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This book aims to both rediscover and advance practical notions of commonweal, or common good, retrieval in an Islamic social order. The first chapter explores shuʿab al-īmān or “branches of faith,” a holistic system of values and actions derived from various sound hadiths, though largely overlooked today. Musa Furber analyses classical texts and classification schemes of the shuʿab to demonstrate how these timeless branches can serve as a guide for spiritual refinement, ethical conduct, and social cohesion. In the second chapter, Ahmad Deeb traces how the metaphysical rupture caused by modernity fosters loneliness and erodes traditional structures of belonging, then proposes a philosophy of community attuned to, and able to nurture, the psychological well-being and cohesion that are an innate human need. The third chapter maps out a skill-based social order animated by Islamic principles: Karim Lahham illustrates how, through intention, work becomes a communal obligation, serving both material needs and spiritual fulfilment, and steering the ethos of such a society towards virtuous praxis whilst transcending the self.

This paper in the series explores one of the first principles of metaphysics, the principle of identity in its logical form, namely, the principle of non- contradiction, and the relationship between its metaphysical and logical dimensions. It is invariably the task of revelation to provide definable and recognizable references that can be brought into human understanding. Logic is given the role of providing in us an eternal order reflective of the order of creation, a role that bestows upon it, therefore, a certain sacrality. The Kantian conceptualist contention, now often encountered, establishes the basis for the contemporary de-ontologization of logic, since it creates a split between second intentions and first intentions, ensuring that reality has no input into the workings of the mind. Secondary intelligibles, however, are based on first intelligibles – things that exist – and thus they are ontologically dependent and reflective of that order. The logical thus can never contradict the metaphysical, and the metaphysical can never in turn be illogical. This seamlessness between the two orders is critical to the safeguarding of a sound intellectual discourse enabling the human soul to understand its existential condition, a condition that remains the same regardless of time and place.

In a philosophical idiom that attempts to be intelligible to the reader who is not traditionally trained, this study outlines various dimensions of traditional Islamic ‘correspondence’ theories of truth. It particularly argues that purely intelligible, ‘abstract’ concepts, universal natures and general principles objectively apply to the world, against schools of thought that contend that they are subjectively imposed. It is only by discerning the congruity or discordance of these fundamental instruments of general metaphysics with forms of extramental reality, that we are able to avoid the implication that their lack of sensible referents implies our knowledge of the world – which is contingent upon the employment of these instruments – must be ultimately subjective. These intelligible entities, universal natures and general principles can thus only be validated by situating them within an all-encompassing theory of objective reality and truth, in the Islamic tradition nafs al-amr or ‘things as they are’. Transcending individual minds and sensible reality, such a theory must be sufficiently broad to account for the ultimate ontological and henological status of such universal and abstract principles and forms. This study demonstrates that a synthetical approach to the nature of objective reality and truth, drawing on the Avicennan and kalām, and especially Platonic and Akbarian traditions, is capable of effectively responding to subjectivist, anti-metaphysical views on the nature of the world and our knowledge of it. It purports to do this in a manner that strengthens the deepest foundations underlying traditional natural theology, illustrating that the physical world of particulars is ‘intelligible’ (in the sense of ‘objectively knowable’) exactly because it is a branch of an ‘intelligible’ (as the contrary of ‘sensible’), non-physically instantiated world.