The Concept Of Knowledge In Islam

Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis / Dutch Review of Church History is continued as Church History and Religious Culture. See https://brill.com/view/journals/chrc/chrc-overview.xml for more information.

The Theory of Knowledge: An Islamic Perspective is a translation of the Persian book Mas’aleh-ye Shinakht by the great Muslim thinker and reformer, Ayatollah Murtada Mutahhari. Mutahhari authored this book as a rebuttal to a manifesto issued in the seventies by young Muslim activists who were deeply inuenced by Marxist theories. With ample citations from the Qur’an and other traditional Islamic texts, Mutahhari discusses the concept of knowing from an Islamic perspective. Mutahhari does not limit himself to the Islamic source texts and continuously engages with the views of a wide range of philosophers including Ghazali, Ibn Sina, Kant, and Hegel. Mutahhari’s epistemological discussion covers a range of issues, including whether it is possible to know, the nature of knowledge, stages of knowing, the unconscious mind, and truth. He also examines materialism and provides a spiritual approach to some of these questions about knowledge which are vital to the human experience.

Dr. Richard I. Evans interviews Jung about his relationship to Freud and his differences with Freudian theory, his views of the unconscious, introversion-extroversion theories, his concept of archetypes, and his responses to some of the contemporary challenges to psychology.

This is an era when the Islamic World is making a range of attempts to redefine itself and to grapple with the challenges of modernity. Many schools of thought have emerged which seek to position modern Islam within the context of a rapidly changing contemporary world. Exploring and defining the relationship between religion and knowledge, Ismail Rafi Al-Faruqi, a distinguished 20th century Arab-American scholar of Islam, formulated ideas which have made substantial contributions to the Islam-and-modernity discourse. His review of the interaction between Islam and knowledge examines the philosophy behind this relationship, and the ways in which Islam can relate to our understanding of science, the arts, architecture, technology and other knowledge-based fields of enquiry. This book includes contributions from Seyyed Hossein Nasr, John Esposito, Charles Fletcher and others, and will prove an essential reference point for scholars of Islam and students of philosophy and comparative religion.

This paper offers a number of valuable insights gained from a long engagement with Islamic as well as global issues, with traditional as well as contemporary concerns. It not only surveys the field along with the powers and challenges at work, but also charts a way out of the present impasse. More immediately, it offers an updated review of the progress of the Islamization of Knowledge project and a timely clarification of the very concept itself. Clearly, that concept, though responsible for generating worldwide debate and action, has been so often misinterpreted and/or inflated. The gradational nature of the Islamizing project is all too obvious, and was never far from the minds of the authors of the 1982 declaration. It would certainly have been juvenile to think otherwise. And yet there is a need now to stress, as the present paper does, the ambitious (but also imperative) nature of the enterprise. For, despite the highly commendable effort invested in further elaboration and, in some brave instances, attempted implementation of the concept, the process of the Islamization of Knowledge remains at an intial, some might even say, prenatal stage. Much work needs to be done, many talents galvanized and resources pooled, institutions set up or reorganized, etc., before a truly genuine and sustainable realization of the concept can be said to have begun. Such a realistic vision needs to accompany and inform every stage of the way. To be lulled into a false or premature sense of achievement is a costly setback at a time when standing idly by for a day may have serious consequences for decades to come.