On 2 October 2024, Dr Ankur Barua, Dr Amal Awad and Dr Hina Khalid convened a hybrid conference called A matter of resonance: Exploring the philosophy of mind in Islamic and Hindu traditions at the Faculty of Divinity, discussing the concepts of mind, body, and self in Islamic and Hindu traditions.
The conference was envisioned with the hope of fostering comparative analyses that would highlight debates relating to self-knowledge, the nature of consciousness, and human subjectivity across Hindu and Muslim worldviews. In premodern South Asia, various types of intellectual exchanges across Indic and Islamic borderlines were modulated by the motif of the self and its relation to the (human and divine) other.
Echoing this motif, seven speakers explored a spectrum of themes such as the nature of the mind, self-realization, aesthetic experience, the significance of reason, the structure of reality, the good life, and moral psychology. Two of the speakers are Visiting Scholars at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge and four are doctoral students from Cambridge and Oxford. The concluding reflections were offered by a scholar based at Aligarh Muslim University, India, who highlighted certain resonances between Hindu and Muslim visions of the human self and its relation to the ultimate reality.
The theme of “Hindu-Muslim interreligious engagement” is virtually unexplored in the UK – the conversations that unfolded during the conference have laid the ground for sustained dialogical engagements with it on future occasions.
More details
Read about the conference and download the programme.
This event was co-sponsored by the Spalding Trust and the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum (small grant scheme).