CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM RESPONSE
TO THE CHALLENGE OF KNOWLEDGE:
SEPARATING THE GRAIN FROM THE CHAFF - 4
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[Background ]
[ The Problem I ]
[ The Problem II ]
Grappling With the Problem III Fazlur Rahman is another scholar who cannot be
ignored, even though he has not been at the forefront of the debate as his
colleagues above, preferring, it seems, to be a detached observer taking
liberty to differ with others on a subject which he has always taken to heart.
Fazlur Rahman spent a good part of his career addressing the issue of
revitalising or rethinking Islamic thoughts very much in the way Iqbal
attempted. He seemed to have believed that there was no other short cut and any
such efforts are simply escapists, but he was still nonetheless ready to
examine them. In his view, all the efforts from the time of Abduh to date fall
into two categories. “One approach is to accept modern secular education as it
has developed generally speaking in the West and to attempt to “Islamize” it -
that is, to inform it with certain key concepts of Islam.” The other approach,
combining a variety of developments, “can be summed up by saying that they all
represent an effort to combine and integrate the modern branches of learning
with the old ones. ... The most important of these experiments are undoubtedly
those of al-Azhar of Egypt and the new system of Islamic education introduced
in Turkey since the late 1940s.”(19) In examining both these approaches, Fazlur Rahman
did not quarrel so much with the principle as with the methods so far adopted
and the results so far realised. In respect of the Islamization of knowledge
for example, he says, this can only be really fulfilled if and when “Muslims
effectively perform the intellectual task of elaborating an Islamic metaphysics
on the basis of the Qur’an”. For, as he argues: “An overall world view of Islam
has to be first, if provisionally, attempted if various specific fields of
intellectual endeavor are to cohere as informed by Islam”. For the sake of
clarity, metaphysics, for him, “is the unity of knowledge and the meaning and
orientation this unity gives to life”. To further illustrate his point, he pointed
to how Ash’arite theology, wayward as he believes it was, was able to permeate,
with remarkably efficiency, intellectual disciplines of Islam, like law, Sufism
and even the outlook on history. But today, he observes, while there is no
dearth of conferences and books on “Islam and this” and “Islam and that”, which
he admitted occasionally contain valuable insights and ingenuity, these feverish activities, as he calls them,
are often apologetic and don’t add up to much.(20) As for the other approach, one of integration, this
too, has not worked according to Rahman, “because of the largely mechanical
character of instruction and because of juxtaposing the old with the new”.
This, for him, is primarily because the whole process of integration has been caught
up in a vicious circle: unless adequate teachers are available with minds
already integrated and creative, instructions will remain mechanical and
sterile, even when the students are good; but on the other hand such teachers
cannot be produced on a sufficient scale unless an integrated curriculum is
made available. This vicious circle Fazlur Rahman argues, “can be broken only
at the first point - if there comes in to being some first-class minds who can
interpret the old in terms of the new
as regards substance and turn the new into the service of the old as regards
ideals. This, then, must be followed by the writing of text books on theology,
ethics and so forth.”(21) This vicious circle is further compounded by the
peculiar relationship between religion and politics and the pitiable
subjugation of the former to the latter. This pernicious phenomena of
secularism, as he calls it, brought the secularist to power, who, alienated
from Islam, “becomes all the more confirmed in his cynicism about men of religion,
the dislocation between their aims and their claims, even though secularism
itself may be a child of incurable cynicism about man’s real nature.”(22) There are of course a number of other scholars who
have made significant contributions and who are still doing so on this subject:
scholars like Adullahi Smith, a historian of the Sokoto Caliphate; Khurshid
Ahmad, Nejattullahi Siddique and Umar Chapra in the field of Islamic economics;
Ahmad Ibrahim Umar, Abdul Karim Souroush both in epistemology and the
philosophy of science, the relatively younger but promising others like Pervez
Manzoor, Ziauddin Sardar and Abdulwahab el-Affendi, who have and still are
producing plethora of writing on the subject among others. But since this is
not a survey, much less an exhaustive one, we need not detain ourselves
further, especially when we shall have cause to refer to some of these efforts
in due course. It will suffice for now to say that the four we have examined
thus far, with others in their trail, appear to be the pioneers of the current
drive for Islamization of knowledge. It may also be said that so far not much
has been produce which substantially supersedes the works of these prominent
figures. Most of the thoughts and ideas of these pioneers especially in respect of what is popularly called today the
Islamization of Knowledge, perhaps with the exception of Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
are not as widespread as the works of the latter generation of scholars. It is
the IIIT however which recently really popularised the idea, taking it far and
wide, not only through its conferences held in many corners of the Muslim
world, but also by the numerous writings it has generated on the subject. They
have done this essentially by moving the subject from academic circles, where
it is discussed in the privacy of ivory towers, to the popular arena thus
pushing it on the agenda of the various Islamic groups and movements. It is
necessary, therefore, to examine the ideas of the IIIT on this subject.
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