Muzaffar Iqbal is the president of the Center for Islamic Sciences (established in 2000 as Center for Islam and Science and renamed in 2013). Over the past thirty years, his research and publications have focused on three broad areas within the framework of Muslim encounter with modernity: (i) the impact of this encounter on Muslim self-understanding of their spiritual and intellectual traditions; (ii) the relationship between Islam and science and the role of modern science and technology in the reshaping of the spiritual, intellectual, and social landscape of the Muslim world; and (iii), Qur’anic studies, including Western academic studies on the Qur’an. His books and articles and articles have been translated into Persian, Bahasa Indonesia, Albanian, and Korean.

He is the General Editor of the Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qur’an (2009–), a 7-Volume English-language reference work on the Qur’an exclusively based on fourteen centuries of Muslim scholarship. The first volume was published in 2013 and Volume II is expected in February 2024.

He is also the Series Editor of Islam and Science: Historic and Contemporary Perspectives, a four-volume work that brings together the most important and influential articles on various aspects of the relationship between Islam and science from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Between 2003 and 2017, he was the editor of Islam and Science (renamed as Islamic Sciences in 2013), a journal that explores, from Islamic perspectives, religious and philosophical implications of data and theories originating in the physical, biological, and social sciences.

He has held academic and research positions at University of Saskatchewan (1979-1984), University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984-85), and Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University (1986-87). During 1990-1996, he worked as Director Scientific Information, Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (COMSTECH). He was Director (Scientific Information), Pakistan Academy of Sciences during 1997-98. In 1999, Dr. Iqbal became the Program Director for the Muslim World for the Science-Religion Course Program of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS), Berkeley, USA, a position he held until the end of the Program in 2001.

Selected Books

New edition by Routledge

Science and Islam, Greenwood Press 2007

Recent Posts

  • UNLOCKING THE MEDINAN QUR’AN
    The title of this heterogenous collection of thirteen articles points to two nonexisting entities: a Madinan Qur’an and an implied lock which supposedly needs unlocking. Both are non-existent because there is only one Qur’an and…
  • And the Earth Quakes, yet again
    Geologists have a convincing explanation: the earth quakes whenever there is a sudden release of energy in its lithosphere. A great deal of seismic activity takes place beneath the mountains but remains unnoticed by everyone…
  • Coping with defeat
    Coping with Defeat is an unusual book not just because it compares two widely different religious entities (Roman Catholicism and “Sunni Islam”), but also because it blends and blurs boundaries between academic scholarship and journalism,…
  • Education from the Qurʾānic Worldview
    Qurʾānic Worldview: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (543–606/1148–1209) observed in his voluminous exegesis Mafātīḥ al-ghayb (“Keys of the Unseen”) that the Qurʾān has three axial themes: the Unicity of Allah Most High (tawḥīd), Messengership and Prophethood (risāla,…
  • New Muslim Evolutionists
    After one hundred and seventy years of sound and fury surrounding “Darwin’s dangerous idea”,[1] one would expect everything has been said by all sides and there is no further need to write on the subject….
  • Why Muslims, especially Muslim teachers, should get vaccinated against precursorism
    The virus called precursorism started to spread among Muslims in the nineteenth century. It has produced many variants. This blog explains why?
  • Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1732-91)
    Stephan Reichmuth. The World of Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (1732-91): Life, Networks and Writings (Cambridge: The E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust) An impressive study on the life and work of one of the last Muslim scholars…
  • Western Academia and the Qur’an: Some Enduring Prejudices
    In the recent flowering of literature on the Qur’an in the West, Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (EQ) stands out: it is the first and so far the only multi-volume reference work on the Qur’an in English;…