Curricular Essays
As discussed above, ASIPT will host colloquia for scholars to discuss critical subjects in Islamic philosophy and theology, with the aim of developing Curricular Essays, English-language teaching texts that each cover the fundamentals of the topic at hand. These essays will be freely available to partner teaching institutions as well as published on ASIPT’s website for global access.
There are six topics that form this initial slate of essays:
- Epistemology
- The essay’s focus will be on providing a basic method for verifying and grading knowledge-claims, especially but not exclusively those about religious belief
- Signs on the Horizon
- A treatment of how awe, wonder, and gratitude for the natural world relate to religious belief.
- The Contingent and Emergent Universe
- An essay on the cosmological proof (popularized as the ‘Kalam Cosmological Argument’) and the argument from contingency, which provide a reasoned proof for why the universe cannot exist without a Necessary Creator.
- Proofs of Prophecy
- An explanation of the concepts of tawatur (mass transmission of a narration such that it would have been impossible to fabricate), i`jaz al-Qur’an (the inimitability of the Qur’an), and prophetic miracles as evidence for veracity.
- Allah’s Volitional Agency and Scientific Inquiry
- A discussion of occasionalism in Islamic theology and its relation to investigating natural causes through the scientific method.
- First Principles of Certainty
- Built on the work of three key twentieth century Muslim scholars, Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, Mustafa Sabri, and Anwar Shah Kashmiri, this aims to distill the fundamentals of their thought for a general audience.
- Each of the three played a key role in traditional Muslim scholarship’s substantive response to modernity and their work is incredibly salient today.
- Their work is a strong foundation for how Islamic theology’s approach to rational, empirical, and spiritual knowledge can confront and address the questions raised by the contemporary world.
- This essay will bring their sophisticated intellectual apparatus into the hands of English-language readers.
