Pioneering research brings Muslim perspectives to the fore in addressing risks to humanity

The project aims to shine a light on how greater consideration of values-based cultures such as Islam can lead to more effective problem-solving - helping us to address global challenges that scientific approaches alone have failed to solve. These existential risks include pandemic diseases, the climate emergency, nuclear conflict, and threats from potentially malevolent developments in Artificial Intelligence.

Led by Professor Caroline Tee at the University of Chester and funded by a £1.2m grant from Templeton Religion Trust, the international project called Muslims, the Secular and Existential Risk (MUSER) seeks to bridge the gap between the traditional, secularised field of existential risk studies and the lived reality for many ordinary people.

As most of the world professes a religious affiliation, the project team will explore how imperative it is that religious perspectives on these questions are taken seriously.

The project is using both anthropological and theological research methods, employing a multi-disciplinary research team who are bringing different research tools to bear on the project’s core questions.

At the core of the project is that by de-secularising approaches to knowledge construction and by taking seriously the Islamic concept of ilm (knowledge) with respect to risk, new perspectives and potential responses will be discovered to the existential challenges that all of humanity faces.

The team is looking at these questions in different cultural and political contexts within British and French communities.  

Two anthropologists on the research team are embedded in these communities for 18 months to find out if there are different ways of addressing risk within them and if these risks are considered in the same way by Muslim communities as they are in secular Western paradigms.

Once this element of the work is completed, two Islamic theologians, also rooted respectively in the Anglophone and Francophone traditions, will contribute their theological expertise to the team's collaborative analysis of the fieldwork data.

It is hoped that the project's major scholarly outputs will launch a new field of enquiry surrounding religion and risk. 

Professor Caroline Tee said: “The project will create a new approach to thinking about existential risk by marshalling the wisdom of the Islamic tradition on the subject. It will also stimulate the serious and constructive integration of other religious perspectives into conversations about risk, which are currently almost exclusively dominated by secular values and epistemologies. The project will therefore make lasting impact by instigating a paradigm shift with respect to how we think about, and potentially mitigate, existential risk.”

Caption: (Left to right) Professor Caroline Tee, Dr Lili Di Puppo, Dr Gregory VanDamme, Dr Maan Al Dabbagh.