Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit Book Talk

In Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, author and expert, Bruce B. Lawrence, delivers a spiritual elan filtered through cultural practices and artifacts. Neither juridical nor creedal, the book expresses a desire for the just and the beautiful. The author sets out an original and fascinating theory, that Islamicate cosmopolitanism marks a new turn in global history. An unceasing, self-critical pursuit of truth, hitched to both beauty and justice, its history is marked by male elites who were scientific exemplars in the pre-modern period.

Bruce Lawrence is Emeritus Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, where he taught for four decades. He holds a PhD in History of Religions from Yale University and has been awarded honorary ThDs from both Virginia Theological Seminary and Episcopal Divinity School. Professor Lawrence specializes in the Comparative Study of Religious Movements; Institutional Islam, especially in Asia; Indo-Persian Sufism; the Religious Masks of Violence; Contemporary Islam as Abrahamic Faith and Religious Ideology.