REFORMING MODERNITY: ETHICS AND THE NEW HUMAN IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ABDURRAHMAN TAHA by Prof Hallaq

BOOK REVIEW: REFORMING MODERNITY: ETHICS AND THE NEW HUMAN IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ABDURRAHMAN TAHA with author by Professor Wael Hallaq [Columbia University, USA] and hosted by Dr Mohammed Hashas [Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose(FSCIR) & Luiss University of Rome ,Italy]Date and time: Sunday 17th May @6pm BST London/UK
About:
Reforming Modernity is a sweeping intellectual history and philosophical reflection built around the work of the Morocco-based philosopher Abdurrahman Taha, one of the most significant philosophers in the Islamic world since the colonial era. Wael B. Hallaq contends that Taha is at the forefront of forging a new, non-Western-centric philosophical tradition. He explores how Taha's philosophical project sheds light on recent intellectual currents in the Islamic world and puts forth a formidable critique of Western and Islamic modernities. Hallaq argues that Taha's project departs from-but leaves behind-the epistemological grounds in which most modern Muslim intellectuals have anchored their programs. Taha systematically rejects the modes of thought that have dominated the Muslim intellectual scene since the beginning of the twentieth century-nationalism, Marxism, secularism, political Islamism, and liberalism. Instead, he provides alternative ways of thinking, forcefully and virtuosically developing an ethical system with a view toward reforming existing modernities. Hallaq analyzes the ethical thread that runs throughout Taha's oeuvre, illuminating how Taha weaves it into a discursive engagement with the central questions that plague modernity in both the West and the Muslim world. The first introduction to Taha's ethical philosophy for Western audiences, Reforming Modernity presents his complex thought in an accessible way while engaging with it critically. Hallaq's conversation with Taha's work both proffers a cogent critique of modernity and points toward answers for its endemic and seemingly insoluble problems.
Speaker - Professor Wael Hallaq [Columbia University, USA]
Professor Wael B. Hallaq is one of the world’s leading academics on Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history. His work has been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, and Turkish. He is currently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. After a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, he joined The McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies in 1985, to become an assistant professor in Islamic law. In 1994, he earned full professorship, and in 2005 became a James McGill Professor in Islamic law. His teaching and research deal with the problematic epistemic ruptures generated by the onset of modernity and the socio-politico-historical forces subsumed by it; with the intellectual history of Orientalism and the repercussions of Orientalist paradigms in later scholarship and in Islamic legal studies as a whole; and with the synchronic and diachronic development of Islamic traditions of logic, legal theory, and substantive law and the interdependent systems within these traditions. Hallaq’s writings have explored the structural dynamics of legal change in pre-modern law, and have recently been examining the centrality of moral theory to understanding the history of Islamic law and modern political movements. He is the author of more than sixty scholarly articles, and his books include Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logicians (Oxford, 1993); A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni Usul al-fiqh (Cambridge, 1997); Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2001); Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2005); and An Introduction to Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2009). His Shari’a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge, 2009) examines the doctrines and practices of Islamic law within the context of its history, from its beginnings in seventh-century Arabia, down to the present. His recent works include The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament (2013), which won Columbia University Press's Distinguished Book Award, and Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (Columbia, 2018). For more information about him and publications, please visit: www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/hallaq.html