Muslim Ethics: Emerging Vistas

Recent political and social events, as well as advances in science and technology, have posed challenges to the traditional Muslim discourse on ethics.

In this book, new in paperback, Amyn B. Sajoo examines these challenges and critically analyzes the implications of emerging initiatives in political pluralism and civic culture as well as moves in bio-medicine and environmental conservation. He considers how the contours of public ethics in Islam may be redefined to provide shared conceptions of the good and the practically useful in pluralist societies.

Finding that modern ethical theories to be blinkered by focusing on the what and how of ethics, Sajoo (civil society, human rights, and Islam; Simon Fraser U., Canada) asks why people act ethically. Though he focuses on Muslims, he says he addresses a fundamental problem that straddles the distinction between secular and religious motivation among people in general. Civility and its discontents, the dance of secular and religious, and pluralist governance are his themes. The study is published in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, and distributed in the US by Palgrave. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Amyn B. Sajoo is currently a Visiting Scholar at McGill University. He is also a regular commentator on public affairs in the news media on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the editor of Civil Society in the Muslim World: Contemporary Perspectives and the author of Pluralism in Old Societies and New States.