Islamic Theology and the Problem of Evil

Chowdhury, an Islamic philosopher, grapples with a fundamental quandary found within Abrahamic faiths: How it is possible that God, “perfectly good, compassionate, merciful, powerful, and wise,” can allow evil and suffering in the world? It’s a question, one that most people of faith have had to contend with as they confront evidence of the reality of evil and conceptions of a deity that is perfect but still allows bad things to happen. Wading deep into various philosophical explanations and theological traditions, Chowdhury uses each framework to coolly examine the nature of evil via four specific categories—human disability, animal suffering, evolutionary natural selection and hell. It is to his credit that he dissects both the narrow and far-reaching implications of each interpretation while staying focused on “providing intellectual resources and not finished answers.”