In con­ver­sation with Aseel Alfataftah, a doc­toral student in Islamic Studies, Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia), and Murad Idris (Vir­ginia) will be our guests for the second installment of Iberian Con­nec­tions’ series on Iberia, Mul­ti­cul­tur­alisms, and Mar­ginal Writing. I have taken the liberty to write a short article wel­coming our guests and asking a few questions.

Pro­fessor Diagne has written an article about his recent book, Open to Reason: Muslim Philoso­phers in Con­ver­sation with the Western Tra­dition, which is available online at the library. We will focus on chapter 5: A Lesson in Eco­logical Phi­losophy. He also sug­gests that we con­sider his book The Ink of the Scholars: Reflec­tions on Phi­losophy in Africa (2016), also available online.

Pro­fessor Idris pro­poses a political analysis of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān in his article for Iberian Con­nec­tions. He has also written about the “feral child of phi­losophy”, with Columbia pro­fessor Marwa Elshakry. Murad Idris’ article, “Pro­ducing Islamic Phi­losophy” touches directly upon the subject of this session of the seminar. Likewise, Idris sug­gests another article on “Ibn Ṭufayl’s Cri­tique of Pol­itics,” in which he dis­cusses the ethical and political values of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and Ibn Sīnā’s namesake allegory.

Spon­sored by the Department of Spanish and Por­tuguese and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for Inter­na­tional and Area Studies.

To be updated.