Minority Religions under Irish Law: Islam in National and International Context

Abstract

Faruque takes seriously the descriptive self and its regimes of power over the normative self but refuses to reduce the self thereto; this is a necessary intervention in modern, Western thought. The light criticism here is only that Faruque sometimes constructs his normative self in a way that reads as private and individualistic even as he asserts that it is compassionate and relational. The socio-cultural self suggests that the normative self should not only care for others in a one-on-one relationship, but also work to overturn structures of oppression and construct structures of liberation so that more and more people can pursue the philosophicospiritual ideal freely and with fewer impediments. Notwithstanding, the constructive and critical insights Faruque brings to the Western philosophical traditions from the pre-modern, early modern and modern Islamic philosophical traditions are tremendous. For this, he is to be praised; his book advances cross-cultural philosophical dialogue, compels Western academic departments of philosophy, sociology, cognitive science and so on to take seriously insights from outside the Euro-American traditions, and challenges all of us to be critical of discourses, movements and practices that presume that humans can be reduced to biology, society, culture or cognitive experiences.