Confronting Inequality. Building Community
Many people have experienced intense anger and fear in the wake of the Covid-19 shutdowns and their subsequent toll on social interaction. During the pandemic, people suffered a loss of control and were confronted by their limitations. At the same [...]
On Modern Islamic Economics Mainstream depictions of economic science and the development of capitalism are by-and-large historically distorted. They ignore power relations and are based upon a particular philosophical understanding of the division of sciences developed under the specific social [...]
My neighbor passed away and I did not hear about it until sometime later. We had not really known each other but had been on greeting terms. The deceased was elderly and ill, and had been in the care of [...]
Over the past six months, the IMTF online roundtable discussion has brought together a number of Muslim voices to explore the area of inquiry concerning Islamic virtues of the self, specifically with regards to their relevance for understanding and confronting [...]
In the first set of essays posted for the IMTF online roundtable discussion on communal ethics, I asked scholars and thinkers from Muslim communities in different geographical regions and contexts to address the basic question of “what we owe to [...]
Parts of what is called modern Europe saw the arrival of Jews and Judaism over two thousand years ago. Following which, approximately two thousand years ago, Europe saw the spread of Christianity. Christians of Jewish heritage were the first to [...]
Islamic spirituality, in both its principles and practices, establishes an impetus and a framework to design businesses that support a positive social and environmental impact. Among them is the notion of faqr (poverty), raised by Professor Martin Nguyen in his [...]
Three centuries of white minority rule in South Africa has left the African majority materially and psychologically impoverished. A record of mismanagement and widespread corruption have resulted in the state's failure to meet the needs of the poor, while service [...]
The neighborhood may be conceived as an intermediate space, a location between the private and the public. Here, an individual extends the immediate and private space of human interaction. The people populating this space are not necessarily part of one’s [...]
The meaning of “community” changes as human societies develop new social and political orders. This is true of any term: a part of it remains tethered to past meanings, and a part grows in response to new developments and novel [...]
It is one thing to expound the conceptual anatomy of virtue ethics as articulated in Islamic traditions of moral philosophy, mysticism, jurisprudence, etc.; it is another to examine how such articulations are extended and enacted by Muslims seeking to live [...]
In The Book of Pious Abstention (Kitāb al-Waraʿ) Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855 CE) is asked what to do if one is in a mosque during Ramadan and a person comes around with (burning) incense from a “disliked” source. In [...]
This piece is a response to the initial query of the project on Virtue Ethics and the Cultivation of the Moral Self by Martin Nguyen. In this first response essay, I briefly analyze the state of affairs of contemporary Islamic [...]
Many of Islam’s leading principles are premised on the idea of the responsibility, individual or collective, of the faithful to be useful members of society and be good to their fellow humans, which is also why Islam places greater emphasis [...]
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that it was the Protestant religious ethic, more particularly Calvinism, that acted as a precursor to modern Capitalist economic development, as it saw a moral and a spiritual [...]
Moral theology can be understood as the science of cultivating human virtue in relation to a recognized set of absolute, divine, or transcendent principles. Considered both theoretically and practically, the cultivated virtues are simultaneously a means of transforming and beautifying [...]
This post and that of Prof. Maria Dakake mark the official beginning of our respective but interrelated inquiries into contemporary Islamic moral theology. Over the course of the next two years, we will each facilitate an ongoing roundtable of Muslim [...]