Ashur Shamis is a British-Libyan activist-scholar renown as co-translator (with Adil Salahy) of Sayyid Qutb’s tafsir Fi Zilal al Qur’an. He has been in Britain since 1965,involved from the outset in Muslim student activities, serving as General Secretary of the Federation of Students Islamic Societies in 1968 under the presidentship of Dr Salah Gahin.He was also closely involved in editorial work of the journal of the Muslim Students Society, Al-Ghoraba, while his translations of Fi Zilal were a regular feature of the FOSIS journal The Muslim through the late 60s and 70s.
His undergraduate studies were in aeronautical engineering, and later in 1977 he obtained an MA in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Birmingham. He has translated Nelson Mandela’s biography, The Long Walk to Freedom, to Arabic.
He is currently engaged in translating to English some works of the late Sudanese intellectual and political leader Dr Hassan Al-Turabi. The first of these is ‘An Appreciation of Salat’. Ashur Shamis notes in a preface,
| The concept of salat is difficult to convey in one word, in the English language, and I suspect, in many other languages. There is nothing comparable to it in any known religious and devotional order, or system. It encompasses humility, dignified movements, and recitations all in a unique combination, in the most natural, serene, fluid and purposeful manner [. . .] a student of Dr Hassan Turabi recently pointed out to me that the author preferred the use of the French word “Liaison”, for salat. Indeed, in Arabic too, salat is said to be a ‘link’, a ‘mutual relationship between two entities’ (silatton bain al-a’abdi wa rabbiehi – a relationship, a liaison, a means of communication between the worshipper and his Master, the created and his Creator) [. . .] |
“Ever since the time of the eleventh-century scholar, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Imam al-Ghazali, wrote his monumental pioneering work ‘The Revival of Islamic Knowledge’, no other Muslim thinker has undertaken an interpretation of salat with such intellectual rigour and sensitivity. Turabi, like al-Ghazali in his time, was daring and controversial, and a fine thinker. He, arguably, remains today one of the most influential theologians in Islam, of the last millenium.”
Ashur Shamis’s life and the impact of his political commitment on his family are the central subjects of the 2021 documentary The Colonel’s Stray Dogs, directed by his son, Khalid Shamis. The film explores Ashur’s return to Libya after the 2011 revolution, where he briefly served as an advisor to the transitional government before becoming disillusioned by the ensuing civil war and returning to exile in the UK.
Ashur Shamis has written extensively on Libyan developments, with numerous TV, radio and press interviews, including the BBC.