126 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 20:2 

Debates on Islam and Knowledge in 

Malaysia and Egypt: Shifting Worlds 

MonaAbaza 
London, UK: Routledge Curzon, 2002. 304 pages. 

Although the debate on the arrival of the lslamization of knowledge (IOK) 

concept continues among today's scholars, giving it a practical framework 
is generally credited to the late Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, a Palestinian­

American scholar and a founding member of the International Institute of 

Islamic Thought (HIT). Mona Abaza, associate professor in the School of 
Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University in Cairo, 
acknowledges this. She took over 10 years to collect and present her 
research in this book. The book is divided into three parts with 14 chapters, 

a hefty 71 pages of notes and bibliography, and a small index. The facts and 
figures about Malaysia covered in the initial pages are from mid-1998 and 
therefore, unfortunately, are outdated. 

In the "introductory reflections," which constitute part 1 of the book, 

Abaza submits that the topic under discussion is controversial even among 
Muslim academics. Nevertheless, she has set out to compare the IOK endeav­

ors in two very distinct cultures whose Islamizers, she believes, have a pri­
marily secular training but an Islamic outlook. While Malaysia propagates