Mirza Family Chair Inaugural Lecture
Lecture title: “Debating Progress and History in Islamic Thought”
Featuring Ebrahim Moosa, Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies; Co-director, Contending Modernities
The inaugural lecture will seek to demonstrate that the critique of modernity from both in the West and outside of it requires confronting the limits of the concept of progress as well as avenues for theorizing it anew. More specifically, it will explore the mixed reception of discourses of progress in Muslim majority societies and ask: Can progress be Islamic? And if so, how might progress in these contexts be reconceptualized? Finally, how might a non-Western Islamic perspective address the critiques of modernity that have hitherto not resulted in significant change?