Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande, "The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2025)

June 14, 2026

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5 min read

"Nobody's ever written on the fact that Fitra shows up a lot in this book," Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande recalls her advisor saying about Ibn Tufayl's philosophical novel Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. That offhand comment upended her dissertation. When she opened the text, fitra wasn't the equalizing theological concept she expected—a natural human awareness of God shared by all. Instead, it was the opposite: a marker of human difference, an "outstanding excellence fitra" that only some people possess. That discovery became The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition, a careful reconstruction of how a group of classical Islamic philosophers turned a Quranic concept about human nature into a tool for thinking about hierarchy, politics, and who gets to know what.

The concept everyone thinks they know

Fitra appears once in the Quran and in several key hadith. In modern Islamic ethics, it is routinely understood as a theological concept: something God created in all humans that gives them a natural awareness of the divine. It functions as an equalizer, a common ground. This reading draws heavily on Ibn Taymiyya and his interpreters, who dominate contemporary discussions, especially around gender and human nature.

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What you'll learn

1 (01:24) **Book Overview and Core Argument** - Raisa introduces her book, *The Politics of Islamic Ethics*, focusing on the concept of "fitra" (divinely created human nature) and its reception in early Islamic philosophy.
2 (02:46) **Personal Journey into Islamic Ethics and Fitra** - Raisa explains how she came to study fitra through a background in theology and ethics, seeking an internal perspective on human nature within Islamic thought.
3 (06:35) **The Surprising Discovery of Fitra as a Hierarchical Concept** - Raisa describes how her initial understanding of fitra as an equalizing concept was upended by reading Ibn Tufayl's *Hayy ibn Yaqzan*.
4 (11:29) **Why "Fitra" is Left Untranslated** - Raisa explains her deliberate choice to keep the Arabic term "fitra" untranslated throughout the book.
5 (17:30) **Fitra as a Case Study in Ambiguity and "Islamic" Thought** - Raisa connects her work to broader questions about what counts as "Islamic" thought and the tolerance of ambiguity in the tradition.
6 (23:11) **Methodological Frameworks: Collingwood, Skinner, and Gadamer** - Raisa discusses how her reading of Collingwood, Quentin Skinner, and Hans-Georg Gadamer shaped her approach to the texts.
7 (27:22) **Defining "Politics" and "Ethics" in a Classical Sense** - Raisa clarifies that her use of "politics" and "ethics" refers to expansive classical questions, not modern political systems.

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Show Notes

Fundamental to Islamic thought is the idea that there is a way that human beings simply are, by nature or creation. This concept is called fiṭra. In The Politics of Islamic Ethics: Hierarchy and Human Nature in the Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2025), rooting her investigation in two central passages in the Qur’an and hadith literature, where it is asserted that God created human beings in a certain way, the author moves beyond discussion of the usual figures who have commented on those texts to look instead at a group of classical Islamic philosophers rarely discussed in conjunction with ethical matters. Tracing the development of fiṭra through this overlooked strand of medieval thinking, von Doetinchem de Rande uses fiṭra as an entrée to wider topics in Islamic ethics. She shows that the notion of fiṭra articulated by al-Fārābī, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl, and Ibn Rushd highlights important issues about organizational hierarchies of human nature. This, she argues, has major implications for contemporary political and legal debates.

Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande is Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago.

Host Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa focusing on issues in Sufism, theology, renewal, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast. He can be reached by email at: [email protected]

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