Prof. Al-Attas has remained one of the most impressive scholars of Islam and of the Islamization of contemporary knowledge. He was associated with the founding of several universities including the National University of Malaysia as well as the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC). His biography is impossible to summarize in a few words. A detailed account is available at Wikipedia.
The universities of today – especially the “successful” ones of the Western world – are in a state of acute crisis about their identity. Yusef Progler has discussed the “modern day university in ruins” elsewhere (see www.multiworld.org), so the issue will not occupy us further here. In the vacuum that has developed, universities now sell themselves to young people as successful processors of human beings for the globally-oriented, corporate-controlled megamachine. Apart from that new calling, they apparently see no other role for themselves.
It is only at this time of crisis in higher education that we are presented with the opportunity to restore – with renewed confidence – the primary concerns of knowledge acquisition with the framework of Islam. Since our secular cheerleaders are themselves without direction, others are free to resume their trajectories independently. For those in Islamic institutions of learning, there could be no better opportunity or occasion.
Another serious ground for re-examining existing frameworks of knowledge is provided by the changed circumstances generated by today’s globalising world. With the decline of Eurocentrism, global intellectual frameworks based on Western “universals” are degenerating into chaos. Also, one cannot have globalisation and Eurocentrism together within the same package. If that were so, we would have nothing but “globalisation with a European face”. That prospect is unacceptable not only because European values of today appear little more than convenience principles which keep changing like weathercocks to the least shift in the wind, Europe-owned science and technology are now being seen as contributing in a major way to the destabilising of planetary ecology and causing grievous harm to human communities within the present century itself.
These opportunities are not to be missed like they were on the last occasion they presented themselves.
After the resurgence of Islam – partly due to the unimaginable power of oil available to the Arabic states – there was a surge of Islamic intellectualism which argued for the establishment of Islamic universities. A number of such institutions were in fact set up in various parts of the Muslim world. While most survived and even thrived, their Islamic character was increasingly questioned because their curricula for the human sciences – especially sociology, political science, psychology, etc., – were invariably wholly imported or simply copied from the Western academic tradition. Most offered students a strange amalgam of some Islamic teaching with major chunks of unchewed West-inspired social sciences. These were kept in separate compartments, unrelated to each other even while the values of one often cancelled the other.
This disease was further compounded by the fact that most of the administrators of these Islamic universities were themselves successfully certified at Cornell or Harvard in precisely the same positivist-oriented sciences or, as Al-Attas put it,
"knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilisation, imbued with the character and personality of Western culture and civilisation and charged with its spirit and geared to its purpose."
Such knowledge can find no legitimacy within any institution that claims allegiance to Islam.
How do we extract ourselves from this situation?
Al-Attas indicates the general direction in which we ought to move. Our task must be first “to isolate the elements including the key concepts which make up that culture and civilization” which are mainly prevalent in that branch of knowledge pertaining to the human sciences. Thereafter, the knowledge freed of those elements and concepts are then infused with the Islamic elements and key concepts, making it true knowledge for the Muslim. Al-Attas warns against “grafting”, especially when the body is already diseased.
"The foreign elements and disease will have to be first drawn out and neutralized before the body of knowledge can be remoulded in the crucible of Islam."
It is only when Muslim intellectuals succeed in drafting courses that fit within the overall scheme of knowledge that Al-Attas describes in this book could we talk seriously about the arrival (or return) of Islamic universities.
The “extraction” proposal should commence with a thoroughgoing critique of the human social sciences inherited from the Western academic tradition. An excellent example of such a critique is available in the White Studies document of American Indian Ward Churchill. But there are several others as well, including many that reject the positivist or materialist assumptions behind much of conventionally-conceived social science.
The overall critique will permit the re-introduction of several important aspects of knowledge that flow from Islamic principles but which are now completely absent from the Western academic studies regime. But for all this to work, the intellectual framework of Islamic knowledge, its primary and secondary aspects, as drawn out by Al-Attas in this booklet, is inevitable.
The important point to emphasize here, in conclusion, is that the last time such a programme was initiated – ten centuries ago – Islamic learning, science and the welfare of the community all flourished.
In fact, though it may not be very extensively acknowledged, this scheme of knowledge acquisition became the template for the first academic institutions of Europe. Al-Attas argues that what has led to the present crisis has been the gradual de-sacralization of knowledge and the dis-enchantment with Nature within the Western academic tradition, both crucial elements of the Islamic tradition of learning.
The programme of the Islamic university that Al-Attas proposes was first presented by him to the world at the First World Conference on Muslim Education, Makkah, in 1977. It is practicable simply because despite present efforts on a global scale to de-sacralize knowledge, the Muslim community has remained God-intoxicated and God-centred. Nothing has shaken its confidence in the message of the Prophet, unlike the total disarray that one sees within the Western world. This refusal to give up faith is a major expression of Muslims of their confidence in their faith. What remains is to extend the force of that confidence to the reformulation of the human sciences within the framework of Islam.
The booklet deals with the blueprint for setting up of an Islamic University, and argues that if the scheme is properly understood, the University is set up first and only then its main schemes simplified for dissemination at the secondary and primary schooling levels.
In Western practice, the education of the child is actually reversed, much to the detriment of the learner seeing things in perspective, or in holistic terms. Professor Naquib Al-Attas is a splendid guide in these matters.
Despite being trained in the West, he continues to remain firmly dedicated to the Muslim worldview and its human sciences and to their necessity not only for the Muslaims, but for now, for the rest of humanity as well.
We hope that this brief introduction will enthuse people not only to read the full book (Islam and Secularism), but to examine and study the other volumes of Naguib Al-Attas.
This is an introduction written by Claude Alvares to a proposed booklet carrying an extract from Islam and Secularism, to be published by Citizens International, Penang.
http://www.typewriterguerilla.com/2008/06/the-dewesternization-of-knowledge/#more-19
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