SIS Book Launch - Akbar Ahmed, The Flying Man

About the Book:

From Ibn Sina and Al-Ghazali to Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas, the Golden Age of Islam produced and influenced some of the greatest philosophers in history. Despite their profound intellectual achievements, however, the contributions of Muslim philosophers have largely been forgotten or even dismissed.

In this fascinating title from Beacon Books, celebrated Pakistani-American academic and former diplomat Akbar Ahmed places the concept of Ibn Sina's Flying Man on par with Plato's allegory of the cave and Nietzsche's notion of the ubermensch. He begins by tracing the crucial transmission of Greek texts into Arabic to the development of an Islamic tradition that harmonised reason and revelation. He explores the lives and ideas of the era's greatest thinkers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, showing how the intellectual renaissance of the ninth to thirteenth centuries continues to influence religious thought and philosophical ideas today.

Ahmed both challenges those who dismiss the contributions of Islamic civilization and revives its rich heritage for modern-day Muslims, arguing that the philosophers of the Golden Age of Islam still have much to teach us about wisdom, wonder and scholarship.

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About the Author:

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at AU and a Global Fellow of the Wilson Center. Ahmed’s career has included distinguished posts in both academia and public service. Highlights from the past four decades of Ahmed’s academic career include appointments such as: Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; the First Distinguished Chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD; the Iqbal Fellow (Chair of Pakistan Studies) and Fellow of Selwyn College at the University of Cambridge; and teaching positions at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Ahmed dedicated more than three decades to the Civil Service of Pakistan, the senior-most cadre of the Central Superior Services of Pakistan, where his posts included Commissioner in Balochistan, Political Agent in the Tribal Areas, including Waziristan, and Pakistan High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland.
Ahmed’s expertise has earned high praise around the world. The BBC called him, “The world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam,” and the Saudi Gazette lauded him as, “Perhaps the most influential living authority on contemporary Muslim societies.”
Ahmed’s critically acclaimed projects include academic books, documentaries, plays, poetry, a feature film, and a comic book. Ahmed’s most recent book, Journey into Europe (2018), is the fourth book in a quartet of studies published by Brookings Press examining relations between the West and Islamic world. The book has been featured in multiple summer reading lists and received positive reviews in popular publications, including, The New York Times and the San Francisco Review of Books. The first three books in the quartet, Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (2007), Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam (2010), and The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (2013) also received notable media attention. Journey into America and Journey into Europe were accompanied by documentaries of the same name (2009 and 2015).
Prior to the Brookings quartet of studies, Ahmed’s most celebrated projects included the Jinnah Quartet and Living Islam. The Jinnah Quartet was comprised of a feature film Jinnah (1998), with Christopher Lee in the title role; a documentary, Mr. Jinnah: The Making of Pakistan (1997); a graphic novel, The Quaid: Jinnah and the Story of Pakistan (1997); and a biographical study, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (1997). Ahmed presented and narrated the six-part BBC TV series Living Islam (1993) and authored the accompanying book of the same name.
In addition to his academic works, Ahmed has produced noteworthy poetry and plays. Ahmed’s poems were broadcast from the Library of Congress in “The Poet and the Poem” podcast series. His plays Noor and The Trial of Dara Shikoh have been staged around the world. He writes a weekly column for the Daily Times, one of Pakistan’s leading newspapers.
Ahmed has remained committed to service throughout his career. His roles include: Trustee, World Faiths Development Dialogue, chaired by Lord George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury; Charter Member, The Interfaith Coalition on Mosques; Member, International Advisory Board for The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at The Queen’s University of Belfast; and Member, Washington Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council.
Ahmed’s esteemed career has earned him a number of awards, including: the Government of Pakistan’s Star of Excellence (Sitara-i-Imtiaz) for academic distinction and Medal of Excellence (Tamgha-i-Imtiaz); the first-ever Purpose Prize alongside Judea Pearl; the inaugural Gandhi Memorial Center Peace Award; the inaugural Award of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington; Professor of the Year Award for Washington, D.C. by Carnegie Foundation in 2004 ; consistently featured in The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims; being named a 2015 Global Thought Leader by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute and The Huffington Post’s WorldPost; acknowledgement as a “Notable Alumnus” of SOAS, University of London, and Birmingham University, UK; the 2017 Sir Syed Day Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in Poetry, Literature, Arts or the Sciences by the Aligarh Muslim University Alumni Association of New Jersey and Pennsylvania; and named the 2017 Scholar/Teacher of the Year of the American University School of International Service, one of the top-ten international relations programs in the US. The National Cathedral in 2005 dedicated an Evensong Service in honor of Ahmed in an unprecedented event led by the Bishop of Washington, D.C., and Senior Rabbi of the Washington Hebrew Congregation.

Host or Publisher School of International Service