The Great Book of Conduct: Ibn al-Muqaffaʿs Al-Adab al-Kabīr

Abstract

Becoming acquainted with our inherited intellectual legacy and taking steps towards the future with a conscious awareness of that legacy can carry us considerably beyond our present position in many respects. We see that many of the questions confronting us today can be traced within a body of experience formed across a vast geography and under widely differing historical circumstances. Within Islamic political and ethical thought and practice, numerous questions bearing discernible connections to contemporary concerns have already been experienced and examined. Problems were identified in relation to particular historical circumstances and intellectual principles, and a substantial corpus of works emerged that approached their resolution from different perspectives. It would not be inappropriate to describe this corpus as “transcending the ages.” For even after the passage of centuries, these works remain accessible to us, while the human-centred systems and structures with which they are concerned continue to exhibit comparable deficiencies. In this sense, these works retain their relevance and vitality. It is therefore of great importance to restore this intellectual legacy to the agenda of contemporary scholarship and thought, and thereby to draw upon the accumulated experience of the past to the greatest possible extent in identifying, analysing, critiquing, and resolving present political and social problems. As we have consistently emphasised, the endeavour to consider the present together with both the past and the future requires a detailed and equally careful examination of the ways in which concepts and problems have been addressed, both historically and in the present day.