ABSTRACT
Introduction The Europe into whose grip the Islamic world fell so fatefully in the nineteenth century was not merely ‘modern’. It was also a civilization in fresh upheaval over its grasp of the meaning of the human. The focus of this crisis was a growing certainty that human life, rather than having been deliberately created by God, was the product of millions of years of gradual evolution from less complex animal species. This book is an attempt to address how that potentially most destabilizing of shifts, whose ramifications may still have to be fully digested by the western psyche, has shaped Islamic thought about the humanum, positively and negatively, over the course of the last century and a half.
