Ethics and the Self in Islam

This is an outstanding collection and a must-read for serious students of Islam. The unifying dialectic of loss and recovery that runs through the volume is both compelling and refreshing. This book authoritatively shows that Islamic discourses on the self and ethics have never been rigid or static, but instead historically contingent and richly dynamic. --Khaled Abou El Fadl, Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law This is a welcome and much-needed contribution at the intersection of two important turns in the study of Islam: the emphasis on ethics and the growing interest in the question of the self and personhood. The volume brings together experts in a wide range of disciplines to examine this complex set of concepts from the perspectives of exegetical, jurisprudential, philosophical, mystical, and postcolonial studies. In doing so, it simultaneously deepens ourunderstanding of the relation between ethics and the self in Islamic intellectual traditions and situates the Islamic approaches to those notions within the humanities more broadly. --Omar Farahat, associate professor and William Dawson Scholar, McGill University