The Problem of Bias An Epistemological Approach and Call for Ijtihad 15-17 Sha'ban 1412 / 19-21 February 1992 Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

The Intemational Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) is pleased to
sponsor this important seminar, as its topic and objectives, the nature of
the issues to be raised, and the points of view represented by the
scholarly participants and their papers are of vital concern to the Islamic
world. Through its participation, the institute has opened a new chapter
for academic activity and intellectual jihad, particularly in Arabic and Islamic
cultutal circles.
As the institute joins the Union of Egyptian Engineers (UEE) in this
pioneering intellectual effott, it seeks to articulate its third objective as
regards the reform of the methodology of Islamic thought: the Islamization
of knowledge in order to build a new Islamic cultural order and lead
the ummah to the most beneficial ways of overcoming its backwardness.
Moreover, as the IIIT joins the UEE in this undettaking, it seeks to
exonerate itself from the charge that it is biased in favor of theoretical
thinking and thus insensitive to the applied sciences. While this is the impression
that might be given by the institute's publications and statements,
the truth is that these are indicative only of its priorities and have
nothing to do with bias.
Contemporary Western thought and cultute have begun to cast their
datkness over everything in a way that obliterates, or neatly so, all non-
Western thought and culture by weakening established concepts and
detracting from the importance of their soutces. The West has done this
under the guise of academic objectivity, by endowing its own social sciences
and humanities with an assumed universality that makes of their
dubious disciplines not only a virtue, but the authoritative last word. In
fact, however, the West's "universality" is little more that its own selfcentetedness
and the stripping of others of all vestiges of their own civilization
and culture.
The universality of Islam, however, is another matter entirely, for it
includes and integrates every people and every culture. Yet the West,
more by means of its influence than its supposed universality, insists on
popularizing slogans like "knowledge for knowledge's sake" and "art for
art's sake" in a less-than-subtle attempt to persuade others to renounce
their own traditions, thought, and culture as a prelude to plunging headlong
into their supposedly universal counterparts in the West. Indeed, ...