Editorial

Abstract

In this issue of AJISS, some of the changes that we plan to introduce
to the journal‘s contents and layout begin to take shape. AJISS, from this
issue onwards, will only accept and publish articles with endnotes. Each
issue will include four main research essays or more, in addition to our
expanded Book Review, Reflections, and other regular sections. It is our
intention that AJISS will now seek to provide a historical dimension to the
modem Islamic experience, especially that of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Lawal‘s “Islam and Colonial Rule in Lagos,” is
an example of this category of research that will be appearing in future
issues of the journal. To elucidate the need for this dimension, it may be
helpful to explain a few aspects of modem Islamic intellectual history.
The Islamic reform movement is, in many respects, the greatest intellectual
endeavor of the Muslim mind over the past two centuries. Its
emergence came against a backdrop of western encroachment and the
inability of the Sufi-dominated Muslim world to respond adequately to
such foreign challenges. Reformists emphasized renewal by revising the
Prophet’s tradition against the stagnation brought about by a Muslim
mind that had become enslaved to a blind and uncritical imitation of the
ways of earlier generations (taqlid). They advocated, moreover, a synthesis
of what is “Islamic” and what is “modem and western.”
Today, Muslims and Islamic intellectualism are in greater need of
comprehending and analyzing the context of the reform movement, the
Islamic response to the weserrn challenge, and the sweeping modernization
process that was to ensue. The main reason behind such urgency is
that although the reformist model succeeded in upholding Islamic tenets
and achieved a limited reconstruction of Islamic self-confidence, it can no
longer provide a basis for renewal (tajdid) or answer the major questions
confronting the contempomy Muslim world.
The importance of al ‘Alwani’s most recent elaboration of the Islamization
of Knowledge vision for renewal, “The Islamization of Knowledge:
Yesterday and Today,” is that it goes beyond the reformist
enterprise. By invoking the Qur’an and its absolute dominance over all
other Islamic sources, the author suggests a new path for the development
of an Islamic weltanschauung. Many pursuits of the Muslim social scientists
have already shown that this process is effectively underway ...