This guest lecture is a joint seminar with the subject RESA3221/4221 What the Qur'an Says: Translation, Interpretation and Society
Introduction
In this lecture, we will look at a few examples of economic (and environmental) teachings in Islamic traditions as put forward by several Sufis, theologians, and legal specialists. By reading select classical and modern scholars, the concepts of economics and environment seems not only interdependent with ethical reasoning but also enmeshed in what I call “ethical cosmology” – based on a holistic accountability of the self, since these concepts relate to both material and non-material sources and values. Hence, we can ask “how did Muslim scholars conceptualize economic and environmental thought in Islamic tradition; and how can modern societies theorize a new economic model through applied ethics?” In light of these questions, I propose to study economic and environmental teachings through a multifaceted conceptual framework centered on the ethical self.
Sami Al-Daghistani is Associate Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Contemporary Islamic Studies at Lund University, an Associate Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR) in New York City, and a Research Scholar at the Middle East Institute (MEI) at Columbia University in New York. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology (2020-2024), a Research Fellow at the University of Oslo (2017-2018), and a Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University (2017-2018). Sami obtained a PhD in 2017 in Islamic Studies at Leiden University with a co-supervision at Columbia University.
He is the author of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Ethical Teachings: Economics of Happiness (Anthem Press, 2021), the award-wining The Making of Islamic Economic Thought: Islamization, Law, and Moral Discourses (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Islam in ljubezen (Beletrina: Ljubljana, 2023), as well as a co-editor of Pluralism in Emergenc(i)es in the Middle East and North Africa (Review of Middle East Studies, 2021), and the editor of Recovering Environmental and Economic Traditions in the Islamic World (Brill, 2024). In 2021, he launched an interdisciplinary research group and consortium Critical Islamic Studies, whose aims are to engage with both historical and modern analysis of and research in the field of Islamic Studies.
Convener: Nora S. Eggen