Karl Jaspers and Imam Musa Sadr On Prophet Muhammad

About the Book

The underlying question in this work is related to the paradigmatic role of Prophet Muhammad and how this paradigm has been understood by both Jaspers and Sadr and why they have come to two different conclusions on this very pivotal issue and furthermore how these differences affected the dialogue among civilizations or more importantly the dialogue among elite intellectuals in Iran (and those intellectuals who work within the paradigm of Sacred Intellectual Tradition in general) and Germany (and those intellectuals who work within the paradigm of the Secular Tradition in general). It is of profound interest to go beyond the journalistic approaches to the questions of ‘difference’, ‘otherness’, ‘traditions’, ‘dialogue’, ‘possibilities of dialogue’, and all that which make up the very backbone of contemporary incomprehensibilities across various civilizations, cultures, societies, nations, ethnicities and systems and instead construct common grounds and grounds of commonalities which could touch the hearts of men and women in a meaningful fashion and fashions which are of meaningful depths, i.e. inspired by Revelation (in religious sense), Intellection (in metaphysical sense), and Beautiful (in aesthetical sense). We cannot leave these issues in the hands of politicians or spin doctors who design the relations between human beings based on geostrategical interests of multinational companies rather than interaction between souls which could elevate the quality of human condition by overcoming the boundaries of ignorance or surpassing the predicament of ignoring the suffering of the others based on any illusory justifications.

About the Author

Seyed Javad Miri graduated from Goteborg University in Sweden and got his doctor degree from Bristol University in England and has been a Visiting Professor in England, China and Russia at the departments of Philosophy, Sociology and Social Anthropology respectively and he has been working on the relation between social theory, religion and philosophy and soon shall move to Sharif University in Iran.