THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2022 - 4:30PM TO 6:00PM
A71 LOUIS A. SIMPSON BUILDING

Nauman Faizi will discuss his new book, God, Science and Self: Muhammad Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought. A reception will follow the talk.

God, Science, and Self: Muhammad Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought (2021) is a groundbreaking new book in the “Modern Islamic Thought” series by McGill-Queens University Press. Nauman Faizi (Assistant Professor of Religion at LUMS) examines the patterns of reasoning at work in Iqbal’s magnum opus, arguably the most significant text of modernist Islamic philosophy — The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1934). Through an intimate analysis of Iqbal’s discourse on wide-ranging themes — including revelation, the self, knowledge, and science — Faizi argues that there are two competing epistemologies at play within The Reconstruction. Iqbal takes knowledge to be descriptive, essential, foundational, and binary, but he also takes knowledge to be performative, contextual, probabilistic, and vague. Faizi demonstrates how these seemingly contradictory approaches to knowledge shape Iqbal’s claims about personhood, God, scripture, and philosophy. In doing so, this book offers an original approach to interpreting Islamic thought as it crafts relationships between scriptural texts, philosophic thought, and scientific claims for modern Muslim subjects.

Nauman Faizi is Assistant Professor of Religion at LUMS in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. His research interests include philosophy of religion, philosophical and scriptural hermeneutics, semiotics, and questions surrounding religion and modernity.

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Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Department of Religion.

Sponsored by Program in South Asian Studies