The proposed Islamic Ethics: A Textbook is a timely contribution to an emerging research field with considerable growth potential.
By the mid-twentieth century, ethics started to be an increasingly appealing subject of scholarly inquiry within the field of Islamic Studies. Pioneer works set the ground by uncovering the ethical dimensions in theological and juristic deliberations within the Islamic tradition, such as those written by Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Drāz (d. 1958), George Hourani (d. 1984), Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), Daud Rahbar (d. 2013) and Majid Fakhry. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, one can speak of an “ethical turn”, as demonstrated by the works of prominent intellectuals and scholars like Khaled Abou El Fadl, Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī (d. 2010), Ṭāhā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Talal Asad, Tariq Ramadan, Wael Hallaq, and others.
Despite the commendable efforts made by the pioneer scholars in this regard, Islamic Ethics, like other emerging research fields, still awaits the full-fledged “canonization” process by having its own authoritative reference works that define and shapes the field, including textbooks, handbooks, encyclopedias, companions, etc. After a comprehensive investigation of available publications in the field, one cannot find any single textbook, companion or handbook dedicated to Islamic Ethics. Strikingly enough, most of the well-known handbooks in Islamic Studies do not have a section or even a chapter on Ethics, such as Routledge Handbook of Political Islam (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics (2013), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law (2015), and Routledge Handbook on Early Islam (2017). Especially after initiating the pioneer M.A. Program in Applied Islamic Ethics at CIS, we noticed the difficulty of composing teaching materials and we felt the urgent need for a Textbook that will be of great help for both teaching professors and students.
Against this background, this project will fill in a glaring lacuna in contemporary scholarship in Islamic Studies, by providing the first-of-its-kind Textbook of Islamic Ethics. Additionally, the prospective Textbook will be of great and added value for the students of Islamic Ethics in the CIS or elsewhere in the world. Finally, the project will open up new avenues of collaboration with reputable and international academic institutions, with expertise in Western moral philosophy. Besides benefiting from existing scholarship in the field of Ethics, the aim here is to enhance the academic reputation of CIS and HBKU at large and to showcase them as international key players in the emerging field of Islamic Ethics.