RECONCILIATION AND ISLAMISATION: A ROADMAP FOR AN ISLAMIC INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL

The Muslim world produced one of the greatest intellectual revolutions in history. Since the Colonial Period, the effort to bring about a global Islamic Revival has been a much sought after project for Muslim intellectuals worldwide. This paper studies the core principles that were instrumental in building the Islamic Intellectual Revolution (8th-18th Century CE). These core principles are identified as the centrality of the Qur’an in all intellectual discourse, a broad epistemological landscape and the unity of the sacred and secular sciences. This paper explores how returning to the same methodology can lead to an Islamic intellectual revival. The Qur’an identifies eight valid epistemic sources apart from itself while declaring itself as the Furqan (Criterion) to judge their validity. These include Sunnah, human intellect (‘Aql and Qiyas), Ijma’ (consensus), intuition (Basira), the physical universe, history, and certain knowledge from other civilisations. It is the duty of the scholars to work towards an integration of knowledge derived from these different sources and thus ‘Islamise’ them. This paper identifies the core reasons for the present intellectual crisis to as being rooted in an ignorance of the broad epistemological landscape of Islam. The Qur’an anticipates how a better understanding of the self and the cosmos will lead to a validation of the truth of the Qur’an in the future (41:53). Contemporary scientific discourse has uncovered important perspectives related to these two domains, presenting a good opportunity for Muslim intellectuals to study them in the light of Islamic thought. It is argued that science today needs a new philosophical paradigm as breakthroughs in physics and cosmology have made the current mechanistic and deterministic philosophy of science obsolete. This paper discusses how a new Islamic philosophy of science that rests on the Kalām and Sufi view of the universe and consciousness is one of the best contenders for this change in paradigm. Developments in Quantum Physics, Fine Tuned Cosmology, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness are taken as case studies to propose solutions from Islamic thought to conundrums related to them. Thus, a practical guide to the Islamisation of the fields of cosmology, physics, biology, and neuropsychology is proposed and it is argued that this approach will inevitably revitalise Muslim thought, reconcile physical sciences with it and thus has the potential to bring about an intellectual revival in the Ummah.