Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt Shifting Worlds by Mona Abaza (London, UK: Routledge Curzon, 2002. 304 pages.)

Abstract

Although the debate on the arrival of the lslamization of knowledge (IOK)
concept continues among today's scholars, giving it a practical framework
is generally credited to the late Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, a PalestinianAmerican
scholar and a founding member of the International Institute of
Islamic Thought (HIT). Mona Abaza, associate professor in the School of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University in Cairo,
acknowledges this. She took over 10 years to collect and present her
research in this book. The book is divided into three parts with 14 chapters,
a hefty 71 pages of notes and bibliography, and a small index. The facts and
figures about Malaysia covered in the initial pages are from mid-1998 and
therefore, unfortunately, are outdated.
In the "introductory reflections," which constitute part 1 of the book,
Abaza submits that the topic under discussion is controversial even among
Muslim academics. Nevertheless, she has set out to compare the IOK endeavors
in two very distinct cultures whose Islamizers, she believes, have a primarily
secular training but an Islamic outlook. While Malaysia propagates ...