Heidegger in the Islamicate World — edited by Kata Moser, Urs Gösken, and Josh Michael Hayes; series edited by Richard Polt and Gregory Fried — is an intellectual excavation and a conceptual re-orientation: at once a map of a dispersed reception and a programmatic provocation. The book refuses the facile opposition between a supposedly monolithic “West” and a homogonous “Islamicate” by showing, in painstaking philological and philosophical detail, how Heidegger’s thought has been taken up, translated, reworked, and resisted across Arabic-, Persian-, Turkish-, and South Asian intellectual milieux. It is neither a parochial appropriation nor a simple exportation of European thought; rather it is a sustained account of philosophical encounter where Heidegger’s categories—being, world, historicty, aletheia, dwelling, and the critique of calculative reason—are interrogated, supplemented, and sometimes overturned by concepts drawn from long-standing traditions of Islamic, Persianate, and Ottoman thought.
This volume treats reception as a philosophically fertile practice, not merely as literary or cultural transmission. To read Heidegger alongside the Islamicate traditions is to witness a two-way movement: Heidegger’s ontological vocabulary becomes a set of instruments—hermeneutic, heuristic, and polemical—by which Islamicate thinkers rethink their own inherited vocabularies (wajd, wujud, ta’wil, fana’, khawf and raja’, the ontological primacy of existence in Mulla Ṣadrā, the illuminationist metaphysics of Suhrawardī, or Ibn ʿArabī’s ecstatic monism). At the same time, these traditions press back: they test Heidegger’s omissions, expose the particularities of his historical situation, and propose alternative frameworks that make visible the limits and possibilities of his ontology when it encounters non-European genealogies of meaning. The essays collected here do not content themselves with analogies; they perform conceptual translations that preserve philosophical rigor while acknowledging the dense historicity and plural semiospheres of the Islamicate world.
One of the book’s central moves is to decouple reception from mere intellectual curiosity and to locate it within political, linguistic, and institutional contexts. The essays show how translation committees, philosophical journals, university curricula, and intellectual publics in Istanbul, Tehran, Cairo, and Delhi have mediated Heidegger’s presence. Translation is not a neutral conduit: the vocabularies chosen to render Sein, Dasein, Ereignis, or aletheia into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish carry interpretive weight. Translators become interpreters, and interpretive choices have consequences for what Heidegger can do in a new context. The volume’s appendix on translations—painstaking, pragmatic, sometimes contentious—makes this point with sober documentation: the philological decisions that appear small on the page shape whether Heidegger is read as a phenomenologist of finitude, a critic of modern technology, a metaphysician, or a thinker whose late work gestures toward a prophetic critique of the West’s enframing.
Across the essays runs a persistent concern with modernity: Heidegger’s diagnosis of the technological enframing (Gestell) and the calculative reduction of beings resonates with Islamicate critiques of colonial modernity, secularization, and the commodification of life. But the resonance is not a simple echo. Authors in this volume place Heidegger within local genealogies of critique—Mulla Ṣadrā’s existential metaphysics, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s perennialist readings, Daryush Shayegān’s diagnosis of cultural dislocation, Corbin’s imaginal anthropology—and thereby remap Heidegger’s questions onto problems specific to the Islamicate world: cultural disintegration, aesthetic re-enchantment, the crisis of the spiritual imagination, and the political economy of knowledge. Heidegger supplies analytic tools; Islamicate traditions supply histories of being that sometimes deepen, sometimes reorient, and sometimes refuse Heidegger’s categories.
A second thematic axis concerns revival—how Heidegger has been used to retrieve and rehabilitate indigenous philosophical lineages. Several contributions demonstrate how Heidegger’s hermeneutics and his insistence on the historicity of concepts provide a methodological opening for re-reading classical Islamic philosophers not as relics but as living interlocutors. This is not antiquarianism; it is a hermeneutic strategy that seeks to reconfigure the meaning of concepts like wujud (existence), nazar (contemplation), and the imaginal (the alam al-mithal) within contemporary ontological debates. In Iran, for instance, Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and his critique of metaphysics are juxtaposed with Mulla Ṣadrā’s primacy-of-existence thesis to generate an interpretive space where existential and metaphysical claims can be rearticulated for modern philosophical problems. The book thereby stages a methodological reclaiming: Heidegger’s tools become instruments for self-retrieval within the Islamicate tradition, but always under the critical gaze that asks whether such retrievals reproduce colonial epistemologies or genuinely renew native philosophical resources.
A third recurrent concern is aesthetics and art. Several essays track Heidegger’s influence upon thinking about art, particularly in Persianate contexts where Corbinian imaginalities and Persian aesthetics intersect with Heideggerian aletheia. The tension between Heidegger’s suspicion of modern aesthetics and the Islamicate valorization of poetic and mystical modes of disclosure is negotiated with acute sensitivity. Contributors show how Heidegger’s critique of the objectification of art resonates with intellectuals who see modernity as spiritually anesthetizing—and yet those same contributors also register where Heidegger’s own reluctance about religion and his European metaphysical inheritance prevent him from fully grasping the ontological potency of Sufi poetics or Shiʿi metaphysics. The result is an optic that lets us see both Heidegger anew and the continuing philosophical fecundity of Islamicate aesthetic theories.
The book is philosophically rigorous in diagnosing the political implications of Heidegger’s reception. Some essays worry that the appropriation of Heidegger can be co-opted by reactionary ideologies or used to justify anti-liberal projects; others insist on the emancipatory potentials of his critique of technological rationality. This tension is not resolved abstractly; contributors place it in the messy particulars of intellectual life: the ways in which nationalist narratives, religious revivalisms, and academic institutions enable or constrain philosophical practice. The volume thus refuses a positivist neutrality: philosophy is always embedded, and reception always participates in networks of power. Yet the editors also insist that such embeddedness is philosophically productive; by attending to contexts, thinkers in the Islamicate world can both contest Heidegger’s blind spots and appropriate his insights to re-imagine political possibilities beyond liberal and technocratic horizons.
A further, striking achievement of this collection is its attention to methodological plurality. The essays deploy a range of philosophical practices—close philological exegesis, comparative conceptual history, hermeneutic phenomenology, and critical theory—without collapsing them into an artificial unity. This pluralism is not merely eclectic: it reflects a deep conviction that any honest engagement between Heidegger and the Islamicate traditions must be ecumenical in method as well as generous in historical imagination. Hence the book moves from careful textual work—on translations, terminological choices, and archival histories—to speculative proposals that imagine future directions for Heidegger studies that are not narrowly European but globally pluriversal.
The volume also stages a meta-reflection about the discipline of Heidegger studies itself. By assembling voices from Cairo to Karachi, Ankara to Tehran, it exposes the provincialism of a Heidegger scholarship that assumes a single center of interpretive gravity. In its place the book proposes a decentered field: one in which Heidegger’s thought is constantly reconstituted through different linguistic, religious, and institutional grammars. Such a shift is not merely ethnographic; it reshapes interpretive priorities. Questions of translation, applicability, and critique become primary rather than marginal; the history of ideas is reconceived as a pluriversal conversation. In that sense the book is not merely a contribution to reception studies; it is a manifesto for a transregional philosophical practice that insists on the mutual transformation of tradition and interpreter.
Readers will find here an unflinching confrontation with difficulties. The text grapples with Heidegger’s darker legacies—the ethical and political controversies that complicate any celebratory reception—and with the danger that Heidegger’s anti-modern rhetoric may be seductively repurposed by illiberal movements. Contributors confront these dilemmas head-on, refusing simple apologies and demanding sustained critical engagement. At the same time, they refuse to abandon Heidegger’s insights wholesale; instead, they subject them to rigorous local testing, asking whether Heidegger’s ontology can be retooled to support emancipatory alternatives to contemporary forms of domination.
Heidegger in the Islamicate World is therefore, in equal parts, a historical dossier, a philological manual, a set of hermeneutic experiments, and a programmatic call. It documents the trajectories by which Heidegger has become an interlocutor across multiple languages and intellectual traditions; it records the painstaking labors of translation and critical appropriation; and it offers provocative proposals for how Heideggerian themes might be reconceived in a world that is not primarily European. The appendix—an invaluable resource—catalogues translations into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, underscoring the material infrastructures that make philosophical exchange possible.
For scholars of phenomenology, comparative philosophy, Islamic intellectual history, and intellectual historians of modernity, this book is indispensable. For anyone concerned with how philosophical ideas travel, mutate, and generate new forms of thought under different historical pressures, it is urgent reading. Most important, for those committed to a philosophy that respects plural genealogies of thought and that aspires to be responsive to concrete social and spiritual crises, this volume offers both a caution and an opening: caution about the perils of uncritical importation, and an opening toward a dialogic practice that lets Heidegger’s questions be answered, refracted, and sometimes surpassed by the rich and restless traditions of the Islamicate world.
Heidegger in the Islamicate World does not aim to settle the matter of Heidegger’s global significance; rather it insists that the question be transformed. To read these essays is to see Heidegger in motion—not as an isolated monument but as a set of provocations that, when placed in contact with other ontological languages, produce new conceptual forms and political imaginations. It is a demanding book, philosophically ambitious, and insistently global in scope; it invites the reader to think beyond familiar axes and to imagine a future of Heidegger studies that is territorially dispersed, methodologically plural, and ethically vigilant.
Simon Gros 
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