Muhammad Iqbal, 1877-1938, Urdu poet and philosopher.

With some exceptions, there is not a real interest in Islamic philosophy and t- ology in Western institutions today. This largely ignored area has the potential to present enlightening insights into the development of the Western thought and to contribute to contemporary discussions in philosophy and theology in general. Scholars working in Islamic thought usually focus on its medieval background and consider it to be mainly of a historical interest and far away from the intellectual world of today. Showing its contemporary relevance is an important task by which the status of Islamic philosophy can be elevated to its proper station. By considering these points in mind, the University of Kentucky organized an international graduate student conference on Islamic philosophy and the- ogy with an emphasis on its contemporary relevance which was held between the 28th and 30th September 2007. This book emerged out of the conf- ence by adding more chapters relevant to the main theme of the book. This book presents analyses and discussions of different topics in Islamic philo- phy and theology by relating them to contemporary debates and ideas in four main areas: epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion and value t- ory. There are ten chapters in sum. Some of the chapters are written by graduate students and some of them by experienced scholars. Each chapter presents c- siderable insight into its relevant topic but does not represent the opinion of anybody except the author.

Bringing together a diverse number of prominent and emerging scholars, from backgrounds in political science, philosophy and religious studies, this book offers novel examinations of the philosophical ideas that laid at the heart of Iqbal's own.

Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) was one of the most influential modernist Islamic thinkers of the early twentieth century. His work as a poet, politician, philosopher, and public intellectual was widely recognized in his lifetime and plays a major role in contemporary conversations about Islam, modernity, and tradition. God, Science, and Self examines the patterns of reasoning at work in Iqbal's philosophic magnum opus, arguably the most significant text of modernist Islamic philosophy, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Since its initial publication in 1934, The Reconstruction has left scholars in a quandary: its themes appear eclectic, and its arguments contradictory and philosophically perplexing. In this groundbreaking study, Nauman Faizi argues that the keys to demystifying the contradictions of The Reconstruction are two competing epistemologies at play within the work. 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 approaches to knowledge shape Iqbal's claims about personhood, God, scripture, philosophy, and science. God, Science, and Self offers an original approach to interpreting Islamic thought as it crafts relationships between scriptural texts, philosophic thought, and scientific claims for modern Muslim subjects.

Two streams run through the Western philosophical stream: one characterized by Being, beings, the unchanging, the static, and the unitary; and the other by Action, actions, the changing, the dynamic, and the diverse. The former might be represented by Parmenides, Plato, and much of what followed; the latter by Heraclitus, and by rather less of what followed. The book explores the "Action" stream as it wound its way through history, through Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Maurice Blondel, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, process philosophy and theology, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Boys Smith. The journey enables us to create the beginnings of an "actology": a way of seeing ourselves, the universe, and God in terms of actions in patterns rather than as beings that change. Such an actology offers a complete alternative narrative far more in tune with the diverse and rapidly changing world in which we live than the ontology that has shaped philosophy, theology, and much else for the past two thousand years.

Excellent bibliographical work about Allama Muhammad Iqbal in the Arabic scripts (Urdu, Persian, Arabic and so on) has been published by the Iqbal Academy, Lahore. Our publication covers only what appeared in the Roman script: English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, and Russian. Many books have some kind of bibliographical list, and we have tried to include all that material in the present publication. With the generous support of the Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, the Iqbal Foundation Europe at the KULeuven, Belgium, has endeavoured to combine meticulous and patient work in libraries with the most modern search on internet. The result is an impressive tribute to Iqbal and to the research about him: 2500 entries, the latest entry dated 1998 (A. Schimmel). Even if many superfluous or repetitive articles may have been published, a researcher should look at even small contributions: they may contain valuable information and rare insights. The databank we compiled at the university of Leuven is composed of material taken from published works and from the on-line services of the major university libraries. From this it appeared that hundreds of scholars and authors have contributed to the immense databank about Iqbal. The highest number of contributions is by Annemarie Schimmel, S.A. Vahid and B.A. Dar, followed by A. Bausani, K.A. Waheed, A.J. Arberry and so many others.