Agency, Rationality, and Morality

Reviewed by: Kamran I Karimullah, Manchester University, UK

Published by: London: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2024, 107pp. ISBN: 978-1642056979.

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Agency, Rationality, and Morality (hereafter: ARM) is a book-length essay by Mona Abul-Fadl (1945-2008), the Muslim Egyptian academic who came to prominence as a critic of modern feminism and western liberalism. It was published some nine years ago in abbreviated form in a UNESCO publication.1 This latter volume, which was commissioned for the UNESCO Histories project, was intended, in the words of Irina Bokova (“Preface,” p.5), Director-General of UNESCO (2009-2017), as a ‘seminal contribution to exploring the richness of Islamic civilization, and its immense contribution to the history of humanity.’ In the spirit of UNESCO’s founding vision, the volume was compiled to ‘underline the importance and value of diversity for all societies and for humanity as a whole....’ Taking advantage of the current hysteria surrounding the increasing cultural visibility of artificial intelligence and machine learning, IIIT saw fit to publish ARM eight years after the UNESCO publication and 16 years after its author’s death from breast cancer in 2008. The work under review, though longer than the version published by UNESCO, presents the same message. In the intellectual climate of 2024, however, the book can now be read as responding to current anxieties about what makes humans human and whether or not robots matter to God. The work under review, therefore, appears to have originally been a provisional draft of the UNESCO publication which was still incomplete at the time of the author’s passing.