The Book of Ethical Conduct: Ibn al-Muqaffaʿs Al-Adab al-Ṣaghīr

Abstract

Recognizing our inherited intellectual legacy and taking steps towards the future with a conscious awareness of that legacy can carry us far beyond our present position in many respects. We see that the issues confronting us today are matters whose antecedents can be traced within a body of experience formed across a vast geography and under highly diverse historical circumstances. Within Islamic political and ethical thought and practice, many questions that bear a discernible relation to contemporary concerns have already been encountered and examined. Problems were identified in light of particular historical conditions and intellectual principles, and a substantial corpus emerged through works that approached their resolution from different perspectives. This corpus may aptly be described as “transcending time.” For not only do we remain able to access it after the passage of centuries, but the human-centred systems and structures with which it is concerned continue to exhibit similar deficiencies. In this sense, these works have retained their relevance. It is therefore of great importance to restore this intellectual legacy to the agenda of contemporary scholarship and thought, and thereby to draw upon it to the greatest possible extent in identifying, analysing, critiquing, and resolving present political and social problems. As we have consistently emphasized, 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.