Omar Sultan Haque, 27, graduated with honors from Brown University where he received bachelor’s degrees in Religious Studies and Neuroscience. His honors thesis at Brown presented a neuropsychological analysis of experiential claims made by mystics. He is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship. He is currently a candidate for combined graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School (in comparative religion) and at Harvard Medical School. At Harvard and Brown, he has received distinctions for his work as a teaching fellow, instructing undergraduates in courses in psychology, neuroscience, engineering, philosophy and religious studies.
Omar has also been involved in a number of research projects: neuroimaging research supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute on neurodegenerative disorders; imaging work for the International Human Brain Database in Sydney, Australia; research on theories of personhood and research on truth-telling in end of life care both for HMS’s Division of Medical Ethics; and NIH-funded research on a malaria vaccine in Mali, West Africa. In 2005 he was selected to attend the Yale Global Leaders Summit.
Most interested in issues at the interface of science and the humanities, science and religion, moral psychology, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, theories of personal identity, and the sources of normativity for a theory of human rights, Omar strives for work informed by the humanistic insight of William James, Aristotle, Spinoza, Fuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, Homer, Shakespeare, Maimonides, Al-Razi, and Nasr Abu Zayd. Personally, he draws inspiration from Rumi, Muhammad, Hallaj, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Goethe, and has gained great satisfaction from volunteering for the past 7 years as a Big Brother for Big Brothers of America and for Americorps.
Omar is presently working on the concept of “Humanistic Islam:” a systematic theological reinterpretation of Islam; he presented the first portion of his work on this subject at a recent international conference.
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HCH: Do you believe that Humanism as a philosophy of life can be compatible with your cultural and national background, or with culture in general? How so? What are the challenges to their compatibility?
Omar: To be true to its own ideals, I believe that Islam must be understood—and more crucially—understand itself, as a type of humanism. I do not mean to imply that one should argue that some truest, most basic essence Islam is or always was humanism or humanistic in the post-enlightenment sense. This posture would be to repeat the ubiquitous and unfortunate pattern of thinkers retrospectively confabulating a forced reconciliation of religious tradition with modern trends or knowledge (i.e. rationalism, feminism, liberalism, the list is endless…). And doing so again and again over time just out of memory of those they replace, but with different selective and expedient readings, placeholders or analytic filters. Any minimal sense of historical perspective renders such schemes feigning inevitability as fanciful. Rather, the increasing expansion of the range of who counts as a member of a moral community–the ummah–grows as we consciously, deliberately, and unapologetically refashion universalistic and humane and humanistic perspectives not because our highest ideals are given in what has been handed down, in tradition, but because this inheritance is pregnant with them, and must be cultivated.