Islam, Modern Scientific Discourse, and Cultural Modernity The Politics of Islamization of Knowledge as a Claim to Dewesternization

Abstract

Thank you for sending me Bassan Tibi’s paper, entitled “Islam, Modern
Scientific Discourse and Cultural Modernity: The Politics of Islamization
of Knowledge as a Claim to Dewesternization,” which was presented at the
1990 MESA conference. I read it with great interest and would like to make
the following observations.
The main focus of this paper is the presentation of a critique of the
Islamization of scientific thought adopted by contemporary Muslim
intellectuals, with special attention paid to its reliability for the establishment
of an authentic Islamic sociology. A comparison is made with the so-called
European project of cultural modernity, a project based on the purely secular
concept of knowledge.
While engaging in this comparison, Tibi raises a number of issues that
are strongly related to the influence of various partial truths and secular
ideological perspectives prevalent in the modern West. However, in his
methodological approach, the author is basically ignoring, either consciously
or otherwise, the viewpoint of history and the philosophy of human civilization.
These factors dictated my choice of the following three points for discussion.
The first point relates to the so-called “Weberian demagnification of the
world,” a concept developed in Europe during the seventeenth century that
rests on the modern understanding of objectivity in the sciences. However,
this statement is completely false, for the earliest claim of demagnification
of the world dates back to the emergence of Islam. The first divine command
from Allah to His Prophet Muhammad and to all humanity was:
Read in the name of your Lord, the Creator . . . Read, for your
Lord is the most gracious. He taught the art of writing. He taught
man what man never knew before (Qur’an 96:1, 3-5).
Many other Qur’anic and prophetic texts prompt Muslims to accumulate
positive knowledge and to make the acquisition of scientific comprehension
part of the community’s life. The Qur‘an emphasizes the superiority of scientists ...