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Prophet Muhammad ﷺ led 80 military missions in 10 years — and personally commanded 27 of them. Yet centuries of pious biography have produced a portrait of near-pacifism that, according to one of the world's leading military historians, cannot survive contact with the earliest Arabic sources.

Professor Joel Hayward — a committed Muslim, a Shaykh with formal Islamic teaching authorizations in theology and Sirah, and one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world — joins The Prometheans to ask what the historical record actually shows.

What does an honest reading of al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Hishām, and al-Wāqidī reveal about the Prophet's strategy, his ethics on the battlefield, and the moral code he developed and enforced during a decade of warfare? And what does it mean — theologically, ethically, and historically — that a Prophet of God was also, without question, a warrior?

In this conversation, we explore:

→ Why the "reluctant pacifist" portrait of the Prophet ﷺ departs from the earliest Arabic sources

→ What Badr, Uhud, Khaybar, and the conquest of Mecca actually looked like as military operations

→ The Prophet's own ethical code for warfare — and why it preceded international humanitarian law by 14 centuries

→ How Islam's Just War tradition compares to the Western one

→ What extremist groups get catastrophically wrong when they invoke the Prophet's wars

→ What it means to be simultaneously a Prophet of God and a master of military strategy

This is not apologetics. It is not polemic. It is history — done with the rigor it deserves.

👤 ABOUT THE GUEST

Professor Joel Hayward (ZDaF, BA, MA Hons, PhD, FRSA, FRHistS) is a New Zealand-born British scholar and Dean of the Sycamore Leadership Academy in Istanbul. He is listed among the world's 500 most influential Muslims and is regarded by The Muslim World Book Review as "the most distinguished writer on the Sirah today." His major works include Warfare in the Qurʾān (2012), Civilian Immunity in Foundational Islamic Strategic Thought (2019), The Leadership of Muhammad (2021 — winner of Best International Non-Fiction Book at the Sharjah International Book Awards), and The Warrior Prophet: Muhammad ﷺ and War (2022). He was formerly Dean of the Royal Air Force College Cranwell, Head of Air Power Studies at King's College London, Chief Executive of the Cambridge Muslim College, and personal tutor to HRH Prince William. He holds ijāzāt in Islamic theology and Sirah.

🔗 Prof. Hayward's website: https://joel-hayward.com

📖 The Warrior Prophet: https://thewarriorprophet.com

🎙️ ABOUT THE PROMETHEANS

The Prometheans is a podcast and YouTube channel dedicated to serious interfaith dialogue and the philosophy of religion — exploring the deepest questions of faith, reason, ethics, and the human condition through conversations with world-class thinkers.

What does it actually mean to live well — and can a philosopher who died 2,500 years ago still give us a serious answer?

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka sits down with Professor Stephen C. Angle — Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, and one of the foremost Confucian philosophers writing in English today — to explore why Confucianism is not a museum piece but a living, arguable philosophy with something urgent to say about how we form ourselves, relate to one another, and build a good life.

They discuss:

— What ren (humaneness), li (ritual propriety), and junzi (the exemplary person) actually mean — and why ritual is a training ground for the soul, not just social etiquette

— Whether Confucianism's silence on a personal God is a philosophical weakness or a different kind of depth

— The concept of Tian (Heaven) as a moral-cosmic order — and how it compares to divine accountability in Abrahamic traditions

— Filial piety (xiao) honestly examined: obedience, or something far more nuanced?

— How Neo-Confucian thinkers like Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming built a full moral metaphysics still worth arguing with today

— "Progressive Confucianism" — can a tradition rooted in hierarchy and role-ethics genuinely ground human rights and democratic commitments?

— Where Confucian self-cultivation (xiushen) and Sufi tazkiyah converge, diverge, and illuminate each other

— What the Confucian vision of the junzi (exemplary person) and Islamic concept of insan al-kamil (the perfected human) might say to one another

Stephen Angle's latest book, Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life (Oxford University Press, 2022), makes the case that Confucianism offers what modern individualism cannot: a philosophy of moral growth through relationship, ritual, and role — not willpower, not stoic detachment, but the patient, daily work of becoming more fully human together.

This is philosophy as it was always meant to be — not a spectator sport, but a way of life.

📚 Stephen Angle's Books:

• Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life (Oxford, 2022)

• Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity, 2017)

• Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy (Polity, 2012)

• Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy (Oxford, 2009)

🌐 Stephen Angle at Wesleyan: https://sangle.faculty.wesleyan.edu/

Philosopher Gordon Marino says Kierkegaard's hardest lesson isn't really about God — it's about the lies we tell ourselves to avoid doing what we already know is right. In this episode, the longtime Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library breaks down anxiety, despair, and faith for the modern crisis of meaning.

In this episode:

What Kierkegaard means by anxiety as "the dizziness of freedom"

Why despair often hides inside outward success, not visible failure

Kierkegaard on self-deception — the excuses we make to our own conscience

Faith as courage, not certainty: the leap beyond endless reflection

Kierkegaard's critique of "the present age" — and what it predicts about social media and modern distraction

Gordon Marino's own story: from a suicidal college athlete to one of the world's leading Kierkegaard scholars

Guest: Gordon Marino is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at St. Olaf College, where he served as Director of the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library for 27 years. He is the author of The Existentialist's Survival Guide and Kierkegaard in the Present Age, and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal.

For over a thousand years, Constantinople stood as "the city" — the last living capital of the Roman Empire, the wealthiest and most fortified place on earth. On 29 May 1453, after a 53-day siege, it fell. In this episode of The Prometheans, we sit down with historian Roger Crowley, author of 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, to walk through one of history's great hinge moments — the siege that ended the Byzantine Empire and reshaped the medieval world.

We trace the story from the unlikely rise of the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II, to the courage of the last Roman emperor, Constantine XI, to the engineering feat that decided the war: the overland transport of an entire Ottoman fleet into the Golden Horn. We also dig into the harder questions the book raises — how much this was really a "clash of civilizations" when Christian engineers built the decisive Ottoman cannons, what the Islamic tradition around the conquest actually says and where scholars still debate it, and why Hagia Sophia's transformation in 1453 still echoes in headlines today.

This is history told for an audience that takes both traditions seriously — not a sides-taking exercise, but an attempt to understand a moment that both Christian and Islamic memory have mythologized, and to find the more complicated, more human story underneath.

Guest: Roger Crowley, author of 1453, Empires of the Sea, City of Fortune, and Conquerors.

If you enjoy conversations that bring rigorous history into dialogue with faith and philosophy, subscribe to The Prometheans and join us for more.

What if the philosophy that built the modern technological world is the same philosophy making us powerless to control it?

What happens when the greatest novelist in history gives the atheist the strongest possible argument — and then tries to answer it?

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky did exactly that. Ivan Karamazov's rebellion against God is not a denial of His existence — it is a moral refusal. The suffering of innocent children, Ivan argues, cannot be redeemed by any future harmony. No eternal paradise justifies the tears of a single tortured child. It is the most devastating formulation of the problem of evil in all of world literature.

And then Dostoevsky attempts an answer.

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Dr. Gregory Sadler — philosopher, educator, and one of the most rigorous public intellectuals engaging the great works of Western thought — to press the question Dostoevsky spent his life trying to answer: if God is real, why does innocent suffering exist? And if God is dead, does that make everything permitted?

Together they explore:

→ Ivan Karamazov's moral rebellion — why granting God's existence and still refusing Him is the sharpest form of the problem of evil

→ The Grand Inquisitor's indictment of Christ — and what the famous kiss actually means

→ Father Zosima's counter-theology: "all are responsible for all"

→ Whether Dostoevsky's answer is genuine theodicy or a change of subject

→ The free will defense — and why it struggles with the suffering of innocent children

→ Alyosha as a lived answer to Ivan's argument

→ What Dostoevsky's response looks like from Islamic, Jewish, and secular philosophical perspectives

→ Whether love can ever be a sufficient answer to logic

This is not a literature podcast. This is a conversation about God, suffering, freedom, and what it means to be human — conducted through one of the greatest novels ever written.

The Prometheans is a podcast and YouTube channel dedicated to interfaith dialogue and the philosophy of religion, hosted by Ali Zaka (AZD) — Pakistani writer, educator, and author of The Final Gospel.

Is Jordan Peterson a prophet of the secular age — or a symptom of its deepest contradictions?

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with philosopher and political theorist Matt McManus — co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson (Zero Books, with an introduction by Slavoj Žižek) — for a rigorous, sympathetic, and unflinching examination of one of the most influential and contested thinkers of our time.

Peterson rocketed to global fame on the back of YouTube lectures, 12 Rules for Life, and a culture-war persona that made him both a hero to millions of young men and a lightning rod for fierce criticism. But beneath the controversy lies a serious philosophical project — one rooted in Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Viktor Frankl — that deserves serious engagement rather than dismissal or uncritical adulation.

We explore:

→ What Peterson actually argues in Maps of Meaning — his full cosmological framework of Order, Chaos, and the Hero archetype

→ McManus's critique of how Peterson naturalizes the existing social order through Jungian mythology

→ The "postmodern neo-Marxism" myth — why Peterson's central intellectual enemy is largely his own invention

→ The central contradiction of Peterson's thought: bemoaning the collapse of tradition while defending the capitalism that destroyed it

→ Peterson's God: is his Jungian-functionalist theology a sophisticated form of atheism?

→ His latest book We Who Wrestle with God (2024) and what it reveals about his religious journey

→ What Peterson's mass appeal tells us about the genuine failures of progressive intellectual culture

→ And what Islamic and Sufi thought — largely ignored by Peterson — offers as an alternative vision of meaning, order, and the sacred

This is not a takedown. It is an honest philosophical reckoning with a figure who has touched something real in the modern crisis of meaning — and an inquiry into why his remedies may leave the disease untreated.

Matt McManus is a Professor of Politics and International Relations. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism (Palgrave Macmillan) and co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson (Zero Books, 2020). His work on postmodern conservatism, human dignity, and political philosophy has appeared in Jacobin, The Philosophical Salon, and numerous academic venues.

🔔 Subscribe to The Prometheans for conversations at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and the deepest questions of human existence.

What if believing in demons, ghosts, and spirits isn't superstition — but is actually rational? That's exactly what philosopher Dr. Hans van Eyghen argues in his book The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs (Routledge, 2023).

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka sits down with Dr. Hans van Eyghen — philosopher of religion at Tilburg University — for one of the most unusual and intellectually serious conversations we've ever had on this channel.

The question sounds simple: why do humans across every culture and every era believe in spirits, demons, ancestors, jinn, and supernatural agents?

The answer is anything but simple.

Dr. van Eyghen draws on epistemology, cognitive science, and the philosophy of religion to argue that these beliefs — when grounded in genuine experience — are not irrational. They are not leftovers of pre-scientific thinking. They deserve the same philosophical scrutiny we give to any other belief about the world.

We cover:

→ What does it even mean for a belief to be epistemically justified?

→ The four types of spirit experience: perception, possession, mediumship, and animism

→ Why the cognitive science of religion doesn't actually debunk supernatural belief

→ What the Quranic account of jinn and Christian demonology look like through a philosophical lens

→ Whether animism — the idea that nature is filled with agents — is making a comeback

→ The Western philosophy of religion's blind spot: it only debates God, while most of humanity believes in something far older and stranger

If you've ever felt a presence in the dark, witnessed something inexplicable, or simply wondered why spirit belief is universal — this conversation is for you.

Dr. Hans van Eyghen is a philosopher of religion and epistemologist at Tilburg School of Catholic Theology, Netherlands. He is the author of The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs (Routledge), Arguing from Cognitive Science of Religion (Bloomsbury), and Revising Cognitive and Evolutionary Science of Religion (Springer).

📖 Book: The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs — available Open Access via Routledge

The Prometheans is a podcast and YouTube channel dedicated to interfaith dialogue, philosophy of religion, and the great questions that refuse easy answers.

🔔 Subscribe and hit the bell — new episodes drop regularly.

What does it mean to wait — and what does that waiting reveal about

what it means to be human?

In this episode of The Prometheans, I sit down with Professor Nick Mount

to explore Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot — one of the most

celebrated and misunderstood plays of the 20th century.

When the play premiered in Paris and London, sophisticated audiences

walked out in anger. But when it was performed for 1,400 inmates at San

Quentin Prison in 1957, the prisoners understood it immediately. Why?

We explore:

→ Why Beckett stripped language down to reach universal human truth

→ The difference between Beckett's waiting and Sartre's existentialism

→ What Godot reveals about endurance, mortality, and meaning

→ Why the play ends with "Yes, let's go" — and nobody moves

Whether you're coming from philosophy, theology, literature, or just

a deep curiosity about the human condition, this conversation will

stay with you.

🎙️ Guest: Professor Nick Mount, University of Toronto

📺 The Prometheans — Interfaith Dialogue & Philosophy of Religion

🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations on philosophy, religion, and the

ideas that shape our world.

What if everything you thought you knew about Hegel was wrong — and what if getting Hegel right is the most urgent philosophical task of our time?

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Todd McGowan — Professor at the University of Vermont, co-editor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press alongside Slavoj Žižek, and author of over 15 books — to explore his landmark work: Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019).

Forget thesis-antithesis-synthesis. That formula is a caricature. McGowan's Hegel has one central concept: contradiction. Not as a logical failure to be corrected, but as the very engine of freedom, history, and being itself. In a world drowning in right-wing populism, authoritarian nostalgia, and neoliberal promises of frictionless harmony, McGowan's Hegel arrives as a genuinely radical alternative — one that refuses every fantasy of a society finally at peace with itself.

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WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE

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► Why the Left Hegelian / Right Hegelian split destroyed Hegel's philosophy for over a century — and what it takes to put him back together

► What contradiction actually means in Hegel — and why it has nothing to do with the formula your professor gave you

► Why Freud is Hegel's missing vocabulary: the death drive, the unconscious, and the subject that engineers its own failure

► Kant vs. Hegel on Reason: why what Kant called Reason's greatest failure is, for Hegel, Reason's greatest triumph

► "Substance is Subject" — Hegel's most radical ontological claim, and why it means no identity is ever purely itself

► Love as the birthplace of Hegel's entire philosophical system — and what it reveals about Christianity, Judaism, and Kantian ethics

► Why Heidegger's Black Forest retreat was philosophically — and politically — more dangerous than Hegel's position at the heart of power

► Why Marxism is, in McGowan's provocative reading, a "rightist deviation" from Hegel — and what this means for the catastrophe of Stalinism

► The Absolute: not a totalitarian closure of the system, but the most radical opening to transformation imaginable

► Why freedom, equality, and solidarity are inherently traumatic values — and why we keep betraying them

► What a "contradictory revolution" actually looks like — and why it has no blueprint

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WHY THIS CONVERSATION MATTERS

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Slavoj Žižek calls this "the book we were waiting for after long years of being bombarded by Hegel as a closet liberal whose last word is recognition." This is the revolutionary Hegel — not the old Marxist Hegel, but the Hegel after Marx: the thinker who shows us that revolution cannot mean the elimination of contradiction, because contradiction is the only thing that keeps history moving.

ABOUT TODD McGOWAN

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Todd McGowan is Professor of Film and Cultural Theory at the University of Vermont. He is co-editor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston, and co-host of the podcast Why Theory. His books include Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, and The Impossible David Lynch. Emancipation After Hegel (Columbia UP, 2019) is widely regarded as the definitive introduction to — and radical reimagining of — Hegel's revolutionary thought.