Muhammad U. Faruque is the Inayat Malik Associate Professor and a Taft Center Fellow (AY 2023-24) at the University of Cincinnati. He also holds a Visiting Scholar position at Harvard University. He earned his PhD (with distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley, and served as Exchange Scholar at Harvard University and as George Ames Postdoctoral Fellow at Fordham University. He was also educated at the University of London and Tehran University. In addition to his formal college education, he has traveled throughout the world to learn and explore, and studied with many scholars from South Asia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, North Africa, and Malaysia.

Dr. Faruque was studying economics while the catastrophic financial crisis of 2008 shook the world. Focusing on stock markets at that time, he began to think seriously about the big questions of life, especially whether or not we can understand and predict what happens in the external world (in the economic sphere) without taking into account some conception of human subjectivity and the metaphysical presuppositions of what is real, what is possible, and what is good. He eventually became disenchanted with the quantitative models used in economics and began to question the mechanistic premises of modern science. After writing his dissertation on “Arbitrage Pricing Theory” using PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and completing his degree, he decided to pursue philosophy from a non-Western perspective. This landed him in Iran and its vast world of Islamic philosophy. For the next three years, he immersed himself in the philosophies of Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Mulla Sadra, while also studying Greek philosophy and modern logic. After studying with leading Iranian philosophers at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy and Tehran University for three years and earning an MA with distinction, he moved to the US to pursue a PhD at UC Berkeley, where he studied philosophy, religion and spirituality, and the history and philosophy of science.

His book Sculpting the Self (University of Michigan Press, 2021) won the prestigious 31st World Book Award from Iran. The book addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of selfhood and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical literatures, including modern philosophy and neuroscience. He is the author of three books and over fifty academic articles, which have appeared (or are forthcoming) in numerous prestigious, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes such as Philosophy East and West, Philosophical Forum, Journal of Contemplative Studies, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (Cambridge), Sophia, Journal of Sufi Studies (Brill), Religious Studies (Cambridge), and Ancient Philosophy. He has delivered lectures in many North American, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern universities. He gives public lectures on a wide range of topics such as climate change, spirituality, meditation, AI, Islamic psychology, and Islam and the West. He is also a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the prestigious Templeton Foundation Global Philosophy of Religion grant and the Title IV Grant, U.S. Dept. of Education.

While his past research has explored modern and premodern conceptions of selfhood and identity and their bearing on ethics, religion, and culture, his current book project entitled The Interconnected Universe: Sufism, Climate Change, and Ecological Living aims to develop a new theory of the human and the more-than-human world based on a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary approach that draws on the environmental humanities, on one hand, and Sufism and Islamic Contemplative Studies, on the other. Alongside developing a theory of what he calls the “interconnected universe,” this study also argues that Sufi contemplative practices support and foster an active engagement toward the planet’s well-being and an ecologically viable way of life and vision through an “anthropocosmic” vision of the self. He is also at work on a book on AI and the existential threats of information technology. He also just published an edited volume entitled From the Divine to the Human: New Perspectives on Evil, Suffering, and the Global Pandemic (co-edited with M. Rustom and published by Routledge). In addition, he has a forthcoming edited volume A Cultural History of South Asian Literature, Volume 3: The Early Modern Age (1400-1700) (co-edited with S. Nair).

In his personal life, he loves gardening (plant life fascinates him), spending time in nature, travelling (he always likes to explore new places!), trying out new cuisines, hiking, cooking, sports (esp. tennis, table tennis, and chess), and watching movies. He also has a passion for classical Indian (raag) and Persian music.

He is affiliated with the departments of Philosophy, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Environmental Studies, and the Religious Studies Certificate program.