An Early Crescent The Future of Knowledge and the Environment in Islam

Abstract

An Early Crescent is about the exciting and greatly anticipated emergence
of ideas which will inaugurate the rededication and renewal of Muslim effort
and spirituality. It is about the process of intellectually taking charge of the
environment and the discourse dominated by the West. There are two
dimensions to this process of taking charge. One is the Islamization of
Knowledge, and entails mastering the dominant idiom and then, from a position
of strength and confidence, creating a uniquely Islamic paradigm in the field
of knowledge. The second dimension recognizes that “discourse” is not just
academic knowledge, but that discourse and knowledge are also inextricably
tied into the environments and ecologies surrounding the Islamic community.
The book is structured between the overview of Anwar Ibrahim and the
epilogue of Abdullah Omar Naseef, two people deeply involved in
contemporary politics, thinking, and policy making. Between this are writings
about two dimensions of the process of taking charge of the dominant discourse,
with the first part considering the Islamization of Knowledge and the
epistemological characterization of the contemporary discourse, dominated
as it is by the West, and the second part dealing with the way the dominant
discourse configures the environment and ecology surrounding everyone in
general, and the way it constrains the ummah specifically.
Ziauddin Sardar‘s critique of the Islamization work plan centers around
its veneer of positivism and the concommitant reification of the disciplines.
Certainly there are overtones of positive theory building in the work plan,
but it must also be remembered that the work plan is not designed to be
revolutionary as much as corrective, and that it is aimed not so much at
intellectuals as at students through the production of textbooks. And textbooks
are certainly examples of knowledge-production. But no one who reads the
impassioned prose of al Faruqi can imagine that here is a man who would
simply pass an Islamic wand over the disciplines to Islamize them. On the
contrary, his descriptions of contemporary Muslim alienation imply that we ...