Islam, Modern Scientific Discourse, and Cultural Modernity

Thank you for sending me Bassan Tibi’s paper, entitled “Islam, ModernScientific Discourse and Cultural Modernity: The Politics of Islamizationof Knowledge as a Claim to Dewesternization,” which was presented at the1990 MESA conference. I read it with great interest and would like to makethe following observations.The main focus of this paper is the presentation of a critique of theIslamization of scientific thought adopted by contemporary Muslimintellectuals, with special attention paid to its reliability for the establishmentof an authentic Islamic sociology. A comparison is made with the so-calledEuropean project of cultural modernity, a project based on the purely secularconcept of knowledge.While engaging in this comparison, Tibi raises a number of issues thatare strongly related to the influence of various partial truths and secularideological perspectives prevalent in the modern West. However, in hismethodological approach, the author is basically ignoring, either consciouslyor 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 theworld,” a concept developed in Europe during the seventeenth century thatrests on the modern understanding of objectivity in the sciences. However,this statement is completely false, for the earliest claim of demagnificationof the world dates back to the emergence of Islam. The first divine commandfrom Allah to His Prophet Muhammad and to all humanity was:Read in the name of your Lord, the Creator . . . Read, for yourLord is the most gracious. He taught the art of writing. He taughtman what man never knew before (Qur’an 96:1, 3-5).Many other Qur’anic and prophetic texts prompt Muslims to accumulatepositive knowledge and to make the acquisition of scientific comprehensionpart of the community’s life. The Qur‘an emphasizes the superiority of scientists ...