Being an Intelligent Slave of God

Abstract

How did premodern Muslim thinkers talk about living authentically as a Muslim in the world? How, in their view, could selves transform themselves into ideal religious subjects or slaves of God? Which virtues, technologies of the self and intersubjective relations did they see implicated in inhabiting or attaining what I shall call ʿabdī subjectivity? In this paper, I make explicit how various discursive, ethical strategies formed, informed, and transformed Muslim subjectivity in early Muslim thought by focusing on the writings of an important ninth century Muslim moral pedagogue, al‐Muḥāsibī (d. 857). This study illustrates the advantages of approaching early Muslim texts and discourses through the tools and methods made available by comparative religious ethics in order to reexamine our understanding of Muslim subject formation and the role of ethical and theological discourses in the same.

The Ethics and Politics of Religious Ethics, 1973–2023

“…Yet another reason for work in the field is to show how religious and ethical thought can inform policy assessment and practical reasoning about vital issues of our time (see, for example, Childress 1982, 1997; Keown 1995; Lammers and Verhey 1998; Newman 1998; Zoloth 1999; Lauritzen 2001; James 2004; Brockopp 2008; Jenkins 2013; Kalbian 2014; Pedersen 2015; Hartman 2018; Gade 2019; and Stalnaker 2020). Relatedly, studying the ethical ideas of various religious traditions can help to dismantle cultural and religious stereotypes, especially the idea that religions are little more than monolithic dogmatic beliefs and regulations (Sells 2015; Raucher 2016; and Sheikh 2019). It is also the case that studying religious reasons for human behavior can help fill out how we understand the many sources of moral psychology and moral formation (see Lauritzen 1992; Antonaccio 2000, 2012; Stalnaker 2006; Cates 2009; Miller 2016; Fredericks 2021; and Dunn 2021).…”