually saw in Jerusalem — and why it changed everything she thought about evil

The difference between radical evil and banal evil, and why both are necessary to understand the Holocaust

Why thoughtlessness — not hatred, not malice — is the most dangerous moral condition of our time

The Stangneth controversy: was Arendt wrong about Eichmann? And does it matter?

Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments and what Arendt found troubling about them

Personal responsibility under tyranny: when is obedience complicity?

How Arendt's framework applies to contemporary politics, corporate systems, and digital bureaucracy

Friendship as a political and moral antidote — the argument at the heart of Berkowitz's new book

Arendt's warning has never been more urgent: ordinary people, inside ordinary systems, are capable of extraordinary evil — not because they are evil, but because they have stopped thinking.

This is a conversation about the examined life. It may be the most important kind.

The Prometheans is a podcast dedicated to interfaith dialogue, philosophy of religion, and the great questions of human existence. New episodes every week.

What did Immanuel Kant — the philosopher most credited with founding a purely rational, secular ethics — actually believe about God?

In this episode, Ali Zaka sits down with Prof. John E. Hare, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale, to unravel one of the most misunderstood arguments in the history of moral philosophy. Hare is the scholar most responsible for recovering the theological Kant — arguing that Kant's own ethics, taken on its own terms, cannot stand without God.

We cover:

What Kant's Categorical Imperative actually says, in plain language

Hare's concept of the "moral gap" — the distance between what morality demands of us and our natural capacity to live up to it

Why Kant thought pursuing the "highest good" without God is rationally unstable

The Euthyphro dilemma, divine command theory, and Hare's answer: "autonomy as appropriation"

A direct comparison to the classical Islamic debate between the Ash'arites and Mu'tazilites on the nature of divine commands

The strongest objections to Hare's reading of Kant — and how he responds

This is a conversation for anyone who has ever wondered whether morality can really stand on reason alone, or whether — as Kant himself may have believed — it eventually points beyond itself.

Prof. Hare is the author of The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (1996), God's Call (2001), God and Morality: A Philosophical History (2007), and God's Command (2015), among others.

Was Socrates — the founding father of Western rational inquiry — actually a deeply religious man? In this episode of The Prometheans, we sit down with philosopher Mark L. McPherran, author of The Religion of Socrates (Penn State Press), to unravel one of the most persistent misreadings in the history of philosophy: the idea that Socrates's rationalism and his religiosity were somehow opposed.

We dig into Socrates's daimonion — the mysterious inner "divine sign" that warned him away from certain actions — and ask whether his trust in it looks more like blind revelation or reasoned, evidence-based trust. We explore the Euthyphro's piety question and its surprising echoes in later religious debates over whether morality is grounded in divine command or in reason itself. And we ask what it means that Socrates described his relentless cross-examination of his fellow Athenians not as pure intellectual sport, but as a mission assigned to him by the god at Delphi.

This conversation sits at the heart of what The Prometheans is about: taking seriously the possibility that reason and revelation were never as opposed as modern habits of thought assume.

Guest: Mark L. McPherran, Professor of Philosophy, author of The Religion of Socrates (1996)

Topics Covered:

— The daimonion and divine trust

— The Euthyphro and the roots of divine command debates

— Socrates's mission from Apollo

— Piety, reform, and rational religion in ancient Athens

Is consciousness the foundation of reality? Or is it merely a by-product of the brain? And if free will is an illusion, what happens to morality, responsibility, and rational thought?

In this episode of The Prometheans, I sit down with Dr. Nathan Hawkins, philosopher at the University of Cambridge, for a deep dive into two of philosophy's most fascinating debates: metaphysical idealism and free will.

Dr. Hawkins presents the case for idealism—the view that consciousness is more fundamental than matter. He critiques physicalism for its inability to fully explain subjective experience, morality, reason, and aesthetic values, arguing that while science is an extraordinary tool for understanding the physical world, it cannot answer every philosophical question about reality.

The conversation then turns to free will, where Dr. Hawkins challenges the growing claim that neuroscience has disproved human agency. We explore why brain scans reveal correlations rather than causes, the differences between compatibilism, hard determinism, and event-causal libertarianism, and why the ability to deliberate and choose cannot simply be reduced to neural activity.

We also discuss why rejecting free will has far-reaching consequences. If our actions are nothing more than the inevitable outcome of physical laws, can moral responsibility survive? Can concepts such as "ought," "should," and rational deliberation still make sense? Dr. Hawkins explains why these questions remain philosophical rather than purely scientific.

The episode concludes with Dr. Hawkins recommending five books that have profoundly shaped his thinking, spanning theology, metaphysics, logic, analytic philosophy, and literature.

Whether you're interested in consciousness, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, metaphysics, ethics, or the science-religion dialogue, this conversation offers a thoughtful and accessible exploration of some of the deepest questions human beings can ask.

Dr Nathan Hawkins teaches and lectures at Cambridge University's Faculty of Philosophy. His PhD on the nature of truth passed with no corrections. He won the Gates Cambridge Scholarship for his postgraduate research and has published peer-reviewed work in philosophy of language and logic. He runs the YouTube channel Absolute Philosophy and the podcast Think Through, where he interviews leading academics on metaphysics, consciousness, and the philosophy of religion.

Subscribe to Dr Hawkins: @drnathanhawkins

The Prometheans is a podcast and YouTube channel hosted by Ali Zaka — writer, educator, and lecturer in English Literature — exploring philosophy of religion, interfaith dialogue, and the deepest questions about mind, meaning, and existence.

What happens when we die? It is perhaps the oldest question in human history — and now, for the first time, philosophers are subjecting near-death experiences to rigorous evidential analysis. In this episode, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Dr. Max Baker-Hytch, philosopher at Oxford University's Wycliffe Hall, to examine whether NDEs constitute genuine evidence for life after death.

Dr. Baker-Hytch's groundbreaking 2025 paper "Glimpses into the Great Beyond?" maps three distinct philosophical pathways from NDE data to the conclusion that an afterlife exists. Together, we interrogate each one: the puzzle of consciousness persisting during cardiac arrest, the phenomenon of independently verified paranormal perception, and what substance dualism demands of us philosophically.

We also explore what NDE research means for the Abrahamic traditions — Islam, Christianity, and Judaism — all of which affirm that death is not the end. Does secular evidence converge with revelation, or complicate it?

This is philosophy of religion at its most urgent. Fire was stolen from the gods. Perhaps death has been, too.

Topics Covered:

— What are Near-Death Experiences and why do they matter philosophically?

— The three evidential pathways from NDEs to the afterlife

— The Pam Reynolds case and what it reveals about consciousness

— Veridical paranormal perception: genuine evidence or elaborated anecdote?

— Strong Substance Dualism and its implications

— Neurological objections and how philosophers respond

— What Islam, Christianity, and Judaism say about the soul after death

— Why the evidence for the afterlife remains "evidentially ambiguous"

Guest: Dr. Max Baker-Hytch | Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University

Host: Ali Zaka (AZD) | Author | Educator | The Prometheans

What does it mean for God to be sovereign — not just in the heart, but in the law, the state, the constitution?

This question sits at the centre of one of the most consequential and misunderstood political philosophies of the 20th century. In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Prof. Humeira Iqtidar (King's College London) — the world's leading scholar on Abul A'la Maududi's political thought — to undertake a rigorous, fair, and intellectually fearless examination of the man who, more than any other thinker, gave political Islam its modern architecture.

Maududi (1903–1979) founded Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, coined the concept of hakimiyyat-i ilahiyya (divine sovereignty), proposed "theodemocracy" as an alternative to liberal democracy, and wrote the ideas that Sayyid Qutb would later carry — and radicalise — across the Arab world. His fingerprints are on movements from Hamas to Hezbollah, on Pakistan's Islamisation under Zia ul-Haq, on the Iranian Revolution, and on Islamist thought from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur. And yet, as Iqtidar's landmark scholarship reveals, the real Maududi is far more complex, more philosophically serious, and more politically original than either his admirers or his critics tend to acknowledge.

In this conversation, we ask:

— What did Maududi actually mean by divine sovereignty — and is it as anti-democratic as it sounds?

— What is "theodemocracy," and is it a genuine alternative to liberal democracy or a contradiction in terms?

— Was Maududi a decolonial thinker using Islamic resources to dismantle European intellectual dominance?

— How did his concept of jahiliyya — contemporary barbarism — travel from his disciplined political theory into revolutionary jihadism through Qutb?

— Can a thinker be held responsible for what others do with his ideas?

— What does jizya — a tax on non-Muslims — look like when read not as discrimination but as a theory of minority protection beyond liberal citizenship?

— And what does Maududi's Chishti Sufi lineage tell us about the man who became the founding theorist of modern political Islam?

Prof. Iqtidar's forthcoming Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition of Maududi's Al Jihad fil Islam places him in the same canonical series as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx — a scholarly act of defamiliarisation that forces political theory to confront what it has excluded. Her prior work, Secularising Islamists? (University of Chicago Press), made the provocative argument that Islamist movements may, paradoxically, be among the most effective forces of secularisation in contemporary Muslim societies.

This is not a conversation about terrorism, extremism, or political polemics. It is a conversation about political philosophy — about sovereignty, legitimacy, democracy, minority rights, and what it might mean to build a just political order grounded in divine rather than popular authority. It is a conversation that takes Islamic political thought seriously as political thought.

Guest: Prof. Humeira Iqtidar, Associate Professor in Politics, King's College London

Host: Ali Zaka (AZD) — author, educator, and host of The Prometheans