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Resources

Publications arising from the project will appear here in due course. The following titles by other scholars, all of which address questions of existential risk from Humanities-based perspectives, inform our work:

Islamic Algorithms

Gary R. Bunt

This book examines how Islam is digitally mediated at a time of technological change, enhanced digital literacy and proactive engagement in Islamic online content by authorities and influencers.

What is the impact of this on societies, believers and understandings of Islam? Islamic Algorithms provides a thorough exploration of Cyber Islamic Environments (CIEs) through representations of significant historical and religious influences across contexts and diversities. This ranges from jinn and angels through to contemporary influencers.

Publication Link

Muslim Societies in Postnormal Times

Ziauddin Sardar, Jordi Serra, Scott Jordan

What kind of future are we shaping for ourselves and our planet? What risks and dangers
lurk over the horizon – in the near and not so distant future? Do we have a sense of direction? And what kind of society and world do we wish to live in as well as leave behind, for
ourselves, for our children, and future generations? What can we, as Muslims, do to
shape a more viable future both for Muslim societies and the world at large? These questions require our urgent attention.

Publication Link
Corridor of beautiful traditional tiled archways
Traditional green domed building

Calamity Theory

Joshua Schuster and Derek Woods

What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse? A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existential risk” studies any real or hypothetical human extinction event in the near or distant future. This movement examines catastrophes ranging from runaway global warming to nuclear warfare to malevolent artificial intelligence, deploying a curious mix of utilitarian ethics, statistical risk analysis, and, controversially, a transhuman advocacy that would aim to supersede almost all extinction scenarios.

Publication Link

Religion and Artificial Intelligence

Beth Singler

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rarely out of the news or the public imagination. Images of red-eyed Terminators illustrate press accounts of incremental advances in medical diagnosis, facial recognition, natural language processing, and robotics. Such advances are transforming society through measurable impacts on people’s decisions and opportunities.

Publication Link

Rethinking the anthropological enterprise in light of Muslim ontologies

Fabio Vicini, Lili Di Puppo

Because of the difficulty anthropology continues to face in relinquishing its secular vestiges, field encounters with not-immediately-perceptible reality, the realm of God, the invisible, and the otherworldly have usually been removed or deemed insignificant in anthropological accounts. In dialogue with the ontological turn and other recent developments in anthropology, in this article we introduce the special section on Muslim ontologies by advocating for a more profound reconsideration of the role that the encounter with other modes of knowing in the field might have for the discipline.

Publication Link

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