E d i t o r i a l  

The Full Circle: Transmission of Ideas 
& the Muslim Social Scientist 

Science Without Philosophy? 
Many of our readers and contributors have raised questions regarding the 
various definitions of social science and their relation to the scope of MISS. 
Definitions of social science have changed with time and place, and one of the 
reasons for that is not what is “social,” but what is “science”? “Science” in 
French, or “wissenschaft” in German, do not translate exactly the same as 
“science” in English. In English speaking world, “science” has an association 
with hard sciences while social sciences have been tacitly considered to be soft 
sciences, or not sciences at all. Such a distinction does not exist in other 
languages. 

It is not our intent here to provide a mere taxonomy of the meanings of 
science, but to develop an understanding as well as a consensus that social 
sciences and their sub-disciplines are, without exception, based on certain 
paradigms that are philosophical in nature. Being a social scientist without the 
knowledge of these philosophical assumptions, upon which the paradigms of 
the socia1 sciences rest, is to willingly escape the full picture. Proper 
philosophical training, therefore, has a deep nexus with the methods of social 
science, and constitutes a necessary pre-requisite of understanding the 
paradigms. Paradigms establish the agenda and the agenda dictates the policy. 
social sciences therefore become a vehicle of understanding the society in 
consonance with the accepted philosophical truths. 

Philosophical exposition of concepts and ideas in turn necessitates a 
definition of philosophy itself. All definitions of philosophy will point to 
certain “givens” or a priori assumptions that precede all scientific inquiry. If 
social sciences stay within the realm of the positivist paradigm, the problem 
may seemingly be solved, but reducing inquiry to empiricism has its own pit- 
falls and the atomistic division in today’s academia is a direct result of that. 
Further, it restricts the scope of those social scientists who also happen to be 
believers in transcendental Truth. Conversely, to the degree that philosophy is 



vl The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 18:l 

the handmaiden of revelation, it poses ethical fetters on the activity of the 
believing scholar. Nonetheless, boundaries are necessary as well as present for 
everything in life, but who delineates the boundaries, and where, becomes a 
relevant question that ultimately shapes a paradigm. 

The principles of revelation are ahhtoricd in nature, but their interpretation 
and understanding are not. Because many contemporary social scientists in 
most places are bereft of the a priori assumptions of the believing scientists, 
they can only study things associated with revelation as a pxteriori and only as 
phenomena, strictly historically. The pure and pristine ideals of the believing 
scientist are considered to be ‘subjective’ and therefore not truly scientific, at 
least by the positivists, so much so that categories such as truth, purity and 
beauty for such scientists have become irrelevant. 

The Quest For Originality 
Having pointed out the necessity of insistence upon the Pure and the True, the 
challenge for the believing scientist thus begins. One of the beneficial paths 
that can be taken by the researcher is going back to the original sources in an 
effort to do what is certain and necessary and not what is contingent and pos- 
sible. To cut through the deceptive and ideological layers of historicism in 
modem scholarship, Muslim social scientists need to study their original texts. 
unfortunately, this is a big challenge for them, as the educated elite in many 
Muslim states around the world has lost the ability to read philosophy and 
social science in the classical languages of Islam in which many of these texts 
were written. Unfortunately, we now rely upon commentary on these sources, 
produced by non-Muslims in their languages for their own purposes. For an 
Indian or Bengali student, for example, to read Ghazzali or Ibn Rushd in the 
original form, is difficult because of what the structures of education in that 
region have gone through in the name of modemism. Consequently, the 
polemical position of Ghazzali in Islamic intellectual history, and the celebrat- 
ed rationalism of Ibn Rushd, come to many present-day Muslims not directly 
but indirectly. Insistence upon purity does not prohibit learning from outside 
of one‘s own religious tradition, but blind acceptance of someone else’s view of 
one’s own intellectual history is also unacceptable. 

It is a widespread notion among many intellectuals, Muslim and non- 
Muslim alike, that the west borrowed from Islam and made great progress, so 
now the Muslims can borrow from the West and do the same. First of all, the 
very notion of progress itself is doubtful, given the pitiful moral condition of 
humanity and the degradation of clean life on t h i s  planet. Secondly, admitting 



Editodd vii 

that there has been more material progress recently in the secular West does 
not suggest that it is an ideal society in any meaningful sense. Also, we know 
well that the scientific achievements of the modem west did not begin in a 
vacuum but are built upon the achievements of the societies of the preceding 
civilizations. But what is certain about the development of western science is 
its outgrowth from within a secular worldview. It is equally important to note 
that the nature of the historical transmission of ideas from the hlamic world 
into the West is significantly different from that of today’s Muslims borrowing 
from the West, and because of the difference in the very nature of transmis- 
sion, the significance of t h i s  transmission is also different. Even when the 
Muslims ruled and were considered to be the reigning civilization, they did not 
dominate, subjugate and humiliate their neighbors as the Western states do on 
a routine basis with the Muslim world. 

Rationalism: OId and New 
During the medieval age of Christian European civilization, the challenge that 
came from the Islamic world to the West was that of rationalism. The trepi- 
dation that Christian thought experienced from Spain was the fear of ration- 
alism, and this is really paradoxical, because it is precisely what threatened the 
Islamic world a few centuries later. m y  this time the threat of rationalism 
came from the West to the Islamic world. 
As the Latin Averroists attacked the Church for clinging on to faith as 

opposed to la libn pensee or ‘free thinking, it was not due to reading the 
‘believing Ibn Rushd’, most of whose Arabic work had been either burnt or 
lost, save some Hebrew and Latin which was later connected to justify their 
position, but a ‘rationalist Ibn Rushd’ opposed to the believing Church. The 
idea of ‘free thinking in the European context can be accurately thought of as 
thinking which is free from revelation and free from the confines of God. For 
centuries the secular minded people in the West took advantage of Ibn Rushd 
to attack the catholic Church. It is also noteworthy for the modern Ntw- 
Rushdjansthat the notion of a ‘free thinker‘ has no equivalent in the classical 
Islamic languages. 

w h y  Ibn Rushd and his rationalism had very little impact in the pre-mod- 
ern Muslim world is not because he was unknown to the Muslim thinkers. It 
is because Elam never developed rationalism independent of religion. It is 
amusing and equally alarming to note that in today’s Japan there are people 
who are attempting to practice California Zen, which has gone through an 
evolution from being &n to Atheism to California pseudo-& and now has 



viii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 18.1 

been exported back to Japan! This is exactly what is happening to many 
Muslim intellectuals and social scientists when it comes to the instrumental 
value of Ibn Rushd for singing rationalistic tunes in an effort to mimic the 
west. The personification of such ideas can be easily discerned, for example, 
in a whole army of Turkish intellectuals whose efforts in the resuscitation of 
Averroism are due not to their interest in reviving the Islamic philosophical tra- 
dition, but only to their thirst for westernization. Modern interpretation and 
application of Averroist ideas therefore amounts to an extreme form of west- 
ernization. Transmission of ideas has indeed come around full circle. 

The medieval European application of klamic ideas therefore does no serv- 
ice to the contemporary Muslims, who we suggest must go back to their basics 
on their own for an original and pure epistemological revision. The challenge 
for the Muslim social scientists, therefore, is to overcome the linguistic barri- 
ers and revive, as among the primary tools of philosophy and social science, 
the use of Arabic as well as other classical languages of Islam in which lie 
embedded the great debates which must be read in the originals in a quest for 
attainment of purity of ideals and noble goals of research. 

Ejaz Akram 
Managing Editor