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The Lantern of the Path

A Wednesday evening majlis. One question, taken seriously, every week. Every Wednesday we sit down together for about an hour and work through one subject properly — a doctrine, a life, a place, a crisis — from the ground up. Where it came from. What the sources actually say. Where the evidence is strong, and where it is thin. And what any of it is supposed to change about Thursday morning. The series takes its name from Misbah ash-Sharia — The Lantern of the Path — a book of short chapters on the inner life, attributed to Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, peace be upon him, the sixth Imam. That book is where we began, and it is still the compass: what does it actually mean to live as a servant of God, and what has that looked like in the hands of the people who have genuinely tried? You do not need any background to come. Nothing is assumed. Vocabulary is explained the first time it appears, and nobody is ever made to feel they should already have known. The congregation is British and mostly not seminary-trained — and entirely capable of handling the real thing. So we give them the real thing, rather than a simplified version of it. How we work One rule sits above the others: The story of our tradition is not Shi'a versus Sunni. It is truth versus the abuse of truth — a story that runs through every community that has ever existed, and finds in each of them its honest servants and its dishonest exploiters. That is not a diplomatic sentence. It changes the method. Where we can, we take our witnesses from outside our own tradition — because when a historian who disliked our scholars still wrote down what he saw, he is a better witness precisely for having had no reason to be kind. And when a critique lands on an empire, a state or a movement, it is paired with an honest honouring of the people that empire betrayed. Everything is sourced. Every verse, every narration, every quotation carries its book, volume and page. Where a report is weak, or a chain of transmission is missing altogether, we say so from the front rather than hoping nobody checks. Some of the most useful moments in this series have been the ones where the honest answer was we cannot verify this, and here is what an honest scholar does with a document he cannot verify. And we do not do names. When a session deals with failure — corruption, capture, a safeguard that did not hold — it is preached structurally: the pattern, the mechanism, why it failed and what stops it failing again. Bring a name into the room and people argue about the name. The lesson goes out of the window. What an evening looks like Each session runs to about an hour and is built as three points, with the lessons woven through rather than bolted on at the end. It closes with a short lamentation and a supplication. The whole session is written up in full and published, with every reference intact — so you can read it back, check it, and follow the sources yourself. Come as you are. Bring your questions.

This programme has finished broadcasting. Every session remains available to watch in full.