Biography
Professor Abdou Filali-Ansary, who is a distinguished philosopher and writer, was the Founding Director of the Aga Khan University's Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC), London. Professor Filali-Ansary was educated in Morocco and France, and received his doctorate from the University of Dijon in 1970 for a thesis on Spinoza and Bergson. He was a Hubert Humphrey Fellow at Boston University in 1979-80. In Morocco, he taught at Mohammad the Fifth University in Rabat, where he was Secretary-General from 1981-1984 and was then until 2001 the Founding Director of the King Abdul Aziz Foundation, also in Rabat. Professor Filali-Ansary’s publications in Arabic, French and English have contributed greatly to our understanding of the place of Islam in the contemporary world. In 1973 he initiated Prologues, a bilingual Arabic-French journal devoted to promoting intellectual exchange between scholars in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Professor Filali-Ansary is recognised internationally for his work, and has participated in many international conferences. In 2012-13 he was Humanitas Visiting Professor in Interfaith Studies at the University of Oxford’s Research Centre in the Humanities.
