The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences b l .  8, No. 1, 1991 V 

EDITORIAL 

We report with great sadness the death of Victor Danner, a friend of 
Islam and Muslims, a graduate of Georgetown and Harvard, and Chairman 
of the lkpwtment of Near Eastern Languages and CuEtures at Indiana Univer- 
sity, BloomingtOn, Indiana. Darner's latest publication was 7he Zslmnic T d i -  
tion: An Intrrrduction. W have been inviting Muslim anti non-Mush scholars 
from time to time to present their responses to the International Institute 
of Islamic Thought’s caIl for the Islamization of Knowledge. So far, we have 
been very lucky to have had the opportunrty * to listen to the late FazIur Rahman, 
Sayyed H. Nasr, Abdulaziz Sachedina and others who joined this debate 
at the IIIT headquarters. Some of these responses have been published in 
various issues of N I S S .  

Victor Danner treated us to his response on May t5, 1989, when he 
presented his paper, which appears in this issue under the title of “Western 
Evolutionism in the Muslim World,” at the IIIT headquarters. In this article, 
he launches an eloquent plea for the rediscovery and reexploration of the 
various schools of thought in Islam and their subsequent adaptation to the 
needs and circumstances faced by contemporary Muslims. He reminds us 
that past attempts at reform by Muslim intellectuals were based on a readap- 
tation of the traditional techniques of Islam which, when presented in a fresh 
manner as a solution to the needs faced by their own contemporaries, gave 
the doctrine of tawhid “a powerful radiance that had a convincing allure to 
it.” This is followed by an examination of the origins of evolutionary thinking 
in the West, how its eventual acceptance and spread throughout the West 
ultimately displaced Christian beliefs and institutions on a massive scale, 
and how the resulting secular civiIization produced by it is threatening to 
sweep aside and destroy traditional Islamic civilization. In closing, he states 
his hope that a better understanding of this phenomenon among the Muslim 
intelligentsia and the people at large will cause them to wake up to this danger 
and begin to work for the preservation of the ”traditional culture of Islam.” 

Our first article in this issue is by Imaduddin Khalil, and addresses the 
Qur’an’s relationship v i s - h i s  modem science. After ruling out the Qur’an 
as a book or textbook of scientific knowledge, he proceeds to discuss the 
philosophy and aims of science and the basic principles of Islam. He begins 
with the role of humanity on earth as the khaEfuh of Allah, moves on to 
the principles of tawiizun (balance) and taskhir (an Islamic concept stating 
that the world and nature have been made subservient to humanity), and 
closes with the principle of a link between creation and the Creator. Khalil 
views the Qur’anic methodology as being a “methodology of discovery” of 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 

the laws of the universe, and claims that the Qur’an stresses that a completely 
scientific attitude is to be used in the study of physical and metaphysical 
phenomenon, and that it categorically rejects everything that has a negative 
impact on this attitude. 

The Qur’an reveals some facts and provides pointers to others. More 
important than this, however, is the Qur’an’s assertion that the knowledge 
gained from the understanding of scientific facts, discoveries, and formulae 
must be used for the betterment of humanity. It is crucial that this be done, 
for the Qur’an forbids Muslims to withdraw from the usual processes of life, 
and from performing those deeds which it views as being utterly devoid of 
utilitarian value. 

Mona Abul-Fad1 has taken the opportunity to elaborate upon a theme 
which she had introduced in MISS 71, namely the one on developing a Con- 
trasting Episteme. She has taken the initiative by launching a discourse which 
seeks to understand Western civilization through a careful analysis of its 
philosophical foundations and a comparison with their Islamic counterparts. 
By selecting examples from both civilizations’ popular culture and social theory, 
she has sought to pave the way for bridging the gulf which has long divided 
Islam and the West. 

Ilyas Ba-Yunus has undertaken the task of developing an understanding 
of sociological realism based upon the concepts found in the Qur’an and then 
putting them together in order to create an Islamic paradigm of sociological 
realism. He seeks to reveal the Qur’anic insights into the nature of human 
action, the nature of human society, and the relationship between the two. 
Ba-Yunus thinks that the Islamic theoretical view of human action is basical- 
ly indeterministic and that human beings are simultaneously self-centered 
and altruistic, a reflection of the function of the human will as a reflection 
of the dilemmatic nature of man. 

The Muslim community in America and Canada has become a focus 
of many recent studies. In the past, Abdo Elholy and Ilyas Ba-Yunus have 
provided us with insightful studies of Muslim communities in America. In 
this issue, we have included a paper by Mazen Hashem which deals with 
the subject of assimilation on the cultural level. The author has used Gor- 
don’s model of assimilation to project an Islamic position regarding each stage 
of assimilation. He advocates an alternative process of assimilation on the 
level of extrinsic cultural traits, a procedure which applies six filtration pro- 
cedures to the different kinds of American cultural artifacts. Hashem recom- 
mends a counterassimilation position on the level of intrinsic cultural traits. 
He defines the Islamic boundaries of identifcational assimilation with respect 
to its ethnic, national, and racial components, a strategy aimed at establishing 
an Islamic melting pot. 

Saddeka Arebi reviews studies on gender anthropology in the Middle 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Vol. 8, No. 1, 1991 vii 

East. She argues that gender relations are inseparable from broader social 
concerns, and that Western feminists should realize that their premises con- 
cerning the “liberation” of women in the West have proven to be self-defeating 
in the eyes of many Muslim women, because such “liberation” only inten- 
sifies the many crises with which they must deal. Gender anthropology in 
Muslim societies, concludes Arebi, has to explicate the effect of the change 
in woman’s position in terms of the change in gender relations within the 
family. For this, we have to develop a theory of gender which encompasses 
all facets of the Muslim woman’s experience as opposed to one firmly rooted 
in Western hninist thought, be it liberal, Marxist, socialist, or radical feminist. 

Zaidi Sattar shows that the literature on Islamic economics has yet to 
come up with a sufficient amount of research on behavioral relations govern- 
ing investment in physical capital. His paper seeks to contribute to the building 
of an investment model within the framework of an integrated macroeconomic 
model. In his paper, he recognizes investment as a dynamic, rather than a 
static, behavior of the firm in question, thus making it necessary to invoke 
dynamic optimization procedures in order to derive the investment model 
based on the Islamic-ethical value system. 

Under our Reflections section, we are publishing a paper by T a g  J. 
al ‘Alwh- entitled “Taqlid and Ijtihad.” This is a revised version of Yusuf 
Wal DeLorenzo’s English translation of the Arabic original. We are including 
this paper because we hope that the reflections of ajEzqih on the crucial issues 
of taqlid and ijtihad will be very useful for those of our social scientists who 
are involved in the Islamization of their disciplines. We hope to have a series 
of articles on this important issue in the future. 

We have also included two review essays and four book reviews. Our 
19th Annual Conference of the A M S S ,  held during October 1990, and the 
Third Islamic Economics Conference are reported on here, as are several 
sessions of the Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) 24th Annual Con- 
ference. The brief report on the hn&n Tirmih- conference which was recently 
held in the city of Tashkent is a reminder that the Muslim republics in the 
Soviet Union are very eager to join in the intellectual revival of the Muslim 
world. 

In closing, we are glad to announce that the MISS staff has completed 
a cumulative index of the first seven volumes of MISS. It is our hope that 
our readers will take advantage of this new and very useful publication to 
locate those articles which will help them in their research. The subject mat- 
ter has been arranged according to author’s name, title of the paper, and sub- 
ject. The staff will also supply interested parties with Xerox copies of any 
previous article for a small fee. We offer these two new items to our readers 
in an attempt to meet the ever-growing demand, both at home and abroad, 
for earlier articles. 

Sayyid M. Syeed