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ABSTRACT
The internationalization of the social sciences, understood as the increasing circulation of people, ideas and materials, has been accompanied by critiques of material and power differentials and of theoretical and epistemological Eurocentrism. Within this context of debate, Islamization of knowledge (IOK) appears as an alternative epistemology. After a brief historical account of IOK’s international institutionalization, the paper focuses on one key institution, the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM), where interviews were conducted with key protagonists of IOK. Analyses of these interviews reveal that IOK has been symptomatic of the failed aspects of the internationalization of the social sciences. To overcome the current state of affairs, proponents suggest three different projects for universalization of the social sciences. The paper concludes with a critical appraisal of these projects’ significance for sociology and hints at potential epistemological fractures within the discipline.
RÉSUMÉ
L'internationalisation des sciences sociales, entendue comme la circulation croissante des personnes, des idées et des matériaux, a été accompagnée de critiques des différends matériels et de pouvoir et de l'eurocentrisme théorique et épistémologique. Dans ce contexte de débat, l'islamisation du savoir apparaît comme une épistémologie alternative. Après un bref récit historique de l’institutionnalisation international de l'islamisation du savoir, l’article se concentre sur une institution clé, l'Université islamique internationale de Malaisie (IIUM), où des entretiens ont été réalisés auprès des acteurs clés de l’islamisation du savoir. Les analyses de ces entretiens démontrent que l’islamisation du savoir a été symptomatique des aspects faillis de l'internationalisation des sciences sociales. Afin de surmonter la situation actuelle, les partisans proposent trois projets différents en faveur de l’universalisation des sciences sociales. L’article conclut avec une évaluation critique de l'importance de ces projets pour la sociologie et suggère des fractures épistémologiques potentielles dans la discipline.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the colleagues at Kuala Lumpur who have agreed to be interviewed for their time and patience and for pushing my argumentative competency to its limits. I would also like to thank S. Farid Alatas for the opportunity to ‘debrief’ my interview experiences, for his expert insights into the backgrounds of IOK and for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am grateful to the extended team and guests of the BMBF-project ‘Universality and acceptance potential of social science knowledge’ at Freiburg University – Chandni Basu, Ercüment Çelik, Christian Ersche, Claudia Honegger, José Jiménez/Tomás Elgorriaga Kunze, Bruno Monteiro, Barbara Riedel and Veronika Wöhrer – for critical comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Ismail al-Faruqi played a key role in the international institutionalization of the debate. Born 1922 in Palestine, he graduated from the American University of Beirut and became District Governor in Galilee in 1942. He obtained a PhD from Indiana University in the US in 1952 and co-founded the Muslim Students’ Association in 1962. He spent time at al-Azhar University in Cairo, at McGill in Canada and was a key figure in the creations of IIUM and International Islamic University in Islamabad (see below). al-Faruqi was assassinated in 1986.
2. On the metaphor of the ‘trap’, see also Sitas (Citation2002) as well as Alatas, who considers Islamic economics to be in the ‘modernist trap’ (Citation1995, 92).
3. One source indicates that the launch of the Islamic Research Academy at Karachi in 1962 had already prefigured some of the arguments taken up at Mecca in 1977 (Barazangi et al. Citation2015, n.p.). Alatas (Citation1995, 95) insists that the idea of Islamic science had been introduced in the late 1950s by Syed Hossein Nasr.
4. I do not dispose of any documented insights into the financial aspects of the debate and rely here on Abaza’s analysis.
5. Afghanistan: 3, Algeria: 2, Australia: 2, Bangladesh: 5, Canada: 2, China: 1, Egypt: 15, England: 22 (out of which 1 indicated an address or affiliation in Nigeria, 1 in Algeria, 1 in Lebanon and 1 in Pakistan), France: 1 (a representative of UNESCO), India: 13, Indonesia: 6, Iran: 6, Japan: 1, Jordan: 4, Kenya: 2, Kuwait: 5, Lebanon: 2, Libya: 3, Malaysia: 2, Mauritania: 2, Morocco: 9 (1 representative of Unesco), Nigeria: 7, North Yemen: 1, Pakistan: 26, Philippines: 2, Qatar: 2, South Africa: 3, Sudan: 5, Syria: 2, Tunisia: 1, Turkey: 6, United Arab Emirates: 3, USA: 16 (of which one was a visiting scholar from Malaysia). All participants were men (First World Conference on Muslim Education Citation1977, 33–66, 88).
6. Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Nigeria, Gambia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Qatar and Somalia.
7. ‘The Conference recommends that all Muslim countries must necessarily implement Allah’s Shari’ah and mould the lives of people upon Islamic principles and values because only then they shall succeed in systematising their education, according to the aims given above’ (First World Conference on Muslim Education Citation1977, 93). Matching the Cold War context, reliance on the Shariah is presented as the right alternative to capitalism and communism.
8. ‘Buildings and offices, libraries and laboratories, and classrooms and auditoriums teeming with students and faculty are all material paraphernalia of little worth without the requisite vision. It is the nature of such vision that it cannot be copied; only its incidentals can. That is why in nearly two centuries of Westernized, secularized education, the Muslims have produced neither a school college, university, nor a generation of scholars that matches the West in creativity or excellence. […] the western spirit is precisely what cannot and should not be copied. It is generated by its own vision of life and reality, in short, by its faith. Education in the Muslim world lacks this vision’ (AbūSulaymān [Citation1982] Citation1995, 7).
9. Al-Attas and al-Faruqi later on disputed authorship of the term ‘Islamization of knowledge’ – al-Attas accused al-Faruqi of plagiarism ([Citation1978] Citation1998, xii).
10. cf. Alatas (Citation1995).
11. http://msanational.org/us/about-us/, 5 May 2015.
12. AbuSulayman, born in Mecca in 1936, received his BA and MA at the University of Cairo and a PhD in International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. He is affiliated with the global Muslim Brotherhood. He was Secretary General of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth from 1973 to 1979. A founding member of the AMSS, he became its President (1985–1987); furthermore, he was a founding member and former president of the IIIT. AbuSulayman also acted as rector of IIUM from 1989 to 1999.
13. Documentation was collected during a research visit to the IIIT-branch in Paris in August 2011.
14. http://www.iiit.org/AboutUs/AboutIIIT/tabid/66/Default.aspx, 2 Feburary 2015.
15. ‘Mission: 5. (1) Towards actualising the University’s vision under clause 4, the University endeavours –
to undertake the special and greatly needed task of reforming contemporary Muslim mentality and integrating Islamic revealed knowledge and human sciences in a positive manner;
to produce better quality intellectuals, professionals and scholars of distinction by integrating quality of faith (iman), knowledge (‘ilm) and good character (akhlaq) to serve as agents of comprehensive and balanced progress as well as sustainable development in Malaysia and in the Muslim world;
to promote the concept of Islamization of human knowledge in teaching, research, consultancy, dissemination of knowledge and the development of academic excellence in the University;’ (IIUM Citation2011, 11–12).
16. Maldives, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Egypt (Abaza Citation2002, 38–9).
17. For his key writings, see Al-Attas ([Citation1978] Citation1998, Citation2001). cf. Abaza, for instance, for details around the intellectual foundations of both institutions, where the legacy of Ismail al-Faruqi and AbuSulayman for IIUM and Syed M. Naquib al-Attas for ISTAC are given with much detail.
18. http://www.iium.edu.my/istac/about-us/historical-background, 15 April 2015.
19. http://www.iium.edu.my/about-iium/iium-video, 25 April 2015.
20. http://www.iium.edu.my/faqs, 10 January 2015.
21. However, some of those features are shared with other Malaysian universities that also attract many foreign students (Umar, Noon, and Abdullahi Citation2014). Another tentative hypothesis regarding the comparative advantages of IIUM in the international academic arena could be formulated: The Mecca conference report had favoured separate education for women. While this does not seem to have been realized at a large scale, the fact that at IIUM two-thirds of students are women could eventually be related to the ‘high moral standards’ at IIUM (J. Farooqui), supposedly superior to that of Non-Islamic universities.
22. cf. This information given for the interviewees in Table 1. A larger collection of CVs of IIUM staff confirms this trend.
23. I draw the reader’s attention to the metaphor of the ‘mask’, probably an implicit reference to Fanon’s writings. The Sudanese among the interviewees were the most well-connected with other ‘southern voices’ and anti-colonial debates.
24. Explicitly quoted as a reference:
One scholar of Malaysia whose name was Alatas, he […] wrote an article about captive mind. That our mind […] is influenced by, by the West. So problem is only how can we […] acquire correct knowledge. Or, […] that knowledge which is closer to reality. (J. Farooqi)
25. We might add that throughout the Cold War context, anything that strengthened anti-communism was also welcomed.