Heidegger, Hermeneutics, and the Interpretation of Islam

Revealing how Heidegger’s philosophy and the religious beliefs of Islam are fundamentally incompatible, this book challenges previous assumptions about Heidegger’s relationship to Islam. This book takes the view that they in fact stand apart. A compelling and innovative comparison, this book explores how the two have been mistakenly woven together through the imaginations of certain scholars and how others continue to utilise Heidegger in that vein.

Exploring this, the book delivers an original study of Islam using Heidegger’s philosophy. Starting from the premise that Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology establishes an important point of reference for thinking about society and politics as well as religion. Following this approach, this book analyses the thought of pivotal Muslim figures in relation to Heidegger’s position to assess not whether they were “proto-Heideggerian” or “pseudo-Heideggerian” but rather to what extent these thinkers understood the problematics of religion, politics, and society as a hermeneutical problem.

A critical point of discussion for our age in light of the prominence of political Islam narrative, this book speaks to metaphysical blind spots of Islamic thought that have produced dangerous ideologies hostile to the West, which seem to reflect Heidegger’s philosophy but are not based on it in reality.