Muhammad Faruque

Muhammad U. Faruque is the Inayat Malik Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati. His research lies at the intersection of religion, science, philosophy, and literature, especially in relation to the Islamic intellectual tradition. He earned his PhD (with distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley, and served as Exchange Scholar at Harvard University and as George Ames Postdoctoral Fellow at Fordham University. His highly acclaimed book Sculpting the Self (University of Michigan Press, 2021) addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of selfhood and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic literatures, including modern philosophy and neuroscience. He is the author of over thirty academic articles, which have appeared (or forthcoming) in numerous prestigious, peer-reviewed journals such as Philosophy East and West, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (Cambridge), Brill Journal of Sufi Studies, Religious Studies (Cambridge), Brill Journal of Islamic Ethics, and Ancient Philosophy. He has delivered lectures in many North American, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern universities. He gives public lectures on a wide of range of topics such as climate change, spirituality, meditation, A.I., Islamic psychology, and Islam and the West. He is also the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the prestigious Templeton Foundation Global Philosophy of Religion grant.

While his past research has explored modern and premodern conceptions of selfhood and identity and their bearing on ethics, religion, and culture, his current project investigates whether or not Sufi philosophy and practice—as articulated in the School of Ibn ʿArabī—support and foster an active engagement toward the planet's well-being and an ecologically viable way of life and vision. He is also at work on a book on A.I. and the ethical challenges of information technology. He also has two forthcoming edited volumes entitled From the Divine to the Human: New Perspectives on Evil, Suffering, and the Global Pandemic (co-edited with M. Rustom) and A Cultural History of South Asian Literature, Volume 3: The Early Modern Age (1400-1700) (co-edited with S. Nair) respectively.

Broadly speaking, his research interests range over Subjectivity, Religion and Climate Change, Islamic Psychology, Graeco-Arabica, Critical Theory, Cross-cultural Philosophy, Comparative Literature, Gender Hermeneutics, History and Philosophy of Science, Contemporary Islam, Qur'anic Exegesis, Islamic Philosophy (especially, post-classical philosophy), Indo-Iranica, Persian and Bengali literature, and Sufism.

He is also affiliated with the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the program in Religious Certificate.