scholarly journals EDITORIAL

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Sayyid M. Syeed
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
New Science ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
American Muslim ◽  
The World ◽  
Passionate Commitment

The news of Professor Mahmoud Abu Saud’s death has saddened usall. For several decades, he has been a prominent figure in the seminarsand conferences of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS),the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), the Islamic Societyof North America (ISNA), the American Muslim Council (AMC), andother Islamic and interfaith organizations. His passionate commitment tothe reconstruction of Islamic thought, as well as his tireless involvementin writing, lecturing, and touring from country to country and from cityto city, were a great inspiration to our young scholars. As a learnedscholar, Social scientist, and, in particular, an economist, friend, and mentor,he will be missed in many forums. He served as a referee for theAmerican Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS), and his commentswere always objective and straightforward. His ideas, ideals, and intellectualand moral heritage will continue to inspire his friends andstudents. We pray that Almighty Allah will cover him with His mercyand also grant us patience and help us to emulate some of his extra-The growth and development of MISS was one of the aspitations ofthe late Mahmoud Abu Saud. Our constant struggle to enhance the intellectualcontent of the journal will be a source of reward to the departedsoul of that great mujdhid. For verily “we belong to Allah and to Him wereturn.“This issue begins with Mahmoud Dhaouadi’s paper on Islamicknowledge and the rise of the new science. In the last few decades,Mahmoud Dhaouadi argues, western science has begun to shift from whatis called classical science to new science. This vision of the emergingnew science promises to heal the division between matter and spirit andto do away with the mechanical dimension of the world. However, theprocess of reconciliation between religion and science in modem westernculture still faces a great many hurdles. Islam, on the other hand, looksat knowledge and science as a continuum whereby divine and humanknowledge and science both cooperate with and complement each other.He gives examples from the practices of classical Muslim scholars, suchas Ibn Khaldin, who based their research on this approach. Knowledge ...

scholarly journals The Conceptual Framework for an Action Plan for the Islamization of Knowledge

1985 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Abdulhmaid AbuSulayman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Western World ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Comprehensive Knowledge ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
The One

It is an admitted fact that the stagnation and the crisis of thought in the Islamic Ummah is one of the most important reasons for its backwardness and for the malaise of its contemporary civilization. It is also an admitted fact that a reform of the methodology of the Islamic Thought on the one hand, and Islamization of social sciences and humanities, and of knowledge on the other, are greatly needed if we wish to overcome the crisis of thought and move into the modern life.We will need this new orientation, if we want to benefit from what the humanity has achieved in terms of knowledge and the progress of civilization up till now, and to interact with it from the Islamic perspective in order to realize the Islamic goals of human life and civilization. Ever since the importance of the reform in Islamic thought was crystallized in the minds of the Muslim youth who had awareness and commitment to Islam and had knowledge of the scientific and academic achievements of the western world, and ever since these youth established The Association of Muslim Social Scientists thirteen years ago, and finally since the establishment of the International Institute of Islamic Thought five years ago, as an independent academic institution fully dedicated to function as a backbone to serve the message of Islam, the idea of reform of the Islamic thought and Islamization of knowledge and of social sciences and humanities has gained acceptance, and efforts have been made to realize that goal. It will be noticed that in view of the focus of concern and action, of course a politically motivated concern to achieve strength and power to defend and combat, concentration has been on disciplines of education and economics. In order to achieve these reforms in a realistic way and on a solid foundation, the plan to be adopted should be based on a comprehensive knowledge of Islamic methodology. It should concentrate on reformation of thought that is related to the behavioral sciences which are considered as the main base for social sciences from which other social sciences are ...

scholarly journals Editorial Note

1986 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-9
Author(s):  
Sulayman S. Nyang
Keyword(s):  
Editorial Note ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
The World ◽  
Part Presentation ◽  
The University

In this issue we have a collection of very interesting articles. There is thelead article written by the late Professor Ismail al Faruqi, founding Presidentof the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Reston, Virginia, and thefirst President of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists in 1972. Thesetwo organizations, which are separate but work together as partners in Muslimscholarship in North America, are the sponsors of this journal.Dr. al Faruqi's contribution on the important question of world theologyintroduces a four-part presentation on aspects of the Islamization of Knowledge.Well-grounded in this field of knowledge and coming from a background whichclearly made him one of the few Muslim scholars capable of engaging in ameaningful dialogue with Western thinkers on their own ground, Professoral-Faruqi identifies the main areas of discourse and then offers a critical Islamicperspective on the problem.Following his article are two position papers on pressing current issues.The first is the piece written by S. Abdullah Schleifer, an American Muslimcurrently working and living in Cairo, Egypt. A prominent journalist withmany years of experience in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world,Schleifer looks at the needs, feasibility and limitations of an independent IslamicNews Agency. This piece is provocative and provides food for thought to thoseMuslims who are interested in the current debate on the New InternationalInformation Order (NIIO). The second paper deals with the operations ofmodern financial markets for stocks and bonds and its relevance to an Islamiceconomy. Written by Professor Raquib uz-Wan, it focuses on a very importantissue in the current discussion on Islamic economics.We regret to announce that Dr. Musa O.A. Abdul, a member of our AdvisoryEditorial Board has passed away due to natural causes. Students andfaculty of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and all others who came to knowhis work in Islamic studies will always benefit, inshallah, from his inspiringdevotion to the cause of Islam.We hope that this issue will continue the steady improvement in the qualityof this journal. We are determined, insha' Allah, to raise the quality of productionand the quality of scholarship in this journal. For this and other relatedreasons we call on all scholars who are interested in the Muslim World tosend in their comments and suggestions. Contributions are welcome fromall over the world ...

scholarly journals Editorial

1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Sayyid Muhammad Syeed
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Cultural Organization ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
The Common ◽  
First Time

The first decade of the 15th century Hijrah is over. It saw the establishmentof the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and was markedby the development of cooperation and collaboration between various Islamicorganizations and institutions around the world. The results have been mostencouraging. This collaboration has contributed toward the initiation of anera of discussions and debates on the Islamization of knowledge and thedevelopment of a methodology for the reconstruction of Islamic thought.Among the consequences has been the unfolding of various intellectual forums.One such intellectual forum for the last five years has been the AmericanJournal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS) published jointly by the IIIT andthe Association for Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS). We are greatly encouragedby its steadily increasing circulation and by the enhanced participationof social scientists as well as lay scholars.'AbdulHamid AbuSulayman, now Rector of the International IslamicUniversity (IIU). Malaysia, continues to send us his inspiring selection andcommentary of Qur'anic verses as the "Guiding Light:'In this issue, for the first time, we are induding a paper by Taha Jabiral 'Alwani, the President of the IDT and author of several scholarly titlesin Arabic. This paper is the English rendering of his lecture delivered inRabat, Morocco at a conference held under the aegis of the Islamic Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). He sketches a briefargument for establishing an Islamic alternative in thought and knowledge,not only for the benefit of Muslims, but for the common good of humanity.Another first is the paper by Eric Winkel, a multi-lingual political scientistof the faculty of IIU Malaysia, who provjdes us with an analysis of Habermasand Foucault. This paper entitled "Remembering Islam . . . " bringsthese postwar leaders of the Frankfurt school of anarchist and radical critiqueinto the discussion of the Islamic paradigm. Winkel explains thecharacterization of Habermas and Foucault of existing epistemologies as "pernicious,pervasive and truth distorting," and shows how their own vision ofthe possible future world is extremely restricted and inadequate. He suggeststhat we remember that Islam, as the divine guidance of Allah, provides thebasis for a truly emancipatory meta critique.Moving from philosophical issues to the more concrete, Ausaf Ali's paperon " . . . Islamization of Social and Behavioral Sciences" argues for a moral ...

Reflections into the Spirit of the Islamic Corpus of Knowledge and the Rise of the New Science

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Dhaouadi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Third World ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Primary Reference

There is no question that contemporary western civilization has beendominant in the field of science since the Renaissance. Western scientificsuperiority is not limited to specific scientific disciplines, but is rather anovetall scientific domination covering both the so-called exact and thehuman-social sciences. Western science is the primary reference for specialistsin such ateas as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, economics,psychology, and sociology. It is in this sense that Third World underdevelopmentis not only economic, social, and industrial; it also suffersfrom scientific-cultutal underdevelopment, or what we call "The OtherUnderdevelopment" (Dhaouadi 1988).The imptessive progress of western science since Newton and Descartesdoes not meari, however, that it has everything tight or perfect. Infact, its flaws ate becoming mote visible. In the last few decades, westernscience has begun to experience a shift from what is called classical scienceto new science. Classical science was associated with the celestialmechanics of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, the new physics of Galileo,and the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes introduced a radical divisionbetween mind and matter, while Newton and his fellows presented a newscience that looked at the world as a kind of giant clock The laws of thisworld were time-reversible, for it was held that there was no differencebetween past and future. As the laws were deterministic, both the pastand the future could be predicted once the present was known.The vision of the emerging new science tends to heal the division betweenmatter and spirit and to do away with the mechanical dimension ...

Why social scientists still need phenomenology

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110643
Author(s):  
Christopher Houston
Keyword(s):  
Social Scientist ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Natural Attitude ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Suspension Of Disbelief ◽  
Do So ◽  
Critical Science

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phenomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes.

Discussion: A Sociologist's Point of View

1950 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-149
Author(s):  
W. Rex Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Full Development ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Reverence For Life ◽  
The Individual

The only words in the title of this symposium which do not cause difficulty are “of” and “in,” since even Latin America is a “nomer” that many protest is a “misnomer,” for some parts of the region southeast of the U.S.A., and “pathology” and “democracy” can get into water as hot and deep as any that lies under the thin ice over which the social sciences skate. The very lumping together in our discussion of twenty republics varying as they do in Latin America is a procedure of doubtful accuracy, and one which at first encounter arouses the ire of any good nationalist in these countries. The term “pathological” suggests too strongly a complacent superior attitude on our own part that may befit the propagandist or the naive and uninformed man on the street, but not the social scientist. The world does not fall so neatly into the patterns of perfect democracy and the outer darkness as Mr. Churchill has supposed. Can we not accept a certain relativity in these matters and remember the large-sized mote in our own eye?With the struggle of almost innumerable thinkers to define the direction and goal, we are surely familiar. The writer has no intention of assembling all the definitions available, for if they were all assembled, sociologists might lay the emphasis not upon forms and constitutions so much as upon something broader that earlier theologians would have called men's will and men's love. Since the development of “Mr. Tylor's science,” cultural anthropology, we would be more likely to say that the legal arrangements grow out of and express the culture; that back of them lies a slow secular growth of the idea that personality, the freedom and full development of the individual are ultimate values, not to be sacrificed to the state; that power may be necessary for survival, and that unity or consensus or conformity may be necessary to power, but that something like Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life” is a deeper principle. These things are no sooner said than we realize that we often sin against the ideals we cherish and fear the freedom to which we give lip-service. The practice falls far short of the preaching.

scholarly journals Globalization, Class and Culture in Global Systems

2000 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Global Systems ◽  
Proper Account

The work of Immanuel Wallerstein has been criticized by certain anthropologists for not having taken culture into proper account. He has been accused of the sin of political economy, a not uncommon accusation, a re?ex of the 80’s and post-80’s anthropological jargon that might ?nally today be exhausted. Years earlier a number of social scientists were engaged in a critical assessment of the social sciences from a distinctively global perspective. Wallerstein, Frank and others were at the forefront of this critique which had a powerful impact on anthropology. The global perspective was not a mere addition to anthropological knowledge, not a mere of extension of the use of the culture concept, i.e. before it was local and now it is global, before culture stood still, but now in the global age, it ?ows around the world. It was a more fundamental critique, or at least it implied a more fundamental critique. This critique could only be attained from a perspective in which the very concept of society was re-conceived as something very different, as a locus constructed within a historical force ?eld which was very much broader than any particular politically de?ned unit.

scholarly journals Observing the Observer

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
David H. Warren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Interested Reader ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
American Muslim ◽  
Muslim Minority

This publication, a collection of ten essays incorporating both quantitative andqualitative studies, has emerged as part of a lengthy research project conductedby the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the Center for Islamand Public Policy (CIPP) beginning in 2004 and concluding in 2007. Naturally,given the state of relations between the United States and those countries perceivedas comprising the “Muslim World,” as well as regular controversies andscandals relating to the American Muslim minority and those who purport toobserve, study, and teach others about them and their religion, such a study isparticularly welcome. The studies included are aimed at both students and specialists,not only in the field of “Islamic studies” itself, but also more broadlywith regard to such related academic fields as theology and anthropology. Anotheraudience is the more general interested reader who might wish to learnwhat may (or may not) have changed in that field attacked so successfully inEdward Said’s great polemic, that its title Orientalism ultimately entered Islamicstudies as a truly condemnatory and pejorative slogan ...

Reported Masculinity Ratio in Pakistan: A Triumph of Anthropology and Economics over Biology (Invited Lecture)

1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 267-303
Author(s):  
Karol J. Krotki
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Sex Ratio ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Corrado Gini ◽  
And Gender

The problem of the sex ratio fascinates social scientists. Some measure it through the masculinity ratio (number of men per woman), others use the feminity ratio (number of women per man). Among the latter is the majority of social scientist on this subcontinent e.g., Gupta [13 ; maps 24,25,26 and 27) and in several countries of continental Europe [66, fn. 33, p. 3] . Corrado Gini, the celebrated creator of various indices, popular in social Sciences, devoted to the topic his very first book [11]. Sex and gender is one of the most important and popular variables, on which a social scientist breaks up his data into Significantly different groups.

Beyond the Post-Modern Mind

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-255
Author(s):  
Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
North African ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
Religious Question ◽  
Islam And Christianity

What can an accomplished Western theologian and philosopher offerto modern Islamic thought‘! Is there a need for the contemporary Muslimintelligentsia to learn from outside sources? And, if "a conscious and intellectualdefence must be made of the Islamic tradition,” does it mean that Muslimshave to live in a state of mental inertia vis-i-vis the impressive Western traditionin philosophy, theology, and other humanistic and social sciences? Finally,what are the intellectual dangers of borrowing from a Western heritage whichis diffuse in nature, and which is not free from ideology most of the time?Would we be accused of eclecticism and a lack of historicism?Undoubtedly, a major North African philosopher like Abdallah Laroui would dismiss the whole theological project of Islam and Christianity, oreven the whole theoretical enterprise of comparative religion, as irrelevant,ahistorical, anti-intellectual, nxluctionist, and obstructionist. The same attitudeis shared by not a small number of Arab and Muslim social scientists whoconsider metaphysics a fading religious pastime that should have been drivenaway from the human mental endeavor long before Kant appeared on thescene. This orientation is sociologically developed by Bassam Tibi in hisrecent book entitled The Crisis of Modem Islam: A Reindustrial Culturein the Scientific-Technological Age, where he argues that the only viableapproach to Islam in the modern wrld is the sociological method. Therefore,his aim is not to study the spiritual, philosophical, and social manifestationsof Islam in today‘s world, but to understand it, “as it is incorporated intoreality as a fait social-that is, a social fact.”Metaphysics and the Search for a Methodin Religious StudiesProkssor Huston Smith, who sees the validity of the argument that religionis a social fact, argues that the religious question is primarily metaphysical.Thus he offers a “synthetic construct” of religion: metaphysical and social.Put differently, Smith maintains that, transcendentally speaking, religion isa priori and universal; whereas socially spealung, religion is subject to diversityand particularism. It is when we understand his “synthetic argument” thatwe begin to unravel his conceptual concerns: Smith is troubled by the modernphilosophical assertion that truth is made and not found ...

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