Religion, Man and the World: Readings in Contemporary Islamic Thought

The book is written by: Medhat El-Leithy, Hisham Fahmy, Ahmed Nasr, Ahmed Abdel Gawad Zayda, Mohamed Affan, Mutaz Al-Khatib, Mohamed El-Araby, Jamila Tilout, Mohamed El-Marakby, Yassine El-Yahyaoui, Islam Ahmed, Cyrus McGoldrick, Youssef Ramos, Ragab Ezz El-Din. The book seeks to move beyond the excessive politicisation in the treatment of the concepts and positions of many of those who adopt a conception of the world founded on Islam as a religion and a way of life, since the study of organisations and movements has prevailed with the surge of political events in the Arab region since the 1980s, while interest in the conceptual and intellectual level has receded, and a climate of political surveillance and ideological interpretation has prevailed. On the other hand, one notices a turning away from Islamic ideas from outside the Arab context, whether with regard to thinkers of Arab origin who live in the West and write in its various languages, or those with no ties of kinship to the Arab world but who offer ideas that have helped shape Islamic conceptions of a world in which ideas are no longer captive to geography or language. The editor of the book sought to commission a team of academics and researchers from the young and middle generations, Arab and non-Arab. The texts are divided between treatments of the central concepts in contemporary Islamic thought (religion, time, interest, justice, the state, violence) and surveys of the main writings of prominent names in this field of thought from various generations and backgrounds (Abdelwahab El-Messiri, Alija Izetbegovic, Taha Abdurrahman, Syed Naquib al-Attas, Wael Hallaq, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Kalim Siddiqui, Tariq Ramadan). The book does not claim to cover all concepts and ideas, but is a beginning, with more to follow, for exploring the diversity of contemporary Islamic thought and engaging with it critically and in a spirit of renewal, without surrendering to the domination of political disputes over the agenda of serious research, and in an effort to restore the course of critical theoretical debates that have often been subjected to ridicule and disdain.