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This volume highlights the scientific advances and ruptures of classical Islam with respect to Hellenism, and the emergence of a new mathematical rationality and a new relationship between mathematics and physics, from a comparative synchronic and diachronic perspective.
Through analysis of the Covenants of the Prophet Muḥammad, which pledge protection to diverse faith communities, this book makes a profoundly important contribution to research on early Islam by determining the Covenants’ historicity and textual accuracy. The authors focus on the Prophet Muḥammad’s relationship with other faith communities by conducting detailed textual and linguistic analysis of documents which have received little scholarly consideration before. This not only includes decrees of the Prophet Muḥammad, ‘Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, and Mu‘āwiya ibn Abī Sufyān, but also of important Muslim rulers. They present their findings in relatio...
This book explores the reasons for the creation of humanity on Earth from the perspective of ancient and contemporary Muslim thinkers, aiming to lay the outlines of a Qurʾanic theory of human existential function. The author proceeds from the assumption that, until now, contemporary Islamic scholarship has suffered from the absence of theorisation about a Qurʾanic conception of human existential function (vicegerency), lacking a unified philosophical and epistemological frame of reference. Challenging common perceptions among contemporary Muslim reformists regarding the human existential function, the author examines both classical and contemporary thought as well as conducting a thorough ...
This book engages with the work of Miskawayh, a formative Islamic Philosopher in the 11th century, who is acknowledged as the founder of Islamic Moral Philosophy. Miskawayh’s The Refinement of Character (Tahḏīb al-Aḫlāq) draws from both ancient Greek philosophical tradition and Islamic thought, highlighting the concepts he integrated into what he argued to be the moral core of Islam. This book pursues a comparative study by analyzing and outlining the inherent philosophical concerns of the Aristotelian concepts of Happiness, Justice and Friendship, which are then brought into conversation with Miskawayh’s own concepualizations of them. While Tahḏīb al-Aḫlāq is deeply influenc...
This volume investigates the emergence and spread of maritime commerce and interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World—the world’s first “global economy”—from a longue durée perspective. Spanning from antiquity to the nineteenth century, these essays move beyond the usual focus on geographical sub-regions or thematic aspects to foreground inter- and trans-regional connections. Focusing on the role of religion in the expansion of commerce and exchange across the region, as well as on technology and knowledge transfer, volume II covers shipbuilding and navigation technologies, porcelain production, medicinal knowledge, and mules as a commodity and means of transportation.
Showing that Muslim societies are facing a crisis that is more cultural than religious, this book focuses on cultural representations through which social life is experienced in the Muslim world. It brings a new theoretical framework to address the secularization process that is underway and the contradictions it entails. This volume will arouse a new debate on secularization and the relations between religion, culture and philosophy. The crisis Muslim societies are undergoing pertains to the culture and not to the Qur’an to the extent that people do not have access to the sacred in itself but only for oneself, meaning a cultural interpretation of the sacred. The Qur’an in itself is not ...
Analyzing the intersection between Sufism and philosophy, this volume is a sweeping examination of the mystical philosophy of Muḥyī-l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 637/1240), one of the most influential and original thinkers of the Islamic world. This book systematically covers Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ontology, theology, epistemology, teleology, spiritual anthropology and eschatology. While philosophy uses deductive reasoning to discover the fundamental nature of existence and Sufism relies on spiritual experience, it was not until the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī that philosophy and Sufism converged into a single framework by elaborating spiritual doctrines in precise philosophical language. Context...
This volume offers an aesthetic reading of the Muqaddima by Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), a text that has been studied up to the present as a work on historiography. It argues that the Muqaddima is also a comprehensive treatise on classical Arab-Islamic culture and provides a picture of classical Arab-Islamic aesthetics in its totality. The theme of the book is the intrinsic connection between beauty and knowledge in the Muqaddima. Whenever Ibn Khaldūn deals with the problem of knowledge and science, he also deals with the problem of sensual beauty as an instrument or an obstacle to attain it. Ibn Khaldūn’s philosophy of history is necessarily also an aesthetics of history. His key-notion of ...