Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande is an assistant professor of religious ethics and Islamic studies at the University of Chicago. Her first book, The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge, 2025), looks at the concept of “fiṭra,” or divinely-created human nature, in the early Islamic philosophical tradition. I had the chance to sit down with de Rande and discuss the lack of academic engagement with Islamic scholarship, the place of Islamic thought in the global canon, the intricate relationship between philosophy and religion, and what we should read to better understand this branch of philosophy.
Ezra Ellenbogen: I’m wondering how you came to an interest in this really specific topic of fiṭra. Was there a text or a moment where you realized, I need to write a book about this?
Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande: There were multiple moments, but I think one that’s really important is that I came out of an ethics program in this field called Religion, Ethics and Politics, at Princeton. I was in this vein where people were asking questions about the law, political domination, freedom, and revolution—“What’s the status of law?”—and questions around natural law and human nature. Nothing is more important for any kind of ethical question than the starting point. If ethics is about moving us somewhere, then we need to understand the starting point. In the Christian tradition, of course, you have accounts of original sin, and so people are interested in the Islamic account of human nature in contrast.
In my seminars at Princeton, there were a lot of these types of questions. I was also aware that on the Islamic studies side, people were beginning to write more conceptual histories. I thought I would start out by writing a book on Sharīʿa. But my advisor said, “You can’t write your first book on ‘What is Sharīʿa?’ That’s a third book. You should start with fiṭra.” And so that’s how I started.
There was also another catalyst. There was a version of my work that would have been straightforward, focusing on fiṭra in terms of how it occurs in the Qur’an.
EE: Just once, right?
RR: Once, yes, in the noun form, meaning the created human nature; the verb itself [faṭara] is used more often in the capacity of God’s creating activity, mostly of humans. As a verb, it shows up more often in the Qur’an. I could have written something about Qur’anic commentaries and Hadith commentaries and the theological tradition, but that was all very well known.
But somebody told me to start with this random thing, which is Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān [by Ibn Ṭufayl], a text that has had a big revival in the American liberal arts education. It’s the first Robinsonade, it’s about this guy born on an island, and Enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with it—Spinoza, etc., they all loved this idea. For a while, it was the only text from the Arabic literary heritage available in European languages, so it had a really big influence on the European image of Islam. Most of the Enlightenment thinkers misunderstood what it was trying to say about human nature and our potential for reason. I think it’s a deeply political text, and fiṭra is really important in that text, which nobody had written on.
In the tale, Ḥayy can reach a conjunction with God by himself, without society, because of his fiṭra. But Ibn Ṭufayl uses fiṭra in this tale very differently than what the general Islamic tradition or theological tradition would make us think. In his account, fiṭra divides people: only a few people, like Ḥayy, and then later his friend who joins him, have an excellent fiṭra, while most people, even scholars, have a deficient fiṭra, which is why they need religious knowledge.
I was very dumbfounded; I wondered how this interpretation developed. That question became the starting point for my dissertation and then the book. So I trace what I call the philosophical understanding of fiṭra from al-Fārābī to Ibn Bājja in Al-Andalus, who’s before Ibn Ṭufayl, and then to Ibn Rushd.
EE: You started in philosophy at Princeton, but then moved out of the program, right?
RR: I was there for one second. Yeah, I interviewed and then I never … I just took theology. I never even took a class with them after the interview. I was there for a hot minute.
EE: You said it was too narrow in the philosophy department, it had the same cast of thinkers all the time. Do you see this narrowness at universities in general, and is this what motivates your interest in Islamic philosophy?
RR: When I entered Oxford, we learned great stuff—scriptures and ethical theory; it was a high-quality program. But nowhere were there any thinkers that weren’t Christian. There was no Maimonides! I just think that historically and contemporarily, we have such a larger repertoire of thought that we could be drawing on in addressing these issues; we have lots of untapped potential.
There’s also a question of justice. I think it is disingenuous and unjust that the people who were absolutely crucial to the creation of modernity don’t get attention. There would have been no Thomas Aquinas without Ibn Rushd, yet people hardly read Ibn Rushd. And al-Fārābī is really the beginning of medieval political thought, yet he also doesn’t get regular screen time. As a result, when I teach classes on religion, ethics, and politics, we read those people. I don’t go Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas. There are people in between. And so I read Fārābī alongside Augustine.
Also, I love saying this to my students and to anybody who wants to listen. They are great texts! It’s not just this dry, “We need to be more inclusive.” They are great thinkers. They ask great questions. They, in part, have outrageous answers. I mean, sometimes I’m embarrassed when I say I love al-Fārābī, because he was a bit of a wacko; he has some disturbing thoughts about certain things, but so did Aristotle.
EE: One issue that you cover in your book that I found particularly fascinating is that when Greek texts like those of Plato and Aristotle were translated into Arabic and brought into the Islamic world, translators brought in fiṭra, which is a Qur’anic concept, right? In the book, you asked why translators would bring an explicitly religious concept into these philosophical translations, and I’m wondering if you could expand on your broader thoughts about that. My intuition is that maybe this means the Qur’an is being read almost as a source book of concepts that then get put in a new conversation.
RR: You put your finger on something that is pure conjecture at this point. I think we are in a stage academically where we’re trying to understand the social history of the Abbasid Translation Movement better, which is the time when al-Fārābī was engaged in this, but we just don’t have any understanding of what really went on there. We have some people like Jack Tannous, who is trying to write this based on a lot of the Syriac sources, but what was al-Fārābī doing there? I mean, we don’t even know where he was from—really, our understanding of this dude is extremely thin, and so it’s hard to come up with motives. The history of the Qur’an at this point is also thin.
I think there is something to him using it, but I cannot really prove it. As far as I understand, in the first translations he gets from Aristotle by the actual Syriac translators, there is no “fiṭra” in the text. So I understand he’s the first to introduce it into this philosophical jargon. I think it’s a conscious effort, and I think it has something to do with his Islamic heritage, background, and context.
Reconstructing more in terms of “What is he doing?” or “Why is he doing it?” is tough. And part of that is, probably the biggest problem is, that he never consciously really defines fiṭra, or tells us why it’s important. He just uses it as if we knew why, and what, and how, and it’s not always consistent either.
EE: If he’s not using the Qur’an as a source for concepts, do you think that he’s trying to make these texts more palatable, more understandable?
RR: Yeah, that would probably be my idea. I haven’t thought about this sort of concept-sourcing—I think it’s a nice idea—but I think he cares not about the Qur’an. I mean, it doesn’t really show up in most of his work, I think he has in his entire corpus one or two Qur’an citations. About the First Cause he says, “If you want, you can call him Allah.” That’s his investment, it’s pretty thin. We also have no idea what at this point the materiality or form of the Quran is. Is this oral? But I do think fiṭra does this job of being more palatable, and it backs up his own philosophical ideas as well.
My intuition says yes then, just because when you read his texts, it seems deliberate when he introduces it. It shows up—ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!—in a lot of either the logic sections, or the political sections. But for example, he talks about cosmology and human beings and their nature, no fiṭra. And then he talks about, “People are created in a certain way, and they need other humans,” and suddenly it’s all fiṭra, fiṭra, fiṭra.
EE: To go back to Ibn Ṭufayl–
RR: Oh, my favorite!
EE: Your favorite?
RR: Well, no, they’re all my favorite. Actually, Ibn Ṭufayl and al-Fārābī are my favorite.
When I entered Oxford, we learned great stuff—scriptures and ethical theory; it was a high quality program. But nowhere were there any thinkers that weren’t Christian.
EE: In a footnote, there’s a quotation from Ibn Rushd, who says that Nomos (philosophical law) is the same in content as prophetic law, as Sharīʿa. This is not something that Ṭufayl thinks, at least I didn’t read that, because in the end of Ḥayy, you have this separation—Ḥayy goes off, he goes back to philosophy, away from religion, as if salvation can be reached just by this. But I was really interested, especially in this context of the debate of salvation and considering the more secular background of these thinkers, in this idea that philosophy can be a replacement for religion.
RR: Yeah, absolutely. For Fārābī, religion is a sort of adjustment to the masses, and so the ideal is philosophy. It’s what brings you salvation. He seems to think that you can attain some form of salvation through religion, but I’m literally working that out right now. The working title for the book is No Salvation for the Faithful.
What’s clear with Ṭufayl, I think, is that he thinks philosophy is the highest form, it’s super erogatory salvation. This becomes clear when he has Ḥayy talk to the masses: he says he stops talking to them because they start stumbling and getting confused, and then they will lose that salvation that they could have attained through religion. So he’s like, “Let the people follow religion, it’s the best they can hope for, and they will win salvation through it, but there is a higher form.”
On the one hand, then, there’s a threat to the status quo here, right? If religion is sort of a meager version of salvation, then philosophy, it’s a threat, maybe. This is where the Straussianism gets out of hand. Is it really like a political threat? Probably not, they were all really comfortable; Ṭufayl was literally the king’s bestie. But maybe there was some sort of anxiety. And so Ibn Ṭufayl is saying, “Don’t worry, philosophers are literally made from frothy bubbles on an island and they stay there. They have no political claims. Yes, they reach salvation, maybe it’s a higher form of salvation, but they make no political claims.” The philosopher, to Ibn Ṭufayl, is politically dead. He’s a hermit. He doesn’t sway the people. He has no power. And this is the important part—I have not written on this—it’s a completely sterile philosophic community. It’s two men. Ibn Ṭufayl goes through great lengths to write all the women out of the tale that inspired his.
EE: This comparison of philosophy and religion reminds me of medieval Christian thinkers, like Justin Martyr, who said that the early Greeks knew Christianity before it was Christianity, who say that Plato was first at the gates of heaven.
But overall, I’m wondering, in what sense do you see these concepts, these debates, as being the most productive in modern thought? Where do you think these really intricate historical and textual investigations come out of the weeds and suddenly start to illuminate something new in a grander sense?
RR: There is a sort of historical element, where we are actually filling in gaps. I recently was reading a paper on the history of emotion, and they’re like, “Well, emotions sort of get shafted by the medieval virtue tradition. We get hope and faith and love suddenly. But with Aristotle, we have a much closer relationship between virtue and emotions.” Nobody talks about the Islamic tradition, which sits squarely in the middle.
EE: And this is also the justice element you talked about earlier?
RR: Definitely, it’s the justice element, but also just pure knowledge. There are two big payoffs. The first is that the Islamic philosophical tradition, if you pay attention to it, shows us just how broad the Islamic intellectual heritage is. I think that is something we’re still, in the aftermath of Oriental scholarship, trying to come to terms with. So much scholarship inside and outside Islamic studies pigeonholes and tries to sort knowledge with this outsider gaze.
I also think in the contemporary period, on this particular issue of fiṭra, the philosophers ask some really good questions and subvert expectations around issues like elitism. That’s my favorite example. All the people we read are elitists. They think some people are better than others, and those people ideally should be in power. The thing is, none of them agree on the details of this. Fārābī thinks—he’s the most naive of them—that the smartest are the philosopher kings, and they’re in power. But all the people often immediately within his own tradition are like, “That doesn’t work!” Ibn Bājja writes a whole text about the fact that nobody wants to be around philosophers. And Ibn Rushd sort of says, yes, the smartest are in power, ideally, but if you don’t speak a common language, if you don’t subject yourself to religion, you have no hopes of ruling. These discussions are just rich in the pre-modern period, and they are rich in the contemporary period.
Similarly, I have an article on their views of women. There’s this idea that in the pre-modern period that all the Islamic philosophers just hate women—they all read Aristotle, so chances are they don’t like women. But they wildly disagree with each other about the status of women! For example, Ibn Rushd thinks, given that humans are inherently rational, women too have the full potential to be so. He’s much closer to Plato on this: he thinks women could be guardians, could be in power. Fārābī thinks women are eternal children, he’s closer to Aristotle on this. Then Ibn Ṭufayl has this weird sterile philosophy boys club.
The inverse then becomes interesting. Ibn Rushd loves being committed to the idea that humans are inherently rational, which means women are rational too. Unfortunately, if you’re not rational, you’re not really human. He thinks if you’re depressed, for example, or if you have other issues, it’s best to execute you. In this way, the most liberal on women is also the most eugenic of them all, because he has this attachment to reason. I’m not trying to say any of these views are good, I’m just trying to say the devil’s really in the details. How do people make these arguments? What assumptions about human beings do they tie into them?
EE: I have one final question. You’ve given us this view that reconsidering Islamic philosophy today gives us an introduction to these debates that we don’t otherwise have. If you were designing a Great Books-style curriculum now, but let’s say it’s very restricted, and you only get so many books on religion, ethics, philosophy, what would you choose from the tradition you cover? For example, if the Greek period were represented by the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics, then later you had something from Augustine or Aquinas, what texts from Islamic philosophy would be the most essential things for us to read?
RR: Definitely al-Fārābī. His Political Regime, I think, is an incredibly important text to bridge the Republic and Aquinas. I do think if you’re also including, let’s say Luther, Calvin, Machiavelli, I think you must have something from the medieval Islamic theological tradition like al-Ghazali.
For the pre-modern, I think Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy is a great text pedagogically. From my perspective, there needs to be Fārābī, and maybe even Ṭufayl. I think this works well if you think about also including, let’s say maybe the Jewish medieval and then early modern thinkers. Fārābī and Spinoza work really well together. And I’ve paired him with Maimonides, which works well because Maimonides thought Fārābī was the greatest philosopher after Aristotle; he’s a huge fanboy. But if you only had to add one, it should be Fārābī.