Muhammad U. FARUQUE: Sculpting the Self: Islam, Selfhood and Human Flourishing

Abstract

The subject of the self has been around, arguably, since people first began to systematize their thinking about the world and themselves, though it has never been studied as systematically as in the last fourteen centuries. That is to say, after the foundations of institutional learning and scientific investigation had been laid in the Islamicate world, more or less in the form we take for granted today. In this thoughtful and deeply knowledgeable study, Prof. Muhammad U. Faruque turns his attention to a set of themes at a moment of “major crisis” for the “theories of selfhood and subjectivity”. The crisis he has in mind is conceptual in nature and attributable to the myriad technological innovations that have overturned virtually every claim about selfhood inspired by neuroscience, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, anthropology and religious studies.