Progress and Knowledge: Spiritual Considerations from Ibn Khaldun
by:
Dr. Ali Zaidi
when:
Sunday, September 28, 2014 - 11:30 to 12:30
This presentation draws upon the work of the 14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun and discusses his ideas on the role of intuitive, spiritual perception as aiding and abetting rational, empirical knowledge. Ibn Khaldun asserts that while all human communities are capable of achieving social order, social order alone does not lead to happiness, for which a religious law and a spiritual perception of the inner nature of things is required. Ibn Khaldun's work reminds us that there are different kinds of knowledges and that human progress does not lie in material development alone.
Dr. Ali Zaidi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies and a co-Coordinator of the Muslim Studies Option at Wilfrid Laurier University. A social theorist interested in questions of religion, secularism, globalization and modernity, he engages with the assumptions underlying secular, social, scientific and religious knowledge of the human condition. His book Islam, Modernity and the Human Sciences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) undertook a comparative analysis of Western and Muslim debates about social knowledge and the truth-claims that are made from religious and secular points of view. Currently, he is working on issues related to Qur’anic hermeneutics, secularism and blasphemy. His work has appeared in Theory, Culture and Society, International Sociology and the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences.
In Winter 2013, he was a Visiting Professor in Pakistan at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Previously, he spent a term in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden, The Netherlands, and in 2006 he was an Invited Junior Fellow at the Summer Academy on ‘Islam and the Repositioning of Religion’, at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany.
Dr. Ali Zaidi, an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University (http://.wlu.ca/globalstudies), discusses his academic and research specializations, as well as shares insights into the Global Studies program itself.