Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview

Islamic anthropology is relatively seldom treated as a particular concern even though much of the contemporary debate on the modernisation of Islam, its acceptance of human rights and democracy, makes implicit assumptions about the way Muslims conceive of the human being.This examination of modern Islamic anthropology provides an account of the human being in various significant strands of Islamic religious thought since the later nineteenth century. Tracing the significance of Darwinist and other evolutionary theories in contemporary Islam, the author gives a thorough account of the variety of ways in which Islamic thought has been affected by, and responds to, the evolutionary anthropology encountered by Muslims through their interaction with occidental culture.