comparative religious ethics, Islamic thought, and ethical theory. She currently serves as President of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics (SSME).
De Rande applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition, and reported the following:
Page 99 summarizes the central aspects of al-Fārābī’s (d. 950) hierarchical account of created human nature (or what is referred to as humanity’s fiṭra in the Qur’an). I highlight the interplay of people’s natural endowments, the promises of education, and the political roles someone might occupy as a result of one’s nature and nurture. As I note, while al-Fārābī emphasizes the role of natural endowments, he also believes in the crucial importance of education to further one’s endowments. Finally, it is not clear whether his viewpoint is socially conservative, meaning whether the natural/developed excellences the author posits correlate with existing social classes or allow for social mobility.Learn more about The Politics of Islamic Ethics at the Cambridge University Press website.
I was really surprised how well the Page 99 Test worked. While my book looks at four different Islamic philosophers and their conceptions of created human nature, page 99 gives readers a good sense of the central issues at stake: the importance of created, natural endowments, the role of education, and the political implications of the hierarchical ordering of human beings. So, while this page does not cover the entire range of the book in terms of actors, it does get to the heart of the issue of the political implications of hierarchical conceptions of human nature in an important corner of Islamic thought.
What the test misses out on is the historical breadth and conceptual depth of my book. First, I try to parse four different philosophers’ engagement with the idea of a created human nature and its political implications. Across al-Fārābī, Ibn Bājja (d. 1139), Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185), and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) we encounter numerous genres, accounts of human nature, and political imaginations. More importantly, my engagement with these classical Islamic philosophers is framed by their relation to the more well-known, scriptural approaches to human nature in the Qur’an and the prophetic literature, as well as an overall concern with the potential place of these philosophers in the contemporary study of religious and particularly Islamic ethics. Especially that last part, the relation to larger questions in the study of Islam and human values, is fully absent on page 99’s deep-dive into al-Fārābī. It is this framing, however, that should be most interesting to people interested in larger value discussions and the place of Islamic thought therein.
--Marshal Zeringue
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