Ignazio De Francesco, Etica islamica contemporanea: Fonti, norme, comportamenti [Contemporary Islamic Ethics: Sources, Norms, Behaviors]. Rome: Carocci editore, 2023, pp. 245.

Ignazio De Francesco’s recent monograph attempts to provide a well-rounded survey of contemporary Islamic ethics, identifying key points of debate and discussion in each of several subfields by means of a deft back-and-forth between classical sources and the modern media and institutions that today engage those sources. The author is a monk and a scholar of Christian literature in Syriac, in addition to his graduate study in Islamics and experience teaching in that field. De Francesco’s Italian publications span several genres, from academic studies of Islamic theology and ethics, to imaginative theatrical narratives like Simeone e Samir (2009) designed to stimulate interreligious dialogue, to studies of early Christian piety and asceticism, to pastoral reflections rooted in his encounters with Muslims in Italian hospitals and prisons. Etica islamica contemporanea is arguably the most ambitious project the author has undertaken and marks a significant contribution to italophone research into Islamic life and thought.

Caterina Bori, a prominent Italian scholar of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), describes the distinctive characteristic of De Francesco’s project in her preface to the book: he documents the questions and concerns animating discussion of Islamic ethics today and strives to do so within a classical frame (10–11). She considers the documentation the real value of the book and this reviewer affirms that assessment, not because the documentation aims at an exhaustive scope or at an artificially balanced mode of presenting each question, but because of De Francesco’s outstanding instincts in choosing the data points he documents. The author’s frequent decisions to select inquiries submitted to Islamweb and other sites situate this monograph in the internet age, but the fresh and contemporary feel of the book does not arise from the platforms where the questions originated, but from the fact that the questions selected cut directly to the central dynamics of ethical debates today, illustrating the changing presuppositions and attitudes that believers bring to their muftī and to the classical tradition. Fundamentally, this book investigates the challenge of (post)modernity for Islamic ethics, the new lenses of believers today and how these engage with ancient faith traditions and classical approaches.

The first chapter carries forward De Francesco’s longstanding interest in niyya, grounded in a doctoral thesis he defended in 2013, synthesized into an article that same year, and subsequently published as a monograph. Because the theme of right intention has received much attention in modern secondary literature, one cannot say that the contribution of this chapter is entirely novel. It is, however, entirely necessary as a foundational point of departure – just as al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) chose a ḥadīth about niyya as the very first tradition in his Ṣaḥīḥ (a choice al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) mirrored in his al-Arbaʿūn al-Nawawiyya (“Forty Ḥadīths”)). This reviewer much appreciated De Francesco’s interest in the “spirituality” (my word, not his) of forming and discerning one’s intention; his engagement with the zuhd books of the second/eighth and third/ninth century on this point was particularly welcome. This reviewer found himself surprised by the author’s framing of the distinction between islām and īmān, citing al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) exegesis of Q 49:14 (21). Al-Ṭabarī draws upon several precedents, including ḥadīth, to claim that islām signifies “speech” (qawl/kalima) and īmān combines this with action (ʿamal). While De Francesco’s desire to insist that belief incorporates “doing” is well taken, many classical interpretations of the famous ḥadīth Jibrīl would rub against this reading, as they associate islām primarily with action and īmān with belief; this is an uncommon example of the author short-changing a significant classical debate without signaling its complexity.

The second chapter sorts through classical debates about the relationship between faith and works and the question of whether God or a human being is the true author of that human being’s actions. Led by a snappy vignette, “Between Mosque and Discothèque,” De Francesco provides a wonderful synthesis of these debates, with an eye to popular speculation that perhaps Muslims’ belief in divine Decree weakens or handicaps Muslim-majority societies. De Francesco does not fall into the trap of blaming “fatalism” for any perceived deficiencies in the Muslim-majority world; instead of faulting one theological school or another, he highlights the voices of scholars like al-Azhar’s Muḥammad Sayyid Ṭanṭāwī (d. 2010) who desperately plead that regardless of their position on scholastic debates about qadar, believers must reinvigorate their urgent sense of responsibility to act for the good.

The third and fourth chapters continue with foundational questions, first dealing with the sources for Islamic ethics (Qurʾān and/or Aristotle (d. 322 BCE)) and then probing the issues surrounding the imitation of the Messenger of God. De Francesco summarizes the chronology of modern Muslim study of the “Islamic” sources for ethics, beginning with Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Drāz (d. 1958) and Muḥammad Yūsuf Mūsā (d. 1963), the former seeing the Qurʾān (properly understood) as a constitution for morality and the latter symbolizing an openness to, and acceptance of, philosophical ethics, particularly via the classical Greek tradition. For De Francesco, Mūsā narrates coherently the passage from the pre-Islamic Arab ethic augmented by the revelation of the Qurʾān to the scientific and cultural golden age of the caliphate, when Muslim scholars swallowed (haḍama) or mixed (mazaja) the Greek heritage into Islamic culture (74). While acknowledging that the approach of Drāz seems to enjoy greater favor among Muslim intellectuals today, De Francesco sees Mūsā’s perspective as a more accurate expression of early Islamic history.

After two chapters treating proper adab in its vertical and horizontal dimensions, De Francesco concludes with three chapters successively dedicated to sexual ethics, to medical ethics and to economic and ecological ethics. De Francesco’s survey of sexual ethics includes a helpful discussion of Sunnī and Shīʿī approaches to transsexuality and gender dysphoria, a subject on which he had previously published an article. This discussion, along with the book’s epilogue, shows the author’s attention to the religious formation of Muslim youth and the questions that preoccupy them. Throughout the text, when De Francesco considers what it means to imitate the Prophet and to maintain proper etiquette in the presence of God, one constantly senses his concern with how the next generation of Muslims will receive and integrate the rich debates of the classical Islamic heritage.

While ethics, by its nature, is a prescriptive science, one finds very few traces of any prescriptive streak in De Francesco’s presentation of the questions at play. Especially with an eye to youth, the author presents the status quaestionis, attempting a snapshot of the way a question is discussed and not indicating who’s wrong and who’s right. This monograph thus attempts to adhere as much as possible to major texts authored by Muslims, including the choices those texts make of examples to illustrate certain ethical principles. This adhesion occasionally leads to the relative neglect of questions a non-Muslim reader might consider important or the inclusion of matters a non-Muslim reader might find curious or provocative. On neglect: De Francesco’s discussion of sexual ethics and medical ethics contains no mention of female genital mutilation, one of the matters to which Western scholars, both Muslim and non-Muslim, frequently and urgently draw attention today. Even if one frames this practice as ethnic or cultural rather than Islamic, its relevance to a text on contemporary Islamic ethics – especially considering the stress De Francesco lays on the “right to pleasure” that characterizes spousal relations – is obvious. On inclusion: in his discussion of adab before God, De Francesco passes quickly from discussing the importance of obeying the Messenger of God as a concrete sign of submission before God to discussing the proper comportment when one uses the bathroom, including great detail about the invocations to utter and the manner in which believers should touch themselves (133). Some readers might find this abrupt shift deliberately surprising, but in fact, De Francesco borrows it from one of his sources, attempting to remain as faithful as possible to the illustrations that the moral manuals he studies select to illuminate a question. For another example that would jump off the page for a non-Muslim taking this monograph as an introductory text, the author passes from a discussion of a spousal right of mutual pleasure to a classical Ẓāhirī maxim that a spouse who refuses coitus thus renounces the right to be fed (156). De Francesco immediately places this maxim in its proper context, but the discussion displays the author’s unwillingness to simply present moral principles alongside their dominant application today, a straightforward passage from uṣūl to furūʿ. The moral questions Muslims ask today often engage assumptions that classical scholars would find radically novel, and the author helpfully offers some premodern moments when the same principle yielded diverse conclusions from classical scholars.

For this reviewer, a relative inattention to the question of interreligious relations is a missed opportunity in the monograph. In the chapter on horizontal adab the author offers a few pages (164–173), largely restricted to juridical questions about whether Muslims can/should attend non-Muslim feasts and celebrations or how Muslims can/should greet or return the greeting of non-Muslims. In the wake of the 2019 Document on Human Fraternity published by Pope Francis and the Grand Imām of al-Azhar Aḥmad al-Ṭayyib (b. 1946), ethical questions about interreligious friendship and brotherhood have taken greater prominence. In this regard, for all its attention to intra-Islamic diversity, the monograph feels more rooted in societies where Muslims enjoy a near-total predominance in the population, not in societies marked by significant religious pluralism.

One can only appreciate the scope of De Francesco’s accomplishment by comparing this monograph to parallel works in the field. Several recent books on Islamic ethics concentrate on one or more subfields rather than attempt a comprehensive treatment; texts focused on bioethics, sexual ethics, or economic ethics are not difficult to find. Some of the now-classic works in the field that aspire to a broader theoretical overview concentrate almost exclusively on pre-modern texts by milestone figures. The widely read studies of George F. Hourani (d. 1984) Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (1984), Majid Fakhry (d. 2021) Ethical Theories in Islam (1991), and Jean-Claude Vadet (d. 2019) Les idées morales dans l’islam (1995) stand above the rest, and more recent additions like the monographs on Muʿtazilī ethics by Sophia Vasalou (2008) and Mariam Al-Attar (2010) focus on narrower sets of questions (desert in the case of Vasalou, divine command theory in the case of Al-Attar).

The two studies that most closely approximate the scope of Etica islamica contemporanea are Amyn B. Sajoo’s Muslim Ethics (2004) and Abdulaziz Sachedina’s Islamic Ethics (2022). Sajoo’s text frontloads the fundamental question of why a person should act ethically at all, presenting a running investigation of an agent’s motive that straddles the religious and the secular. Sajoo provides a robust engagement with the claims of contemporary liberalism, the Islamic foundations for civic culture, and the possibility of public ethics and pluralist governance. He does not attempt a deep dive into specific ethical issues; contemporary debates like abortion, human genetic intervention, euthanasia, and organ donation receive passing discussion in Sajoo’s first chapter, but not the foundational exposition that De Francesco provides. De Francesco cites Sachedina’s most recent monograph but does not engage it in depth, presumably due to the recency of its publication. Sachedina might resist the notion that the scope of his monograph remains in metaethics, but by comparison with De Francesco’s volume, this characterization would be accurate. Sachedina primarily provides a volume on uṣūl, whereas De Francesco offers a more comprehensive introduction to different areas of ethics. One central element of Sachedina’s volume largely absent here is the notion of zakāt. Sachedina revives the ghost of William Montgomery Watt (d. 2006) and places tazakkī at the center of Islamic ethics, a concept that plays no significant role in Etica islamica contemporanea.

In sum, Ignazio De Francesco has done far more than provide Italian readers with the most well-rounded introduction to Islamic ethics in that language. He has furnished what this reviewer considers the best blend of a well-sourced yet readable introduction to the classical debates in Islamic ethics and a sketch of the landscape in which Muslims debate moral issues in the internet age. Some elements could be reframed to improve the text’s accessibility, but De Francesco writes very clearly. This is not a book for specialists, but an introduction that leads a general readership into the thick of complicated moral debates. One can only hope this text will be translated into English soon, and perhaps into other languages beyond that.

Regarding the mechanics of the book, typographical errors and mistakes or inconsistencies in transliteration were exceedingly rare. This monograph is very well edited. The index unfortunately treats only proper names rather than concepts. The bibliography thankfully does not reproduce the many works cited in the volume’s abundant footnotes, but restricts itself to the most important studies in European languages, nearly all of which are in English. De Francesco engages this material throughout the book and does so admirably.