For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intersection of modern science and traditional Islamic thought.
Asim Islam holds a graduate degree in medicine from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Royal Holloway, University of London. He wrote his doctoral thesis on analytic number theory and is currently studying quantum field theory at Imperial College London. But he was also interested in what the Islamic philosophical tradition might contribute to his science-infused questions about the nature of human perception and self-awareness.
In 2016 Islam began a deeper investigation into those questions as one of two inaugural Science and Religion Research Fellows at the Cambridge Muslim College. The college was founded in 2009 in the storied university town of Cambridge, England by Timothy Winter, a British academic and convert to Islam, to create an institution to promote Muslim education and greater dialogue between Islamic intellectual traditions and the modern world. The sometimes-fraught relationship between present-day science and religion is a key part of that dialogue.