Muhammad U. Faruque is the Inayat Malik Associate Professor and a Taft Center Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and a former Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. His award-winning book Sculpting the Self (University of Michigan Press, 2021) addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of selfhood and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical literatures, including modern philosophy and neuroscience. His current book project entitled The Interconnected Universe: Sufism, Climate Change, and Ecological Living aims to develop a new theory of the human and the more-than-human world based on a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary approach that draws on contemporary perspectives in the environmental humanities and environmental ethics, on one hand, and Sufism and Islamic Contemplative Studies, on the other. Alongside developing a theory of what he calls the “interconnected universe,” this study also argues that Sufi contemplative practices support and foster an active engagement toward the planet’s well-being and an ecologically viable way of life and vision through an “anthropocosmic” vision of the self. He is the author of three books and over fifty academic articles, which have appeared (or are forthcoming) in numerous leading, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes such as Sophia, Philosophy East and West, Philosophical Forum, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (Cambridge), Journal of Sufi Studies (Brill), Religious Studies (Cambridge), and Ancient Philosophy. He has delivered lectures in many North American, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern universities. He is also a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the prestigious Templeton Foundation Global Philosophy of Religion grant and the Title IV Grant, U.S. Dept. of Education.

In this talk referred to by some philosophers as “the knot of the universe,” investigations concerning human selfhood and subjectivity can help unravel questions of central contemporary relevance, such as what it is to be human in a globalized, secular world. This talk aims to unravel the concept of the self in Islamic thought through a global philosophy approach. Beginning with the Qur’an and then following the various streams of Islamic thought such as theology (kalām), philosophy (falsafa), and Sufism, this talk shows how Muslim thinkers reveal themselves to be fundamentally concerned with the problem of the human condition.  Their manner of addressing this central issue from their differing perspectives devolves on the cultivation of what can be called both an anthropocentric and anthropocosmic understanding of the self that emphasizes self-knowledge, self-cultivation, and self-transformation on the one hand and a relational view of the self and the cosmos on the other.