From the Divine to the Human: Contemporary Islamic Thinkers on Evil, Suffering, and the Global Pandemic, edited by Muhammad U. Faruque and Mohammed Rustom, is a fresh and insightful engagement with one of the most challeng- ing questions of human thought, namely evil and human suffering, from an Islamic perspective. The volume takes a new approach by focusing on the human subject and its potential and spiritual development in the face of evil and suffering. Although the overarching problem of evil is considered one of the most investigated questions in the field of philosophy of religion, the issue is mostly addressed in the context of God’s divine attributes with the objec- tive to justify the existence of a powerful and benevolent God and the fact that evil exists, hence the formation of various theodicies. The present volume, however, shifts the attention from the divine attributes to human capabilities, and while it does not overlook the metaphysical nature of evil and suffering, it draws attention to the anthropocentric conceptions of them, thereby address- ing both the theoretical and the practical dimensions of the problem.

The volume begins by a concise introduction where the editors intro- duce the topic and provide a short history of various versions of the problem of evil and suffering, as well as ways by which the philosophers of religions have largely addressed the issue. Following this background information, the reader is made aware of the unique approach of the present study and the redirection that will take place throughout the volume, i.e. drawing attention away from the traditional approach in philosophy of religion, where the focus is on God and His attributes, and directing the emphasis on human capacities and spiri- tual development. Subsequently, the contributors of the fourteen chapters of the volume attempt to achieve the aforementioned goal by investigating both pre-modern and contemporary Islamic literature to propose new avenues in studying the nature of evil and human suffering.