Muslims and Modernity: After Two and a Half Centuries What Have We learnt?

My aim in this paper is to explore, from an epistemic point of view, the main cause of the failure of the ‘projects’ introduced/developed by Muslim intellectuals/activists in response to the challenges posed by modernity/postmodernity in the past two and a half centuries. The paper discusses four different responses by Muslim elites to the challenges of modernity and post-modernity. The paper suggests a conjecture concerning the main epistemological cause of Muslims underdevelopment and follows this by critically assessing one particular project, namely, Islamisation of Knowledge, as a typical case which exemplifies the conjecture in question.