"The Ethics of Empire and Wealth: Ibn Khaldun and the Modern State"
We are holding the inaugural Sir Muhammad Iqbal Lecture, to be delivered by Professor Wael B. Hallaq, who is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the Columbia University. Professor Hallaq is widely considered to be one of the foremost contemporary authorities on Islamic law, having made foundational contributions to the field through several award-winning books, including Authority, Continuity, and Change in Islamic Law (2001), Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (2013) and his most recent book, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge. His work has been hugely influential, widely debated and translated in multiple languages.
The topic of the lecture will be "The Ethics of Empire and Wealth: Ibn Khaldun and the Modern State".
The lecture is named in honour of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, who was one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century and whose political ideals provided the intellectual foundation for Pakistan. Revered as the poet-philosopher of the East, Iqbal’s poetry in Urdu and Persian is considered as the finest expression of Eastern literary and philosophical tradition in modern history.