C. The Self-Perpetuating Core of the Malaise... 5 1. The present State of Education in the Muslim World... 51. On the Political Front... 22. On the Economic Front... 33. On the Religio-Culture Front... 4
2. The Lack of Vision... 6
1.Compulsory study of Islāmic civilization...102. Islāmization of Modern Knowledge...13
1. Fiqh and Faqīh(s); Ijtihād and Mujtahid(s)... 152. The Opposition of Wahy to `AqL... 163. Separation of thought from Action... 174. Culture and Religious Dualism... 22
1. The Unity of Allah (SWT)... 24
2. The Unity of Creation... 24
a. Cosmic Order... 25b. Creation... 26c. Taskhir... 27
3. The Unity of Truth and the Unity of Knowledge... 294. The unity of Life... 29
a. the Divine Amanah... 29b. The Khalifat... 30c. The Comprehensiveness... 33
5. The unity of Humanity... 33
1. Mastery of the Modern Discipline... 392. Discipline survey... 393. Mastery of Islāmic Legacy: The Anthology... 404. Mastery of Islāmic legacy: The Analyses... 415. Establishment of the Specific Relevance of Islāmic to the disciplines... 416. Critical Assessment of Modern Discipline:the State of the Art... 417. Critical Assessment of Islāmic Legacy: The state of the Art... 428. Survey of the Ummah ‘s Major problems... 429. Survey of the Problems of Humankind... 4310. Creative Analyses and Syntheses... 4411. Recasting the Discipline under the Framework of Islām: The University Textbook... 4512. Dissemination of Islāmized Knowledge... 46
1. Conferences and Seminars... 472. Classroom workshops for faculty Training... 47
PREFACE
The Trustees of the International Institute of Islāmic Thought are pleased to offer this unique gift to Islāmic scholars around the world. It is an essay on the Islāmization of Knowledge, which they believe is the timeliest gift that can be made in the first decade of Fifteenth Century Hijrah. It is the outcome of the two papers on the Subject by the President of the Board and the Director of the Institute, as well as the input of over fifty scholars of Islām from around the world, who were involved in the Islamabad Seminar, sponsored by the Islāmic University, Islamabad, and the International Institute of Islāmic Thought, held in Islamabad in Rabi al Awwal, 1402/ January,1982.
The presentation following these pages is of vital importance because taking stock in one’s situation, learning from the past and planning to direct change to desired ends are absolute necessities of survival and prosperity. The Divine Judgment (انا الله لا یغیر ما بقوم حتی بغیر وا ما بانفسهم) (Allah will not change the fate of a people until they change what is in themselves – Qur’ān 13:11) is an absolute law of history.
This essay contends that the ummah suffers from a threateningly dangerous malaise. Tt attempts to apply a cure certain to restore to ummah its health, as well as to nudge it forward on its predestined role of responsible world leadership.
( کذالک جعلناکم امه وسطا لتکونو ا شهداء علی الناس و یکون الرسول علیکم شهدا )
The last half fourteenth century of Islām witnessed a great surge in Islāmic awareness worldwide, as well as the many significant strides which segment of ummah have made toward self-liberation. Despite these advances, that same century witnessed a great setback: a universal rush of Muslims toward imitating other civilizations. This rush never reached its goal in any field. Instead, it succeeded in de-Islāmizing the top echelons of Muslim society and demoralizing the rest. The vision of Islām became clouded by another, [pg. vii] one which came to us with colonial invaders. the alien vision, however, has survived them; and indeed, it has grown more virulently after the invaders’ departure. For many generations, the Muslim seemed unable to get rid of it, it is evident everywhere: in the imported institutions, and in the spread of the English and French Languages among them; in the design of their offices, homes, and cities; in the recreational programs; the economic and political practices they follow; and in the very ideas of reality, of nature, of man and the society they hold. the prime agent disseminating the alien view has been the educational system, bifurcated as it is into two subsystems, one “Modern” and the other “Islāmic”. This bifurcation is the epitome of Muslim decline. Unless it is dealt with and removed, it will continue to subvert every Muslim effort to reconstruct the ummah, to enable it to carry forth the amanah Allah subhanahu wa ta`ālā has entrusted to it.
In the past, many great Muslims have attempted to “reform” Islāmic education by adding to its curriculum subjects constitutive of the alien view. Sayed Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Abduh were champions of the cause. Jamal Abdul Nasir brought its strategy to completion in 1961 when al Azhar, the greatest fortress of Islāmic education, was turned into a “modern” university. All their efforts and those of millions like them, rest on the assumption that the so-called ‘modern’ subjects are harmless and can only lend strength to the Muslim. Little did they realize that alien humanities, social sciences, and indeed the natural sciences as well were facts of an integral view of reality, of life and the world and of a history that is equally alien to that of Islām. little did they know of the fine yet necessary relation which binds the methodologies of these disciplines, their notions of truth and knowledge, to the value system of an alien world. That is why their reformed bore no fruit. On one hand, the stagnant quality of Islāmic learning was left untouched. On the other, the added new learning never produced any excellence such is it produced in its own homeland. On the contrary, it made Muslims dependent upon alien research and leadership. By its pompous claim of scientific objectively, it managed to convince them of its truth over and against the affirmation of Islām which the votaries of “progress” called conservative and backward.
It is time for Islāmic scholar to disown such easy and harmful methods of educational reform. For them the reform of education is Islāmization of modern knowledge itself, a task identical in character with though greater in scope than that undertaken by our ancestors who digested the knowledge of their time and produced the Islāmic legacy of culture and civilization. As disciplines, the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences [viii] must be reconceived and rebuilt, given a new Islāmic base, and assigned new purposes consistent with Islām. Every discipline must be recast so as to embody the principles of Islām in its methodology, in its strategy, in what it regards as its data, its problems, its objectives and its aspiration. Every discipline must be remolded to incorporate the relevance of Islām along a triple axis constitutive of tawhīd. The first is the unity of knowledge of the truth. This will lay aside once and for all the claim that some science is `aqli and some science is naqli and hence irrational, that some disciplines are scientific and absolute and others dogmatic and relative. The second is the unity of life under which all disciplines must be taken into cognizance and serve the telic nature of creation. This will disarm the claim that some disciplines are value-full which others are value-free or neutral. The third is unity of history, under which all disciplines will acknowledge the ummatic of societal nature of all human activity, and serve the purposes of the ummah in history. This will put to rest the division of knowledge into individual and social sciences, making all the discipline at once humanistic and ummatic.
There can be no doubt that Islām is relevant to all aspects of thinking, of living of being. This relevance must be articulated unmistakably in each discipline. The textbooks used by the discipline must be rewritten, establishing the discipline as an integral department of Islāmic vision of reality. Moreover, Muslim teachers have to be trained in the use of the new textbooks and Muslim universities, colleges and schools transformed in order to resume their pioneering leadership in world history. It is the madrasah, animated by this vision of Islām, which created for itself the waqf status, giving it its legal corporate personality and autonomy that made it the model of the universities of Paris, Oxford and Cologne in the twelfth century, it was this same Islāmic vision which made the madrasa the forerunner in every field of human inquiry, the molder of human characters and personality and the projector of the ummah’s splendid achievements in culture and civilization. That madrasah observed the schedule of Islām whose day begins with salat al ishaa. Its teaching activity was a live-in process where teacher and student constantly lived and worked together with one objective in view, namely, the articulation of the patterns of Allah in creation. Its pedagogy rested on the impeccable character of the shaykh whom the student was to emulate. While its commencement was the investiture of students by shaykh with his immah (the origin of cap and gown graduation ceremony) at the symbol of total confidence that the student may now speak with his teacher’s authority and on his behalf. The standards of education were the highest because the requirement of carrying the teacher’s honor and reputation in the student’s [ix] hand was the gravest. This excellence was made possible because at its base stood the vision of Islām, the will and predication to pursue the truth for the sake of Allah alone.
Notwithstanding all this, Muslims find themselves at the starts of this fifteenth century Hijrah besieged by deluge of students without plans for a natural growth of the educational system, an explosion of knowledge on all fronts without plans for scholars or institutions to cope with it. The Muslim world keeps sending its youth to the West for education and training in ever increasing numbers and suffering their loss through the brain drain. To add further to the tragedy the opening of the fifteenth century shocked the Muslim conscience with its war of Ba’thi Iraq and the Islāmic Republic of Iran; the U.S.S.R’s invasion of Afghanistan; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon; annexation of the Golan Heights and systematic colonization of the whole of Palestine; the continuing wars of the Westen Sahara, Eastern Africa, South Arabia, and the Philippines; the continuing occupation and colonization of Kashmir, Bangladesh; and the persecution of Muslim community of India (the largest minority in history). Still more, Islāmic activities around the globe are the object of prosecution, persecution and misrepresentation. The cause of Islām itself seems to be in peril.
All
these phenomena cast darkness and gloom over the ummah. Nothing is more
tragically crucial for its thinkers than the focus their minds on the ummah’s
malaise and seek the countering cure. Never in Islāmic history has the war-cry الله اکبر been more needed on the intellectual level as it is
today.
Dhū al Hijjah, 1402 A.H. / October, 1982 C.E.
Ismā`īl R. al Fārūqī
International Institute of
Islāmic Thought [x]
Islāmization of Knowledge
1. The Problem
A. Malaise of the Ummah
The
world-ummah of Islām
stands presently at the lowest rung of the ladder of nation. In this century,
no other nation has been subjected to comparable defeat or humiliation. Muslims
were defeated, massacred, robbed of their land and wealth, of their life and
hope. They were double- crossed, converted to other faiths. They were moreover
secularized, Westernized and de-Islāmized by internal and external agents of tier enemies.
All this happened in practically every country and corner of the Muslims world.
Victim of injustice and aggression on every count, the Muslim were nonetheless
vilified and denigrated in the representations of all nations. They enjoy the
worst possible “image” in the world today. In the present-day mass media, the
“Muslim” is stereotyped as aggressive, destructive, lawless, terrorist,
uncivilized, fanatic, fundamentalist, archaic and anachronistic. He is the
object of hatred and contempt on the part of all non-Muslim, whether developed
or underdeveloped, capitalist or Marxist, Eastern or Western civilized or
savage. The Muslim World itself is known only for its inner strife and
division, its turbulence and self-contradictions, its wars and threat to world
peace, its excessive wealth and excessive poverty, its famine and cholera
epidemics. In the minds of people everywhere, the Muslim world is the sick man’
of the world, and the whole world is led to think that the root of all these
evils stands the religion of Islām. The facts that the ummah counts over
a billion, that its territories are the vastest and the richest, that is
potential in human, material and geopolitical resources is the greatest and
finally that is faith ̶
Islām
̶ is an
integral, beneficial , world-affirming and realistic religion , make the
defeat, the humiliation and the misrepresentation of Muslim all the more
intolerable.
1. On the Political Front: The ummah is divided against itself. The colonial [1] powers have successfully fragmented the ummah into some fifty or more nation-states and set them against one another. The boundaries of the Muslim states have been so defined as to create perpetual friction for every state with its neighbors. Political machination by the enemy continually exploited those areas of friction and creates cause for alienation and hostility. Internally, every Muslim nation-state is in turn, divided against itself, its population being heterogeneous which one group having been assigned hegemony over the other groups by the colonial masters. No nation state was given the time and peace or the resources to integrate its own citizenry in order to make them a greater whole. To make things worse, the enemy has imported aliens into the Muslim World in order to guarantee perpetual strife between them and the natives or converted the natives to Christianity which necessarily implies their estrangement from their Muslim compatriot, or infused into non-Muslim natives a nation of their identity which sets them in conflict with the Muslims. Finally, the enemy has created hostile “foreign” states within the body of ummah to divert Muslim energy away from reconstruction and to drain its resources in futile wars, or to serve as bases should colonialism decide to reoccupy the land for the colonial powers’ economic, strategic and political interested. No Muslim state is secure internally and none is secure externally. Every Muslim government spends the greater part of its resources and energy on securing its own power within and integrity without ̶ and yet without avail.
The oil bonanza which Allah taālā found fit to grant to some Muslim countries has proven little of the ni’mah it was supposed to be. Found mostly in scarcely populated lands, the new wealth in artificial, “cosmetic” development of their lands. Indeed, the new wealth is so abundant that no such pursuit could exhaust it. Hence, it is channeled for “easy and secure” investment in financial markets of the non-Muslim world where it helps the enemies of Islām to become stronger. Political instability in every corner of the Muslim World makes long term planning and investments too risky for any careful investor. Thus, Muslim World areas endowed with potential for significant agricultural or industrial development remain devoid of funding capital; and the wealth which could develop these potentialities into actual prosperity for the whole ummah is channeled elsewhere.
Well-meaning or otherwise, Westernizing Muslim leaders did not know that their programs would sooner or later undermine the Islāmic religion and culture of their subjects. The connection between the manifestations of Western productivity and power and the Western views of God and man, of life, of nature, of the world, and of time and history, was too subtle for them to observe or, in their hurry, to mind. A secular system of education was built which taught Western values and methods. Soon it began to pour into society generations of graduates who were ignorant of their Islāmic legacy. Their ignorance was combined with suspicion of the legacy’s guardians, namely the `ulamā' who were well-meaning despite their conservatism, liberalism, legalism or mysticism. A gap began to develop within the ranks of the ummah, dividing it into Westernizing secularizers and opponents of secularization. The colonialist power saw to it that the former became the decision-makers in society.
Everything Islāmic fell under attack by the colonialists directly or by their native stooges. The integrity of the Qur'ānic text, the geniuses of the prophet (SAAS), the veracity of his sunnah, the perfection of the shari`āh, the glories of Muslim achievements in culture and civilization ̶ none of them were spared. The purpose was to inject doubt in the Muslim’s confidence in himself, in his ummah, in his faith and his ancestors to undermine his Islāmic consciousness. Also, to subvert his Islāmic personality, and thus, to make him more subservient, lacking the spiritual stamina necessary for resistance. The colonialists and their stooges filled the Muslim’s daily life with effect promoting Western culture, he was bombarded by newspapers, books and magazines, radio and television, cinema and theater, records and tapes, street posters and neon signs. Muslim governments took pride in a news boulevard they opened in their capitals dotted with Western-style high-rise office or apartment building, but they were not shamed by the squalor and degradation of the whole rest of their towns and villages. Westernized elites frequented public halls to watch of hear a movie, an opera, a concert or a drama, and their sons and daughters read about them in books in secular or missionary schools and colleges, without realizing their incongruity with everything else they thought or did. Those who completed their self-Westernization stood out even more oddly against their Muslim environment and background. The integrity of Islāmic culture and the unity of the Islāmic style of life were shattered in their own persons, in their thought and action, and in their homes and families. Western social institution and customs were introduced with [4] impertinence. Instead of raising themselves from their decay to the heights of virtue and societal efficacy envisaged for them by Islām, Muslim women began to hanker after the manifestations of Western decay: gradual nudity and tabarruj, economic independence of aimed at individualist license, egotistic pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of duties imposed by the extended family.
In our cities, Islāmic architecture is dead and Islāmic town planning non-existent. Our overgrown urban centers repeat every mistake and shortcoming of the European city which underwent the industrial revolution two centuries ago as if we are utterly incapable of learning from the experience of others. Our homes, our furniture and arts of decoration are hodgepodge of all styles, betraying our confused notions of who and what we are.
In short, despite all claims to the contrary to the extent that he Westernized himself, the Muslim has, in fact, barbarized himself. His life has become a conglomeration of styles discontinuous with his past. He has made of himself something neither Islāmic nor Western, a cultural monstrosity of modern times.
C. The Self-Perpetuating Core of the Malaise
There can be doubt that the main locus and core of the ummah’s malaise is the prevalent educational system. It is the breeding ground of disease. It is in schools and colleges that self-estrangement from Islām and from its legacy and style are generated and perpetuated. The educational system is the laboratory where Muslim youth are kneaded and cut, where their consciousness is molded into a caricature of the West. Here the Muslim’s linkage with his past is severed; his natural curiosity to learn the legacy of his fathers is stymied; here, willingness to touch base with them and spring toward creative representation of Vergegenariigung (i.e; the making present and alive against) of Islām is blunted with the doubt the system has injected into every recess of his consciousness.
1. The Present State of Education in the Muslim World: Despite the tremendous expansion which has taken place so far, the state of Muslim education is at its worst. As far as Islāmization is concerned, the traditional and the secularist schools, colleges and universities have never been more daring in the advocacy of their un-Islāmic theses, and never have they had the captive ear of the overwhelming majority of Muslim youth as they do today. Since its inception under colonialist administrations, the secularist education system has assumed tremendous preparation, elbowing the Islāmic system from the field. Islāmic education, for the most part, remains as private affair devoid of access to public funds, where public funds are made available, demands [5] of secularization are imposed in the name of modernism and progress. This usually consists of bifurcating the curriculum into contrasting – no, opposing – sections, one Islāmic and one modern, al Azhar being the classic example. The Islāmic part of the curriculum remains unchanged, partly because of conservatism and vested interests and partly because it is in the secularist plan to keep it out of touch with reality and modernity, so that its graduates would present no competition to those of the secular institution. This was all thought out and well planned by the colonial strategist. National independence gave the secularist system its greatest boost by adopting it as its own pouring public funds into it, and secularizing it even further in the name of nationalism. The forces of Westernization and secularization and the resultant de-Islāmization of teachers and students is worse than under colonialism. A spirit of resistance, of searching for liberation and an Islāmic solution, then animated nearly everyone. Today, there is cynicism and lethargy, mistrust of all leaders largely due to repeated false promises and disappointment, no university administration, no private organization is doing anything about the sinking morale of college youth about their continuing deIslāmization through ‘education’. The colossal building program in the affluent countries and consequent expansion in students, faculty and facilities, all serve the secularist cause. Hardly any percentage of funds are devoted to “modernize” in genuine sense, i.e., to improve the Islāmic quality of education, the Islāmic orientation of students and faculty. Everywhere the race is on at maddening speed toward the Western educational model.
2. The Lack of Vision: Despite all claims to the contrary, the result achieved is not the Western model but a caricature of it. Like the Islāmic model, the Western educational model rests ultimately on a vision, though different from that of Islām and is animated by a will to realize that vision. Buildings and offices, libraries and laboratories, classrooms and auditoria teaming with students and faculty are all material paraphernalia of little worth without a vision. It is the nature of the vision that it cannot be copied. Only its incidentals can. This why in nearly two centuries of Westernized, secularized educational, that Muslims have produced nothing- neither a school, college or university, nor a generation of scholars - which matches the west in creativity or excellence, the insoluble problem of low standards in Muslim World institutions is a necessary consequence of this lack of vision. There is no genuine search for knowledge without spirit; the spirit is precisely what cannot be copied. It is generated by a vision of the self, the world and reality, in short by religion. Muslim world education lacks this vision. Its leadership does not [6] have the vision of Western man by necessity; it does not have the vision of Islāmic by choice, i.e, by ignorance, laziness and unconcern. Educational leadership in the Muslim world has been Philistine, without culture and without cause. Nationalism has inspired the Western universities in the last two hundred years because romanticism has replaced the defunct God of Christianity with “la nation” as genuine “ultimate reality”. For the Muslim, no reality is ultimate but God. Ultimate loyalty to the nation-state, is therefore not only impossible to him; it is blasphemous. Whatever the Muslim’s linkage with his legacy and past, it is not possible for him to be a “nationalist” in the same sense as the European who has outgrown his Christianity.
Look at the highest model of Muslim university teachers, the professor with a doctorate from a Western university. He was trained in the West and graduated with fair or less than fair average. Since he was not Islāmically motivated beforehand - i.e., he has not embarked on his expedition to seek knowledge for the sake of Allah ta`ālā, but for a materialist, egotistis (at best nationalistic) goal- he did not obtain all the knowledge available to him in the West. Neither did he surpass his Western teachers at their own game, nor did he like his ancestors who learned and Islāmized the sciences of ancient Greece, Persia and India, digest what he learned or seek to rehabilitate to pass, to obtain the degree, to return home and achieve a position of affluence and eminence. The books he read as a student are the ultimate reaches of his knowledge, for now, he has neither time, nor energy nor motivation to push the frontiers of knowledge his training had reached. His living and working conditions add to his distraction from such a distant ideal. Naturally, his students must come out even less motivated as well as less competent than him. For them, the Western ideal has reached even farther. Gradually, the standards sink. Western education in the Muslim World becomes a caricature of its Western prototype.
The materials and methodologies presently taught in the Muslim World are copies of the Western ones but divided of the vision which animate them in the West. Lacking this they became instruments of mediocrity. Unconsciously, these dispirited materials and methodologies continue to exert a sinister de- Islāmizing influence of the student by posing as alternatives to the Islāmic ones as well as agents of progress and modernization. They make of the graduate of Muslim World university a typical “sophomore” thinking that he knows but knowing very little indeed.
The very possibility of excellence in the Western disciplines is thus removed from the Muslim student. This possibility requires perception of totality [7] knowledge in the fields as a well as motivation by a driving idea to appropriate and transcend the totality. The former depends upon the later since in order to acquire knowledge of the totality, one must be driven by a consuming idea which only commitment to a cause generates. Without a cause, the Muslim is not driven to master the totality of knowledge in the discipline, and without that mastery, no transcendence of the discipline’s state of the art is possible. For the Muslim teachers who studied in the West never reached the totality of knowledge. As teachers in the universities, they could never impart this requisite of excellence to their students. Content to copy and to translate the less than the totality which they have acquired, they and their students are doomed to a mediocre performance at best.
That teachers in Muslim World universities are not possessed by the vision of Islām and are not driven by its cause is certainly the greatest calamity of Muslim education. Throughout the Muslim world, students enter the university equipped - as far as the Islāmic vision is concerned - with the little knowledge of Islām they have acquired at home and / or at the elementary or secondary school. Obviously, this constitutes no “vision” and no “cause” ideologically, therefore, the freshman student enters as tabula rasa. He may come with sentiments but surely not with ideas. These sentiments, if any are shipwrecked when confronted with the “ideas”, and “facts”, and the “objective” judgments of “science” presented to him in the disciplines. Obviously, he has no defenses, no vision with which to counter on this ideational level. If he does not graduate a confirmed atheist, secularist, or communist, his view of Islām has receded to the realm of personal, subjective, and sentimental attachment to family and people. Of Islām as a vibrant ideology presented to him in textbook or classroom with as miserable a defense as a soldier with lance and sword confronts one armed with a tank and machine gun. Nowhere in the Muslim world is the Islāmic vision taught to all students as the Western tradition is taught to high school students in the West, i.e., with consistency, universality, utmost seriousness, and commitment on the part of all. In no Muslim World university is such a vision part of the “basic” or “core” studies program compulsory to all students.
II. The Task
The greatest task confronting the ummah in the Fifteenth century Hijrah [8] is that of solving the problem of education. There can be no hope of a genuine revival of the ummah unless the educational system is revamped and its faults corrected. Indeed, what is needed is for the system to be formed anew. The present dualism in Muslim education, its bifurcation into an Islāmic and secular system must be removed and abolished once and for all. The two systems must be united and integrated. The emergent system must be infused with the spirit of Islām and function as an integral part of its ideological program. It should not be allowed to remain as an integral part of its ideological program. It should not be allowed to remain an imitation of the west, nor left to find its own way. It cannot be tolerated to serve merely the economic, programmatic needs of the students for professional knowledge, personal advancement, or material gain. The educational system must be endowed with a mission, none other than that of imparting the Islāmic vision and of cultivating the will to realize it in space and time. Such a task is indeed difficult to perform and may be costly. However, the ummah in its totality spends as far lesser percentage of its “gross national product” of its annual budget, than most other ummah in the world today. Even in those affluent countries where the budgets of education are significant, the expenditure is for the most part on buildings and administration rather than on research and educative activities proper.
The ummah must spend far more on education than it presently does in order to attract the best minds and to help them maintain the dignity Allah ta`ālā has bestowed upon them as “men of knowledge” or “seeker” after it.
A. Uniting the Two System of Education
The Islāmic system of education consisting of elementary and secondary madrasahs as well as of colleges level kulliyyahs or jāmi`ahs ought to be united with the secular system of public schools and universities. The union should bring to the new, unified system the advantages of both, the financial resources of the state and the commitment to the vision of Islām. Union of the two systems should be the proper occasion to eliminate their disadvantages, that is, the inadequacy of archaic textbooks and inexperienced teachers in the traditional system and the mimicry of the secular West in its methods and idea in the secular.
The advantages may be gathered by the new system if the respective governments agree to appropriate for it the necessary funds without exercising stiffing control. Steps must be taken to make the new educational system financially secure, if not wholly independent, by promoting endowments whose income would fund the system or its parts. Such endowments are precisely the awaqāf which the Sharī`ah recognized and protected for the welfare of the ummah. It was the waqf of each madrasah that it autonomous [9] in the past, and thus enabled its teachers and students to seek knowledge for the sake of Allah ta`ālā alone the necessary condition for any successful search for the truth. It gains was the waqf institution which gave the madrasah the first legal or corporate personality in history. It was the waqf-based madrasah that constituted the model emulated by the first universities of the West when they were founded eight centuries ago.
Because of the explosion of knowledge as we as of student of student numbers, education may be too expensive nowadays to be funded by waqf endowments alone. A yearly portion of public funds will be necessary. However, the state should develop the wisdom necessary to negotiate with the educators or the amount of subsidy and trust them to make the best possible use of it. If state universities in the West could do this, it is anything but presumptuousness to claim that Muslims acting under Qur’ānic injunctions are incapable of the same. There can be neither good nor future in an ummah which does not respect its learned sons and daughters, which does not exert itself to transmit to them the cultural and spiritual legacy of the ancestors, and which does not enable its youth to add to and enrich their tradition. It is a sign of tyranny when the state does not trust its educators to do their job without policing the educational establishments. Finally, it is a sure sign of decay when educators have to be told by political rulers what to teach and how to run the academic concern.
B. Installing the Vision of Islām
The union of the two systems is expected to do more than bring means to the Islāmic system and autonomy to the secular. It is expected to bring Islāmic knowledge to the secular and modern knowledge to the Islāmic system. In regard to elementary and secondary education, the crime of entrusting Muslim youth is entitled to receive full instruction in the religion, ethic law, history and culture of Islām. The ummah or any section of it, as well as its legally responsible, and in the eye of God criminal indictable if they failed to give that basic instruction in Islām to every Muslim child.
The same is even more true in the case of adult education. The child’s spirit is protected by his parents of guardian who will to it that he commits no act odious to Islām or violates any provision of sharī`ah. The adult on other hand, is free. He is the target of anti- Islāmic propaganda in and outside the university. In the college classroom and in the assigned readings he is constantly presented with alien ideologies in the name of science and modernism. Anti- Islāmic ideas and options for conduct are claimed to constitute scientific truth, to be based on objective fact. In his tender years, the Muslim students was presented with Islām through the voice of parental authority. His attachment to the Islāmic position therefore was born out of sentiment, not of reasoned conviction. Evidently, his commitment to Islām cannot withstand the onslaught of scientific” objective” or modern truth. This is why in the absence of any counter presentation of the Islāmic is claims as presentations made with the same force of objectivity, with the same appeal of modernity, the Muslim college student succumbs to the secular claim and converts to it. So begins the process of de-Islāmization in Muslim universities. After four years of such alienating influence stemming from the mass media, his peers and society the Islāmic consciousness of the Muslim is ravaged. No wonder that he becomes a cultural philistine, a cynic who is at home neither in Islām nor in the West, ready to be swayed by anyone who caters to his whim of the moment.
1. Compulsory study of Islāmic Civilization: The only possible antidote to this de-Islamization on the university level is the compulsory four years study of Islāmic civilization. Every student in the university ought to undertake this course of study regardless of his major. The fact that he is a citizen, a member of the ummah, imposes upon him to acquire a viable amount of knowledge of the umma’s legacy, an adequate command of the ummah’s spirit and familiarity with its civilization. It is not possible to be civic without such knowledge. Even if the student belongs to a non-Muslim minority, it does not absolve him from fulfilling this basic equipment. Since he and / or his parents have opted to be citizens of the Islāmic state, he must acquire the necessary familiarity with civilization to which his home state belongs, the spirit and hope which move it and his compatriots. No person may be left without acculturation in Islām, without socialization” or integration into its society. Only such study can immunize him against invading ideologies; for it would enable him to meet argument with argument, objective evidence with objective evidence. Only such study an prepare him for genuine participation in the cultural life and progress of the ummah; for only through it will he learn the essence of Islāmic civilization, the logique of Islām, the direction into which the ummah is going, or hoping to go. Only through it will he learn how to distinguish his ummah- and hence himself- from the others and feel proud of this distinction, anxious to maintain it and pull the others to identify with it.
The study of civilization is the only way to grow in the person a sense of his identity. No one may be said to be self-conscious who does not know his forefathers; and that is to say, who does not know the spirit which animated [11] then, their achievements in the arts and sciences, in their political and economic life in their travails and tragedies, their glories and victories; who is uninspired by their hoes. The consciousness of self- identity is not achieved except when such knowledge of one’d background is contrasted with knowledge of other peoples and groups, of other civilizations. To know oneself is to know how one is different from others, no in material needs or utilitarian realities, but in the view of the world, in normal judgment, and spiritual hope. This is all the domain of Islām, of the culture and civilization which Islām built and sustained through the generations. It is achievable only through the study of Islām and its civilization, and the comparative study of other religious and civilizations. Today to be “modern” is to be civilizationally conscious; i.e., to be conscious of the nature of one’s civilizational heritage, of the essence which produced its various manifestations, of its distinction from other streams of civilizational history, and of its pull and direction for the future. Without such knowledge, one cannot be the subject of his own fate; and certainly, one cannot survive in this world. Unlike the past, the civilizational forces contending in this century can reach and overtake anyone without invasion or military occupation of his land. They can subvert his mind, convert him to their world view, neutralize and contain him as puppet whether he is aware or not. Certainly, these forces are contending with one another to dominate the world. And it is the decision of Muslims today whether Islām will be the victor tomorrow; whether or not Muslims will be the subjects of the history or merely its objects. Indeed, the civilizational battle now in progress in the world- scene, will not leave anyone unscathed. Every human is bound to be transformed by one contender or another, unless he himself instantiates the contender civilization and is therefore a transformer of others.
It is unbecoming of Muslims to argue that Islāmic civilizational will remain alive as long as it is taught in the department of institute of Islāmic study in the universities or colleges of sharī`ah. indeed, it is indicative of their decadence that Muslims have instituted “departments of Islāmic studies” in their universities. These are always copies of departments of Orientalist studies INN Western universities, where the study of Islām is the specialization of the few whom society needs for administrating its relations with the Muslim World. On the other hand, although the need for specialists in the sharī`ah to adjudicate the disputes of Muslims will always require the high training the colleges of the sharī`ah provides, the sharī`ah must be made available to all ummah members. Everybody must have a reasonable mastery of the sciences of the sharī`ah because it constitutes the normative minhaj or method of Islāmic existence.[12]
Moreover, knowledge of Islām and its civilization is not meant for the few. The vision of Islām is not meant for, nor needed by the specialist alone; it is for all humans and it is designed to elevate all those who are possessed by it to higher level of existence. Islām abhors the division of humans into clerics and lay; it insists that all men are to know, teach and observe the truth. The vision of Islām is needed to defend the whole people against the alien ideologies invading the consciousness. Unless everybody is immunized against the disease, the ummah will become the victim. Moreover, Islām is the comprehensive religion whose vision is relevant to every human activity, to every endeavor, whether physical, social, economic, political, cultural or spiritual. It is not an other-worldly religion like Christianity and Buddhism, content to direct divinity “affairs and leave the rest to Caesar. Nothing is said or done in any shop or factory, offices or home, theater or field or a fortiori, in any classroom or laboratory of the university to which Islām is not relevant. The vision of Islām is therefore truncated- and hence dead- if it is cultivated only in one department or faculty. It must be the guiding, determining first principle of every discipline, of every pursuit, and of every human action.
What is needed therefore is a four- year course of study to be part of the basic” or core” program for all students, regardless of their majors or professions. It should seek to give the Muslim student knowledge of the first principles of Islām as essence of Islāmic civilization in the first year; of the historical achievements of Islāmic civilizations in essence and manifestation, in the third year; and of how Islāmic civilization is the only viable option in dealing with the fundamental problems of Muslims and non-Muslims in the contemporary world, in the fourth year.
2. Islāmization of Modern Knowledge: It would be a great step forward if Muslim World universities and colleges were to institute compulsory courses in Islāmic Civilization as part of their basic studies program for all students. This would provide the students with faith in their own religion and heritage and give them the confidence in themselves to enable them to face and surmount their present difficulties as well as to forge ahead toward the goal assigned to them by Allah ta`ālā. But is not enough.
In order to forge ahead toward this Islāmic goal and thus make the Word of Allah supreme in space and time, knowledge of the world is absolutely indispensable. This knowledge is the goal of the disciplines. Before Muslims went into decay and slumber; they had developed the disciplines established and clarified the relevance of Islām, of its world view and values, to every one of them. They integrated them successfully into the main corpus of Islāmic knowledge. They made wonderful contributions in all fields and they utilized [13] that knowledge efficiently to promote their Islāmic ideals. During their slumber non- Muslims have taken the legacy of Muslim scientists and men of Knowledge, integrated it into their own world view, developed the disciplines, added significant contribution to them and utilized the new knowledge to their advantage. Today, non-Muslims are the undisputed masters of all the disciplines. Today in Muslims world universities, non-Muslims books, achievements, world views, problems and ideals are being taught to Muslim youths. Today Muslim youth are being Westernized by Muslims teachers in Muslims universities.
This situation must change. There can be no doubt that the Muslim academicians ought to master all the modern discipline, understand them completely, and achieve an absolute command of all that they have to offer. That is the first prerequisite then, they ought to integrate the new knowledge into the corpus of the Islāmic legacy by eliminating, amending, reinterpreting and adapting its components as the world view of Islām should be blazed. Finally, by their example as pioneers, they ought to teach the new generation of Muslims and non- Muslims how to follow in their footsteps, push the frontiers of human knowledge even farther, discover new layers of the patterns of Allah ta`ālā in creation, and establish new paths for making His will and commandments realized in history.
The task of Islamizing knowledge (in concrete terms, to Islāmize the discipline, or better, to produce university level textbook recasting some twenty disciplines in accordance with the Islāmic vision) is also the most difficult. No Muslims has yet contemplated it enough to discern its prerequisites, or to articulate its constitutive steps and measures. All that our previous reformers had thought of was to acquire the knowledge and power of the West. They were not even aware of the conflict of Western knowledge with the vision of Islām. It is our present generation that first discovered the conflict has inflicted upon us caused us to wake up in panic, fully aware of the rape of the Islāmic soul taking place before our very eyes in the Muslims World universities. That is why we are alerting the Muslims World to the veil and seeking for the first time in history to elaborate a plan to arrest it, to combat its effects, and to re-launch Islāmic education on its proper track, leading to its predestined goal.
It is most regrettable that the Muslims World is till devoid of a center where thinking on this high level takes place. What is needed is a university which acts as headquarters for Islāmic thought, where the disciplines undergo Islāmization and the process gets tested in the class and seminar rooms of the undergraduate and graduate programs of study. Until the Islāmic university of Islamabad entered into collaborations with the International Institute [14] of Islāmic Thought, not one educational institution in the Muslim World had moved a finger to Islāmize knowledge, to produce Islāmic textbooks for college use in the disciplines, or the tools of research necessary for the writing of these books, and yet, everywhere in the Muslim World one hearts of the need to Islāmize education, its men and institutions , its curricula and textbooks than lip-service, either made by the ignorant or designed to mislead the masses.
This task is the noble of the tasks, the highest instantiation of the Divine irādah, the first and categorical imperative of all morality. The world religions, the West and Communism did not begin to grow, to develop and achieve what they did without such a cause animating and driving their adherents. The least argument is that Muslims too, should lend their soul to determination by a cause if they want to stop being the objects of history and become its subjects. And yet, Islām is not another “ism” on a par with these movements; nor does it present its claim as its own, as a dogma, personally experienced and subjectively appropriated, which can only be adopted or dropped arbitrarily. The claim of Islām is a rational, necessary, and a critical claim. It has universal validity, an ought-claim and title to the acknowledgement and acquiescence of mankind, as a rational claim it can be met only with counter argument, which the Islāmic adherent should welcome and to which he should respond with evidence. No part of the Islāmic claim, no relevance of Islām to any discipline, may be accepted without convincing evidence. But when the Islāmic vision has made its claim and established it for the most exacting scholarship, when it has substantiated it for the most fastidious consciousness, then it can be rejected and/or resisted only out of irrationality or malice. The former is the prerogative of the ignorant, the mentally deranged; the latter, that of the committed enemy. Both constitute what Islām calls jahiliyyah.
This is then the great task facing Muslim intellectuals and leaders: To recast the whole legacy of human knowledge from the standpoint of Islām. The vision of Islām would not be a vision unless it is a vision of something, namely, life, reality and the world. That content is the object of study of the various disciplines, to recast knowledge as Islām relates to it, is to Islāmize it; i.e., to redefine, and reorder the date, to rethink the reasoning and relating of the data, to reevaluate the conclusions, to re-project the goals - and to do so in such a way as to make the disciplines enrich the vision and serve the cause of Islām. To this end, the methodological categories of Islām, namely, the unity of truth, the unity of knowledge, and the unity of humanity, the unity of life and telic character of creation, the subservience of creation to man and of man to God must replace the Western categories and determine the perception [15] of ordering of reality. So too, the values of Islām, namely, the usefulness of knowledge for man’s felicity, the blossoming of man’s faculties, the remolding of creation so as to make concrete the Divine patterns. The building of culture and civilization, of human monuments in knowledge and wisdom, heroism and virtue, pietism and saintliness, should replace the Western values and direct the learning activity in every field.
To elaborate and articulate more precisely, the foregoing principle reflect the purpose of the rest of this book.
III. The Methodology
A. Shortcoming of the Traditional Methodology
In consequence of the terrible devastation which non-Muslims inflicted upon the ummah in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Hijrah - the Tatar invasion from the East and the Crusader invasion from the West - Muslim leaders lost their nerves, their confidence in themselves. Thinking their world consigned to doom, they became over-conservative and they sought to preserve their identity and most precious possession, viz., Islām by proscribing all innovation and advocating a strict adherence to the letter of the sharī`ah. It was then they abandoned the major source of creativity in the law - ijtihād. They declared its gates closed. Treating the sharī`ah as perfected in the works of the ancestors, they declared any departure from it an innovation, and every innovation undesirable and condemnable. As elaborated by the schools, the sharī`ah was to become frozen and as much to safeguard the survival of Islām. The survival of Islām, and indeed, Muslim victory and expansion in Russia, the Balkans, Central, and Southeast Europe in the eighth to twelfth centuries did not undo the conservative measure. The universal adoption of tasawwuf and its tarīqahs or ways helps the Muslims to overcome their difficulties in the absence of ijtihād as source of creativity. The sharī`ah therefore remained a closed system until modern times when modern science and technology gave the West the power to confront and defeat the Muslims.
In modern times the west undid the Ottoman conquests in Europe, occupied, colonized and fragment the whole of Muslims World except Turkey proper, from where the Western powers were driven by force, Yemen and cultural and West Arabia which provided little incentive for colonization. The Western powers exploited Muslim weakness to the utmost possible and contributed in major fashion to the present malaise of the Muslims World [16] described in the first pages of this easy. In response to the defeats, tragedies and crises which the West had imposed upon the Muslim World in course of the last two centuries, Muslim leaders in Turkey, Egypt and India have tried to Westernize the ummah in the hope of making it politically, economically and militarily viable. Wherever it was made, the more striking the more consistently it was applied, as in Turkey and Egypt. In the former, it prepared the way for Mustafa Kamal to abolish all Islāmic institutions and reject every traditional Islāmic principle affecting public life. The whole Islāmic system was to be replaced by the Western system. Today, after two generations (sixty years) of Westernization, Turkey is just as weak and poor in all respects as other Muslim countries. Westernization succeeded somewhat in de-Islāmizing one class of society, but did nothing else. In Egypt, where Westernizing was less consistently pursued, a Western system was implanted and the traditional Islāmic system was permitted to function alongside. The two systems competed with each other; and, despite, the tremendous advantages the Western system enjoyed - public funds, government support and favors - both failed to achieve excellence. They succeeded only in weakening each other.
1.
Fiqh and Faqīh(s); Ijtihāh and Mujtahid(s):
Today, the term fiqh means possession of knowledge of the sharī`ah according to a given school; and its derivative faqīh refers to the person endowed with such knowledge. General fiqh and its derivative would apply to possession of knowledge of the sharī`ah in all schools of law. Such knowledge presupposes command of the Arab language, of the judgmental (hukmi) passages of the Qur'ān and Sunnah. Evidently, it is a technical meaning, highly restricted when compared with that of the Qur’ānic term faqaha or tafaqqaha, repeated in numerous verses, which point to intellection and understanding, to grasping the essence and explanation, in short, to knowledge of Islām as whole. The movement of the term from this general connotation to the narrow technical one is itself an index of the ummah’s outgrowth of the need for a general meaning capable of containing its creative tendencies and varied activities. This shift in meaning of the term, and the loss of the dynamic aspect the early usage of the term indicated, constituted a sign of conservatism and narrowing of vision. The great jurists of Islām – Shafi`ī, AbuHanīfah, Mālik and Ahmad ibn Hanbale – all understood the compound term usūl al fiqh– not as the general principles of the Islāmic law, but the first principles of Islāmic understanding of life and reality.
Moreover, the early faqīhs of the ummah–namely, the Prophet’s companions, their successors, the tabi`ūn, and the great founders of the schools [17] (RAA)– were preeminently knowledgeable in all matters affecting the lives of Muslims. The faqīhs of the classical period were real encyclopedias, masters of practically all the disciplines from literature and law to astronomy and medicine. They were themselves professional men who knew Islām not only as law, but as ideal and theory, as a system of thought and life lived by millions of humans in actual practice. The highest Islāmic qualification ever, namely, al adhawq al shar`ī, or the intuitive knowledge of the purposes of the law, was well within their grasp. If they were the models of creative handling of the Muslim’s problems on account of their superb competence, certainly neither the knowledge nor the wisdom of today’s faqīh-graduate equip him adequately to assume the responsibilities which the early faqīh have carried out so successfully.
Within the traditional system itself several attempts at self-reform were made, the most daring of which was proposed by Muhammad Abduh, and his teacher, Jamaluddin al Afghani. Although awakened Muslims everywhere approved their call to reopen the gates of ijtihād, the measure failed for two reasons: First, the traditional qualifications required of the mujtahids remained the same and thus restricted the practice of ijtihād to the graduates of the traditional madrasah, i.e., to those who saw no need for it. For, the graduates of the traditional schools were precisely the recipients of an education which convinced them that the methodology was absolutely adequate and that the problem of the Musim World was merely one of human reluctance to realize the values of Islām. Secondly, the understanding of the mujtahid as necessarily the faqīh, (i.e., the person whose training has enabled him to translate all problems into legal term, to make pronouncements upon them under the categories of the law), contained or subsumed the problem of the modernity under those categories. This restricted ijtihād still further by concentrating all its effort upon iftā, or the pronouncement of juristic verdicts upon specific actions which Muslims have done or propose to do in their daily lives. Almost by defination, as it were, the traditional faqīh or mujtahid were incapable of looking at the problem as a whole, lost as he was in determining the exact correspondence of given deeds to norms and rules already specified in one or more schools. The situation called for a new methodology of which the traditional mujtahid were incapable of conceiving, for reopening our every understanding of usūl, or sources of Islāmic knowledge.
2. The Opposition of Wahy to `Aql: Perhaps the most tragic development in the intellectual history of the ummah is the alienation of wahy and `aql from each other. It was the advent of Greek logic and its influence upon some Muslims who were all too anxious to utilize the methods it provided to convince [18] non-Muslims of the truths of Islām which set them on the path leading so such alienation. Hellenized Christians and Jew lived for centuries under the dichotomy; and many had brought it into the ummah with them when they converted to Islām. It was al Fārābī who gave it its classical statement upheld by the philosophers against the mutakallimūn. It was accepted by some later mutakallimūn who were content to elaborate the faith defensively. And it dominated the field of intellectual discussion in the age of decline, especially under the influence of tasawwuf which advocated a purely intuitive and often esoteric methodology, and hence, found no fault with such estrangement between reason and revelation.
The separation of wahy and `aql is utterly unacceptable. It is inimical to the whole spirit of Islām, opposed to the central appeal of the Qur’ān to reason to weigh rationally all matters, to favor the more reasonable, the more median course. Unlike those religions which sought to overwhelm man’s understanding, to overpower man’s conscience so as to surrender to the irrational, or even the absurd, the call of Islām was rational and critical. Invariably, it invited men to use their intelligence, to apply their critical faculties to all claims, to consider the alternative, always to be cogent, coherent, to say nothing but the truth of which one is absolutely certain, always to seek correspondence with reality. Such exhortations, injunctions and commands are practically found on every page of the Qur’ān. Without reason, the truths of revelation cannot be appreciated. Neither would they be recognized for what they are – namely Divine – and acknowledged as such. The claims of revelations would be indistinguishable from other claims including the absurd. When acceptance of revelations is based not on reason, it is subjective, arbitrary, whimsical. No religious thesis based upon personal whims could claim the acquiescence of mankind, or of any significant part of it for a long time. The Muslims’ exaggerated emphasis on the institution at the cost of reason opened the gates to corruption of the faith. By not distinguishing it rationally from the absurd, superstition and old wives’ tales can certainly masquerade as truth and penetrate the faith. Just as surely, the overemphasis of “reasons” at the cost of intuitive faith corrupted the “life of reason” by reducing it to materialism, utilitarianism, mechanism and meaninglessness.
3. Separation of Thought from Action: In the early period of Islāmic history, the leader was the thinker and the thinker was the leader. The vision of Islām was dominant. And the zeal to realize it in history determined all conduct. It was the preoccupation of the whole community of Islām. Every conscious Muslim sought to probe reality for material and opportunities to undergo re-kneading into Islāmic patterns. The faqīh was at the same time imām, [19] mujtahid, qāri', muhaddith, teacher, mutakallim, as well as political leader, army general, farmer or businessman, and professional. If he felt weak in any aspect, everybody around him was eager to step in and make up the deficiency. Everybody gave freely all that he had to the cause, and everybody left strong with the strength of others. Muslims were so closely associated with one another that the weakness of any one of them was quickly overcome with one another that total experience of all. Since Islāmic thought was by nature oriented toward reality, this association with concrete living and doing provided the laboratory in which Islāmic thought tried its creative ideas. Equally, it anchored thought in reality and compelled it to keep its gaze focused upon the real commonweal of living men and women. If that period witnessed little speculative or metaphysical thought, the reason is not that they were incapable of it, but that priority for most Muslim thinkers lay in enabling the masses of people to lead healthy, rational, virtuous and prosperous lives.
On the other hand, the actual life of the people, being object of continuing thought on the part of the leaders, had the benefit of their creative ideas. Adequate thought was applied to the problem of the ummah. And the solutions fitted the requisites of the situation. The ummah prospered in every facet of thought and life; for her welfare was constantly in view of the best minds, and the solutions projected by them were put to practice and implemented because the same minds commanded the executive power, or were closely associated with those who did.
Later, this unity between thought and action was broken. The moment they were separated from one another, each began to deteriorate. Political leadership and the men of power moved from one crisis to another without the benefit of thought, without consulting the learned and obtaining their wisdom. The result was bungling which alienated the wise subjects and isolated the leader still more. Put on the defensive, the political leaders perpetrated still more and greater mistakes. On the other hand, the thinkers estranged and removed from active engagement in the ummah’s affairs focused upon the ideal as grounds for their condemnation of political authority. Some began to indulge in affirming the normative over and against the actual. Those whose condemnations carried political consequence were subjected to persecution by the leadership in power. Those thinkers whose condemnation did not, were encouraged to soar still higher away from reality. Other thinkers began to compromise the normative in their association with the political leadership. Increased tension led to polarity and this brought about the run of both thought and action. Whereas action became tyrannical and succession to power violent, thought, having abandoned empirical reality, the real commonwealth of the [20] people, contented itself with commentaries on older works or took to mystical flight in Sufi speculation. Soon, the whole ummah became impervious to its own political leadership. The long succession of tyrants, corrupt leaders, throne-usurpers and caliphal puppets manipulated by powerful sultāns demoralized the ummah and repulsed it from the political scene. The Sūfī brotherhoods received the people with open arms. They provided them with spiritual self-disciplining and cultivation of mystical experience, and thus compensated them from the tyranny which none could bear.
Soon, while the sultāns reigned without challenge, the greatest mental energies of the ummah were channeled toward the spiritual, personal and subjective values contemplated by tasawwuf. The equivalence and convertibility of the spiritual with the worldly, characteristic of the early period, disappeared. In its place came the purist of the spiritual at the cost of the worldly, of the other world at the cost of this world. Losing its anchor in the actual experiences of the ummah. Muslims thought became conservative and literal in law, speculative in Qur’ānic exegesis and world view, world-denying in ethics and politics, esoteric in the sciences of nature. Great thinkers, jurists and saints all looked down upon political authority and action as something beneath them, in itself contemptible. First resistance to the world, and then complete disregard for it, became the first conditions of virtue, the ummah seemed to have lost the balance between the personal and the public values so sublimely exemplified by the Prophet (SAAS) in his life.
4. Cultural and Religious Dualism: Al Sirāt al Mustaqīm or “the straightforward path” which was the hope of all the practice of early Muslims, was a single, unitary path stemming from the vision of Islām, integrating all of the man’s tendencies and activities into one integral surge toward Islāmic self- realization in history. In the period of decay, and because of the estrangement between thought and action, the path split into two: the way of the world and the way of God or virtue. This bifurcation of the Islāmic life into two paths inconstant opposition to each other – the one praiseworthy and involving all the religious and ethical values; the other condemnable and involving the material world with all its values – corrupted and destroyed both. Both paths were transformed. The former became an empty spirituality, similar to the vacuous spirituality of Christian and Buddhist monkhood. For a spirituality that does not concern itself with the empirical welfare of the masses, which does not seek to actualize justice in the rough and tumble of the market places of the world must be subjective, bent upon the religious interest of the adherent alone. Such as spirituality is egotistic even when it calls for altruistic acts; [21] for its prime concern is the state of consciousness of the practitioner. The others and their welfare are from it tools and instruments of self-trial, self-purification and self-ennoblement. No wonder that this spirituality fell to the lure of gnosis and the mystical experience; and it became the prey of superstition and miracle-mongering. It never occurred to the shaykh(s) who founded the Sūfī tarīqqahs and the brotherhoods would aberrate in such manner and develop an ethic and a hope which would run counter to Islām. But the fact is that most brotherhoods did succumb to this temptation.
The path of the world, on the other hand, developed its own immoral system, absolved as it were from the moral requirements which the representative of the religion of Islām declared the specialized pursuit of another class of Muslims. Without moral values as internal to and constitutive of it, the system was bound to deteriorate and become the prize for anyone who could contend for it successfully. Government, political leadership or office thus became an instrument for self-glorification and the brute exercise of power, or for extortion of moral and material benefits from the people. When, in the modern period, the foreign colonial enemy attached, invaded and occupied the land, the masses put up little resistance, the battle, they had already become convinced, was not theirs. Finally, when the colonial administrations set up another educational system and began to favor a style of life, of thought and activity alien to that of the masses, they regarded it as something deja vu, condemnable and contemptible but not worthy of total uprising of the ummah in holy war (jihād) against it.
B. First Principles of Islāmic Methodology
As prerequisite for the removal of dualism from the educational system, which is in turn a prerequisite for the removal of dualism from life, for the solution of the malaise of ummah, knowledge ought to be Islāmized, while avoiding the pitfalls and shortcomings of traditional methodology, Islāmization of knowledge ought to observe a number of principles which constitute the essence of Islām. To recase the discipline under the framework of Islām means subjection of their theory and method, their principles and goals to the following:
1. The Unity of Allah (SWT): The unity of Allah (subhānahu wa ta`ālā) is the first principle of Islām and of everything Islāmic. It is the principle that Allah is indeed Allah; that no other being is Allah; and that He is absolutely one, absolutely transcendent, metaphysically and axiologically ultimate; that everything else is separate and different from Him and [22] in His creation. He is the Creator by Whose command everything that is, has come to be and every event that happens, has come to happen. He is the source of all goodness and beauty. His will is the law of nature, as well as the law of morality. His worship and praise is due from all creatures above all from humans, whom Allah has created in the best of forms and endowed with faculties with which to recognize Him and acknowledge His works, as well as the capacity to transform creation so as to fulfil therein His ethical and esthetic patterns.
To think and live in consciousness of divine unity is to do so in world enchanted and alive, since everything in it is there by Allah’s act, is sustained by His providence, nothing is futile or devoid of meaning. Everything in Allah’s creation is according to a precise measure which Allah has ordained for it. To be part of such a world is to recognize one’s infinite complex of relations with all creatures; above all to acknowledge one’s creatureliness, one’s indebtedness is to have Allah constantly present in one’s consciousness. To be a Muslim is to have Allah constantly present in one’s consciousness. And since He is the Creator and Judge, to be Islāmic means to do all and everything as He has directed and for His sake. All good and all happiness, as all life and all energy, are His gift. In the Islāmic life, these are acknowledged and used as such, while in Islāmic thought, He is the first and ultimate cause and end of everything. As such, His being and activity are the first constitutive and regulative principles of all knowledge. Whether the object of knowledge is the microcosm of the atom or the macrocosm of the stars, the depth of the self, the conduct of society or the march of history, Islāmic knowledge regards the object of knowledge as materially caused by the antecedent constituents of situation whence the object proceeded, but the actual discharge of causality which brought about the object out of an infinity of other possible objects on which those same constituents might have led, as the initiative of the Divine being, issuing from Divine command. Likewise, Islāmic knowledge regards every object of knowledge as fulfilling an end willed by Allah, or serving another end which is so willed, so that the causal hierarchy of the universe is at once a hierarchy of ends at the top of which stands the Divine Will, willing the end of every individual being, of every series of ends and of the hierarchy as a whole. Islāmic knowledge recognizes that there is neither being, nor truth, nor value outside the chains and complexes of same in which Allah ta`ālā is cause and end, both immediate and ultimate; that whatever is conceived of, known or evaluated outside the divinely ordained nexus is non- existent, false or value-free or merely misrepresented as standing outside that nexus. [23]
2. The Unity of Creation:
a. Cosmic Order. – From the unity of Allah (SWT), the unity of His creation follows with logical necessity. As He has said in the Holy Qur’ān, “If there were in heaven and earth other god than God, both heaven and earth would have fallen into chaos” (21:22). If there were more than one ultimate reality would not be ultimate. Moreover, the universe would then have to follow different orders; and if it did, it would not be the ordered universe we know. Nor would it be possible for us humans to know a universe in which more than one order obtains. Cosmic order, it must be remembered, is that under which we discern objects as substances, qualities, relations and events. It is the consistency or unity of cosmic order that enables us to cognize the permanence of substances as things, and the repetition of events as causal relations. Without cosmic order, neither things nor causes and consequents would be the same.
Creation is an integral whole precisely because it is the work of the Creator Whose order and design has infused every part of it. Cosmic order consists of the laws of nature. These operate throughout the universe and permeate every part of aspect of it. The material, the spatial, the biological, the physic, the social and the esthetic – all reality obeys and fulfills these laws. All laws are the sunan (patterns) of Allah ta`ālā in His creation. Allah ta`ālā is not merely the source of these laws, or having once designed nature according to them and established their working in nature, operates and/or controls them no more. He is not retired but eternally living and active. Therefore, every being in the cosmos and every event that takes place, are so by His command. At any stage of its existence, every being has built without it the dynamic power to change. This dynamic power comes from God and is sustained by Him. Furthermore, this power is not necessarily bound to produce the result with which it is associated. It is by Allah’s command that a particular effect is caused by the causes usually associated with it. Allah (SWT) may operate a cause to bring about its effect immediately; but He may and does operate a cause by means of other cause, so that what seems to us to be an inexorable chain of other causes, so that what seems to us to be an inexorable chain of causes is just as much divine causes, as a single cause. For our part, as humans, we trust Allah ta`ālā, or His cosmic order that given a cause, its effect will follow. As al Ghazāli and Hume had found out despite their ideological differences, there is no necessity to any causal connection. Indeed, what we call causality is mere ‘following upon” and repetition, leading us to believe that a cause is usually followed by its effect. Such faith has nothing to stand upon except the benevolence of the [24] Divine Being. For Allah ta`ālā seeks not to cheat or misguide. He is a benevolent creator who ordered things in the universe or to make it livable and comprehensible to us; to make it possible for us to exercise our moral options and prove our ethical worth in the deed.
b. Creation: A kingdom of Ends. – Allah ta`ālā created everything and did so with precise measure (25:2). This measure assigns to everything its nature, its relations to other beings, and the course of its existence. Equally, the divine measure subjects everything not only to the system of causes described above, but also to a system of ends. Everything has a purpose, a raison d’etre, which its being served. This purpose is never final but always subject to other purposes constituting a final nexus which ends only in Him. For only He is the ultimate End, the final purpose unto whom everything returns. His will makes every good, good.
Everything that is, therefore, is at once related in a cause-effect relationship to everything else, as well as in a finalistic, or means-to-end relationship. For both the metaphysical and the axiological relationships terminate with God the network of each is infinite. Certainly, both are open for human inspection, for human knowledge and appreciation. Being infinite, however, human can know only a portion of the relationship, led, as it were, by a pocket spotlight in a dark jungle. But it is their prerogative and duty to press every forward in its exploration and discovery. To discover and establish those relationships is to establish for knowledge and appreciation, the immutable patterns of Allah (SWT).
That all things in creation serve a purpose and that all purposes are interrelated as means and ends to one another makes the world one telic system, vibrant and alive, full of meaning. The birds in the sky, the stars in the firmament, the fishes in the depth of oceans, the planets and the elements – all constitute integral parts of the system. No part of it is inert or evil, since every being has a function and the role in the life of the whole. Together, they make an organic body whose members and organs are interrelated in ways which humans are only now coming to discover for science, but only in very limited parts of nature. Muslims know all too well that creation is organic, that every part of it serves some end or another, even if that end is not known to them. This knowledge is a consequence of their faith. Confronted with the wolf devouring the lamb, the bird eating the butterfly or the human body feeding the worms in the earth, they assume all being to be good, fulfilling in its natural activity a divine purpose and serving a system of purposes which culminates in the Divine Will. The Muslim is not free to ascribe anything to accident or to blind fate. Earthquakes and pestilences, drought and tragedy, the Muslim [25] regards as ordained by Allah. However tragic or painful, the Muslim accepts these events as His effects, willed by Him for a good cause which may not be discerned presently, being effects of Allah, the Muslims is never overwhelmed by them because he knows Allah, the author of them, to be at once his beneficent protector. He therefore assumes them to be tests, ordained by Allah to try him, calling for the greatest firmness, faith and optimism in the final outcome. This aspect of the faith of Islām is precisely what humans need when faced with tragedy.
Allah’s ordaining of this world as one which causes are followed by their world as one in which causes are followed by their effects, where causes converge on everything from an infinite scope, and where effects diverge from every event in infinite scope and where the same infinite interrelationships exist and bind everything together in system of ends, is itself meant to provide a theater for man’s life and ethical endeavor. The theater is not its own end; nor is it the property and exclusive domain of man. Since man is created for a life of service to His Creator, the world is His grant to Him. Man’s duty is therefore to work out the divine patterns in it, but to safeguard it from deterioration and indeed to improve it.
C. Taskhīr (Subservience) of Creation to Man.– Allah ta`ālā has granted the world as a temporary gift and theater to man. He has made everything in it subservient to him; i.e., capable of being used by man for his nourishment, enjoyment and comfort. Such use may be immediate as in the case of nourishment and enjoyment, or mediate as when the forces of nature are utilized to produce the goods men need. Between the objects of creation and human usufruct there is a built-in concordance. Creation has the needs of humanity built into it, its objects being meant to serve those needs. The whole range of nature is capable of receiving man’s efficacy of suffering change at his initiative, of transformation into any pattern man desires. Humankind can dry up the seas or harness the sun, move the mountains and cultivate the deserts, or lay the whole world waste. They can fill the world with beauty and enable everything to prosper, or fill it with ugliness and destroy everything. The subservience of creation to man knows no limits. Allah ta`ālā has willed it so. The causal and finalistic interconnections of the subjects of the creation are the substance of this subservience which would be futile and meaningless without them. Men would quickly lose interest in creation and give up any attempt to transform it into the outght-patterns revealed by Allah, if he could not depend on causes to bring about their effects, or the means not to be good for the ends. It was a Muslim thinker who first expressed the Kantian notion, ‘You should therefore you can,’ as the first principle of the metaphysics of ethics; and he did so under the inspiration of the Qur’ānic principle, “God [26] does not make imperative except that which is possible” (2:286). Without this necessary implication, but universe would be either an inert, immovable and unchangeable world, or world for fools.
3. The Unity of Truth and The Unity of Knowledge: Reason may certainly have its illusions and aberration as well as its uncertainties. Its capacity for self-criticism gives it a fair degree of protection; but wherever ultimate truth and reality are concerned, its human predicament leaves it in need of corroboration by the infallible source of revelation. Once the questions of first or ultimate principles are settled then reason acquires new vigor with which it can overcome the problems confronting it. Its basic presuppositions must all be apodeictically certain. Some are so by self-evidence; others are the common experience of humanity at large. There are others, however, which are capable of an ought-necessity only; i.e., they are capable of being perceived as true only by those who have the requisite degree of wisdom, or maturity of religious or ethical vision and who are on that account expected to see the reality as it is. Hence, recognition of such truths and values may not be mathematically universal, but it enjoys a different kind of necessity, an ought to be necessity or Sollensnotwendigkeit. Where reason does not enjoy apodeictic certainly, the light of faith can provide this certainty and in fact cast illuminating light on all over presuppositions, and support with additional certainty the whole worldview built upon them. This light of faith is definitely epistemological, and comes as the consequence of reasonableness not its opposite. Between it and the apodictically certain presuppositions of reason, there is affinity, harmony, correspondence and complementarity. The least in Islām, unlike the other religions which are dogmatic through and through, faith is never irrational in its role and contribution. It does not stand above reason, just as reason does not stand above faith. The perception of reason and faith as diametrical opposites, and of man having to choose between them is not Islāmic. That “the Jews require a sign (miracle) and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block (skandalon) and unto the Greeks foolishness… The foolishness of God is wiser than men… Not many wise men… are called: but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; … the weak things …. to confound the mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised hath God chose, yea, things which are not to bring to naught things that are” (I Corinthians 1:22-28) maybe Jewish or Christian or Hindu, but it is the antithesis of the Islāmic position.
As concern the theory of knowledge, the position of Islām may be best described as the unity of truth. This unity devolves from God’s absolute unity, [27] and is convertible with it. Al Haqq (“the truth”) is the name of God. If God is indeed God, as Islām affirms, then the truth cannot be many. God knows the truth and, in His revelation, He tells it as it is. What He conveys in the revelation cannot be different from reality, since He is the Creator of all reality as well as of all truth. The truth which is the object of reason is embodied in the laws of nature. These are the patterns of God in creation, His sunan, which are constant and unchangeable, and hence are possible to discover, to establish and to use for the benefit of humanity. Besides proclaiming God’s existence and creation, revelation instructs about the world, giving the very same laws of nature or divine patterns in accordance with which the universe runs. Obviously, there can be n truer disclosure or rendering of these laws or patterns than by their Maker and Author. Theoretically, therefore, there can be no discrepancy. This logical equivalence of reason, truth and reality with the facts of revelation is the most critical principle epistemology had ever known. This equivalence is based on the three principles underlying all Islāmic knowledge.
First, the unity of truth prescribes that no claim on behalf of revelation may be made which goes counter to reality. The propositions which revelation is supposed to teach must be true; i.e., they must correspond to reality and agree with it. It is inconceivable that God may be ignorant, or that He may seek to cheat or misguide His creatures. His statements, therefore, given expressly to guide and instruct, cannot oppose reality. Wherever such variation from reality occurs, the Muslim is rightly cautioned by the doctrine of the unity of truth to reconsider his understanding of revelation. The doctrine guards him against over-hasty interpretation, exaggerated allegorical interpretation and eisegesis, or the reading into the material of any esoteric meaning (bātin) which is arbitrarily assumed on someone’s personal authority. The meanings of the Islāmic revelation are eternally anchored in two solid rocks: Arabic lexicography and syntax which remain unchanged since the revelation of the Qur’ān, and reality. This is why Qur’ānic revelations has known no hermeneutical problems as such. All exegetical issues revolved around questions of lexicography and syntax.
Second, the unity of truth prescribes that no contradiction, difference or variation between reasons and revelation is ultimate. It denies categorically that there is no over-arching principle, fact or understanding which can solve the contradiction. In one’s investigation of nature and attempt to discover the patterns of laws of the Creator in the universe, it is certainly possible to make mistakes, to fall under illusion and to think one has grasped the truth while being in error. Such would create discrepancy between revelation and reason. [28]
The unity of truth rejects such discrepancy as illusory and demands of the enquirer to reconsider, to reinvestigate the data. The cause of the discrepancy may well be in the findings of science or reason, in which case it would be salutary to send the investigator back to the data for reexamination, and it may well be in his understanding of revelation, in which case it would be equally salutary to send him back to its data for review.
Third, the unity of truth, or the laws of nature with the patterns of the Creator, prescribes that no inquiry into the nature of creation or any part of it may be closed and concluded. The patterns of God in creation are infinite. No matter how much or how deeply we may come to know of them, there will always more of them to discover. Hence, openness to new evidence and persistence of the unity of truth. A critical attitude to all human claims and an active search for the laws of nature which is never ultimately conclusive, are at once necessary conditions of Islāmic and of the genuine science. Under this view, the strongest conclusion is always tentative, valid only until new evidence has questioned, refuted or verified it. The highest wisdom, the most certain pronouncement, must always be followed with the affirmation, (Allah knows better!) ولله اعلم
a. The Divine Amānah.– In a passage of the Qur’ān, Allah ta`ālā said: “And when (after creating heaven and earth) Allah told the angels that He was about to create a vicegerent and to assign him to the earth, the angels pleaded; would you place on earth persons who will do evil and shed blood while we praise and adore you constantly? Allah replied: I have an ulterior purpose which you don’t know. Having created Adam, Allah taught him the names of all things, showed him to the angels and asked them to name the things of nature. They could not and answered, praise be to you. We know only what You have taught us. Yours is the knowledge and the wisdom.’ Allah asked Adam to tell the names, which he did... Then Allah asked the angels to prostrate themselves to Adam.” (2:30-34). In other passages concerning the creation of man. Allah ta`ālā said “we offered Our trust to heaven and earth and mountains. But they withdrew and refused to accept it. Man, however, agreed to carry it (33:72). I have not created men and jinn but to serve me... (51:56). Allah created heaven and earth… that you humankind may prove yourselves ethically worthy by your deeds (11:7). Praised be He... Who created life and death that you may prove yourselves ethically [29] worthy by your deeds. (67:1-2)
The foregoing passages of the Qur’ān answer for all time the question of whether or not man’s being has a reason which explains it. Islām affirms with all possible emphasis that man has a raison d’etre which is the service of Allah ta`ālā. The Divine Will of two kinds, a kind that is realized necessarily, and the divine patterns on the basis of which creation runs. These patterns are the laws of nature. They are immutable and their fulfillment is cosmic. In addition to revelation, they may be known by reason. Allah ta`ālā enjoined upon man to seek them, to understand them, to establish them for knowledge and to utilize them to his advantage. The second kind is realized only in freedom, only when they are fulfilled in condition where both fulfillment and violation or non-fulfillment are distinct possibilities. These are the moral laws. They co-exist with laws of nature; i.e., they are always realized in a context of things, persons and relations in the empirical world, but they belong to a different order from the empirical. They are a priori. Whether or not they enter the real situation and become fulfilled therein depends upon that situation’s fulfillment or otherwise of their own peculiar requirements. They demand the free exercise of their own peculiar requirements. They demand the free exercise of a personal will. Devoid of such will, “heaven and earth and mountains” were incapable of carrying the Divine amānah (trust). Only man carried it; for he alone is capable of such moral freedom. His capacity puts him above the angels. For they don’t enjoy the freedom to obey and disobey. That is why Allah commanded them to prostrate themselves before man. For their lack of moral freedom, they are inferior to man. They are perfect and can only obey Allah’s orders. They praise and serve him constantly and never disobey. Thus, the obedience of man is worthier than the obedience of the angels, precisely because it is done by a person who is well capable of doing otherwise. For such a person, to turn away from the way of evil, the way of the lesser good, the way of the material or utilitarian or selfish good, and opt freely to do that which the moral law demands, is to realize a higher value. The moral life is higher, superior, nobler and greater kind of life. The higher part of the divine will does not enter history and become real unless human beings chose to realize it in freedom. Man is therefore a cosmic bridge between the higher echelons of the Divine Will and historical reality. Evidently, his beings is of tremendous significance.
b. The Khilāfah. – Man’s carrying of the Divine amānah constitutes his khilāfah or vicegerency to God. His khilāfah consists in the fulfillment of the moral laws. But these have aspects which are not merely religious or other worldly, but which are quite this worldly in their character and effect. The whole rest of the corpus of religious or moral laws consists of actual practices [30] of living, of being and doing. What they add to the actual practices is a quality, a perspective, a way of discharging those self- same practices. It is commonplace for men to desire, to grow and to enjoy, to acquire and possess, to love, to marry and procreate, to seize and exercise power, etc. Islām wishes these activities to continue, it does not, like Christianity or Buddhism, condemn and wish them to stop. All it seeks is to have humankind enter into these actions with different motivation, and to perform them in a different way. The different motivation is for them to be willed for the sake of God; and the different way is to do them justly and righteously, to have them bring about their utilitarian or moral objective without entailing and undesirable, unjust or immoral consequence.
The aforementioned unity follows from the fact that Islām does not separate the sacred or religious from the secular. In its view, there is one reality only, not two, as in the case of religions which bifurcate life into a sacred sector and a secular sector. Nothing is as such, sacred except Allah. Islām regards everything as creaturely, not sacred and it assumes it to be good since it is God’s. it is the manner of doing what we do that fulfills or does not fulfill the religious or moral requirement. When it does it is good; when it does not it is evil. Human deeds alone, therefore, does not mean to withdraw from the usual processes of life, nor to perform deeds which are utterly devoid of utilitarian value. The whole matter of religion is a quality of the very practices of living. On this account, Islām remains imbedded in the very processes of life and history. There is neither piety nor virtue, and certainly no Islām, outside of these processes. Christianity and Buddhism may regard religion as doing other thing than the processes of life and history and they may prescribe self-mortification and asceticism, monkery, combat and even arrest of those very processes. They do so because in their view the processes of life and history stand condemned as evil and doomed. For Christianity believes creation is “fallen” and “evil” and “hopeless” and prescribes faith and the imitatio Christi as salvation from them. Likewise, Buddhism believes creation is evil, “tanha”, full of nothing but pain and suffering and prescribes self-and life-denial as salvation from the processes of life and history.
Islām denies such a priori axioms condemning life and history. In its view, creation is as good, brought about by Allah (SWT) for good purpose, namely that it may be affirmed with devotion to Him and justice to mankind. Involvement in its processes is at the root of Islām’s view of man. Allah (SWT) has appointed him to achieve two objectives. First, humans should transform creation into the divine patterns, i.e., so rearrange its materials so as to make [31] them fully and beneficially human needs, the material (food, shelter, comfort, procreation) as well as the moral, the intellectual and the esthetic. Second, in the very act of transforming creation, humans ought to instantiate the ethical values by choosing to enter into those acts of transformation in to Allah (SWT) and justice to mankind.
The content of the Divine amānah and therefore of khilāfah is the development and establishment of culture and civilization. To institute peace and assurance of life and property to organize humans into an ordered society capable of producing food, of processing, strong and distributing it to all in adequate quantities and quality, to provide shelter, warmth and comfort, communication and ease, to build and make available the tools necessary to realize these goals and , finally to furnish opportunities for education and self-realization, for recreation and esthetic enjoyment, this is the core content of khilāfah. It is equivalent to the making of culture and civilization to the affirmation and promotion of life and the world. Allah ta`ālā commands all this to be done and declares it to be the very reason for His creation of the world. The Divine ulterior motive in all this is that humans may prove themselves ethically worthy in doing it. They can do so by entering into their routines of action for His sake and maintaining the balance of justice throughout their actions. Rightly, Muslims understand khilāfah as predominantly political. The Qur’ānic repeatedly associated khilāfah with establishment of political power (7:128; 10:14, 73). Political action, i.e., participation in the political process as in election of bay'ah of the ruler, giving continual counsel and advice to the chief of state and his ministers, monitoring their actions, criticizing and even impeaching them all these are not only desirable, but prime religious and ethical duties. Failure to perform such duties is as the Prophet (saas) said to lapse into jāhiliyyah. On the other hand, to be part of the politico economic body of Islām is integral to the faith itself. Abū Bakr and sahābah (RAA) fought those who wanted to secede from the state while maintaining the faith; they were regarded as apostates who have rejected the whole of Islām. Unlike Christianity, which regards the political process as the depth of evil, and counsel against involvement in it, Islām regards it of the essence and prohibits withdrawal. The same is true a fortiori of culture – and civilization building. Islām regards them as the very business of religion. All the more contrasting with the norms of Islām, therefore, is the disengagement of the Muslim masses from the political process in the period of decay.
The same is true of the requirement of peace and security, perhaps the most precious and the most sought-after prize in the Muslim World today. [32] Every Muslim must feel secure in his life, property, personal honor and place in society. To fulfill this requirement is a first Islāmic societal imperative. To this end, Islām requires that every Muslim be politicized, i.e., awakened organized and mobilized to seek fulfillment of the objective in his own person as well as in the persons of his family members, neighbors and all fellow-Muslims.
c. Comprehensiveness. – The will of Islām to culture and civilization is comprehensive, as it must be if it is meant seriously. This comprehensiveness is at the foundation of the comprehensiveness of the sharī`ah. Every aspect of human life is affected and this affection is the relevance of Islām to it. This relevance may be clear or unclear – hard as in the sharī`ah’s injunction and prohibitions, its wājibāt and muharramāt; or soft as in its categorizations of mandūb, makrūh and mubāh. But nothing escapes Islāmic’s relevance. True the area of the mubāh (permissible) is wide. But its width is not as sign of Islām’s irrelevance, but of its fall outside the realm of strict enforcement, whether coercively, as in the case of the wājib and harām, or by moral authority as in the case of the mandūb and makrūh. Beyond that realm stands the realm of culture and life-style which is just as important for Islām as that of strict enforcement. In fact, strict enforcement depends upon proper acculturation which is its presupposition and without which it is unthinkable. Nothing is enforceable to which the masses have not been acculturated already, of which they are not already convinced.
It is therefore the duty of the Muslim thinker to Islāmize, i.e., to define and apply the relevance of Islām to every single item in human living. The Qur’ān has already done as in a number of areas of human activity, normally assigned the status of “soft enforcement” or neutrality; e.g., greeting, soft voice, door-knocking before entry, quick exit after food, gentleness to parents and elders, etc. The Prophet (SAAS) did his best to complete the application by his teaching and example in the areas of how to eat and drink, to keep clean, to recreate oneself, to treat one’s neighbor, etc. The style of life, which Islām had instated in the early period in elaboration or extension of these Qur’ānic and Sunnatic directives, needs today to be redefined, recrystallized, complemented so as to extend to those firmly to those areas which modernity had raised from the status of luxury or marginality to that of necessity. The areas of social intercourse, of travel and transportation, of recreation, of the audio and visual arts, of mass communications, for example, are especially needy of such extension of coverage by the relevance of Islām.
5. The Unity of Humanity: Being the unity of Creator, the divine unity must stand in absolutely the same creaturely relation to all humans. The [33] converse of this relation is that all humans must stand in absolutely the same creaturely relation to the Creator. In so far as their being is concerned, they cannot be optically plural without this plurality implying an equal plurality in the Creator. Certainly, humans can and do have different characteristics such as race, color, physical build, personality, language style and culture. None can have ontological value; i.e., constitute the person it qualifies as a different being. None of them can affect the person’s creaturely status before Allah (SWT). Their value remains accidental to the person’s being His creature. By determining the personality and conduct of the possessor, ethnic characteristics may very often do bring about his moral felicity of ruin. But their determination of the ethical outcome is never necessary, never final or ultimate. For it is never necessary that a person with any imaginable combination of such characteristics be morally worthy, or unworthy. The inner core which is constitutive of the person’s being must therefore remain somewhat free of them, capable of following their determinative power, as well as of doing otherwise, i.e., of channeling their causal efficacy to other ends.
The foregoing argument is the reason underlying the divine statement of the Qur’ān: “O people, we have created you (all) of as single pair, as male and female (namely, Adam and Eve); and we have constituted you into estimate and nations that you may know one another. Nobler among you in the estimate of Allah is the more virtuous” (49:13). Belonging to one gender or another, to “tribes and nations” or one ethnicity or another, is perhaps the most obvious characterization of, and first differentiation among, humans. Second, comes language, physiognomy intelligence, and dexterity, body strength, which are less fixed at birth and more apt to undergo change. Third, there are the readily changeable characteristics of personality which constitute the virtues and vices: from wisdom and knowledge, piety and patience, to ignorance and foolishness, faithlessness and rebellion. All these constitute human personality or life style, at least in its foundation and base. The rest of personality life style is what is built up as habit or judgment, tendency or temperament, reputation, history or tradition of that personality through the accumulation of its own deeds. All of them are constitutive and determinative of the human person. But they differ widely from predetermination before birth and hence immutability, to acquisition in various stage of life and hence growth and development or change and abolition.
Human are most apt to mistake the values of these characteristics, the nature of the roles they play in the life of the person, in history, no other human facts have determined judgment of persons and groups more than the first order of characteristics, namely, gender and ethnicity. And yet these are the most innocent because they are the least dependent upon moral decision [34] and action, the least susceptible to change. In most cases, their immediacy and obviousness misled judgment to take them as ontic and to differentiate and discriminate on their basis. That is why the Qur’ān picked them first and sought to demolish all judgments dependent upon them. These characteristics are God’s work, necessary and unchangeable, created by God merely for the purpose of identification. They are to be solely regarded as a “passport” or “identity card”, saying absolutely nothing about the moral character or value of the carrier. This is the meaning of the verse if its terms are taken literally. If the term “know” is taken figuratively, then the Qur’ān would be telling us that gender and ethnic characteristics were created by God to the end of humans finding in term mutual complementary and cooperation.
All humans are therefore one and the same; the base and ground of Islāmic universalism. All humans are one in God’s eye except as their deeds distinguish them in moral virtue, in cultural or civilizational achievement. If these deeds are dependent upon preemptive cultural characteristics and to grow others – which is always possible. The door to such alternation is never closed. On the other hand, where judgment does take place on the basis of the immutable characteristics a moral crime – namely ethnocentrism – is committed. The implications of such crime are ominous; the unity of humanity is violated and divine unity is violated as well. Nothing is more odious to Allah (SWT) than shirk (i.e., associationism or polytheism); and nothing less than shirk is the implication of ethnocentrism. Religion and all sorts of causes have been paraded as cause of various conflicts among groups of humans. In reality, nearly all conflicts among groups are ultimately reducible to ethnocentric decisions made on the basis of immutable characteristics of so called “enemy.”
With ethnocentrism, of which racism and nationalism are the commonplace expressions, Islām can have no compromise. The conflict between them is insoluble, as the damage which ethnocentrism inflicts upon the human spirit whether as subject or object of discrimination – is irreparable.
To condemn ethnocentrism as Islām does is not to condemn patriotism. The latter means the attitudes of love and endearment, of appreciation of the life and value of the group, of self-preparation to undergo any exertion or sacrifice, including laying one’s life, for its defense. As much, patriotism is not only an evil, but a positive good enjoined by Islām. It is both a religious and ethical duty, to love and serve, to defend one’s people and land against aggression and injustice. Ethnocentrism, however, is far removed from patriotism. Its essence is to assume the advantage of the ethics entity as ultimate criterion of good and evil; and its most common expression is to hold the [35] ethnic entity superior to mankind because of the image characteristics of its members, to regard and pursue that advantage at the cost of any other. It is because ethnocentrism makes such assumption that it is possible for it to command the absolute loyalty of the adherent. The claim it makes is the claim of ultimate reality. The committed ethnocentrist, whether Jew, German, French or Russian, genuinely assumes the Jewish people, Germany, France or Russian to be ultimate realities constituting ultimate criteria of good and evil. What Zionism built in the psyche of the Jewish people, what Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche and other romantic thinkers built in the psyche of the German people as to what is “Deutschland”, what Rousseau, Fustel de Coulange and others had built in that of the French people as to what is la Nation, or la France, was nothing short of the mystique which bloated the Jewish people, Germany and France into something approximating the ultimate reality of religious faith. The pride and inspiration which those mystical entities command, the moving appeal which they exercise upon the heart and imagination of the adherent are indeed those of the reality that is a mysterious, tremendous, fascinating a priori and absolute, transcendent and ultimate.
The Muslim is the person who believed the exact opposite precisely because his God is absolutely the only God of all the premise which necessitates his assumption of the unities referred to above as well as the unity of humanity. A Muslim nationalist or racist is therefore a contradiction in terms; and the Muslim who claims commitment to nationalism is either a munāfiq or zindīq (i.e., a non- Muslim pretending to be one) or one whose commitment is so superficial that it cannot withstand the lure of bribe or personal advantage. That is also the reason why the careers of the overwhelming majority of so called committed Muslim nationalist leaders had left much to be desired by way of consistency, fidelity to the professed ideal, and normal integrity.
In modern times, knowledge of man has nearly all been based upon ethnicity as ultimate definition of humanity; and knowledge of society, upon ethnicity as ultimate ground of social order and organization. The universalism of the Enlightenment had never been given a chance of implementation before it was repudiated in favor of the ethnocentric approach of Romanticism. Indeed, the universalism of the Enlightenment was theoretical and suspicious, considering that even in the hands of the prince of the movement, Immanuel Kant, the various people of mankind were graded as superior and inferior on the basis of traditional European prejudices and the innate characteristics of Asians, Africans and Europeans. Romanticism swept over the whole of the West, wiped out every trace of rationalist or Christian universalism, and provided the greatest impetus for the humanities, the arts and the social [36] science. Man was defined by the thinkers as a function of facts, faculties and forces which spring and nourish themselves from a land mystically conceived, from a race or people or blood mysteriously standing in an infinite dimension of time, and from a tradition whose roots run infinitely as to depth and extension in both space and time. Furthermore, these are understood not by reason, but grasped by feeling, immediate experience and intuition. Their most eloquent and clearest expression is to be found in the arts, especially in music, painting, and literature. Even religion was reconceived by these romantic thinkers, notably Schleiermacher, as founded solely on the ineffable experience of the adherent, i.e., his personal feeling, after conceding the point to its detractors that it is irrational and arbitrary and of the same nature as “illusion” and “opium”.
The Western humanities continued to speak of “man” and “humanity”. But in their romanticized understanding, these terms denoted Western man and Western humanity. If they did not exclude the billion “blacks” and the billion “browns” and the billion “yellows” of Asia, Africa and Latin America, it counted them only as approximations of humanity which may be colonized, exploited and used for the welfare of Western humanity. Certainly, they ought to be studied; but they ought to be so as specimens of an age that the West once underwent and thus contribute to the Western man’s historical (evolutionary) understanding of himself.
Ethnocentrism is internally divisive; for it is always possible to find within any defined group sub-groups which reveal a greater concentration of innate characteristics than the larger group. Such “fact” could then furnish the base for a smaller group to call itself an ethic entity endowed with a stronger particularism. Hence, besides separating the Western from the rest of the world with which they were coming into more intensive contact because of the development of industry and transportation, romanticism divided the West into mutually hostile and competitive nations, each seeking its “national interest” as if it were the criterion of all good and evil. The nations of the West learnt from and readily accepted the findings of one another. The romantic insights, analyses and expressions of one nation were quickly acknowledged as true of another, adopted and applied as if they were one’s own.
The Western social sciences – history, geography, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology – were all developed under the impetus provided by Romanticism. All of them, each in its own way, are based upon the ethnocentric view that the nation, or ethics entity in its well-defined geography and demography but infinite and woozy history is the ultimate unit of analyses and value. When they speak of “society” or “social order”, they mean their own national entity or order. Political science follows, Western [37] geography and history can conceive of the world only as a satellite to the West, a world revolving around England, America, France, Germany, or Italy as its heart and core, depending on the author and place of publication. Western economic was at its earlier stages impertinent enough to claim for itself the status of a universal science. But it was put back in its place as a Western analysis of a Western nation by the arch-romanticists and ethnocentrisms of Europe, the Nazis. The same bombastic claims made on behalf of the discipline by Karl Marx were denied in practice by Lenin and Khruschev. Their regime however has not yet permitted a statement to this effect to appear in print; but it allowed a fair measure of ethnocentric (in this case, national-socialistic) declarations to be included in the new U.S.S.R. constitution of 1978.
Finally, the anthropology is the boldest of all. In its view, “humanity” means ethnicity and is logically equivalent to and convertible with it. In the last two centuries, its effect has been to whip up humankind into a frenzy of ethnocentric consciousness by singling out one subgroup after another, and constructing for it an ideology and axiology out of that group’s innate and particular to that ethnic group. Instead of identifying and emphasizing what is universally human, its whole concern is to identify, to develop and to blow up to great proportion the particular.
Islām recognized the family as the constitutive unit of social order and buttressed its extended form with legislation regarding inheritance and dependence to enable the largest possible family membership to eat from the same kitchen, and hence economically. The purpose is that by living in close proximity to one another, often under the same roof, the member of the extended family would mutually support their social, emotional and mental health and wellbeing. Beyond the family, Islām recognized not the nation or ethic group, but humanity, the universal social order. Nothing stands between the two circles of family and humanity. By themselves they constitute all there is to the social order. Man’s membership in this order is Islām’s concern in social sciences. Human groupings between the family and humankind, namely, the country or region, the people or nation, Islām regards purely as administrative units which are absolutely irrelevant to the definition of good and evil, to the interpretation and application of the sharī`ah. The arts the humanities and the social science of the modern West must therefore be totally recast. A new foundation of first principles should be given them which are concordant with the universalism of Islām. And they ought to receive from the Islāmic thinker a new axiology – viz., Islāmic values and ends – as ultimate objectives for guiding social research. [38]
IV. The Work plan
The objectives of the Work Plan are the following:
To realize these objectives, a number of steps must be taken, their logical order defines the order of priority belonging to each step.
A. The Necessary Steps Leading to Islāmization of Knowledge.
Step
1. Mastery of the Modern Discipline:
Categories Breakdown.
The disciplines, as they stand today in their most advanced state in the West, must be broken down today into categories, principles, methodologies, problems and themes. Such breakdown must reflect the “table of contents” of a classic textbook in the discipline’s methodology or the syllabus of course in the discipline which graduate courses in that discipline assume their students to have taken and mastered. Such breakdown will not be couched in technical terms, nor in chapters’ titles. It would have to be couched in sentences-form, making clear what the technical terms mean, and explaining the categories, principles, problems and dominant themes of the discipline in its Western and highest form.
Step
2. Discipline Survey
Every discipline ought to be surveyed and essays written on it to lay bare the broad outlines of its genesis and historical development, the growth of its field of vision, the main contribution which its great votaries have made. An annotated bibliography of the most important works should conclude the survey for each discipline. It should include, in categorized and ordered form, the most important books and articles upon which knowledge of the discipline stand and without which no masterly of it may be achieved.
This step has for purpose to ascertain Muslim understanding and mastery of the discipline as it developed in the West. Clearly substantiated and amply annotated and footnoted, the discipline survey would constitute a base of common understanding for specialist on the discipline which they are expected to Islāmize. Since disciplines in the West today have become “many-splendored things” [39] because of the explosion of knowledge, it would be necessary for Islāmic scholars dealing with that discipline to touch base and agree together on the identity, history, topography and frontiers of the object of their Islāmization efforts.
Step
3. Master of the Islāmic Legacy: The
Anthology
Before any elaboration of the specific relevance of Islām to the discipline, it is necessary to discover what the legacy of Islām had to say on the discipline. The legacy of the ancestors must remain for us the starting point of the relevance of Islām. Our Islāmization of the discipline would be all the poorer if it did not take the legacy into account and did not benefit from the insights of the ancestors. However, the contribution of the legacy to the discipline is not ready for the modern researcher to obtain, to read and understand. Indeed, the modern researcher is not equipped even to search in the legacy for Islām’s contribution to the discipline. The reason is that the categories of the modern discipline, sometime even its very name, are unknown as such in the legacy. Likewise, the legacy may contain worthy materials which are not classifiable/relatable to any modern category. The Western-trained Muslim scholars is too often defeated by inaccessibility of the legacy. He is strongly tempted to give up in despair, judging that the legacy is silent on the matter in hand whereas the fact is that he is unfamiliar with the legacy’s categories under which the sort of material relevant to his discipline is classified. Moreover, the Western trained Muslim scholars has neither the time nor the energy requisite for successful exploration of the vast and colossal works of the legacy of Islāmic learning.
On the other hand, the traditionally trained Muslim scholars, masters of the Islāmic legacy, can neither discover nor can establish the relevance of the legacy to the modern disciplines because of their ignorance of those disciplines. This is so despite their expertise in the legacy. They are unfamiliar with the topics, the problems and themes of the modern disciplines. Therefore, it is necessary to instruct them in what is needed and then turn them loose on the legacy to draw from it what is pertinent. For this, the product of steps 1 and 2 serve the purpose, by familiarizing the experts with the modern disciplines and thus providing them with a criterion of relevance which they can use in their searches.
This step involves the preparation of several volumes of anthologies of selected readings from the legacy for each modern discipline, arranged according to the categories of that discipline. These anthologies would give the modern Muslim scholars ready access to the legacy in the area of his specialization. They would present in topical order familiar to him, the best that legacy [40] has contributed to the range of issues which are the main objects of his disciplined study. Since the modern Muslim disciplinarian has neither time nor know-how to reach the legacy by himself (in most cases he does not even know the language of the legacy), no familiarity with the legacy – let alone the mastery of it – is possible for him without these anthologies.
Step
4. Mastery of the Islāmic Legacy: The
Analysis
In order to bring the achievement of the Islāmic legacy closer to understanding of the Western- trained Muslim scholars, it is necessary to do more than merely to present in anthological form, pages of materials deadline with a given subject. The ancestors had done their own work of relating the Islāmic vision to the problems which faced them. And they did so under influence of all sorts of factors and forces which pressed upon them for attention. In order to understand their crystallization of the Islāmic vision, their works must need be analyzed against their historical background, and the relations of the problem at issue with the other departments of human life and thought identified and exposed. Historical analysis of the contribution of the legacy will undoubtedly illuminate numerous areas of the Islāmic vision itself. It is conducive to a better understanding of the vision to learn how the ancestors understood and were moved by it; how they translated it into prescriptions for action and a style for conduct; how it helped them overcome and solve their peculiar difficulties and problems.
Such analyses of the contributions of the Islāmic legacy cannot be undertaken at random. A hierarchy of priorities ought to be established and Islāmic scholars invited to undertake them in order. Above all the main principles, the major problems, the continuing themes – those issues which promise relevance to the problems of the present, ought to be the object of Islāmic educational and research strategy.
Step
5. Establishment of the Specific
Relevance of Islām to the Disciplines.
The forgoing four steps amount to posing the problem to the Islāmic thinker. Together, they sum up for him the development of the discipline which Muslims have missed during their slumber. Equally they should inform him with the greatest authority and clarity possible of the contribution of the Islāmic legacy to the areas studied by the disciplines, and generally, to the goals of the discipline. These materials will have to be made more specific by translating or theorization, of reference and application. In this regard, the nature of the modern discipline, its constituent methods, principles, problems objectives and hope, its achievements and shortcoming – all of these should [41] be related to the Islāmic legacy; and the legacy’s specific relevance to each must be deduced from the general contribution. Three major questions must be posed and answers to them found. The first is, what did the Islāmic legacy of learning, from the Qur’ān to the modernist, contribute to the whole range of issue envisaged by the discipline? The second is, how does the Islāmic legacy contribution to the discipline? Where has the legacy fulfilled, fallen short of or transcended the vision and scope of the discipline? The third is, given the areas of issues in which the Islāmic legacy has given little or nothing, in which direction may Muslim effort be henceforth exerted in order to fill the discrepancy, to reformulate the problem, to enlarge the vision?
Step
6. Critical Assessment of the Modern
Discipline: The State of The Art.
Now that both the modern discipline and the Islāmic legacy have been exposed, their methodologies, principles, themes, problems and achievements have been identified, surveyed and analyzed and finally, now that the specific relevance of Islām to the discipline has been clarified and established, the discipline should be subjected to critical analysis from the standpoint of Islām. This a major step in the Islāmization of knowledge. All the previous five steps seem to lead to it as sort of preparatio. In its historical development, the circumstantial factors which determines the discipline to be what it is must be identified and exposed. Its methodology – what is regards as its data and problems, their classification and categorization; what is regards as its theory, the first principles under which it treats its problems – must be analyzed and tested for reductionism, adequacy, reasonableness and consistency with the five-fold unity which Islām teaches. The discipline’s dominant problems and persistent themes ought to be analyzed for their assumptions, their importance and relationship to the essential vision of the discipline. The discipline’s ultimate purpose ought to be critically related to its methodology as well as to its front-line objective. Has it fulfilled the vision of its own founders? Has it realized its role in the total enterprise of knowledge-seeking that is the human quest? Has it established for the understanding and for history the divine patterns of creation it was meant to establish? The answers to these questions should give a genuine state of the art report on the discipline from the standpoint of Islām, as well as to shed the necessary light upon the areas where one or another kind of Islāmic correction, amendment, addition or elimination is necessary.
Step
7. Critical Assessment of the Islāmic
Legacy: The State-of-the-Art.
By the Islāmic legacy we first mean the Holy Qur’ān, the word of Allah (SWT) [42] and the Sunnah of the prophet Muhammad (SAAS). These are not object of criticism or of assessment. The Divine status of the Qur’ān and the normativeness of the Sunnah are beyond question. Muslim understanding of these two sources however is not. Rather, it is subject to both assessment and criticism in terms of the principles which the two revelatory sources provide. So too is everything else in the legacy, which may be derived either of the two sources by human intellectual endeavor. This human element needs to be reviewed because it is not playing the dynamic role in Muslim life which it once did and which it is always supposed to play. The relevance of our human understanding of the revelation to the various problems of the present must be subject to critique from three areas of reference: First, the Islāmic vision insofar as it can be established from the source of revelation directly and from its concrete instantiation in history by the prophet (SAAS) his companions and their descendants (RAA); second, the present needs of the ummah around the world; and Third, all modern knowledge represented by the discipline. If the legacy is found to be inadequate or erring, it should be corrected by our present endeavor. If it is adequate, further development and creative recrystallization are necessary for the future. At any rate, no Islāmic stand is viable today which does not relate to the legacy in its strength and weakness. Moreover, today’s and tomorrow’s Islāmic stand must assume from that is continues with the legacy, rather than a radical departure from it.
The task of assessing the Islāmic legacy’s contribution in each field of human activity must therefore fall upon the shoulders of the experts in that activity. They are the monitors of Muslim need in that field and they are the masters of the modern principle studying that activity. Certainly, they should be assisted by the experts in the legacy in order to guarantee the most adequate and correct understanding of it possible.
Step
8. Survey of the Ummah’s Major
Problems.
Awakening from its slumber the ummah is today confronted with formidable problems on all front. Its economic, social and political problems which are overpowering by any standard are “iceberg tops” of its deeper-laying malaise on the intellectual and moral levels. The whole “iceberg” or complex of cause, manifestations, dialectic with other phenomena and consequences of the ummah’s problems, requires empirical survey and critical analysis. The wisdom of the discipline should be brought to bear upon the ummah’s problem, i.e., to enable the Muslims to understand them correctly, to assess with precision their effect upon the cause of Islām in the world. No Muslims disciplinarian may pursue his disciplined study as pure, ivory-tower, [43] intellectual curiosity; as it were, in isolation from the ummah’s existential realities or from its hopes and aspirations. The prayer to Allah (SWT) to grant us a “useful knowledge” or علما نافعا must apply to our disciplinarian pursuits, by bending our gaze to the problems at hand. Above all the problem of the disciplines and of our educational institution, viz., the persistence of their de-Islāmization attempts. Simultaneously, our attention must be devoted to the main problems affecting the ummah’s political social, economic, intellectual, cultural, moral and spiritual problems; indeed, the ummah’s problems in every department of human endeavor.
Step
9. Survey of the Problems of
Humankind.
It is an intrinsic part of the Islāmic vision to bear responsibility not only for the welfare of the ummah but for that of the whole human race. Indeed, the amānah of Allah (SWT) encompasses the whole universe; and man’s responsibility must accord therewith. It is true that the ummah is in many respects backward and non-developed by comparison to other umam. But in respects of possessing the truth, the ideological statement of it which most conducive to religious, ethical and material prosperity at the same time, the ummah is second to none. Because of Islām, the ummah alone possesses the vision requisite for the felicity of humankind, for history to be as Allah (SWT) has desired it to be.
Hence, the Islāmic thinker is called upon to confront the problems facing the world today and contend for their solution according to Islām. As carrier of the Islāmic vision, the ummah is today the only viable speaker for the human masses of the earth whose causes it lost between imperialists-colonialists, and revolutionaries seeking to throw off their yokes. Ethnocentrism is ravaging interhuman relations worldwide. Alcohol and other drugs, sexual promiscuity and deterioration of the family ethic, illiteracy and laziness, militarism and armament build up, the rape of nature and the threat to the earth’s ecological balance have been doing the rest without effective check from any source. Certainly, these problems constitute another area reference for Islāmic thought, planning and action, that is of crucial important the ummah’s felicity as well as to the felicity of humankind, to solve these problems and lead humankind to felicity, that is to prosperity with justice and dignity, cannot be separated from the Islāmic hope.
Step
10. Creative Analysis and Syntheses.
Having understood and mastered the modern disciplines as well the Islamic legacy; having assessed their strengths and weaknesses; having established the relevance of Islām to the specific areas of inquiry of the [44] discipline; having identified and grasped the problems facing the ummah in its march in history as the khulafā of Allah on earth; and having understood the large problems of humankind from the standpoint of Islām which enjoins upon the Muslim to be shuhadā `alā al nās in human history, the stage is now set for the Islāmic mind to make its creative leap. A new road must be blazed for Islām in the fifteenth century if it is to resume its world leadership and continue its salutary and civilizing role in human affairs.
A creative synthesis must be struck between the Islāmic legacy and the modern disciplines which would bridge over the gap of centuries of non- development. The legacy of Islāmic learning must become continuous with modern achievements and start to move the frontiers of knowledge to more distant horizons than the modern disciplines have envisaged. The creative synthesis must maintain its relevance to the umma’s reality by addressing itself to its problems which have already been identified and analyzed. Indeed, it must provide efficacious solutions to the problems of the whole world as well as address the ever-new issues presented by Islāmic hope. What are the specific contents of the that hope in every department of human life and how does the new synthesis move the ummah and humankind forward in its realization of the hope?
Giving
the specific relevance of the legacy to a certain topic or problem, and given
the particular character of the pertinent issue, what options are legitimate
for the Muslim to pursue? Certainly, in every case, a vast array of the options
are possible, which approximate or stand at a distance from the Islāmic ideal;
which are more or less effective; which generate or retard movement toward Islām’s
ultimate goals. Which of these options is possible, necessary or indispensable,
desirable, legitimate? By what criteria may the specific relevance of Islām (its
sharī`ah, its ethic, its culture and spirit) to the problem be
ascertained? By what principles may the contribution of the creative synthesis
be projected, tested and evaluated; the proper emendation and correction
introduced and their progress and efficacy monitored and evaluated?
By nature, the Islāmically determined minds will not all reach the same solutions, or choose the same options in their determination of the relevance of Islām to the present and future existence of the ummah. Such diversity will not be undesirable, but highly welcome. We need scores of diverse critical analyses by the Islāmically committed and modern-disciplined in order to enrich the ummah’s consciousness of its own desiderate and goals. In fact, the ummah may not be said to have recaptured its dynamism of the first centuries of the [45] Hijrah unless Islām itself becomes again for all Muslims as cauldron constantly bubbling with new idea in which Allah’s patterns may be objectified in nature; an infinite mine of ethical and creative options in which His divine values and commandments may be concretized and instantiated in history.
It is out of a wealth of such new insights into the meaning of Islām, of creative options for the realization of that meaning, that the desired college or university textbook may be written for the discipline. The essays representing individual breakthroughs in any topic, branch or problem must pile high in order to provide a “background vision” or “field of relevance” from which the Islāmic vision for the discipline may be drawn.
Islāmization of the discipline is not fulfilled by one textbook even if it complies perfectly with the foregoing requirement. Scores of textbooks are needed to develop the intellectual stamina of Muslim minds. Above all, numerous books are immediately needed to fill the educational needs of the various university levels (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior and graduate). More books are needed to satisfy the Muslim needs which are infinite and to project and crystallize the vision of the Islām which is equally infinite. However, priority dictates that our first efforts be devoted to the production of standard textbook in each discipline which would state definitely the relevance of the Islāmic vision to the discipline – and serve as general guide for future Islāmic minds to follow. Hopefully, it need not be said that any attempt to preempt the production of the university textbook by leaping over the foregoing steps is bound to result in mediocrity. The prophet Muhammed (SAAS) commanded us to do anything that we enter upon doing, perfectly. The university textbook is truly the final end of the long process of Islāmization of the disciplines. It is the work which crowns the long search of all foregoing steps.
Step
12. Dissemination of Islamized
Knowledge.
It
would be idle, even if great, should all these works be produced by Islāmic
scholars, and be kept in the privacy of their personal collections. And it
would be great pity if they should remain known only to closed circle of their
authors’ acquaintances and friends, or utilized by the educational institution
of their neighborhoods or countries alone. Whatever is produced for the sake of
Allah (SWT) belongs to the whole ummah. The benefit of it will not win
Allah’s blessing unless it is brought to end is appropriated by the greatest
number of His creatures. Although Muslims may, and indeed should be, materially
rewarded for their intellectual effort, the work of thought in Islām cannot be
copyrighted, i.e., monopolized for profit. The fact that it is produced for the
sake of Allah (SWT) imposes upon it always to remain available to whomsoever
wishes to invest in the paper, ink and binding [46]
necessary to carry it.
That is why the Work Plan calls for measures to place every one of the works produced, under the foregoing steps, in the hand of every Muslim university academician free of charge. To such academician the given article, essay, pamphlet anthology or book should come as personal invitation to join in this enterprise, to become a “producer” of better works in consequence of his appropriation of the product in hand. Equally, to place such products in the hand of all Muslim thinkers is the greatest reward possible in this world. This is not to obviate the need for the material reward; but for the scholar determined by the vision of Islām and devoted to seek wajh Allah ta`ālā there can be no greater reward than to plant that vision in the heart and mind of another human, no greater duty than to nurture that vision in the consciousness of the Muslims of the world.
Third, the products of this Work Plan should be officially presented to the universities and colleges of the Muslim World with the request to consider them for possible adoption as required reading in the pertinent courses of instruction. Naturally, they would have to be translated to the languages of instruction in the various countries of the Muslim World.
B. Other Necessary Aids to Islāmization of Knowledge.
1. Conferences and Seminars: A series of conferences and seminars should be held between experts in the relevant fields designed to solve any problems transcending any single discipline. The ummah’s problems mostly fall in this category requiring all the light numerous disciplines could shed on them at same time. Another series of conferences should be held between scholars specialized in various aspects or areas within one and the same discipline in order to assist one another in their respective tasks.
2. Classroom Workshops for Faculty Training: Once the textbook and the literature preceding it in step 1-12 have been produced, it is necessary for the teaching faculty to be trained in their use. The experts who produced [47] these works should be given the opportunity to meet the faculty and discuss with them the unwritten presumptions, the unprojected effects of the theories, principles or solutions they have included in their essays and books. In addition, such meeting would explore the pedagogical issues of materials presentations and thus help the faculty to achieve the ultimate goal efficiently.
C. Further Rules of Implementation.
1. In the stage of Muslim academic development, it is not reasonable to expect Muslim scholars to contributed their work free. Honoraria proportionate to effort, and additional to their regular salaries, should be instituted as incentives and rewards for production and quality. Such honoraria should be fixed on the basis of scholarly standards universally applied throughout the world. We do not believe that the Muslims and or native or resident scholars should be paid less than the non-Muslims, non-native or non-resident. Such discrimination is at the very root of the “brain drain”; at the very root of the demoralization of the Muslim scholar; and finally, at the very root of the cynicism, unconcern and laps into academic nihilism of the resident scholar.
2. The greatest possible care should be taken to see to it that only the most competent scholars are commissioned to produce the instructional materials projected. However, since it cannot be absolutely ascertained that any scholars commissioned to do a certain piece of the work will actually produce it, and since the quality of the product thus commissioned to produce the same work. Casualty is only the other side of exacting demand and cannot be compromised, hence, it is to be accepted as principle that up to five scholars will have to be commissioned to do each piece of works. Moreover, since scholarly work – even in the exact sciences though to lesser degree than in the social science and humanities – is bound to be personal and represent differing viewpoints and styles of the authors, the multiplication of commissioned works in one discipline is never duplication. It is always an enrichment.
3. Whenever the work contemplated is too big for any individual, it should be divided into parts, each of which would be commissioned to a separate scholar. This will also expedite completion within the projected time.
4. Since this work is a pioneering effort – real “first” in the Muslim World – and since its benefits will fall to all Muslim counties, it is certainly justified to seek funding for it from every Muslims country. Islāmization of modern knowledge is a fard'ayn on the whole ummah as long no responsible [48} agency of the ummah has undertaken it. Every effort must be exerted therefore to obtain funds from the Muslim World, its organs and agencies, and its rich individuals.
Appendix I Report on the Seminar:
Islāmization of Knowledge
Held at Islāmabad
Rabi al-Awwal, 1402 A.H./January 1982 C.E
I. Survey
The Seminar was attended by twenty-one scholars from ten countries. Another five scholars planned to but could not attend, and sent in their papers. Besides the faculty’s staff of the Islāmic University, thirteen Pakistani scholars participated. Fourteen disciplines were represented. In addition to the addressed of the inaugural session, eighteen papers were presented and considered. These were fourteen sessions in all: six devoted to the work plan and methodology of Islāmization of knowledge and eight to the disciplines.
II. Highlights
A. The Problem. The Seminars focused its attention on the problem calling for Islāmization of knowledge and sought to define it in precise terms. The obvious form of the problem is the duality of the educational system, and the split personality which it engenders in Muslim youth. While the heart, or conscience, is Islāmic because of upbringing in home, environment and elementary school, the mind is slowly but surely transformed by the Western knowledge acquired in higher education. The modern disciplines are in the main based on principles which are Western in provenance and character. They developed in order meet special circumstance of Western history; and they were designed to satisfy the aspirations of Western life, thought and hope. Their philosophies and methodologies are inseparable from the general worldview of their peoples. It is not proper, therefore, that Muslims should learn them without consciousness of their connection with Western ideology nor without Muslim relating them to the ideology of Islām. Such relating is certainly possible. It requires correction by Islām of the theory, method and goal of the discipline, and the reconstruction of its theory and structure in harmony with Islāmic principles and value.
Indeed, the problem reaches deeper and farther afield. The long stagnation of Muslim minds has accustomed Muslims to think to abstraction from [50] action and to act in abstraction from thought. That is why Muslim thinkers have inordinately concerned themselves with the normative, and paid far too little need to heed to the empirical realities of the present. For too long they have satisfied themselves with mediating for them. Likewise, Muslim leadership has been too little moved by considerations of thought and planning. The action of Muslim leaders has in the main been blind or hesitant, unsure of its objective and extempore in its calculation. The transplant of the modern disciplines assumed the irrelevance of Christianity as religion or morality. They suggested to the Muslims studying them that their secularism is both universal and necessary; that Muslims too, may pursue them, having suspended or put in brackets their Islāmic faith. That is why in the Muslim world, Islāmic thought and Muslim conduct continue to drift apart from each other. Practically all papers presented to the Seminar showed concern over this problem. The papers of Drs. ‘AbdulHamīd AbūSulaymān and Ismā’il R. al Fārūqī were in the main devoted to it.
B. The General Principles. The Seminar devoted almost entirely three sessions to discussion of the general principles of Islāmization. These were found to derive from the unity of truth of knowledge, which prescribed total accord for action and thought. The truths of the Islāmic revelation all support a world and life affirming career for man on earth. Life, Islām holds, is meant by God to be lived to the full, nature to be mastered and usufructed, the instinct to be fulfilled, the faculties to be realized. But in all these, morality, the virtues of justice and equity, of universalism and charity, of balance and temperance, of altruism and brotherhood, of honesty and truthfulness, of uprightness and cooperation, must be observed. Wealth, the Qur’ān affirms, is a positive good. Work and enjoyment are forms of `ibādah but they are to be had without cheating or theft, monopoly or exploitation. In everything that he does, the Muslim must be responsible to Allah ta`ālā to the world – ummah, so his family and his own person, to all future generations. He should steer his life between the embankments Allah ta`ālā had provided. He should never rest until he has transformed himself, his dependent, the ummah and mankind, indeed – the whole universe, into the likeness of the pattern Allah ta`ālā has revealed. These principles unanimously acknowledged as the core of Islām, and constitute its relevance to all aspects of life and thought.
C. The Work Plan. The Work Plan elaborated by the Seminars consists of steps designed to make the Muslim’s thought consistent with Islām. The [51] first necessity is the mastery of the legacy of Muslim learning; the second is the mastery of the contemporary legacy of learning; the third is the identification of their shortcoming in relations to the ideals of Islām; and finaly the fourth is their reconstruction so that they coalesce with each other and do so in harmony with the vision and ideals of Islām. This work should and can be done by Muslim scholars in relatively small steps falling within their individual specializations and capacities, but in trans-disciplinary, and trans-university cooperation with one another. Details of the various steps may be read in professor al Fārūqi’s paper. The same paper has elaborated an annual budget for completion of the project within the coming five years.
III. Evaluation
The Seminar on the Islāmization of knowledge achieved a number of worthy results:
First, it brought together numerous Muslim scholars from around the world to interact with their Pakistani colleagues. Many of the scholars present were highly distinguished in their respective fields and ranked as the foremost specialists of the world today in a number of disciplines besides Islāmic subjects. The seminar provided an occasion for them to meet and to discuss subjects of their specializations with one another. It has made available to the Islāmic University a pool of great Islāmic talents.
Second, the Seminar produced 18 papers on the Islāmization of the different disciplines by the foremost scholars in the field. In Economics for instance, the Seminars produced papers and brought four of the top scholars of Islāmic Economics in the world. These will constitute valuable works of reference for researchers in the same fields.
Third, turning to the topic which in its essence and goal, namely Islāmization of knowledge, the Seminar produced – and approved unanimously – a statement on the meaning of Islāmization, on the methodological principles and goals of Islāmization of the disciplines requisites for Islāmization education.
Fourth, the Seminars considered and approved a practical work plan designed to implement the process of Islāmization in each of the disciplines. To the end of the facilitating and expedition it, the process of Islāmization was divided into eight steps leading to and culminating in the production of the university textbook. Thus, what may not be completed by one scholar may be so by many each concerting on a portion of the necessary research. The plan seeks in various ways – breakdown into categories and principles, survey and bibliographies, anthologies of reading critical state- of-the-art analyses and creative synthase – to bring the discipline into accord with the principles [52] and values of Islām.
Fifth, the Seminar resolved that the Islāmization of knowledge be carried out as cooperative venture between the Islāmic university and the Intentional Institute of Islāmic Thought. For this purpose, it worked out a plan of cooperation between the two institutions in which the responsibilities of the each in the implementation of the work plan were identified and elaborated. For its part, the Islāmic University would set up a committee to advice on the details and materials of implementation and to act as liaison with the international Institute of Islāmic Thought. It would be logistically and financially responsible for Pakistan and non-Pakistani scholars operating in Pakistan in any research project jointly sponsored by the two institutions. The Islāmic University will undertake the printing, publication and world- distribution of all the works produced by this cooperative project according to a list of some 10,000 names to be prepared by the International Institute of Islāmic Thought. The University would host specialist seminars in any discipline whenever the need therefore or testing workshop necessary for implementing the Islāmization program.
On the other hand, the International Institutes of Islāmic Thought would assume logistical and financial responsibility for all scholars operating outside Pakistan on any part of Islāmization of the disciplines assigned to them. In consultation with Islāmic University, the institute would carry academic (ideational) responsibility for all scholars and all works connected with Islāmization. To this end, it would set up advisory committees of specialists in the various discipline, appoint correspondents in various countries of the Muslims world and establish contacts or develop relations with government agencies, educational institution, academicians and thinkers interested in the Islāmization of knowledge. The institute would assist Muslim scholars engaged in Islāmization to work all ways possible to facilitate fulfillment of their assignments, including bibliographical materials, specialist’s workshops and meeting, visits to center of learning and ideational consultations.
Sixth. In sensitivity to the need of Muslims universities around the world to institute course on Islāmic civilization in their basic liberal arts or humanities curricula and the near total absence of reliable textbooks in this field of study, the Seminars unanimously resolved to assigned top priority to the production of the requisite textbooks. The need therefore is overwhelming in secular or modern universities where Muslim youths are constantly bombarded with alien ideologies and where Islāmic culture and civilization is taught only those [53] who major in it. The other students are the majority; and they are left with the elementary notions of Islām they had learnt at home or in pre-university schools which obviously inadequate to counter the foreign ideologies and to immunize Muslims against that alienating effects of these ideologies. The Seminar agreed that the Islāmic University and the International Institute of Islāmic Thought recruit and commission immediately competent Muslim scholars to produce an anthology of reading in Islāmic civilization which could fill the gap and to take the necessary measures for Muslim scholars to produce creative interpretations and histories of Islāmic civilization for use as university textbook in the future.
Appendix II
Islāmic Civilization Course
Need and Justification
1. Muslim youth around the world are subject to numerous de-Islāmizing forces acting upon them within the University and colleges as well as outside. Under claim of modernization, these forces tend to Westernize and secularize our youth. They operate on the level of knowledge conveyed in lecturers or read in books, in periodicals or in the mass media.
2. Muslim youth may have received a measure of indoctrination in Islām at home and the elementary or secondary school. But this is inadequate to meet the challenge of alien ideas and ideologies which confront them as adults.
3. A very small fraction of university and college students major in Islāmic studies and received adequate instruction in Islāmic culture and civilization to counter the alien ideologies. In the overwhelming majority of cases, Muslim youth received no instruction in Islām at all on the college level; and hence stand unprepared to resist the alien ideas presented to them in the name of modernity science and objectivity.
4. Instruction in Islām as our ideology, our culture and civilization as the only viable option in all matters affecting Muslims thought and life, ought to be given on the same level as the alien ideologies namely, on the university and colleges level. Only equally sophisticated, scientific, objective presentation of the Islāmic ideology can reverse the process of de-Islāmization in our youth.
5. It is therefore suggested that a new two-year course in Islāmic Civilization be instituted as compulsory (i.e., required as integral part of basic studies) in all colleges and universities and that passing it with a grade of B be a necessary requirement for graduation.
6. The Contents of course should include the topic elaborated in the attached outline. In the absence of creatively written textbooks on the subject which are usable as required reading on the university level it is suggested that an anthology of already-published works (articles, chapters in books) be prepared, published and put to immediate use. [55]
Tentative Syllabus for a Two-Year University
Course in Islāmic Civilization
Chapter 1: The Ancient Near EastChapter 2: Judiasm, Zoroastrainism, ChristianityChapter 3: Makkah
Chapter 4: Islām: The ReligionChapter 5: Tawhīd: the Core Section 3: Tawhīd as First PrincipleChapter 6: Tawhīd as First principle of KnowledgeChapter 7: Tawhīd as First Principle of MetaphysicsChapter 8: Tawhīd as First principle of the Political OrderChapter 9: Tawhīd as First Principle of the EthicsChapter 10: Tawhīd as First principle of the Social OrderChapter 11: Tawhīd as First Principle of the Economic OrderChapter 12: Tawhīd as First Principle of The International OrderChapter 13: Tawhīd as First Principle of the Literary EstheticsChapter 14: Tawhīd as First Principle of the Aural and Visual Arts
Section 2: Manifestation in the Political LifeChapter 1: The Prophet (SAAS) and his SunnahChapter 2: The Sahabah (RAA)
Section 3: Manifestations in Social lifeChapter 3: The Islāmic State at MadinahChapter 4: The FutūhātChapter 5: individual and Corporate Da'wahChapter 6: Administration and Justice
Chapter 7: The FamilyChapter 8: The Educational SystemChapter 9: The Hisbah
Chapter 10: `Ulūm al Qur’ān al KarīmChapter 11: `Ulūm al Sunnah al SharīfahChapter 12: `Ulūm al Fiqh wa UsūluhChapter 13: `Ulūm al Akhlāq wa al SiyāsahChapter 14: Al ĀdābChapter 15: `Ulūm al Tabī'ah
Chapter 16: The CitiesChapter 17: The Aural and Visual ArtChapter 18: The Minorities
Chapter 1: Western ChristianityChapter 2: The Modern WestChapter 3: Socialism, fascism, CommunismChapter 4: Judaism, ZionismChapter 5: HinduismChapter 6: Theravada BuddhismChapter 7: Mahayana BuddhismChapter 8: Chinese Religions and CivilizationChapter 9: the Archaic Societies
Section 1: The MalaiseChapter 1: Muslims DecayChapter 2: ColonialismChapter 3: Christian Mission and Oriental studiesChapter 4: Aftermath of ColonialismSection 2: Muslims ResponsesChapter 5: Al Salafiyyah MovementChapter 6: Al Sanūsiyyah MovementSection 3: The Continuing MalaiseChapter 8: Division and EthnocentrismSection 4: Islām and the WorldChapter 9: The problem of KnowledgeChapter 10: The problem of Individual and FamilyChapter 11: The problem of Nature and its UsufructChapter 12: The problem of Economic and Political World Order [57]
Appendix III
Ideational Plan of Potential Contributions to the Disciplines
“State- of-the -Art”; “Structure of Contents”;
“Critical Analysis”
Prepare an essay on the current methodology of your discipline discussing the following points:
1: History: How did the discipline com to adopt the methodology it now pursues? What influences came to bear upon and helped produce or adopt its present methodology? Who were the great thinkers that determined the methodological process in your discipline? What did each of them contribute that is significant to the discipline? Under what ideational pressures and/or circumstances were there ideas assimilated into the discipline? Does the history of the methodology of your discipline teach anything about the future of the discipline? If so, what, and how and why?
2. Method: What are the constitutive categories of your discipline? How does your discipline define its data? Which materials constitute such data? What does the discipline seek to do with its data? How/what does the discipline seek to achieve? What constitutes its purposes or objectives? How many schools of methodological thought is your discipline divided into? How do they differ from one another, and how are they alike?
3. Content and Problems: How would you paraphrase the tables of contents of half-a-dozen representative basic textbooks of discipline (the kind of textbook which every first-year graduate student majoring in discipline must take, or must have taken)? How do your account for their variety or for their unity and similarity? What is the nature of the problems of the discipline? i.e., of its persistent problems across authors, topics, data societies, and values? Are these problems soluble? Do all the disciplinarians themselves think so? What is regarded by the discipline as its frontier? Is that frontier of human knowledge?
4.
Islām and Your Discipline: Assuming that you have given much thought to
the relevance of Islām to your discipline, under what categories of framework
would you classify or order that relevance? Besides the normative general
sources of Islām (the Qur’ān and the Sunnah) where is this relevance to
be sought? Does Islām distribute its impact equally between history, method,
content or problems of the discipline? Or does it differentiate? What are the
dominant ideas in that relevance which is peculiar to your discipline? Can you
give a few illustrations which you consider typical of both the Islāmic relevance
and of the discipline? Is the discipline today and art? A science? A humanitas?
How do you expect the discipline to contribute to human felicity on earth? Will
it do so in its present state-of-the-art?
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