Muzaffar Iqbal

Muzaffar Iqbal is the president of the Center for Islamic Sciences (established in 2000 as Center for Islam and Science and renamed in 2013). Over the past thirty years, his research and publications have focused on three broad areas within the framework of Muslim encounter with modernity: (i) the impact of this encounter on Muslim self-understanding of their spiritual and intellectual traditions; (ii) the relationship between Islam and science and the role of modern science and technology in the reshaping of the spiritual, intellectual, and social landscape of the Muslim world; and (iii), Qur’anic studies, including Western academic studies on the Qur’an. His books and articles and articles have been translated into Persian, Bahasa Indonesia, Albanian, and Korean.

He is the General Editor of the Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qur’an (2009–), a 7-Volume English-language reference work on the Qur’an exclusively based on fourteen centuries of Muslim scholarship. The first volume was published in 2013, the second in 2024; Volume III is expected in 2025.

He is also the Series Editor of Islam and Science: Historic and Contemporary Perspectives, a four-volume work that brings together the most important and influential articles on various aspects of the relationship between Islam and science from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Between 2003 and 2017, he was the editor of Islam and Science (renamed as Islamic Sciences in 2013), a journal that explores, from Islamic perspectives, religious and philosophical implications of data and theories originating in the physical, biological, and social sciences.

He has held academic and research positions at University of Saskatchewan (1979-1984), University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984-85), and Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University (1986-87). During 1990-1996, he worked as Director Scientific Information, Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (COMSTECH). He was Director (Scientific Information), Pakistan Academy of Sciences during 1997-98. In 1999, Dr. Iqbal became the Program Director for the Muslim World for the Science-Religion Course Program of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS), Berkeley, USA, a position he held until the end of the Program in 2001.