In The Story of Reason in Islam, leading public intellectual and political activist Sari Nusseibeh narrates a sweeping intellectual history—a quest for knowledge inspired by the Qu’ran and its language, a quest that employed Reason in the service of Faith. Eschewing the conventional separation of Faith and Reason, he takes a fresh look at why and how Islamic reasoning evolved over time. He surveys the different Islamic schools of thought and how they dealt with major philosophical issues, showing that Reason pervaded all disciplines, from philosophy and science to language, poetry, and law. Along the way, the best known Muslim philosophers are introduced in a new light. Countering received chronologies, in this story Reason reaches its zenith in the early seventeenth century; it then trails off, its demise as sudden as its appearance. Thereafter, Reason loses out to passive belief, lifeless logic, and a self-contained legalism—in other words, to a less flexible Islam. Nusseibeh’s speculations as to why this occurred focus on the fortunes and misfortunes of classical Arabic in the Islamic world. Change, he suggests, may only come from the revivification of language itself.
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1. The Arabian Desert2. The Daunting Idea of God
3. Free Will and Determinism
4. The Qur’an: Created or Eternal?
5. From Wasil to Ibn Hanbal
6. Early Islam: Literacy, Conflict and Expansion
7. Speculative Discourse: A Style
8. Discourse: In Pursuit of the Ultimate Answers
9. Law and Morality
10. Al-Ma’moun and the Devil’s Banquets.
11. The Language-Logic debate
12. Back to the Human Will and Language
13. Expanding the View
14. An Interlude: Caliph, Imam, and Philosopher-King
15. Philosophy and Politics
16. The Philosophers’ ‘Frenzy’
17. Back to Wine and Logic
18. Motion and Light
19. The Nature of Truth
20. Fardajan and Beyond
21. The Cosmos
22. Cosmic Lights
23. Fast Forward
24. Language and Reason: The Dilemma
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Sari Nusseibeh is Professor of Philosophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. His most recent book isWhat’s a Palestinian State Worth? (2011) .