New Books In Islamic Studies

In his brilliant and philosophically charged new book God, Science, and Self: Muhammad Iqbal's Reconstruction of Religious Thought (McGill-Queen's UP, 2021), Nauman Faizi conducts a close and often dazzling reading of a towering yet difficult Muslim modernist text. Through a painstakingly intimate analysis of Muhammad Iqbal’s discourse on wide ranging themes including revelation, the self, knowledge, and science, Faizi shows that Iqbal’s thought houses in productive tension representational and pragmatic registers of hermeneutics. Iqbal’s hermeneutic often embodied the very objects of critique and dissatisfaction that he identified in the epistemological norms and patterns of Western colonial modernity. Faizi reads these markings and tensions not as a form of fatal contradiction but rather as the necessary wounds carried by a panoramic thinker wrestling with the significance of religious knowledge and revelation in a world beset with the malaise of modernity. This stunningly erudite book, published in the exc