Book cover design for "The Story of Reason in Islam" by Sari Nusseibeh.

Summary of the book:
In The Story of Reason in Islam, leading public intellectual and political activist Sari Nusseibeh narrates a sweeping intellectual history—a quest for knowledge inspired by the Qu'ran and its language, a quest that employed Reason in the service of Faith. Eschewing the conventional separation of Faith and Reason, he takes a fresh look at why and how Islamic reasoning evolved over time. He surveys the different Islamic schools of thought and how they dealt with major philosophical issues, showing that Reason pervaded all disciplines, from philosophy and science to language, poetry, and law. Along the way, the best known Muslim philosophers are introduced in a new light. Countering received chronologies, in this story Reason reaches its zenith in the early seventeenth century; it then trails off, its demise as sudden as its appearance. Thereafter, Reason loses out to passive belief, lifeless logic, and a self-contained legalism—in other words, to a less flexible Islam. Nusseibeh's speculations as to why this occurred focus on the fortunes and misfortunes of classical Arabic in the Islamic world. Change, he suggests, may only come from the revivification of language itself.

This book describes how the rapid development of writing in the Arab world created a magnificent cultural flowering. Our design is inspired by calligraphic art and the concept of enlightenment. We created an original ink drawing, layered it with physical typography, and then photographed the construction with light shining through from behind. The material effect fuses the type and image together and creates a sensation of sweeping light.

This book was published by Stanford University Press in 2016.