The study of historical precedents for engagements with existential risk in the Islamic tradition offers valuable insights. A particularly illustrative case is that of the plague treatises, which came to form a distinct literary genre in Muslim literature between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 These works offered Muslim scholars an opportunity to confront fundamental metaphysical, spiritual, and ethical questions that conferred meaning and purpose upon the tribulations posed by the existential risks of their time. How should an existential threat be understood in light of the Divine decree and the foreordainment of all things (qadar)? Where are the boundaries between confident reliance upon God’s will (tawakkul) and the refusal to act responsibly in the face of such dangers? How is natural causality to be conceived in relation to Divine agency, and can—or should—the two be separated? And, finally, what spiritual and inward disposition allows one to perceive the Divine wisdom operating behind the veil of appearances, even amidst existential peril?
Yet these texts also reveal their limits when treated as ready-made models for contemporary reflections on existential risk. Their relevance today depends upon a necessary work of interpretive re-articulation, for none of them can speak meaningfully to our present without the added layer of our own philosophical and spiritual exegesis. The distance between traditional cosmologies and modern scientific knowledge, for instance, cannot be overlooked. Classical theological worldviews often stand in marked tension with modern epistemologies, especially in their engagement with the natural sciences. This tension is, of course, destined to be resolved and to stimulate the ongoing work of reflection and reformulation within Muslim thought. The effort to remain attuned to its own time has always been vital to the relevance and creative adaptability of the Islamic intellectual tradition, a principle memorably expressed in the oft-cited saying attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 661): “Do not raise your children as you were raised, for they were created for a time other than your own.” Figures such as Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī (d. 1210) and Murtadā al-Zabīdī (d. 1791), to name but two, underscored in their works the necessity for Islamic theology to remain abreast of the scientific developments of their age.
Today this task is arguably more urgent, yet also more difficult, than ever before: the vast majority of Muslims are born into, and profoundly shaped by, modernity or post- modernity. One might even contend—provocatively—that Islamic traditional civilisation, as a functioning global intellectual and ethical ecosystem, no longer exists. To frame the present situation as a simple binary opposition between tradition and modernity is therefore to misrecognise our actual condition. Contemporary Muslim thinkers are thus faced with the challenge of translating the traditional vision of the world into a language capable of resonating within the conditions of modernity. In other words, when reflecting on existential risk through the lens of traditional Islamic knowledge, we must also acknowledge an existential risk to Islamic knowledge itself—one that arises not only from external pressures but from within its own historical predicament.
The epistemicide wrought by modernity, colonialism, and secularism threatens not only the relevance of the tradition; it has also engendered a certain ossification within the tradition itself. This is visible in the narrowing of the corpus studied and cited by most contemporary Muslim scholars; in the fossilisation of inherited categories and hierarchies of knowledge that remain largely disconnected from the conditions of modernity; in a pervasive fear of intellectual and doctrinal creativity that renders Islamic knowledge a matter of repetition rather than reflection; and in an increasing inability to integrate the multiple dimensions of lived human experience into the normative framework of religious thought. Through such self-enclosure, traditional Islamic knowledge faces the existential risk of losing its capacity for renewal and relevance, and thus its ability to apprehend the conditions in which Muslims actually find themselves today.
”The micro-macrocosmic worldview and anthropology of the Islamic tradition provide a powerful lens through which existential risk appears not merely as a threat but as a call to meaning.
For Islamic knowledge to remain relevant in the face of both external and internal existential risks, it must first be revitalised by re-centring the nexus it establishes between the conditions of time—its metaphysics and cosmology—and the conditions of human existence within time—its philosophical anthropology. In other words, what traditional knowledge now requires is a new hermeneutics of the human condition, framed by our present situation of existential risk.
Certain classical doctrinal principles, born of the cross-fertilisation of theological, Sufi, and philosophical traditions, may prove particularly fruitful in offering a framework for such a reinvention:
First, we must revisit the relation between divine manifestation and the human being, articulated both in the micro-macrocosmic notion of humanity’s spiritual Caliphate and in the doctrine of perpetual creation (khalq jadīd). From this perspective, existential risk is not merely an external disruption but an invitation to inner re-creation—both for humanity as a whole and for each individual human being. It need not be read as the herald of an imminent end, but rather as the sign of a transformation so profound that it brings our present state and form to their close.
Second, we must re-invest the dimension of the imaginal world (ʿālam al-mithāl), which holds a central place in Islamic epistemology and cosmology. This intermediate realm, situated between the material and the metaphysical, offers a distinct conception of human existence and a mode of interpreting human destiny that Henry Corbin (d. 1978)
famously described as its “hiero-history.” Far from being peripheral to the everyday experience of Muslims, the imaginal domain functions as a structuring element of the religious worldview itself. Devotional literature, for instance, carries genuine epistemic weight in this regard: it mediates a particular vision of the world, of the human being, and of their shared relation to God, situating them all within the imaginal order.2 Once integrated into the sacred dimension of time—in other words, when read within the imaginal horizon of hiero-history—existential risk is no longer reducible to the question of material survival. It pertains, above all, to the life of human consciousness, and it concerns less to the world as such than the way in which the human being situates himself within the world.
Eschatology encapsulates this approach when understood not merely as scriptural interpretation or speculative reflection on the end-times, but as a symbolic grammar through which existential risk itself may be read. As found in the works of the Andalusian mystical theologian Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), the elements of traditional eschatological narratives point as much to the inner reality of every human being, and of humanity as a whole, as to the awaited figures destined to appear at the end of time.3 Mirroring humanity’s caliphal vocation, the Antichrist (al-masīḥ al-dajjāl) in this perspective signifies less a particular individual than a collective failure of discernment—a distorted relation to nature and to illusion that constitutes humanity’s ultimate existential peril. Conversely, the figure of the Imam Mahdī symbolises the re-unification of fragmented knowledge around a divinely inspired axis. Such an eschatological reading of existential risk lays bare a crisis rooted in the disorganisation of knowledge: the fragmentation of disciplines and the loss of a holistic vision have stripped traditional Islamic learning of both orientation and purpose. It is therefore imperative to revisit the classical classifications and hierarchies of the sciences—once themselves a recognised literary genre4—not as a nostalgic exercise, but as an act of creative recovery: a reconfiguration of Islamic knowledge capable of responding organically to the conditions and exigencies of our time.
In sum, the micro-macrocosmic worldview and anthropology of the Islamic tradition provide a powerful lens through which existential risk appears not merely as a threat but as a call to meaning. At the same time, such risks can themselves serve as catalysts for the renewal and reorientation of Islamic knowledge itself. This circularity is a hallmark of traditional wisdom: the world mirrors the soul, and the soul mirrors the world. Far from heralding an end, our present moment of existential risk may thus open a profound opportunity to reactivate Islamic knowledge and the traditional sciences—not simply for the sake of survival, but as a pathway to meaning. Ultimately, existential risk is to be embraced above all as a blessing: an invitation to transform our ways of being, thinking, and acting in the light of Divine wisdom.
Gregory Vandamme
¹ In this regard, see Justin Stearns, Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). For my part, I have focused in particular on the treatise composed by the Moroccan scholar and Sufi master Aḥmad Ibn ʿAjıb̄ a (d. 1809), The Stringing of Pearls in the Remembrance of Decree and Predestination (Silk al-durar ?ī dhikr al-qaḍāʾ wa-l-qadar), which I intend to translate and analyse within the framework of the MUSER project.
² See on this subject my forthcoming article, “Devotion and Metaphysics in a Litany Ascribed to ʿAbd al- Qādir al-Jīlānī,” in I of the Heart: Texts and Studies in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. M. Faruque, A. Khalil, and M. Rustom (Boston: De Gruyter–Brill, 2025).
³ See in particular chapter 366 of his celebrated spiritual summa, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings), which deals with “the knowledge of the mansion of the ministers of the Mahdı̄ who will appear at the end of time, as announced by the Messenger of God—may God bless him and grant him peace—as being part of his household.”
⁴ See, for example, the original classification proposed by the Indian scholar Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762): Ḥāfiẓ ʿAbd al-Ghaffār Khān, “Shāh Walī Allāh: On the Nature, Origin, Definition, and Classification of Knowledge,” Journal of Islamic Studies 3, no. 2 (1992): 203–213.
