Islamization Or Rehabilitation Of Knowledge

The conditions prevailing in the Muslim world are far from satisfactory. There is poverty, despondency, and misery. There is extremism and terrorism. There is a culture of denial. The situation is urgent. These challenges require reform of Muslim thought. For there is "a crisis in the Muslim mind." This crisis began with the association of the use of reason in the explanation of revelation with kufr or unbelief. This resulted in a misrepresentation of the teaching of revelation and its partial replacement by tradition. Hence, religious thought requires reconstruction. This requires the rehabilitation and the engagement of reason. It is through reasoning that we attain knowledge. But rather than focusing on the corruption of their knowledge of Islam, tainted by poor reasoning, unwarranted accretions, and problematic practices, Islamists focus on the Islamization of knowledge. This is analogous to putting out a fire in the neighbor's house before extinguishing a bigger fire at home. It is urgent to revive reason that was spurned more than a millennium ago. Anti-rationalism has a long history in Islam. Islamists urge the Islamization of Western knowledge because they perceive it as "unIslamic," tainted by assumptions at variance with the Islamic worldview. But the corruption of the knowledge of Islam is a bigger threat than Western knowledge. UnIslamic knowledge is a bogeyman. Empirical knowledge is not unIslamic; it is descriptive. To refer to this knowledge as unIslamic is to refer to the knowledge of Allah's world as unIslamic. What requires Islamization are the arts and social disciplines, for example economics. There is a pressing requirement to articulate a usury-free economic paradigm. But contrary to what we would expect from the efforts to Islamize knowledge, in place of enthusiasm for Islamization, we encounter a baffling reticence, shyness, and an unwillingness to Islamize economics. What we encounter in the plethora of efforts to replicate usury-based finance, is the Westernization of Islamic finance. This is a manifestation of Westoxication, of a "captive mind," the unquestioning replication of the West. Rather than encountering an eagerness to Islamize finance, precisely the reverse is true. We encounter an eagerness to replicate usury-based finance, as manifested by the use of profit and capital guarantees in financial agreements rather than ensuring that Islamic contracts reflect risk-sharing, as required by revelation. Efforts of this kind could result in an erosion of authenticity.