Building Collaborative Research Networks Across the Islamic Scholarly Tradition and Western Philosophy

This project seeks to develop a will on the part of western philosophers and scholars of Islam to be open to potentially transformative learning from the “other.” The project aims to do so by 1) systematically mapping the contours of each field and identifying areas of overlap and potential engagement, 2) strategically pursuing research on well-crafted lines of inquiry, and 3) identifying academics and scholars who are interested in and capable of further developing such inquiry and gathering them in an informal network. The project will be research-intensive and focused on identifying, exploring, and developing connections across subfields in both knowledge traditions. True interdisciplinary research will empower a new generation of scholars to become informed commentators on other scholarly traditions and propose new avenues for future research. While there is much historical evidence that Muslim thinkers from the post-classical through early modern periods addressed philosophical thought contemporary to their times, there is a relative lack of such engagement today. We hope that exploratory research of the kind our project envisions will revive this tradition within the Islamic world – the tradition of engaging in philosophy qua philosophy. The outcome of this encounter between western and “non-western” philosophical traditions would be knowledge production and dissemination capable of critical reflection on epistemic and value commitments from multiple perspectives.