This thesis analyzes contemporary interpretations of Islamic religious ethics regarding the environment and its problems. The first part introduces a theoretical perspective in which the analyzed problem is viewed as historico-sociological problem of interaction between the modern phenomena of environmentalism and the traditional framework of religious ethics. The object of the second part is a close analysis and summary of those parts of the religious textual tradition which are included in the contemporary ethico-religious interpretations of environmental problems. In the third part, three separate discourses of contemporary Islamic environmental ethics and two other perspectives are distinguished and analysed using texts which represent them, published on this topic in English and Arabic. On this material common features of Islamic ethical attitude towards the nature and environmental problems are demonstrated as well as notable differences between the interpretations of jurists, layman activists, institutions and other actors. Attentions is paid to various possible relations between modern environmental concepts and notions and traditional ethico- religious Islamic tenets including their possible political and social implications.

The aim of this thesis is to interpretate the stories The Living, son of the Vigilant, The Bird and Salaman and Absal, written by one of the greatest scholars of medieval Islamic East, Ibn Sina (980-1037). Unlike his philosophical and medical writings these stories have a different character and create a coherent narrative cycle. Based on their themes, narrative methods and symbolism they should be in my opinion called initiation stories. The main aim of this dissertation is thus to verify this hypothesis by means of the hermeneutic interpretation. These stories, read as a coherent cycle, show typical features of initiation genre: the hero can't find his way, his existential condition makes him desperate, he is consumed by strong desire for reaching a higher ontological degree, meets an initiator, goes through initiation rites of passage, crosses the border between the uninitiated and initiated space, reaches the final initiation through symbolic death. The interpretation of each of Ibn Sina's three writings reveals an inner coherence of the stories: The Living, son of the Vigilant focuses on the motive of an initiator-guide and the description of the stages on the initiation way leading upwards, The Bird tells in an emotional way about the state preceding the initiation and then concentrates on...

The Philosophers such as ibn-Sina had maintained that time and space were co-eternal with Allah, emanating by necessity from His Attributes, and not being the results of a deliberate act of creation. This must be the case, for otherwise nothing would have been present to induce Him to create the world after a period of non-existence. Al-Ghazali's refutation of this is that Allah had decreed in pre-eternity that the world would materialize at a future, predetermined date, selecting an instance for its birth from a myriad like-instances by exercising His Free Will and manifesting therewith a cause with a delayed effect. The Philosophers' explanation of local phenomena as resulting from the perpetual motion of the spheres is flawed, since perpetual celestial motions would result in perpetual, not transient phenomena. Time, the measure of motion, does not extend beyond the physical realm. Time, and hence motion, is finite. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Ancient Languages & Cultures)

Les Épîtres des Frères en Pureté forment une encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques (au sens hégélien) composée par Aḥmad b. aṭ-Ṭayyib as-Saraḫsī vers 280/894 à partir des travaux effectués par les Frères en Pureté, héritage du « cercle d’al-Kindī ». Le système trouve ses fondations dans l’arithmétique de Nicomaque de Gérase, est composé de la science kindienne, et s’élève sur les préoccupations politiques d’al-Ǧāḥiẓ, mais réalise une construction philosophique originale. Historiquement, une fois démontrée l’unicité du rédacteur, établi qu’Abū Ḥātim puise sa réfutation d’Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī dans la doctrine rasaélienne de l’héritage scientifique des prophètes, compris que les Rasāʾil sont alimentées par le kindisme, repéré que le seul héritier d’al-Kindī apte à cette entreprise est as-Saraḫsī, la comparaison des fragments saraḫsiens avec les épîtres révèle l’identité de style et de doctrine. L’identification de surcroît d’as-Saraḫsī au réviseur de l’Introduction arithmétique de Nicomaque autorise à postuler un système philosophique fondé mathématiquement. Préoccupées par le problème ontologique de la diversité du réel sous l’unité du Créateur, par le problème épistémologique de la divergence des méthodes et des doctrines scientifiques et religieuses malgré l’unité de la vérité et par le problème politique de la discorde malgré l’interdépendance des hommes, les Rasāʾil Iḫwān aṣ-Ṣafā entreprennent d’unifier la multiplicité empirique des êtres, de coordonner les savoirs et de réconcilier les hommes en une communauté vertueuse au moyen de trois concepts mathématiques : par leur origine dans l’émanation des êtres à partir du Créateur exprimée par la suite arithmétique, dans leur structure par la compréhension des analogies et des puissances entre les choses que révèle le rapport harmonique, et dans leur finalité au moyen de l’abstraction géométrique des formes hors de la matière constituée en modèle initiatique des âmes à la séparation d’avec le corps. / The Epistles of Brethren in Purity are an encyclopedia of philosophical sciences (in the Hegelian meaning) and were composed by Aḥmad b. aṭ-Ṭayyib as-Saraḫsī around 280/894. They are based on the work of the Brethren in Purity, which are the social inheritance of the “circle of al-Kindī.” The system itself is based on the arithmetic works of Nicomaque of Gerase. It is full of kindian science and erected on al-Ǧāḥiẓ political concerns. But as-Saraḫsī builds a very particular philosophical object. At the historical level, once we determine that the author is unique, that his views on the scientific heritage of the prophets is largely used by Abū Ḥātim ar-Rāzī to dispute with Abū Bakr, that the epistles are full of kindian elements, that the only al-Kindī’s student able to write such a book is Aḥmad b. aṭ-Ṭayyib as-Saraḫsī, we can compare the text with his fragments and reveal that they both share a particular style and philosophical ideas. So, because as-Saraḫsī is also the corrector of Nicomaque’s Introduction on Arithmetics, we can assume that he gives great importance to mathematics and base his system on it. The Epistles are focused on the ontological problem of the diversity of reality under the reign of the Creator’s unity, on the epistemological problem of contrariety of sciences and religions in methods and beliefs, and on the political problem of adversity of men in spite common interdependence. So they unify the effective multiplicity of beings, order the different disciplines of knowledge and build human reconciliation in the virtuous city, thanks to three mathematical concepts: they rewrite the emanation of beings from the Creator’s spring with the arithmetical sequence, they unify the actual structure of the world with the harmonic relation that rationalizes the different analogies and the mutual powers of their parts, and they educate the soul to its spiritual end with the geometric abstraction of forms from the material.

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The Philosophers such as ibn-Sina had maintained that time and space were co-eternal with Allah, emanating by necessity from His Attributes, and not being the results of a deliberate act of creation. This must be the case, for otherwise nothing would have been present to induce Him to create the world after a period of non-existence. Al-Ghazali's refutation of this is that Allah had decreed in pre-eternity that the world would materialize at a future, predetermined date, selecting an instance for its birth from a myriad like-instances by exercising His Free Will and manifesting therewith a cause with a delayed effect. The Philosophers' explanation of local phenomena as resulting from the perpetual motion of the spheres is flawed, since perpetual celestial motions would result in perpetual, not transient phenomena. Time, the measure of motion, does not extend beyond the physical realm. Time, and hence motion, is finite. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Ancient Languages & Cultures)

This dissertation engages a cultural discussion on time concepts that took place between Arab thinkers and creative writers in the aftermath of the June War of 1967 against Israel and the onset of a period of Arab cultural self-critique. It focuses on a set of intellectual projects and examines their propositions on Islamic notions of time and their place in the modernity of Arab thought. Intellectuals such as the Syrian poet Adonis (b. 1930), the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed ʿAbed al-Jabri (1935-2000), and the Lebanese psychologist Mustapha Hijazi (b. 1937) critiqued the alleged Arab “event-based” and “discontinuous” perception of time which lacks the notion of the temporal as a homogenous impersonal medium. Focusing on the example of Sufism, they argued that time in the Islamic worldview is a heterogenous mix of sacred and profane events in an ontology deprived of change. My dissertation debates these findings in two ways. I first draw on the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of “duration” to problematize these thinkers’ discursive ideal of homogenous time which imposes on the heterogeneity of lived temporality the attributes of space and, as such, produces a mechanistic vision of the world. I then focus on the discourse of Ibn ʿArabi (d. 637/1240) and Mulla Sudra (d. 1049/1640) to demonstrate that Sufism advances a view of time as a flux of change internal to the life of the soul and leading to moral self-perfection. Finally, my dissertation focuses on alternative Arabic engagements with Sufi writings on time through the works of the Moroccan ethicist ʿAbdurrahman Taha (b.1944), the Iraqi Marxist Hadi al-ʿAlawi (1933-1998), and the Egyptian novelist Gamal al-Ghitani (1945-2015). I argue that these thinkers and writers draw on the heterogeneity of time in Sufism to critique the semantic neutrality and abstraction of modern time which depends on capitalism as a life form.