Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series
Incorporating Scientific Materialism in an Islamic Worldview: The Perspective of Abdullah Cevdet
- Zeynep Gültekin
- Date
- Thursday 20 March 2025
- Time
- Serie
- What's New?! Spring Lecture Series 2025
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
Abstract
Muslim debates on science and the relationship between Islam and science have been shaped by the colonial history. In this public lecture, I will explore the ideas of Abdullah Cevdet, a reformist in the late Ottoman Empire. As a physician and Muslim thinker, Cevdet focused on the relation of science with knowledge revealed by the Islamic sources. He admired the reasonableness of scientific truth, its elucidation of human experience within a rational explicable framework. However, he refused to accept the scientific view as the only source of insight about life. He sought for a balance between reasonableness and metaphysics, and argued that a fusion of Islam and science on a metaphysical level would deepen the scientific worldview and enable the salvation of the Islamic civilization.
About the speaker
Zeynep M. Gültekin is a researcher and lecturer in Islamic studies and religious studies. Her main subject of interest is the modern Muslim debate on science and the relationship between science and Islam. In her PhD research "Being a Muslim and a Scientist: Authority in the Islam-Science Debate", she analyzed how contemporary Muslim scientists in the natural sciences evaluate the relationship between Islam and science, and the solutions they propose to the challenges from science.
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