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The Department of Humanities & Social Sciences is excited to host Dr. Feyzullah Yilmaz for an enlightening session on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024, at 4:00 PM in the VC Faculty Lounge.
Don’t miss this opportunity to deepen your understanding of Iqbal's contributions to philosophy and spirituality. All are welcome!
Abstract: This talk will focus on the philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (1877 – 1938), a leading modern Muslim thinker, and analyze its development. Iqbal’s philosophy and its development is often interpreted within the narrative of the transition from pantheism to theism and from Indian nationalism to Muslim nationalism. However, this framing inadequately situates Iqbal’s philosophy in its broader historical and intellectual contexts. The aim is to go beyond this failure. Accordingly, the main argument of this talk is that Iqbal’s philosophy and its development is best analyzed and understood within the context of, and as a response to, the problem of nihilism, and that Iqbal’s response to the problem of nihilism is a reconstructed form of Sufism.
Bio: Feyzullah Yılmaz completed his PhD in Political Science at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkiye in 2016. In his dissertation, entitled Overcoming Nihilism Through Sufism: Muhammad Iqbal, His Philosophy, and Political Theology, Dr. Yılmaz analyzed Iqbal’s philosophy within the context of and as a response to the problem of nihilism as it was debated in modern German philosophy. His articles were published by the Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies and Open Philosophy. From 2018 to 2024, Feyzullah Yılmaz worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Sabahattin Zaim University in Istanbul. In 2024, he joined LUMS as a Bard Fellow, where he focuses on developing his dissertation into a book manuscript and teaching courses in political science.
