Foreign thinker
Muhammad Legenhausen
Muhammad LegenhausenPhilosophy of Religion, Islamic Theology, and Religious PluralismAmerican
"Islamic pluralism does not mean that all religions say the same thing, but rather that one can, while adhering to the truth of one's own religion, also honor the truth and beauties present in other religious traditions."
Life and Thought
Mohammad Legenhausen (born Gary Carl Legenhausen, 1953) is an American philosopher and university professor who, after converting to Islam and the Shia faith, has been teaching and researching at the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute in Qom for many years. He is renowned for his numerous works in the philosophy of religion, modern theology, and the critique of liberal religious pluralism.
Gary Carl Legenhausen was born in 1953 in New York into a Christian family. He pursued his higher education in philosophy and received his PhD in 1983 from Rice University in the United States. He then taught philosophy at the University of Texas Southern, and during this period, through acquaintance with Muslim students and deep study of Islamic sources, he converted to Islam and the Shia faith, adopting the name 'Mohammad'.
Legenhausen immigrated to Iran in the late 1980s and continued his academic activities at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy and then at the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute in Qom. For decades, he has been teaching Western philosophy, philosophy of religion, and modern theology to Iranian seminary students and researchers, and expounding Islamic teachings in English.
Legenhausen's primary research area is the 'philosophy of religion' and the issue of 'religious pluralism'. Critiquing John Hick's theory of religious pluralism, he proposed an alternative view titled 'Non-Reductive Religious Pluralism' or 'Islamic Pluralism'; a view that, while emphasizing religious truth-orientation and preserving the exclusive identity of Islamic doctrines, prescribes respect and coexistence with other Abrahamic and traditional religions. The book *Islam and Religious Pluralism* is one of his most famous works in this field.
