Contemporary Social Theory: 
Tawhfdf Projections 

Mona M. Abul-Fad1 

Introduction 

Contemporary social theory is conventionally addresed from within 
the dominant tradition of inquiry. Rarely is it subject to a critical 
reflection from beyond its own ken. This is a pity, for the subject matter 
and scope of social theory go beyond the confines of any exclusive 
tradition, while its reach and influence in the global context of our times 
merely reinforce its extended compass. Given the fact that the ambitious 
claims made by social theorists about the univetsality of their project are 
hardly borne out by the reality, any pretensions at exclusivism or 
hegemony would be as anachronistic as they are morally reprehensible. 
The gap between the legitimate ambitions for a universally relevant social 
theory and the mdity of a field grounded in its historical coflstralll . tsand 
cultural prejudices can be filled only by a critical and constructive 
initiative taken from within the profession to constitute a candid, open, 
and reflexive self-encounter. The opportuneness for such an initiative is 
enhanced by its urgency: the discrepancies that follow on the ineptitude 
of our social knowledge can only raise doubts about the relevance of our 
science to our social condition. 

In deploring the tesulting ineptitude and irrelevance, it is possible to 
do so in the voice of a genemlized subject, the universal "I," for surely 
this is one of the ateas of convergence where scholats from different tra- 
ditions could agree. The measure of this agreement can only be gauged 
by remembering that "a science for the study of society" originally went 
beyond its grounding in scientific reason to its justification in a moral 
reasoning. And here, regardless of the grounding of that morality, we find 
another significant area of convergence for scholars working in different 

Mona M. Abul-Fad1 directs the Western Thought Project at the International Iastitute of 
Islamic Thought, Hemdon, Virginia. 



306 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

traditians: wheher we come to the field from an Islamic perspective that 
we strive to recover and Tecoflstruct, or from a diffuse western perspec- 
tive with its overlappine currents, the need is admittedly for a framework 
of inquhy and for new directions, and above all for a more salubrious 
ethos to inform our social knowledge. 

The test of the new science of society would lie in its ability to 
accommodate the universality of a realm of human experience, demon- 
strated in the range and versatility of social phenomena and social 
activity, and the specificity that accmes to such experience, as indeed it 
must in consonance with the principle of temporality and inhemt diver- 
sity. It would also be found in the possibility of the new science 
recovering, or, more aptly, renewing its m o d  mandate to be exercised 
as a profession with a conscience and experienced as knowledge with a 
vocation. For various reasons, some of which are ad- in this essay, 
the recovery of social theory cannot come from within the prevailing 
traditions of inquiry, which, at the very least, call for a radical testructur- 
ing. The elements for this recovery will have to be sought from "with- 
out," although clearly one of the structuring premises in the reorientation 
of social theory will have to call into question the autonomy and boun- 
daries of "traditions" in question. 

1 

The present essay constitutes a step in this general direction of 
rethinking some of the charactektic strains of contemporary social theory 
and it is taken as a prelude to the quest for a new synthesis.' For our 
point of departure and implicit frame of reference, we take a paradigm of 
contrasting epidemics in the conviction that such a paradigm offers a 
more promising venue both for the reconstruction of social theory proper 
and for the opportunity it provides for promoting an intra/intercultural 
discourse as a premise and a field for this reconstruction.2 Ultimately, it 

'This is a revised vexsion of a presentation orifi'nauy submitted at the annual 
convention of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists in 1990. It resumes the 
discussion of the possibility and prospects of inquiry into society and across cultures 
along the hes suggested by a tawhzifipmadii conceived within the framework of a 
contrasting e p h e .  See American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 7 ,  no. 1 (March 
1990): 15-38 and 8, no. 1 (March 1991): 15-44. 

'For some relevant literature broaching social theory with cultural pe tives in 
view, Ernest Gellner's work in general provides a good example. Cuhure, a d  
Pofitics (1987), Gellner's polemics, reflects on a complex of culture, identity, and politics 
in two different communities: one evolving in the umtext of the western intellectual tra- 
dition and the other in that of a Shi'i Muslim cultural tradition. The final essay on 
"Tractus Sociologic&%ilcmphichilosophicus" is a subtle reflection of this thrust. In his Plough, 
Sword and Book: m e  Structure of Human History (Chicago: 1988), the historical dynamic 
of pattern and interrelationships between the detenninants of history, politics (coercion) 



307 

is only such an intellectually open and culturally sensitive field that can 
constitute a realistic plane for a genuine interaction in a global age. Given 
that the social aggregate, whatever its level, canstitUtes the primary unit 
of social inquiry, a better undemding of its various dimensions is 
essential. These dimensions include the much touted categories of 
subjectivity and contextuality, as well as those even more pervasive and 
encompassing, if more ambivalent and more complex categories of 
intrasubjectivity and htercmtextuality, which animate and structure the 
civilizational encounter among world communities through time and 
particularly at this elusive point in time, qualified as "modernity." 

Social themy takes this complex field for its scope of inquiry, 
although it assumes its mandate more in terms of a juxtapository anthro- 
pology of "self" and "other" and is predicated on a semantics of cau- 
sality and explanation rather than a hermeneutics of undetstanding. A 
more humane global order postulates an appropriation of discursive 
categories that transcend exclusionary and hegemonous practices and 
that lay the ground for an alternative anthropology and moral economy. 
At present, this order is more of a realizable postulate than an estab- 
lished actuality. It is against the contom of a paradigm that enhances 
the prospects of this realizability that our reflection on social theory is 
conducted, and it is towards a crystallization of such a paradigm that we 
hope to be contributing. Even though our preliminary summation con- 
cedes initially to a semantics of identity and dichotomy, it does so, 
within the framework of a contrasting epistemics, by redefining its 
points of reference and taking commonality for its shaping ground. 
"Beyond Cultural Parodies and Patodizing Cultures" suggested how this 
process of resituating and restructuring the sociocultural encounter 
affects its premises and its promise. For the benefit of the present 
inquiry, a brief recapitulation on this conceptual strategy may be in 
order. 

One part of the dialogy in a multilateral and openended discom is 
constituted mund the tuwhidiepisteme, and the other around a natural- 
istic humanist counterpart idenWied with the dominant discoutse. Histori- 
cally, the tuwhidi episteme constitutes the submerged nexus in the 
dominant discourse, and the challenge and priority go to elucidating its 
premises and presuppositions. The need for such articulation is prompted 
by the promise that it holds for providing a comctive to the dominant 
discourse, where the self-destructing elements have come to outweigh the 

and cul- ( m p i t ~ h w l e d g e )  m contoured frofn a dological division of hlpr 
perspecbve. The mteaest of Gellner's works partly denve from the range and codnparative 
perspectives he deploys, cularly with re ard to his awareness and fami- with 
aspeas of the b w c  author of me Interpretation of cul- 
tures (New York Basic Books, 1973), who has written more Seictly 8s a cultural an the  

fi Clifford 

pologist. 



308 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

constructive elements of which it was comprised initially in the earlier 
stages of its emergence, which coincided with the birth of the modem 
project for which it set the pace3 

For analytical putposes, the core feat= in each of the epistemes in 
view, the tuwlzidz-and the secular, or the immanentist-cum-humanist, are 
profiled against two corresponding culture types that are projected in their 
affimte historical proximations. These constructs are respectively desig- 
nated as a "median culture type" and an "oscillating culture type." The 
conceptual constructs a* conceived of by way of a discursive strategy in 
order to ovetcome the conventional stereotyping, which emphasizes the 
cleavage between the classical-Biblical West as "self" (Grem-Roman, 
Judeo-Christian) and the Muslim Orient as "other." 

In the shaping discourse that is proposed, whatever formal affinities 
that might arise between the historical West and the Oscillating culture are 
taken for c o n c m c e s  of contingency more than necessity. In other 
words, whatever the convergences between the Oscillating culture type 
and the culture identified with the modem West, these convergences may 
be genealogical but not congenital: they fall within the realm of the 
presently congenial-a "conjonctureff -but not the culturally genetic. 
Conversely, Muslim societies, which historically fall within the range of 
the median culture type, do so by virtue of a founding set of assumptions 
that, in their generality, are potentially accessible and realizable for other 
societies as well. If the affinity is temporal in the one case, that of the 
oscillating culture type and the modem West, it is constitutive in the 
other, as in the case of the Muslim historical community. As such, the 
convergence with the median culture type in this historical community 
maintains its dynamic efficacy only as long as its constitutional affiity 
mnains intact. By the same token, to the extent that they 8te distanced 

3F0r the recwstrudion of the discursive genealogy of modernity, see Hans 
Blumenbexg's epic "The Legitimacy of the Modern Aqe,' in Studies in Contemporary 
German Social Thought, trans. Robe~t Wallace (Cambndge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983 
[1966]). For a useful discussion of his work, see the special issue on Hans Blumenberg 
in History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 4 (November 1993). With the assault on the 
metaphysical foundations of the western tradition conducted by influential postmodern 
currents, the debate on modemity has intensified over the past decade. Among the inter- 
esting initiatives are those taken not so much to salvage the modem project, but to 
distance it fkom the metaph@al sources of the tradition together with an attempt to 
reconcile the contradictions rn the latter. Patrick Madigan's interpretative essays in this 
area, which deserve to be better known, provide an accessible example of this tendency. 
See The Modern Project to Rigor: From Descartes to Nietz,.de (Lanham, MD: University 
Press of America, 1986); Christian Revelation and the Completion of the Aristotelian 
Revolution (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), and Arktot& and His 
Modern Critics: The Use of Tragedy on the Non-Tragic Viiion (Scranton, PA: University 
Press of Scranton and A s s o c i i  University Presses, 1992). This theoretical trope is 
authoritatively dissected, with an optimistic ithy humor, in an internal debate by John 
Nelson, "Desttaying Political Theory in Or& to Save: Or John Gunnell Turns on the 
Western Traditiq" in Tradition, Interpretation and Science: Political Theory in the 
American Academy, ed. J. Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 



Abul-Fadk Contemporary Social Themy: Tuwhiif~bjections 309 

from their constitutively structuring matrix, median-proximate societies 
become equally vulnerable to the currents of the Oscillating variant. In all 
cases, however, assuming the intrinsic universality of both these culture 
types and their conditioned/conditioning historicity, their differential 
implications for their relevant historieq/communities may be relative, but 
they are by no means morally equivalent. 

The effects of a civilizational dynamic drawing on the median culture 
type are, in principle, more likely to be consistent with the well-being of 
the societal aggregate. We take this to be the case in view of a grounded 
referentiality, securing the multidimensionality and the proportion that 
characterize the cognitive and valuational sources of that culture type. To 
explain this, we need to touch briefly on the idea of the bearings of a 
culture, a compass that assures it meaning, coherence, and directionality, 
or purpose. We distinguish between a horizontal and a vertical bearing. 
These bearings 8te defined initially in relation to the centrality or the 
marginality of the cosmic axis and its nature. A culture in which the 
concept of revealed guidance from beyond a human source is central is 
qualified primarily by its vertical bearings, wheteas a culture in which 
this concept is peripheral to its constitution, incidental, or arbitrarily com- 
posed, is qualified preeminently by its horizontal bearings. Given its 
transcendental axis, the median culture type is assured a "verticality" that 
cuts through the various common categories (nominal, cognitive, 
substantial, formal, spatial, temporal) in a manner that is not available to 
a counter culture type (the oscillating culture), which is defined primarily 
by its "horizontal bearings." As a consequence of this horizontality, the 
boundaries of social knowledge (values, cognition, meaning) in the 
oscillating culture type will stop short in the here-and-now, the world of 
immanence, whence history comes to an end. In the other case, these 
boundaries extend to include both this world and "the hereafter," the 
beginning and the beyond as well as the immediate and the immanently 
tangible that unfolds in time, in the in-between. 

In the same way, while the limits of human mponsibility and 
morality stop short at the boundaries of this life-world for all in the 
horizontally pitched culture type, in the median culture type the circuit of 
cansciousness and the span of human moral accountability go beyond the 
here-and-now only to redound reflexively upon it and to "calibrate" 
immediate human conduct and worldly attitudes or to qualify history. In 
short, where the end of history is imminent in the oscillating culture type, 
in the median culture type no such end is foxseeable in the life-world, 
not because history is perceived to be cyclical ad injiniturn as opposed to 
a punctuated linearity, nor because of a myth of the etemal retum, but 
because with the vertical bearings of that culture type, the line does not 
come to an abrupt and arbitrary end on the horizontal plane of mottality. 



310 The Americau Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

The meaning, relevance, and efficacy of the paradigms of social 
inquiry are a function of the dimensions they comprise as much as of the 
way they might be used in specific contexts. Invoking such dimensions 
as "interiority and exteriority," the immanent and the t ranscent ,  the 
hereand-now and the hemfter, as much as consciomess and society, 
can thus hardly be taken for a metaphysical diversion. The levels of 
experiential reality and the multidimensionality of the human experience 
have a d iwt  beating an the field of social theory, a fact that is not easy 
to grasp in the absence of a viable soutce for an integrated This 
is specially the case if we recall that, in addition to the categories 
suggested above (subjectivity, contextuality, etc.), the staples of conven- 
tional social theory include rationality and legitimacy: which cannot be 
separated from an ontology and a praxiology and which are all central to 
human agency and social order. 

Where the paradigm of inquiry fails to comprehend critical dimen- 
sions of human cognition and valuation, or where it fails to relate these 
adequately to being or to the "life-world," it comes to operate against 
inherent constfaints that reflect inevitably on the quality and practical 

'It is interesting to note that the modern German debate on reforming the university, 
which is taken to be the amditim for a renascent community (cf. Islamhtim of KMwl- 
edge goals) focuses on the centraliifr of philosophy in structuring and guiding the 
academy, i.e., the modern empirical kipl ines  of scientific inquiry, since it is taken to 
orient research and to impart a unified and unifving potential to knowledge in society. See 
J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Culnrral Criticism und the Historian's Debate, ed. 
and trans. shierry W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), chapter 4, where 
the theme "The Idea of the University" is taken from Karl Jasper's o r ig i i  thesis in Die 
Idee &r Uniwrsitur (Heidelberg: l%l). It is the elusivenesS of this search for an inte- 
grating principle that provides the aaimus for a paradi seekinglrefuting debate in con- 
tempomy western thought verging on contingency &&) and ambivalence (Bauman). 
See Thomas Fleming, "The Part and the Whole" in The Politics of Human Nature (New 
Bruuswick, NJ Transaction, 1988); Thomas Pangle, Rebirth of Classical Political 
Rationafism (Chi : Chicago Univers Press, 1989); Geoffrey Hawthorne, Enlighten- 
ment und D e s p i x e  History of Socic?Theory (Cambridge: 1987); Rorty, Philosophy 
und the Mirror of Nature, and Agnes Heller, "From Hermeneutics in the Social Sciences 
to the Hexmeneutics of the Social Sciences," Theory und Society, no. 18 (1989): 291-322. 

'For the discourse on r a t i d t y  and le itimacy, the Weberian academy continues to 
deconstruct and unravel the uniquely occ i i ed  dimensions of the central sociologica~ 

he developed. W. Schluchter, Ihe Rise of Western Rutionulkm: Mar Weber's - i  Dew pmenful History (University of California, 1985 [1981]), trans. w. introduction by 
Guenther Roth and Richard Munch, UndersrMding Modernity: Toward a New Perspec- 
tive Going beyond Durkheim und Weber (London: Routledge, 1988); Thomas Burger, Mar 
Weber's Concept of Theory Formation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), esp. 
"hstscript," 181-230. Susan Helrman, Weber, the Ideal Type and Contemporary Social 
Theory (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) is more concerned with the 
pblems of objectivity in comparative cultural contexts and the possibility of a post- 
positiviSt social theory; Franco Ferraroti, Mar Weber und the Crisis of Western 
Civilizdon (New York and London: Associated Faculty Press, 1987), esp. chapten 4 and 
5, which retains the focus on the historicist dimension of these concepts. A less amven- 
tional line of inquiry updating the founding father with frontier ideology was opened up 
by Alan Sica, Weber, Irrationality und the Social Or&r (Bebkeley: University of Cali- 
fornia, 1988). 



Abul-Fadk Contemparmy Social Theory: Tavhfdf Rejections 311 

cansequences of social theory. One such a m  of "scientific lag" recurs 
persistently in the study of Muslim societies in general, and particularly 
in a d d d n g  sociocultd dynamics in the predominantly Muslim Middle 
M.6 The frustrations experienced frequently by Westerners in under- 
standing events in that part of the world are hardly due to their being 
beyond the pale of rationality and resistant to acculturation to standards 
of legitimacy. But rather, assuming the good faith belying intent, it is 
because the "monochromic" paradigm,' within which they continue to 
recotlstruct their worlds, operates within the stunted and partial confines 
of an arbitrary and biased definition of both rationality and legitimacy. 

At present, the dominant tradition that structures the discourse within 
and beyond social theory is shaped against the oscillating culture type. It 
thrives on patterns of cognition and a scale of values that promote a 
delusory sense of abundance and variability when, in fact, it replicates a 
welter of monochromes. Introducing a mode of discourse drawing on the 
sources and assumptions of the median culture type would be a means of 
illuminating and extrapolating on some of these propositions and 

%ere is something to su est that there is a parallelism between the scientific world- 
view of the modern age Jts p0wer;Political practices dong the lines developed in 
Edward Said's thesis on "Orientdim and Abdul Wahab Messiri's concept of an 
"Imperialist E ology," American Journal of Zslamic Social Sciences 11, no. 3 (Fall 
1994): 404-1 F , although one would want to qualify Zygmunt Baumau's cryptic cynicism 
when he observes that "the practice of science is in its jnuermc$ structure no different 
from that of state politics; both aim at a monopoly over a dormnant territory, and both 
reach their aims throu the device of inclusion/exclusian ..." Modernity and Ambivalence 
(Ithaca, Ny. Cornell t? niversity Press, 1991), 8 61. L 
mode of civilization (i.e., capitalism) and to the sociocul encounter (i.e., Third World) 
may be seen to implicit1 constitute Giddens' roject as in Z7ze Nation-State und Violence 

: University ofCalifornia Ress, 198) and explicitly prompts such critical over- 
views (BerkelE. o the field as with Timothy Luke, Social Theory and Modernity (Sage Publica- 
tions, 1990), esp. chapter 8. 

3 social theory to a perceived 

'But it is changing-even in theology. From its origins in the history and @ilcwphy 
of the natural sciences in the sixties, the paradigm debate cau an in the socd sciences 

retical W i ,  especially in the domain of relating values to history and social chan e. 
see the proceedings of an international Fpos ium jointly sponsoted 9 the ~ t u t e  !or 
Advanced Studies of Religion at the Umversity of Chicago and the DwMty School for 
Ecumenical Research at Tubingen in Purudigm Change in Theology, ed. David l ' k y  and 
Hans K u y  (New York The Crossoad Publishing Co., 1989). The renowned Catholic 
theologian s recent writings on globalii presume this paradigmatic shift, which reflects 
a converging culture in ce- social science and theology circles. For its discussion in 
the context of developmental studies, see Ihe Center Cannot Hold. For an overview on 

able trends in protestant theological circles, with a special focus on social theory, zb% Marshall ruad Rober Vandervmen, ed.,Social Science in Christian Perspective 
(Lanham, MD and London: University Ras of America, 1988). Cf. analogous riodic 
mergences within social science itself, as between Freudians and Marxists (kmm, 
Marcuse, and the "critical school") or between Marxiam and Weberiaas (cf. William Roff, 
ed. Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning, [Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 1987]), which provide the oscillating culture type with its moments of reprieve, 
veritable spaces of incubation, in anticipation of new currents a d  directions. 

and, toward the end of the eighties, had reached theology, w P ere it triggered fresh theo- 



312 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

exploring the possibility for a more salutary moral economy.8 In the 
process, the parameters of social inquiry would also be expanded and 

In the perspective of a contrasting episteme, theory and episteme are 
means for identifjing as much as for construing or representing social 
reality at any given moment. Thence it is logical and empirically consis- 
tent to expect a degtee of correspondence between cultme types and the 
prototypical vehicles for repducing, disseminating, and controlling 
knowledge, values, and power in society. Central to the episteme and the 
cultUte alike is the worldview that marks the divide between two possible 
worlds and opens up a range of alternatives and options for conducting 
social theory. Since it is the oscillating culture type that currently prevails 
and defmes the norms for the practice of contemporary social theory, it 
qualifies as an apt subject of inquiry. While conceding it a “procedural 
preference,” we will set the vantage point for our critical reflection 
against its obverse in the median culture type. 

Adopting contrasting cultUte types as a strategic access and a 
heuristic device is, moteover, an exercise that is ultimately justified to the 
extent that it provides those analytical insights and synthesizing pempec- 
tives that are needed to critique and reconstruct contemporary social 
theory. In what way would a social theory conceived and practiced in the 
median culture differ from its current practice and conception? To answer 
this question, we need to identify the premises and founding assumptions 
or formative currents and practices that inform current social theory as it 
is practiced in the advanced outposts of the academy, and then see how 
they are replicated at different levels of inquiry and how they come to 
affect the various a m  of intellectual and academic activity concerned 
with the study of human and social phenomena. This, however, is a 
project that will only be broached indirectly in this essay. In doing so, we 

reinvigorated. 

%deed, it must not be for otten that the origin of social theory, as it developed in 
the nineteenth centmy, lay in t%e quest for a new moral basis for society following the 

of traditional authority and the pervasive ‘‘breakdown in cwnections” cf. BNIX $EE A New Science: The Breakdown in Connections and the New Sociobgy (New 
York and M o d  Oxford University Press, 1989). Whether in the continental tradition 
of positivist sociolog (i.e., Auguste Comte, COWS & philosophie positive) or in the more 
empirical tradition ofpolitical economy (i.e., Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentimen&), 
the founding fathers have all left their contributions in this ami. For a relevant inquity 
into the place of religion and moral values in the founding traditions of western social 
science, see C o d e  LeRoy, “Religion in the Social Sciences and the Modern World” 
(Ph.D. diss., Chicago University, 1977). The general tenor remains very much as Robert 
Nisbet put it in his introduction to his compact classic The Sociological Tradition (Lon- 
don: Heinemam, 1966), in which he pointed out that the “ma’or ideas in social sciences 
invariably have roots in moral aspirations.” For present trends, see Nonna Haan et al., 
Interpretive Social Science us Moral Inquiry (New York Columbm University Press, 
1983); cf. Mona Abul-Fadl, “The New Sociology: Gender and the Moral Economy” in 
Proceedings of the 21s Annual AMSS Conference (Hemdon, VA: AMSS and IIlT, 1993), 
242-58. 



Abul-Padl: Contemporary Social Theory: TawhkfiProjedons 313 

assume that central to these conceptions is a worldview that permeates the 
understanding of society at a given moment and serves to structure and 
shape the disciplines in its light? While clearly the shape and pursuit of 
social theory may not be conditioned solely by the prevailing worldview, 
and while the underlying assumptions constitute a part of that worldview 
as much as its product, yet the theory and the episteme together should 
be seen in the context of that interdependence.'o 

Taking our cue from a holistic pexeption, it will thus be possible 
first to outline the underlying characteristics of the dominant paradigm 
and then to consider its operational implications. This will be done by 
selecting areas/moments at the interface of the civilizational encounter to 
highlight the nature and significance of a transition where "self and other" 
cmssed." Eventually, this is the crossing and transition that must be 

m e  current debate on modernity has cast doubt on the merits and Viability of this 
worldview as much as it has thrown its features into relief. Coming from the pen of a 
partisan, see Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse ofModernity (Cambndge and 
Oxford Polity Press, 1992), who attempts to salvage what was left of a radical critique 
that set the pace for much of the present debate. See also Max Horkheher and 'Iheodor 
Adomo, m e  Dialectic ofEnlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York Continuum, 
1993 [1969]). For one of the enduring anatomies of "the mind of the Enlightenment," as 
the soul of the modem worldview, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy ofthe Enfighfen- 
ment (Princeton, NI: Princeton University Press, 1979 [1951]), 3-36. Cf. "The Concept 
of Enlightenment" in Horkheimer and Adorno, Ihe Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3-42. In 
The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 
Dorothy Ross reviews the imported and adapted models of litical science, sociology, 
and political economy specifically in this context of a &erentiated "discovery of 
modernity" on both sides of the Altantic. 

"Cf. ". . . 'the polar night of icy darkness and harshness' that Weber saw as the 
inevitable accompaaunent of a modern rationalized and routinized socie does not merely 
require socid scientific explanation . . . a routinized and regu- &worlci is itself a 
requirement for a positivistically conceived science of society," in view of which a 
critique of the concepts and categories of such a social science 1s necessarily also "a cri- 
tique of the covertly manipulative precepts and practice of the society in which we are 
living and of the instrumentally rational worldview which tends to legitimize it." Terence 
Ball, "The Ontological Presuppositions and the Political Consequences of a Social 
Science," in Changing Social Science: Critical Theory and Other Critical Perspecrives, 
ed. Daniel Sabia, Jr. and J. Wallulis (Albany: SUNY, 1983). It is this web of dialectic 
and interrelatedness that sums up the premise and purpose of our point of departme in the 
direction of a critical reconstruction of both social theory and the 'umr&icontext that 
constitutes its setting as much as its object. 

"The attempt to relate a sociologicd perspective to a civilizationai one, or to evolve 
the latter fmm the former, is not typical of mainstream (American) sociology, although 
it is at the root of the K h a l d h h  scholarly tradition of inquiry into the phenome- of 
a1 'wnr& a2 bashan: Recent trends in western sociological ScholaFShip on urbaruzat ion 
may constitute a revival of this tradition, especially as it can also draw on sisnificant 
internal sources of varying subtraditions, whether we think of work by Mumford, Waller- 
stein, Braudel, or others. Janet Abu Lughod's bold and challe ing synthesis, exemplary 
for its originality, methodology, range (and bibliography)-&Tre European Hegemony: 
The World System 1250-1350A.D. (Oxford University Press, 1989)-is in thisatetion. 
The earlier work of Pitrim A. Sorokin in the area of cultWsociologica1 symbims is of 
special interest to a tawhidt-sociological view. Cf. Social and Cultural Dynamics (New 



314 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

revisited, examined, confronted, and reappropriated in a transcendent 
trajectory that is aimed at more than a "fusion of horizons."'2 

2 

The integrality of a culture field and its internal coherence might best 
be indicated by tracing the philosophical antecedents of the social 
sciences. The aim is to demonstrate how social theory, far from being an 
isolate in a complex of isolates, constitutes an integral part of an epis- 
temic field to which it contributes and from which it derives its own 
c ~ h e m c e . ' ~  This "organic" affinity provides a useful diagnostic/analy- 
tical category for asce-g some of the traits of theory that 8te not 
exclusive to it, but are germane to knowledge produced in that culture 
frame. At the same time, identifying these traits within their "family 
cluster," in itself p e h p s  constitutes the single most plausible argument 
as to why a perspective coming from the median culture is needed. It 
serves to show that the particular points of emphasis that lend contem- 
porary social theory its style and that structw its modes of thought and 
research are not "given," as hithetto assumed by an objectivist social 
science, but rather are self-imposed elements more aptly acknowledged 
as elements in a socially/historically constructed univelse." It would be 

Yorlc American Book Co., 1937), Contemporury Sociological Theories (New York 
Harper and Row, 1928), and Sociological Theories of To& (Harper and Row, 1966). 

*See H. G. Gadamer, Truth und Method, tr. Sheed and Ward (New York Crossroads, 
1975), 27@2. Although a dialogy conceived in the framework of a tuwWiTepisteme has 
its distinctive points of de and ends, there is much in the Gadamerian hermeneutics 
that could provide a f e r t r m d  of exchange. So too with some of the current initia- 
tives coming from feminist theory. Cf. Lorraine Code, whut Can She Know: Feminist 
%ory ond the Corr\tnrction of Knowle&e (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 
1991), who takes up this tbeme-a "fusion of horizons"-in proposing a dialogic model 

"'Ihe notion of ap organizipg w p p t  nmhg throughout a knowledge fiild and 
1endingacertainamsde.n cy to Its vanow d e v t s  may have gained cmency in the 
rnehtkm& 'cal debate following an the Kuhillan revelations in his classic, The Structure 
of Scientific Rewlutions. But inal i n s i i  at the inception of social thewizing were 
not wantbg, as the opening m% to the classical paradigm in political sociology would 
suggest. See Andrew Jan= Politics Md Purudigms: Changing Theories of Change in 
Social Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford Universiq Press, 1986), 7. This same underlying 
continuity in the spirit of an epoch, 90 noticeable m the heyday of positivism, is currently 
evidenced in the discursive" climate of a postmodem academy of fluidity and "tra~~i- 
tiomality." Cf. Jane Flax, Thinking Frugments: Psychounu&sis, Feminism, und Post- 
modcmism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of 
California Press, 1990), chapters 1 and 6. 

of inquiry. See pages m 2 0 1  and chapter 7. 

"For a pithy and irited debate of this theme, see the special section "collsttuctin 
the Social," History 3the Humun Sciences 7 ,  no. 1 (February 1994): 81-123, whic! 
brhp refreshing pespe&ves and mines the insights developed nearly three decades 
whes in the piowering work by Beger and Thomas L u c h ,  The Social Construction 



Abul-Fadk Contemparary Social Theory: Tawhdihjections 315 

misleading to defer to them passively as simply the predilection of the 
times, a kind of impressible manifestation of the universal Zeitgeist, just 
as it would be misleading to impute them to the creation of alienated or 
troubled geniuses in society. Rather, whatever the specific or changing 
traiti of contemporary social theory," they are embedded in the stmctme 
of an episteme and discourse that have defined the chamcter of the 
modem West and that can be i n f e d  from any point of entry or access 
to it.16 In the following, I will attempt a simplified condensation of the 
shaping cultwe of science in the direction of an all-inclusive empiricism 
that, for specifically American ~rasons," reached its apogee in American 
social science. 

Philosophical Antecedents of 
Contemporary Social Science 

The empirical or "logical positivist" character of the social sciences 
can best be understood in light of major philosophical trends in modem 
philosophy and n a d  science.'* The outcome was the establishment of 

of Reality (New York Doubleday, 1966). Writing on modes of thought about culture and 
variauts of relativism, Stephen Tumer ("Constructing the Social," p. 109-15) refers to 
James Bryant Conant's idea that "the science of a cular perdsetved as a kind of 
reception device which received and Bccepted ideas for which it was ready, so 
that a scientific idea bom out of its time woul need to wait until the discipline had 
changed emu for new ideas to be received," which may well be a tribute to a spiritual 
mentor as we i? as a suggestive insight for contemporary Muslim thinkem puzzling over 
some aspects of their own intellectual legacy (Kuhn was assistant professor to Conant). 

"With a few notable exceptions, the preoccupation with the metatheoretical level of 
i n q u ~  continues to echo a Continental mystique (malaise, lust, or a scha&nfieud), 
notab cultivated in critical and post-Marxist strains as Anthony Giddens and Jonathan 
Tumer point out in surveying the proliferation of approaches in a succinct overview to 
the s tabof-hmt  in the field, in Social Theory Today (Cambridge and Oxford, UK: B a d  
and Blackwell, Poli Press, 1987), introductioa Jeffrey Alexander's (ibid., pp. 11-57) 
discussion of the fii% fKlm the pfspecf've of the enduring "Centrality of the Classics" 
for both em iricists and postpaativists is itself sug estive of the degree of obfuscation 
and ambivJence at the roots of amtemporaxy socia& science. 

the most e m p a s i n g ,  as 
to the subject in the w r i t i i  of 

The Hidden Agenda of 
Modernity (New York The Free Ress, 1990); cf. "Rediscovering History," Encounter 

histecentariginalcontri- 

36, no. 1 (1971). 

"Dorothy Ross, The Origins of Arnericun Social Science. 

'%e literature on positivism iu the socialscimces is iuunense and varied and cuts 
actoss generatans: from the latter hventies with the formation of the "Vienna Circle" to 
the pnxent polemics. Cf. Otto Neurath, Foundorions of the Social Sciences: International 
Encyclopuediu of Unified Science, vol. 2 (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1944); 
Anthony Giddem, "Positivism and Its Critics," in A HirtoryTSociologicul Andysis, eds. 



316 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

an ideal model of knowledge, which thereby excluded all forms that did 
not meet its strict criteria. Each discipline was thus left with the option 
of adopting this epistemological model or perishing. The "ideal" model, 
of cotme, was the scientific/empirical one. The immense success of 
science in the modem period propelled this paradigm of knowledge to a 
position of preeminence amongst all other forms of knowledge and soon 
t e n d e d  them obsolete, vestiges of a ptescientific age. Hence, humanity's 
inquiry into the nature of its social world was forced to adopt this 
empirical model as its epistemological basis. 

However, it was not just the success of the scientific enterprise that 
cleared the way for the empirical model, but rather the self-criticism that 
philosophy underwent also contributed to this hegemony. One must =all 
that the social sciences were at one time not "sciences" but were areas of 
philosophy. If philosophy can be shown to be an illegitimate practice, or 
at least can be testticted in its scope, then all fields relating to the 
investigation of the social world must find a new home. 

The seeds of philosophy's demise are to be found in British 
empiricism, which reached its climax with David Hume. Beginning with 
the Greeks, the heart of philosophy has identified with metaphysics and 
with its baggage of metaphysical concepts. Essentially, British empiricism 
destroyed the validity of metaphysical knowledge by its claim that 
experience is the origin of all of our knowledge. Locke denied the notion 
of innate ideas by holding that all knowledge comes from our senses and 
is "built up" into more complex ideas. Locke said that "secondary 
qualities" (i.e., color, warmth, smell) were not actually in the objects 
themselves but instead existed in our subjectivity. However, he held that 
the "primary qualities" (i.e., extension, mass) were inherent in objects and 
therefore retained the metaphysical notion of substance (i.e., something 
existing independently from us). Nonetheless, he was not a through and 
through empiricist, as he maintained that intuitive knowledge (i.e., such 
as our existence and the principle that all men are born equal) is valid. 
Berkeley extended the scope of this argument by claiming that the 
primary qualities were also subjective in nature, thus denying independent 

(New Yak 1978); Russell Keat, "The Critique of Positivism," in Z%e Politics of Social 
Theory: Habermas, Freud and the Critique of Positivism (chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1981). A classic and concise statement is A. J. Ayer's "Introduction" in Logical 
Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York Free Press, 1959), which condenses his fame- 
making book in the English-speaking world, Lmguge,Truth and Logic (London: Gollanz, 
1936). Another one is Herbert Feigl, "The Origin and Spirit of Logical Positivkn," in The 
Legacy of Logical Positivism, ed. Peter Achinstein and Stephen Barker (Baltimore: Johns 
Ho kins, 1969), 3-24. Brin ing a less conventional civilizational, d o d t u r a l ,  and t h e  
so&cal dimension to the fore is Eric Voegelin in "Positivism and Its Antecedents," in 
From Enlightenment to Rewlution, ed. John Hallowel (Durham, NC: Duke University 
Press, 1975), 74-109. 



Abul-Fadk Contemporary Social Theory: TawhiifiTPmjecticms 317 

existence to things (i.e., substance). With the exception of ourselves and 
Gad, all knowledge is knowledge of sense perceptions. 

This "purging" of nonempirical elements was continued by Hume 
(17 1 1 -76), who brought empiricism to its extreme. Like Berkeley, Hume 
denied a reality "behind sense impressionS. He claimed that all we can 
know are "bundles" of sense impressions. Furthermore, we have no 
knowledge of ourselves or God, for seflse impressions do not g m t  us 
these notions. Similarly, notions of necessity and causation are equally 
bogus. Hume said: "Where is the necessaly connection?" Certainly not in 
experience, where all we find is a series of sense impressions. According 
to Hume, we take frequent associations of some of these impressions and 
form "psychological habits." For instance, it is simply a habit of mind to 
think the sun will rise tomorrow; there is no necessity involved here. This 
extreme empiricism led to skepticism, whereby all "matter of fact 
knowledge" (i.e., empirical knowledge) is reduced to associations and 
probabilities. Math and logic alone survive Hume's devastating critique, 
for they deal not with "matters of fact" but with logical relations between 
facts. Thus comes his famous statement regarding metaphysics, moral 
science theology, and even the ~ t ~ ~ i l  sciences, namely, that we throw all 
such works on these subjects "into the flames for they contain nothing but 
supedtion." 

Yet, the undeniable mults of science cast doubts on the extent of 
Hume's critique. Thus Kant, after presupposing that we do in fact have 
scientific knowledge, strove to show how we can have this knowledge 
(i.e., a priori and synthetic, knowledge that is both certain, like math and 
logic, but also says something about the world, unlike the analytical 
truths of math and logic). The consequence of this salvaging of science, 
however, placed limits on the human mind, namely, our knowledge 
extends only to our experience and not beyond. Concepts such as sub- 
stance, cause, and unity apply to experience, and any further application 
is unwarranted. Hence reason knows no metaphysical truths, and the 
realm of moral knowledge is reduced to "practical knowledge" or faith. 
Thus, while Kant saved scientific knowledge from skepticism, he also 
teconfirmed Hume's skeptical position with regard to metaphysical 
speculation. 

A final blow was given to the notion of nonempirical truths by J. S. 
Mill. Mill maintained that logic was not deductive in n a t w  but rather 
was inductive. More specifically, the syllogism is not a case of inferring 
via deduction from one premise to another. The premise, according to 
Mill, is originally an inductive (empirical) truth such as: 1. All men are 
mortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Therefore, Socates is mortal. We teason 
inductively from men being mortal to the specific case of this particular 
man (Socrates) being mortal. Logic is no more than a helpful tool for 
organizing our inductions. Mill also concluded the same about mathemat- 



318 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

ics. Hence, all knowledge is from experience, even the relations between 
"matters of fact." 

The pt.eceding paragraphs trace the steps involved in the decline of 
speculative (metaphysical) philosophy. What remains are empirical facts, 
by which we can form generalizations by way of induction. Most impor- 
tantly, the facts must be observable sense data, in other words, veri- 
fiable thtough experience. Logical positivism was the epitome of this 
empirical/scientific trend in modem philosophy. For logical positivism, 
philosophy is metaphysics and metaphysics is supemtition; thus, only 
science (empiricism) is valid knowledge. But while present-day method- 
ology of the social sciences is most definitely empirical, it should not 
simply be equated with logical positivism, for from the beginning the 
latter was riddled by contradictions and was actually antagonistic to the 
actual practice of the natural sciences insofar as the hypothetical/ 
deductive model of the natural sciences were, in principle, d e d  out by 
a strict empiricism. Them always remains an element of rationalism in 
any empiricism. Theory, which is so essential for the natural sciences, is 
a necessary rational element that cannot be ignored without an inevitable 
anarchy of unrelated bare facts arising. 

As the social sciences were expelled out of the dying body of specu- 
lative philosophy, they sought refbge in the epistemological canons of the 
natural sciences. The demise of metaphysics went hand in hand with the 
ascension of science. Thus, it could be plausibly argued that the social 
sciences did not bomw a model from another "discipline" in the sense 
of an analogy. For instance, the evolutionary model that the social 
sciences bomwed from biology was not the same as the adoption of a 
certain type of epistemological methodology. Issues of methodology must 
be kept separate from issues of theories or models. Yet, them was a 
connection between the transformation of the social sciences into 
empirical sciences and the application of the evolutionary model to poli- 
tical and social theory. The reductionism that was a consequence of a 
radical empiricism made these disciplines receptive to a biological model. 
Ultimately, the "unity of science" proponents desired a complete 
reduction of all sciences to physics, so in the end, social phenomenon 
would be explained in terms of physical laws. 

There was thus a certain element of ruthlessness about the epis- 
temological project that came to define the terrain of social knowledge 
and to make it an integral part of an emerging pattern of inquiry and 
subject it to its ubiquitous underlying presuppositions. The general 
autonomy of a cultural tradition would seem to be a s s u d  by the 
pervasiveness of its logic. This thesis has two implications for asesing 
contemporary social theory. The one would suggest that radical testtuc- 
turing calls for going beyond the closed citcle of positivism and its 
intemal countercultures and justifies a recourse to alternative epidemic 



Abul-Fadl: Contemporary Social Theory: Tawhiifi Projections 319 

modes drawn from beyond that circle, such as that proposed in the 
median culture type.19 The other implication calls for a holistic framework 
for investigating social theory, which would make it possible to engage 
it as part of a more encompassing and inclusive epistemic discourse. With 
this provision in view, the question is whether or not it is possible to 
identify the elements of a more pervasive worldview in the western 
cultural sphere that transcends social theory and that may have its mts 
in a heritage antedating the modem era. Clearly, this pushes back the 
boundaries of inquiry in ways hardly conceivable if social theory were 
technically confined to a closed, self-contained spectrum, beginning and 
ending with itself. 

Ems and Thanatos, Or, the Cult of Conflict 

The dominant worldview sees in conflict and antagonism the stuff of 
the social otder.” Indeed psychoanalysis, which remains largely domi- 
nated by its Freudian origins, candidly sums up the lifeprinciple as one 
of perpetual struggle whether at a primary level for survival, or at a 
secondary level (the libidinal) for fulfillment?’ This struggle, which ani- 
mates the individual psyche, is externalized and pmjected on temporal 
society in all its sectors to constitute its civilizational life-force. Inherent 
to this semantic field is a whole gamut of concepts and symbols 
suggestive of the stmggle: conflict, control, manipulation, confrontation, 
domination, repression. Psychoanalysis is a gateway to social theory. The 
other grand pottal is that of economics, which, even before the bmk-  
through in psychoanalysis, has been the arena defined by scarcity. It too 
was targeted for a competitive and conflictual mode from the outset, with 

‘9 have addressed this isme in Paradigms in Political Science Revisited, which was 
published as a separate supplement to American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (Sep- 
tember 1989) and in “Beyond Cultural Parodies,” American Journal of Islamic Social 
Sciences 8, no. 1 (March 1991): 15-44. 

2%. Collins, Conpict Sociology (New York Academic Press, 1975); L Cosea, The 
Functions of Social Conflict (New York Free Press, 1956); Ralf Dahrendorf, CIass and 
CIass Comct in Indimrial Society (Stanford, CA: Stanfoni University Press, 1959); A. 
Giddens, ”The Nation-State and Violence,” in A Contemjwrary Critique of Historical 
Materialism, vol. 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). 

“James Strachey, tram., Civilization and Its Discontents (New York Noxton, 1961), 
for all its compactness, provides an exemplary and graphic illustration of this mntlictual 
and antagonistic essence that is integral to the natural world and that carries over to guilt- 
ridden man and his cultural artifices. In E m  and CiviliZarion (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 
Herbee Marcuse attempts to synthesize Marx and Freud as he negotiates his way through 
the same tradition, notwithstanding his disillusionment and soul-searching for a way out 
in a resuscitated Dionysian aesthetic. Habemas takes up the cue in ”psychic Themidor 
and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard 
Bemstein (oxford: Basil and Blackwell, Polity Press, 1985). 



320 The Americau Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

its own paraphernalia of suggestive concepts and with an emphasis on a 
power political dimension. The notoriety achieved in one field or the 
other should by no means rob other more autochthonous disciplines (i.e., 
sociology and anthropology) of their sham of originality in this field 
Here again, the key to the conception and growth of the disciplines from 
the outset lay in the conflictual and power-centric animus. The literature 
is infected with this virus, regardless of the field and the ideological 
assumptions of its observer. Studies are given to exploring and projecting 
the ways and means to contain this conflict or to attidating it and 
exposing it in anticipation of its manipulation and control. Depending on 
the ideological perspective, the need is to ensure the maximum f&ms 
for conflicting interests without having the system founder and, perhaps, 
to seek means of mediating the conflicts that emerge. Elsewhere, research 
is busy anticipating, gauging, ptecipitating, or investing in the conflicts 
and antagonisms that serve to discredit the system and prove the 
inevitability of its destruction-presumably to make way for a con- 
sistently superior order. 

This element of what might be properly construed as a social Dar- 
winism may have reached its apogee in the Marxian formulation of social 
theory.= There, the class struggle is the agent of a dialectical historical 
materialism and, as such, it comes to be aptheosized into the catalyst of 
social tmnsformatiian and the benefactor of an alienated humanity. In 
giving the priority to the dialectics of the forces of material production 
over those of biological repduction, it retains the essence of the con- 
flictual and r e p d v e  dynamic inherent in the ongoing battle between E m  
and Thanatos for the soul of civilization. The prize remains that of 
domination and mastery rather than sheer primitive survival or "enlight- 
ened progress." This ethical code permeates the mainstream and becomes 
the mainstay of social theory as the cult of domination comes to be 
eulogized under various norms and guises and is practiced and legitimated 

%terestingly, a recent prospectus on Marxism in the nineties is conducted against 
a Darwinian perspective; see Alan Carling, "'Pessimism of the Intellect, Optjmism of the 
Will": A Reconstructed Marxist Theory for the 199O's?," History of the Human Sciences 
6, no. 2 (May 1993): 115-20. Marx's o m  "orientalism" and defence of imperialism reflect 
and anticipate the culture that favored the success of Darwinisn. An even more coqenial 
trans-Atlantic culture hastened its appeal and spread at the turn of the century, to comcide 
with the iastitutidization of sociology and anthropology. See R. Hofstadter, Social Dm- 
winism in Americm Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1955) and John Greene, "Darwin 
and the Social Sciences" in Donvin and the Modern World View (Baton Rouge: Louisiana 
State Universily,l961). 'Ihrough his unconventional work, Bowler has established his 
authority in the field Darwinism (1993); The Non-Danvinim Revolution (1988); The 
Eclipse of Damtinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decndes around 1900. 
Elsewhere, he applies his eclectic interests as a naturai scientist and historian to recon- 
struct the identity and self-imag(ia)ing in Victorian England thtuugh an imagined past that 
would justify them in their turn of the century empire. The Invention of Progress (Oxford: 
Basil and Blackwell, 1989). 



Abul-Fadk Contempary Social Themy: Tmhidi Projections 321 

accordingly. The art of civilization excels in deceit. As social theory itself 
becomes its subtle exponent, the spade is no longer called a spade. Instead, 
so many names ate devised for the cult as to smother its reality. 

Whether in its cruder or more sophisticated forms, this Darwinian 
assumption is a fundamental bone of contention between the two culture 
types and epistemes. This is hardly because the median culture is more 
idealistic, while its c o u n t e e r u c t  is more realistic, nor is it because one 
deals in empirical realities and the other might indulge in utopias. Rather, 
the diffetence is due to the different nonnative premises and the conceptual 
framework of the median cultwe type, as historically it has been formulat- 
ed in workable structures and institutions. Such premises will admit the 
possibility of another version of social reality that may be just as practical 

self-refuting. This alternative is feasible, for it is predicated on a unitary 
conception of social reality that admits an integral complexity and divetsity 
within a framework of consonance. It rendeTs it radically at odds with the 
present reductionist and exclusivist conflictual model. 

The evolutionary code is a good example of a pivotal access to the 
modem mind that has spawned, spanned, and punctuated its activity, 
whether its domain was that of the life sciences or that of the social 
sciencesn Its animus is one of conflict, struggle, and domination in a 
race for survival. It is this conception that has stmctured much of contem- 
porary social theory, and the question is whether this influence was due 
to a predilection in the scope and subject of the field of social relations 
that made it more susceptible to a Darwinian interpretation of reality, or 
whether, beyond social theory as a specialized inquiry, there was some- 
thing in this code that appealed to a more basic sensibility in the per- 
vasive perceptions in the later nineteenth century. Both possibilities 8te 

real, and the case of the growth and consolidation of a trend have been 
made validly in the different and complementary accounts of an era. 
Obversely then, the question is one of accounting for the success of the 
Darwinian mode of thought in the European cullma1 context of its times. 

Contrary to prevailing orthodoxy, Darwin's thought did not launch 
the evolutionary epoch, but, more consistent with the evidence at hand, 
it was merely a formalization and a consummation of a trend already well 
underway. By providing the empirical evidence it needed from the natural 
sciences, the Darwinian discovery provided already existing currents of 
intellectual thought the legitimation needed to consolidate a h n d  and 

and realizable without being necessarily destructive, self-ttanscendin g, Or 

23Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of M Idea (Berkeley: University of California, 
1989); cf. Michael Schmid and Franz Wuketitis, eds., The Evolutionary Theory in Social 
Science (Holland: Dodrecht, 1987) for recent debates in the field 



322 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

lend it the currency it came to command." More disconcertingly, the 
Toots of this d c t u a l  animus can be found much deeper in the recesses 
of the historical western trndition,= whether the latter is seen in its 
affinities with a liberal humanist ethos or in tern of a specific theologi- 
cal humanism. If decoding an episteme may take its cue fmm struggle 
and confrontation as an underlying and persistent theme in much of social 
inquiry, plumbing the depths will likely lead beyond social inquiry. 

One of the first lessons the reflexive social scientist will need to learn 
as he/she taps the psycho-genesis of his/her field concerns the traumatic 
involvement with the c d c t u a l  mode that conditions the dominant 
paradigm. Challenge, defiance, and rebellion are found to be rooted in the 
mythological wellsprings of a classical antiquity replete with conflicting 
and d c t u a l  models that plunge it in ambiguity.% There Pmmetheus, 
the culture hem, steals the fire from the pagan gods, and the struggle is 
perpetuated among these petty deities themselves in a vision that is 
spuriously ennobled by a nostalgic appeal to the "essential humanism" of 
the Greeks and to their basic "natumlism." So compelling was this theme 
in the early Roman empire that it conditioned the reception and mediation 
of chtistianity there. Instead of shaping indelibly a culture from the start, 
the response to divine revelation itself in the Roman West was conceived 
in terms of the dominant Hellenistic context of its times." 

"See "The Social Sciences" in Encyclopaedia Brimnica, Macropaedia; also Robed 
Hutchinson and R. Doran, eds., The Social Sciences Today. The periodic academic and 
intellectual reviews of the fi ld are suggestive of # e n d  trends as well as evaluations of 
the past. Recently, a number of promigent profesmnals in the field were invited to reflect 
on the state of the art; see Social Science and Modern Society 30, no. 1 (November/ 
December 1992): Special Thirtieth Amivemuy h e .  

=With an imnic nod at the Social Danvhh,  Crane Brintog, in A History of Western 
Morols (New Yo& P on House, 1990 [ 1957]), takes agon, the Greek root of "agony" 
and of s t r i f e 3  struggle, for a stating point in tracing a western moral ideal 
on tbe assumptian that "conflict" is a ood and mxssary. word undedyiu~ much that is 
valuable in western character and ric%er in its connotations than mere competition," 
which is at the root of democracy. y y ,  the Greek won was the name given the 
farmer religiously ritualized asembly o the Greeks to Wirness their games. See page 27. 

26An original and insightful explolation of the sociocultural reIevance and the restora- 
tive value of classical mytholo (and the specific farm it assumed) for the western 
psyche especially during epac8transitions where bearings are sought is provided by 
Charles Segal, "Greek Tragedy aad Society: A Stxucturalkt Perspective," in Greek 
Tragedy rmd Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben. Sophocles' tril provides a key to 
illuminati9 moce than a psyche of a generation, the foundation'3'a civilization-the 
"curse of clvilizatioa." See Charles Se al, Tragedy and Civiliution: An Interpretation of 
Sophocles (Cambridge, MA. Harvad fJnivemty Press, 1981), and Leonard Wessell, Jr., 
"Mythas and Logos" aad taken as a key metaphor, "The Myth of F'rometheus," in Prome- 
thew Bound: The Mythic Structure of Karl Marx's Scientific Thinking (Baton Rouge: 
Louisiana State University Press, 1984). 

nCf. Mhur Weigall, m e  Paganization of Christianity. 



Abul-FadL Contempary Social Theory: TawhdiPmjections 323 

A comparison of the respective accounts of Adam's fall in the 
biblical and Qur'anic versions illustrates the point. In the Qur'anic m r d ,  
the event is attributed to forgetfulness, to a dawning curiosity and a 
weaknk of resolve before temptation. It is followed by Adam's repen- 
tance and God's forgiveness and promise of cont ind  guidance to his 
progeny. The same event is tendered in the extant biblical account as an 
act of humanity's blatant rebellion that is followed by God's own remorse 
at having created such a spirited monster that could not be testrained. So 
great is the heavenly agitation that damnation becomes the lot of 
humanity, much along the lines of Zeus's revenge upon a Prometheus 
chained to the rock and doomed to have his liver pecked out by the 
vulture for eternity?" In the biblical version, however, atonement is in 
view-in His loving compassion God, so that version goes, takes it upon 
Himself to redeem a fallen humanity h u g h  the incamation, crucifixion, 
and resurrection of Jesus from the dead. 

In the event, the drama of G m k  mythology that was played out in 
the temples of yore and gave the world the tragedy as a unique form of 
art also provided the setting and format for much in the "modern pagan- 
ism."29 It gave the modem (western) mind the specific modes, mores, and 
concepts that molded a coflsciousness and furbkhed it with the means for 
its self-expression and atticulation-and to which we can react today as 
social theorists reflecting critically on a tradition. In the age of science 
and scientific rationalism, the mnactment of the Act of Creation fmds its 

.metamorphosis in the Drama of Evolution: the catharsis of the ancients 
becomes the "revolution" of the modems and comes to be seen as that 
creative act that, at a given moment, releases the load of tensions in a 
society teeming with contradictions and frustrations so as to "transform" 
that society and carry it one step forward in the spiral of progress. In the 
pmess, the Delphic oracle gives way to the predictions of the pollsters 
and the experts from their new Olympian heights of t~~tional objectivity 
and data computations. Surely for a political scientist of a reflective dis- 
position, the search for the mts and constituents in the western tradition 
as they are projected in his/her field will unravel a labyrinth that is as 
fascinating to the imagination as it is stimulating to the intellect. It can 

%e c w h g  of Odysseus (Adorn, "Odysseus: Or Myth and Enlightenment" in 
Horkheimer and Adcnno, Dialectic of Enlightenment) may have wed him such 
ignominity. Whetha the "culture of mass deception" (Adomo, "The culture Industry: 

uellce of the abortion of 
modernity remaLlls an open question. cf. ~ichael ~ o h i E  e Cunning of Reason; 
Umbem Em, Faith in Fakes and TrawLs in Hyprrealiq, Jacques Ellul, The Techno- 
logical Bhf l  

Enlightenment Mass Deception") is itself a cause OT a 

%ee review essay on Peter Gay's The Enlightenment: An Interpretation - The Rise 
of Modern Paganism, no. 1 (New York Alfred Knopf, 1967) in Mona Abul-Fadl, "The 
Enlightenment R e v i S i  American Journal of I s h i c  Social Sciences 7, no. 3 (Decem- 
ber 1990): 417-35. 



324 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

almost certainly contribute to an enlightened and enlightening paradigm 
for the study of a tradition in mutation and continuity. 

Identifying the Darwinian code (which is the evolutionary code 
informed by the conflictual ethic) as a valid and fruitful point of access 
to the modem epistemic discourse that has structured social theory is one 
thing. Locating the sources of this code and its possible variations beyond 
contemporary social thmry is quite another. It goes to show the inbuilt 
Constratn ' ts in the oscillating culture medium, which limit the prospects 
of rectifying the imbalances it generates and which simply reinforced, 
multiplied, and perpetuated in the practice of social theory. 

This is what we mean by suggesting that the oscillating culture neces- 
sarily points beyond itself and that a radical critique of contemporary 
social theory is likely to reinfotce a sensibility for options and dimensions 
that are aquired and developed within the median culture. The voca- 
tionist (as opposed to the professional social scientist) will be more sen- 
sitive than othes to the opportunities lying in that altemative culture 
mode and will be mote capable, if he/she desires, of pweeding on a 
track of reforming contemporary social theory from within on the basis 
of insights gained in the cotme of exposure to the view from without. To 
cultivate this conviction, namely, to ~ssure the belief in the benefits and 
the possibilities of b w  out of a self-imposed closure, he/she will 
need to see how the ingrained habits of a mind formed in the process of 
centuries of the great convetsation have acted on its perceptions of mlity 
and have continued to do so in ways which have not always been pro- 
ductive. In this sense too, it will be necessafy to realize the price this 
kind of monoehmatics has exacted, if only as an argument for fostering 
the virtues of opening to alternatives. 

The Matrix of an Inquiry: 
Reductionism and Excess 

Just as social theory develops in the context of an epistemic field of 
cognition that reinforces its characteristics in one direction or another, so 
its conflictual underpinnings tend to be reinforced by othet elements in 
its operative paradigm. It is the presence of a certain matrix of inquiry 
that adds to the encumbrances of devising a social theory that might be 
more responsive to the needs of global societies in ttansition, whether in 
the westem world itself or, more particularly, in the much larger and 
more challenging societies that c d t u t e  the Third World. 

With conflict presumed to be a foundational premise of the social 
order and, more generally, of history, a self-destructive core belief is 
imposed arbitrarily and generalized upon contemporary social theory. This 
is reinfo4 by a matrix of inquiry that is similarly afflicted, as it con- 
strains arbitrarily the range of inquiry and misleads by the modes it 



Abul-Fadk Contemporary Social Theuy: TawhCfi Pmjections 325 

projects for its focus. The importance of any ma& of inquiry, it might 
be noted here, is due to the way it determines the kind of questions to ask 
and sets the preliminary orientations that, by virtue of the mechanics of 
the inquiry itself, come to be subsumed into its conclusion. Asking the 
wrong kind of questions prejudices the cowx of inquiry and dissipates 
the efforts that go into it. What happens the moment questions axc r a i d  
within the prevailing antinomic matrix is that it imposes avoidable 
dilemmas on the inquiry's domain. To assume, for example, the division 
between public and private morality paves the way for ambiguity in 
assessing individual conduct in society and appraising social action. This 
has a demoralizing impact in more than one setlse, and the mction is 
even more disconcerting when scholm assume attitudes analogous to 
throwing out the baby with the bath. In a context where theory thteatens 
to assume the burdens of a futile metaphysical disputation, it provokes its 
pragmatic mponse, and scholars are almost forced to choose between 
their reason and their conscience.3o They must either confiie their pursuits 
to namw utilitarian interests and mounce all claims to a m o d  integrity 
or abdicate their profession and follow their vocation at their own peril. 

The matrix of inquiry can be an encumbrance for social theory, and 
not just for the conscience of its practitioners. It is mted  in dualistic and 
polarized conceptions that are themselves the constituents and the soume 
for the conflictual/confrontational dynamic. The categorical fact/value 
dichotomy heads the list of these schisms. But the antipodes pervasive 
and litter the field, as the distinctions m the gamut between the real and 
the ideal, the material and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane, theory 
and practice, philosophy and science, reason and revelation, and, p e b p s  
most of all, subject and object. These ate categories not particular to 
social theory in itself, but they riddle the westem tradition from its 
classical sources in antiquity down to the existential philosophies of our 
times. Their implications go beyond determining the anatomy and mor- 
phology of social theory to defining many of its p d u r a l  and functional 
tlaits. 

The reductionist propensity, which has overtaken the field of social 
inquiry as much as it has every other ate8 of modem existence, is an 
outcome of this dichotomy and dichotomizing instinct. As such, it con- 
stitutes another point with which we take issue in questioning the validity 
of the dominant paradigm. As the trajectory of modem social theory illus- 
trated, the triumph of positivism occurred through a xxiuctionist con- 
striction of the vision confining the world to the sensory world and 

'Yf. We1 on the mod d i I 7  

"PasiWties.. . . " m Geage Graham, ed. 

with it, camhmks the penduler generative momentum ofthe oscillating culture type. 

American political scientists tom be- 
tween the demands of their disapline @oshws&) and their mod perceptLons; * seealso 

Post-Behaviwd Era, 127,130. Deflaat 
of the ratirmalist temper, Kariel's tone carries echoes of alataanarchist disamse 4 



326 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

reducing life to its biological conception?1 Various interpretations have 
been given to account for the precipitating factom in this r e g d o n ,  and 
as often as not in the complexity of a many-sided world (q the social 
world is bound to be), it is difficult to isolate the causes from the effects. 
The coming of a nominalist ttend at the onset of a desacralizing current, 
identified by some modem diagnostics of the malaise of the culture3' 
could have been as much a symptom of the malady as its cause. 

The issue is not one of causality but of understanding. This is another 
a m  though where the traditions and methodologies of contemporary 
social science founder. While such social science may display consider- 
able analytical vittuosity, its faculty for synthesis is astonishingly under- 
developed. Reductionism does not affect the anxi of undetstanding in 
general or specific areas of inquiry, but its consequences are diffwe and 
affect attitudes in a more practical context. The distortions attendant on 
reductionism have not only reflected on the understanding of human 
nature and the social world, but have also teflected negatively on the 
attitudes and ethics of social science in a manner detrimental to humanity 
and society. 

"Underlying social theory is a conce of humanity. A projection of this concept in 
the disciplines is not just at the root of &I emergence, but the source of the differen- 
tiation that occurs through time and from one thinker or school to another. The modem 
search for the "subject" un&rlies much of the uncertainty in contemporary social theory. 
John Christie, "The Human Sciences: Origins and Histories," History of the Human 
Sciences 6, no. 1 (February 1993) and Claude Blanckaert, "Buffon and the Natural History 
of Man: Writing Histo and the 'Foundational Myth" of Anthro logy," ibid, 13-50. The 
thrust in the present Jwtionkm comes from a revival in sociogol where studies on 
man and human nature have resurged more sophisticated, mellowed? an ethical sense 
of realism and drawing more on Anstotle than on Skinner. Currently, Roger Masters com- 
mands the field of theorizing a political theory of the state in this perspective. See The 
Nature ofPolitics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). See also Degler, Human 
Nature and Thomas F l e e  , The Politics of Human Nature (New Bruaswick, NJ: Trans- 
action, 1988), which provicks a more accessible and potentially more relevant work for 
an interactive Islamic scholarshp. Cf. chapters 1 and 4. Inquiries, reflections, and insiets 
fIpm an Islamic perspective abound, especially those written within the thmplucal 
tradition Cf. S. H. Nas ,  collsidered relevant for social theory are those written with a 
view on the issues of cantemporary social thought and that develop comparative insights, 
i.e., Gai Eaton, King of the Castfe and Mohamed Talbi, "La Vocation de 1"Homme" in 
Talbi and M. Bucaille, Reflexions sur le Corm (Paris: Seghers, 1989), or those with some 
interest in conceptualization. Due to the centrality of the concept of khiklfah, the concept 
has frequently been taken up from trditionistfiqhfpspectives, more descriptive and 
analytical than conceptual or sociological. As a result of the rich legacy, scholarship on 
sources also provides an impom resource for the Muslim social theorist. Cf. 'Abd al 
Majid al Najjtir, al Ins& fi a1 Qur'h. Cf. M. Abul-Fadl, "The Islamic View of Man: 
Agency, Morality and Responsibility" (foficoming), a synopsis of which was prepared 
for publication in a UNESCO-sponsored project on The Foundations of Islam. 

=For some relevant insights from a semiotic penpective, see Eugene Rochberg- 
Halton, Meaning and Modernity: Social lllreory in the Pragmatic Artitude (Chicago and 
LonQn: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. chapten 1 and 11. For a sapiedii 
perspective, see S .  H. Nas ,  Knowledge and the Sacred (New York Cmssroad, 198 l), esp. 
chapters 1 and 5 .  



Abul-Fadl: Contemporary Social Theory: TinvhidiProjections 327 

There was a time when the methods of psychoanalysis and behavior- 
ism were conspiring to open up new vistas of understanding and unfa- 
thorned prospects for human betknnent. The grandeur and promise of this 
scientific breakthrough lay in a ductionist fallacy cmceming the con- 
cept of the human being, which exerted its fatal attraction in practically 
every nascent discipline in the nineteenth century, including homo 
economicus and Superman. By the early twentieth centmy, reducing the 
individual to the essentials of hk/her biological organism and elaborating 
on the possibilities of manipulating and controlling the mctions of this 
organism in an equally controlled environment fed on the tensions of an 
age tom between exorcising the "ghost in the machine" ( K d e r )  and 
lamenting with T. S. Elliot the spreading "wasteland." Experiments on 
rats and analogous organisms pointed the way to prognostics on the 
human behavioral potential, which was canonized in B. F. Skinner's 
t0me.3~ 

While the ideas of this school may no longer constitute the otthiodoxy 
they once did, the naturalism that underlay its philosophy continues to 
infect the profession and to reflect on its perceptions of morality. The 
ethos of manipulation, prediction, and control continues to haunt an era 
noted for its scientific breakthroughs in the areas of genetics and repm 
ductive technologies. Behaviorism might have exhausted its momentum 
by the end of the sixties:4 but the ethics of the profession remain vul- 
nerable and reflect on the practice. Admittedly, a notable shift away from 
the scientistic cult might be taking place. This is seen in the profusion of 
organs and organizations that have come to reflect the rediscovery of 
ethics and their relevance to modernity. A new agenda of priorities is 
emerging, but whether this can effectively check the excesses associated 
with the ductionist syndrome is another matter. The view from the 
median vantage point is inclined to be more skeptical about the prospects 
of success in the absence of extemal sources to reinforce these efforts. 
These doubts are based on a reading of the nature of the "self-comting" 
mechanisms in the oscillating culture. 

Another, and less conventional, way of viewing reductionism would 
be to relate it to excess. The latter is itself one dimension of a syndrome 
of an absence of restraint and a lack of measure. These related features 
are germane to an oscillating culture and, in this sense, reductionism in 

33Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York Knopf, "71). 

"G. Homans ("Behaviorism and After," in Giddens and Turner [A], Sociul Theory 
Today, 58-81) claims that, quite the opposite, the behaviod movement maiotains its 
influence today through its intemalizatim in behavioral psychology and, more generally, 
through its pervasive and unacknowledged influence in various r a t i d  and utilitarian 
schools. What is clear, however, is that it exerts its influence in an attenuated form within 
a milieu that has itself become more attuned to a variety of reductionism. 



328 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

the materialistic cult of our times is merely one phase and expression of 
a residual propensity in that culture type. This is reflected partly in the 
e85e with which the western tradition lends itself to classification into 
epochs and discernible ternpels (the Zeitgeist). It facilitated Comte's task 
in isolating the Ages of Man in his evolution through the theological, the 
rational, and into the scientific age. It is also reflected in the smoothness 
with which the transitions back and forth along the cultural continuum are 
effected. It was easy for Marx to stand Hegel on his feet, for example, 
with little embarrassment. To take a newer event from a more pragmatic 
field: the political convergence in the international order between liberal- 
ism and communism should hardly come as a surprise to anyone familiar 
with the currents in an age of "the end of ideology.'f35 In the past, how- 
ever, these revemtls and convergences, in short these "oscillations," took 
place against a more complex and prodigious cultural grounding that 
mediated effectively the contradictions and moderated the fall-out of the 

What makes the modem variant of reductionism ostensibly more 
reprehensible than its counterparts in earlier epochs is the near erosion of 
the cushioning of a tradition that provided a sense of both measure and 
&t. In the present swings of an essentially empirical and moody 
culture, there seem to be few mrves with which to check the regular 
indulgences. It is, moreover, the nature of the self-correcting mechanisms 
in this culture mode that adds to the malaise in social theory. The 
Marxian volte-face to the Hegelian fallacy may have put the dialectic on 
its feet, but it hardly provided a more credible grounding for modem 
social theory. Similarly, if the socialist system was conceived as the 
remedy to the excesses of an individualist liberalism, its own excesses, 
ConceptualIy and historicalIy conceived, were no assurance that the social 
order could be sanified. The tendency to counter excess with excess is 
hardly the pt.escription for sound theory. 

The oscillating culture is typical of a mode of thought and action that 
represents the unaided human quest in all its stumblings and its conse- 
quences: the heroic image of man, self-subsistent, autonomous, and self- 
sufficient. In this sense, it is susceptible to all the frailties to which this 

swings. 

%Daniel Bell's review of the field in The Social Sciences &er the Second World War 
seems to have been written with his theme on The End of Ideology in view. With the col- 
lapse. of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberalii a new jubilationmy mood briefly 
took on with the revival of the controversy around "The End of History" (and the Last 
Man) with its implicit Hegelian (and Nietzschean) themes signifying a rediscovery of 
"ideology" in a new world order. Ironically, it was the laaer that would p v i d e  the sequel 
to the end of ideology in the rebM of an impending clash of.- aaqding  to 
Harvard Rofessor Samuel Huntington and & central figures m Amencan thmk-tank 
circles. Clearl the discourse in a globakhg social theory is &&rated on the scales of 
a praxis m re&xivity. For a launcher on this theme in Muslim scholarly circles, see "The 
End of History? Or the West and the Rest?," roundtable, Proceedings of the Twenty-First 
Annual AMSS Confirem, 31-63. 



Abul-Fadl: Contemporary Social Theory: Tawhriif Pmjections 329 

quest is vulnerable. Yet the vocational social scientist will also concede 
to its elements of nobility, if only on account of the human being’s 
generic humanity. Endowed with an innate sensibility (fitruh), humanity 
is urged on (instinctively) to se8Tch for the m o d  basis of the social 
order. Intuitively, as Aristotle well knew in corroboration of the certitudes 
of still earlier generations of oriental sages, virtue in this order could be 
sought in justice, and the just lay in the “median”: nothing to excess, 
moderation is best?6 This is an often overlooked piece of intuition that 
has been resuscitated recently, albeit in the dry, ductionist, and some- 
what banal computations and formulations on the subject that sparked off 
another of those elated moments of discovery in the odyssey of a young 
but prematuring social theory.37 

The upshot is that reductionism, as one of the consequences of the 
matrix of inquiry, affects modem social theory in a variety of ways and 
at different levels. It is associated with an ethos of excess and indulgence 
and displays a chronic want of measme. As these would seem to be traits 
historically endemic to the culture type in view, any autochthonous efforts 
to counter this tendency from within the same self-contained parametes 
are perennially caught up in the same self-defeating cycle. One is re- 
minded of the parabolic bird-infested tree and the sage of al G-i. 

One way to overcome excess is to inject a sense of measmc into 
contemporary social theory and not to presume either the indifference of 
social theory or the irrelevance of measure to it. Left to its own devices, 
theory as philosophy can only intuitively locate the need, but it stumbles 
in its efforts to defrne content?* The costs of stumbling are too high in 
an era of technological glut, nor can the matter be left entimly to a for- 
tuitious pragmatics to fill the void. This is enough incentive to induce a 
tum for direction to other sources beyond the culture closute. 

It is at this point that petspectives drawing on the example of the 
median culture type and its sources could provide more than the prin- 
ciples needed for critiquing social theory. They could constitute a sub- 

%Stephen Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political 
Philosophy (Princeton: Rincetan University Press, 1990). 

=I have in mind the Rawlsiau debate at Harvard in the early eighties, which tumed 
the young author overnight into a cause celebre and provoked a polemic that reached 
beyond the confines of the American academy. See On Reading Rawles. 

=The whole paradigm of modernity, hence its underlying episteme, is constituted on 
a procedural impetus without content: growtb/change for its own sake, without direc- 
tionality, so much so that freedom, rationality, and progress becane a function as much 
as a measure of this void. See David Kolb, A Critique of Pure Modernity (Chicago: 
Chicago University Press, 1989), chapters 1 and 12. His conclusion in tethinking the 
modem world from the vantage points of identity, community, and ratiodity converges 
with the points of depature of such thinkers as Rorty and Bauman, who end mexely 
a f f i i  Kolb’s premises. Thus the self-referential discourSe on modexnity isxked in 
an Impasse. 



330 The Amencan Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11 :3 

stantial resource to ground efforts for going beyond criticism to coflsttuc- 
tive synthesis and, in this sense, they set the stage for the missing dim- 
tionality. A number of factots qualify the altemative cultwe for this role, 
not least of which is the holistic conceptual affinity associated with its 
cultme matrix and backed by the substantive and integrated nature of its 
procedural ethic. In the tawhid-episteme, for example, justice is not 
simply the formal/instmmental value of the modem liberal rationalist and 
its pragmatic variatians in the West, rather, it is essentially a substantial 
value that cannot be reduced arbitrarily to any one of its constituent 
dimensions or componer1ts.3~ As an inclusive scale of values, itself 
embedded in the tawhiifiepistemic field, justice permeates the value 
system acms a means-ends axis. It operates as a key ordering mecha- 
nism that is integrated with and integrating of the value scale at the 
foundational and operational levels of the social order. 

The practical consequences of such an outlook for the conduct of 
contempomy social theory are immense. Not only would it restructure 
the grounds of many an inquiry in the field of social studies, but it would 
invest it with meaning and purpose or direction such as it lacks at pre- 
sent. Indeed, it would clear the ground of the plethora of fragmented, 
dispersed, redundant teseatches whose sole validation lies in their data- 
pooling virtues and that become the temptation and justification for a 
dubious market morality. It would also heal the rifts that splinter an 
academy tom between its moral conscience and its professional con- 
sciousness. Even the criteria of policy making, whether the issue area is 
one of welfare and social policy or foreign policy, would be included in 
the propaedeutic thrust in the theoretical field. By appropriating a means- 
ends axis at the cognitive level of inquiry, it would be possible to be both 
consistent and moral. There would be no mom for an amoral science or 
a value-neutral technology any more than there would be scope for 
validating an end irrespective of the means. The categorical imperative 
would be a practical/pragmatic alternative instead of p d i n g  as an 
autonomous category.4o 

3 

What are the implications and projections of our inquiry into the 
gened character of contemporary social theory for our interest in the 

"See Majid Khadduri, llre Islamic Conception of Justice (Baltimore and London: 
Johns Hop- 1984), for a discrete exmition of the different dimensions as seen 
through the legacy. 

'@Amitai Etzicmi, "The Moral Foundations of the Marketplace. What is to be Done?," 
Currents in Modem Thought, The World and I: A Chronicle of Our Changing Era 5,  no. 
12 (December 1990): 46675. 



Abul-Fadl: Ccmtemparary Social Theory: TawhfdiProjections 331 

broader realm of an intemhral encounter? In this context, we focus our 
interest on the encounter between historical Islam and the West for 
various fe8sofls, not least of which is its continuity, intensity, and purport 
for shaping the course and fate of a modem culture. As we have inferred 
from the outset, a critical reflection an social theory from a contrasting 
epistemics perspective has the advantage of redefining its grounds and 
scope in such a manner as to encompass planes of inquiry that have 
unwartantdly been excluded or suppressed in an ethnocentric profdon. 
The same social theory that provides the framework of inquiry into social 
phenomena within a particular society also provides us with the tools and 
insights for intrasocial and intemcietal comparisons. These comparisons 
go beyond their academic intent. They project an undemtanding that is 
likely to reflect back on a matrix and reinforce its subsequent output. 

The rupture that might have occurred with the coming of the 
Enlightenment was not of a nature to undo some of the more enduring 
characteristics that would eventually come to reinfoxe the epistemic 
underpinnings of modem social theory. To all putposes and intents, they 
formed part of the effective cultutal and knowledge framework that 
conditioned the kind of interaction and borrowing that took place in the 
medieval Christian West on the eve of its renaissance as it came into 
contact with the then-dominant Islamic civilization. In the same way, it 
ccmtinues to affect the reading of the West of society in the Muslim 
ecumene, whether in modem times or, in retmpect, as it attempts to 
reinterpret its sociocultural pattern and pontificate on its implications. As 
this constitutes a distorting propensity in any prospective cultural 
encounter, as much as it distracts from the credibility and viability of 
contemporary social theory, it would be instructive to draw attention to 
some of the a m  where the matrix of inquiry and its reductionist or con- 
flictual propensities potentially constrain more constructive developments 
in self-underdanding as much in the understanding of the “other.” 

The Conflictual Mode and the Culture-Filter 

One of the areas of enlightenment that might benefit from a critical 
reflection on the westem heritage from its sources may be that of CTOSS- 
cultural intetaction?l How the historical West interacted with other 
cultms, and how this exchange was projected in the various domains of 
the encounter, particularly during the ”epochal thresholds,” deserves par- 
ticular attention for its heuristic/revealing potential. An example of one 
of those historically pregnant moments occm in the course of the trans- 
mission of the Islamic empirical tradition of inquiry to the European 

“Where East Meets West: The West on the Agenda of the Islamic Revival (Hemdon, 
V A  International lastitUte of Islamic Thought, 1991). 



332 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

centers of leaming and in the way in which this tradition was received in 
the cultural medium of the Renaissance. 

This is one of the relatively gray and ambigious junctures in the his- 
tory of the rise of the modem West that have scarcely received the atten- 
tion they deserve. The constraints are as much padigmatic as historical 
and psychohistorical. Yet it is only in revising the framework of inquiry 
in a spirit of critical empathy implicit in a contrasting episteme that the 
anomalies and the distortions of a historical encounter can be explained 
and u n d e d .  Corrective pe~pectives could then be introduced to 
address the implications that have continued to shape, well beyond the 
initial encounter, the modernity of our day. To take one example, let us 
turn to that critical junctute in the early modem period when such scien- 
tists as FtanCis Bacon were actively engaged in mediating the lessons 
from another heritage. Only a deeply riveted, conflictual psyche could 
have conceived of "torhuing" Nature to yield her secrets, and such 
logistics could only be fitting for a vivid imagination that saw Nature 
"d in tooth and claw."42 

There was nothing in the transmitted Islamic legacy to suggest such 
an ordeal, but clearly, the culture filter that was effecting the mediation 
must have played its tole. In the event, Bacon also imparted to the 
madem scientific worldview its ethos, which has set the tone for 
humanity's ambivalent encounter with natum in modernity. Other 
examples could be sought of the way in which the rationalist legacy was 
reapptopriated from Islamic sowes to reconstruct a chapter in western 
scholasticism and to bridge the transition to modernity. But this would 
constitute one of the themes for msearching within a new paradigm of 
inquiry, where the agenda setting would allow for new perspectives on 
old questions and enable the raising of questions hithe& unthought of. 
At a critical juncture in the encounter between two great traditions, 
opportunities abounded for the rising West, but they were marred by the 

%f. Jeny Weinberger, Science, Faith and Politics: Francis Bacon and the Utopian 
Roots of the Modern Age-A Commentary on bacon's Advancement of Learning (Ithaca 
and Lonrdon. Come11 Univemity Press, 1985). This work intmprets Bacon's ethos against 
its contending biblical and classical antecedents to illuminate the "problematic of tech- 
nologyr whence "the more science promises human self-reliance, the. more we search for 
missing ods, we feel besieged by the very means which grant us power, and we are 
&emate& proud and ashamed of our impious mastery over nature" @. 17). For the ccm- 
sequences of such a amfounded impiety, see Fred Alford, Science and the Revenge of 
Nature: Marcw and Habcrmm (T 
chapters 1 and9. One can only thinko%dialectic of the Ehbghkmnent and the J y  

movement as an entecedent to the currentfin a2 d c l e  malaise seep in the emlo 'cal 

in 27u Meuning of History (Chi of Chiwo Press, 1949) may retain its 

University + of Florida, 1985), 

alienation of Nature that was to provoke its backlash in the nineteenth -- ROmantlC 

movnnent.Tohighligbtthehistoricalali~~inthew~psycbe,Lowith's~ 

heuristic value for the ongoing m 3 - m  o B modernity's genesis and consequences. 
0: Universi 



333 

misperceptions and cross-perceptions that affected the culture filtering in 
progress to the detriment of an entire sequence." 

How Conflict Is Viewed from the "Median" 

In contesting the conflictual mode of the modem episteme, the 
median culture type is not indulging a utopian vision of eternal harmony 
and concord among a breed of mortal demigods. 'Ihe historical record of 
confrontation and struggle in human aggregations points to a contrary 
reality that needs to be explicated in other than a eulogizing vein. What 
is at issue here is the primacy of conflict, and there is every need for 
redefining its parameters to make it mote consistent with the alternative 
and even more realistic reading of social reality and human condition pm- 
jected in their telic conception. In such a reading, conflict is a function 
of a substantive injustice (zulm) and not of differences or diversity 8s 
such. Conflict, in the sense of an imvocable and sustained clash of forces 
or of a disputatious conduct that is s e c d  to a calculus of domination 
and subjugation or an ethic of mastery and dominion, is not ingrained in 
the n a t d  order, and its perpetuation in the social order can hardly be 
the norm. There is nothing "natural" or editjing about jungle law when 
it is applied to humanity, and its consecration amounts to a flagrant 
deviation from an order of creation that is inherently beneficent and just. 

In fact, if a semantic field for conflict and confrontation as concepts 
wete to be constructed in the respective modes of inquiry associated with 
their respective culture types, the oscillating and the median, one would 
at best come up with a range of remote equivalences of meaning rather 
than with any identity in meanings. This is a point that cannot be 
developed here. To take but one example in passing, however, to shed 
some light on the distinction in view, one might consider the term d- f-'a 
/ hf and its Qur'anic usage. Literally, the term could be associated with 
a range of activity connoting taking the initiative, paying one's dues, 
pushing forth, warding off, averting, repelling, defending, fending, 
advancing, repaying. In fact, it pmvides a compact genemtive concept 
that invokes a world of meaning, none of which ttanslates identically into 
analogues 8ssociBfed with conflict in its generic westem mode. In the 
latter, conflict genetally is Bssociated with domination, mastery, and sub- 
jugation. It is a function of power, g d ,  desire or whatever could be 
rationalized in terms of "ideal and material interests." In this sense, con- 



334 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

flict is both conceived instnunen tally, on a means-ends axis and, like 
fnastety and domination, it also constitutes an end or a terminal value. 

In contrast, whether in its syntax or inflections, hfu'u (verb) as a 
profde in action, and hf' (substantive noun) as a state, or a process in 
progress, the Qur'anic usage places the concept in a Unique context of a 
putposeful detemce.O" Here, the phenomenal friction, or clash of wills, 
is embedded in a state of activity and a constellation of relationships that 
are essentially provoked by a seismic infraction in the "cosmic balance" 
and signaling a violation in the natuml/social order, which sparks off an 
ignitional charge for due restitution. To borrow a less familiar, but more 
graphic expression, conflict here becomes "ambilectic" and diffusely 
structum the syskm. The implications for social theory are real. 

Conflict comes to be seen as a provisional, not a permanent, state. It 
is a contingency, not a necessity. The vocational scholar would not be 
taking this for his/her starting point in an inquiry simply because such an 
inquiry, conducted in the unitary perception and telic conception of social 
reality, would have other grounds and ends in view that themselves 
become signifiers or qualifiers of conflict. He/She would take that con- 
dition as a symptom of a substantive disorder or disjuncture, which would 
then constitute the proper target for social inquiry. Conflict, in the sense 
of forced confrontation and an imposed encounter, may be a means to 
avert a wrong, to "right" an order, but there 8te a variety of means for 
achieving such a betterment, and conflict is not the norm. "Standing up 
for" (something) and "standing up to" (some happening) suggest coun- 
tenancing a violation or an aggression, a taking of the initiative to set 
things right. But all this amounts to a different reading of social reality, 
which also reflects on other central values in social theory. Conflict for 
contml and mastery assumes a conception of power as a value to be had. 

Beyond its instrumentality, power becomes an acquisition, and 
conflict is the enabling mechanism. In the du$i'zjuzh context, power is 
associated with a field of exercise, not an object of acquisition. This 
paves the way to ascertaining the ends to which it is exercised and 
~infomes the purposefulness of the detemt/initiative suggested in the 
generative concept. This again rebounds on the nature and the role of 
social theory in two contrasting modes, so that ultimately an inquiry into 
the semantics of a controversial concept ends up verifying/validating its 

Beyond contesting the counterimplications of a conflictual ontology 
and epistemology, it is necessary in the median culture type to make 

sociological significance. 

"Qur'an 2251 end 2240, where the verses-when taken in their COIteSPOllding 
sequences, parallelism, and symmetrieq when relating the precept to the pnrctce; the 
empirical to the nonnative; the relative to the universal-pmde a wealth of msterial for 
a sociological hemeneutic that could take us beyond the traditional commentaries, which, 
for all their instructive iusights, are no substitute far au integmtd social theory. 



Abul-Fadk Contemporary Social Theory: Tawh~-projedions 335 

another qualification. Differences among a community's d t u e n t s ,  
whether that community is conceived globally or locally, or difference 
among participants in a situation, fall within a b m d a  category of charac- 
teristically human exchange. The resulting institutional complexes poten- 
tially cover a btoad spectrum of nuanced ttansactions and can by no 
means be conceived primarily in terms of antagonisms and paradoxes. 
Functionally, complementarity is the norm, while "kinetkally," a dis- 
tended dynamic provides the code. The conceptual as well as the institu- 
tional matrix in the different domains and levels of the social order in 
that culture medium are projected so as to assure that this Complemen- 
tarity and affirmative dynamic are, in fact, the assumed norm.45 

Variety and difference ate not only a part of the "natural (cmted) 
order" to which the social order bears an aftinity in consonance and to 
which, plausibly, it could be made to conform. But this variety is 
ordained and sanctioned in the tawhfd-principle, which legitimates both 
orders: the cosmic and the social. This legitimating principle assumes its 
noetic/conceptual expression at the level of the belief-system it engenders 
('aqfhh). It also assumes an ethico-legalist expression, in the form of 
the Shari'ah, at the font of the social order at the organizational level. 
Admitting this principle goes beyond its historical relevance in the Mus- 
lim ecumene to its sociological implications for a global moral order. 

In this light, it is quite implausible to assume, for example, that the 
religious tolerance for which the pax Zslamica was justly celebrated was 
simply a piece of accidental charity or that it was merely the reflex of a 
long-ingrained ancient "Middle Eastern" tradition antedating Islam. 
Indeed, it was the centuries of RomanlByzantine oppression and perse- 
cution in the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores that not only 
shaped the history of Christianity and dictated which sects prevailed, but 
which also paved the way for the swift sptead of the Islamic conquests 
there and for the overall favorable attitude of the local populations to 
their new Muslim conquerors by the latter seventh century.46 To attempt 

"Hammuda Abdel Ati, Family Structure in Islam (IQdianapolis: American Tnst Publi- 
cations, 1979). Combinin4 his Azharite trainjng with his western @uate work, A e l  
Ati withstood the attractions of the dominant sociolosy that contmues, through its 
conflictualbinaryreductionismsandits . * wer orientations, to condition much 
research and wnting-particularly in th=pf%nist scholmhip in general and of 
women in Islam and in the Middle East in particular. This is an epistemic flaw that 
carmot be reduced to the "ideolosy versus science" distinction referred to by Nikki Keddie 
in "Problems in the Study of Women in the Middle E&," InternatiodJounnl ofMiddle 
Eusrem Studies, no. 10 (1979): 225-40, a distinction and categories which themselves bear 
questioning in a critical social theory. Cf. John B. Thomsoa, Iakology and Modern 
Cuhre  (Stadorck Stanford University Press, 1990), chapter 1. 

46... (tolerance) was M y  an issue, for it was "the way &gs dways were anyway 
in the older empires" was the remark casually made to the author by a Columbia profes- 
sor m a private exchange after a relevant pauel Session in the 1988 Annual Coweation 
of the American Political Science Associatioa Inadvertently, this might not simply be a 



336 The Amencan Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

to explain away religious tolerance in Muslim history, it was naive if not 
tendentious to claim that it was in conformity with prevailing conventions 
( 'urf) that communal rights were extended voluntarily to various religious 
communities. While conceivably the ancient Semitic Orient might have 
known a wider range of tolerance to communal differences than many in 
the medieval westem world could have even d-ed of, yet the nahm 
and practice of religious tolerance in the Muslim experience was hardly 
an unwitting extension of ancient folk traditions. Instead, it owed its sig- 
nificance to systemic factors intrinsic to a deliberate and self-conscious 
principle of order in community that was both institutionalized in histotic 
precedent and prophetic practice as well as enunciated within the explicit 
and cotlseflsual parameters of the Islamic monotheistic p d i g m  and its 
normative precepts. 

The folly of claiming convention to have been the arbitrator can only 
be seen against the power realities of the day. Where the sociopolitical 
order was founded on a religiously inspired belief-system (an "ideology"), 
and where the judicial foundations of that order were built into a norrna- 
tive, sociological, and educational system, the issue of communal affilia- 
tion and the practice of religious tolerance was hardly a matter of public 
indifference (as it became with the secularization of the westem mind). 
In the sense of transcending the ascriptive principle of identity formation 
and power organization, Islam as world order belongs as much to the 
postaxial " modem" historical system as to the ancient or medieval worlds 
of "traditi~n."~' In evoking our historical analogies, we do not have far 
to look, whether we take the cornprehemive social order enjoined in 
Islam as a precedent to the ideological order of modemity or whether we 
stop to examine one or another variant of the ecclesiatical order in pre- 
modem Empe or Europe on that protracted eve of modemity. In either 
case, it is not had to see that, paralleling the conflicting ideological 
interests of the modem cold war era in a Eurodominant age, the religious 
cleavages and clashes of a medieval world were potentially no less 
intense or deadly-were it not for the more modest means of destmction 
at their dispad. 

The Middle Eastern social order was witness to such intensity wher- 
ever that dominance was spread and its means assured. Thus the interlude 

have a direct bearing far episteanoogies and social theories as well, especially inthe con- 
text of && penenis in the former and evolutionary e v e s  and 
categariesmthelaaex. 

%f. S. N. Eiseastadt, "The Axial Age Bre&hu& -Tbeirclma&mh * 'Csaud'Iheir 
~win~originsaAdDiversityofAxialAgeCivilizocions(SteteUmv~ityofNew 
Yo& 1986). 



Abul-Fadk Conternpamy Social Theay: Tuwb~~projectons 337 

of the intmsive cmsadhg kingdoms in the Muslim Mediterranean around 
the twelflh century (1095- 1274 CE) merely replicated the mcompmds- 
ing exclusivism and the liminal principles of identity assertion and power 
dominance that were now imposed under the Frankish hotdes in place of 
the eattier Romans and Byzanhes.'* What, then, was the restraining fac- 
tor allowing for tolerance of diversity under the "Islamicate"? Was not 
this tolerance embedded in its very constitution, which impelled a keen 
observer of the scene to craft a graphic term to depict a unique reaiity?" 
If it were not merely a projection of a timehonored convention, can it be 
attributed to an enlightened self-interest? Not to belabor the obvious, it 
might be pointed out that other factors were indeed at work. Where the 
political poweB of the day were under no compulsion to compmmise 
with the "other" out of expediency, interest, or othetwise, as was the case 
with their later imperial successors in the middle Ottoman period, the 
roots for a systemic tolerance under the earlier Islamic dynasties sufely 
deserve to be examined more objectively.m 

have in mind particularly the carnage of the First (or the Jerusalem) Crusade and 
how it com uest of the holy city. 
Eventually, r?hsadem were tamed or acculturated to t h e x y  and tolerance of the 
Islatnicate and retumed to Europe with a code of chivalry. See Francis Peters, "The Early 
Muslim Empkq" in Marjorie Kelly (ed.), Islam: The Religiocrs and Politicd L$? of a 
World Community (New York Ebeger, 1984), cham 4, esp. . 76-77, 85. cf. John 
Esposito, Islam: The Stmight Path (New York and M o d  O%rd University Press, 

tence,'' in R. Savoy (ed.), Introduction to I s h i c  Civilium'on (Cambridge: Cambridge 
Univedy Press, 1976). Contempo generally hover 

Discussion of the cnrsades by Twelfth Century Christians," in Isma'il al Faruqi, &uys 
in I s h i c  Md Compwufiw Studies (Brentwood, MD: International Institute of Islamic 
Thought, 1982). The recent reprint of Francesco Gabrieli's Arab Historions of rhe 
Cru.wdes, trams. E. J. Costello (New York Dorset Press, 1989 [1957,1969]) is hardly an 

academic or cultural diversion, in view of its timing ("the Rushdie affair"), 
previous publications of this press (i.e., Robert Payne's notorious llre Hiiory of I s h  
[ 19871) and the quesionable quality of aspects of the selectio4translati- of the work 
at band itself, which are too numerous and ive to pin down here-p. 165 for 
example-its jacketmet pieties notwi<Classics m the sch~larly sense wete 
written by Harold Lamb (two volumes, 1945) and H i  Belloc's, with its chalk&= 
title: The Crusodcs: 7lw World's Debate (1937). In 1987, Jonathan Riley's shoxt history 
of the crusades was publiied by Yale University Press. Pamela Kemaghan's The 
Crusades: Cukures in Conflct (Cambridge University Ress, 1993), published as part of 
the Cambridge Histwy Program, is strangely evocative of the Huntingtonian thesis of 
global trends m iatemational codict. 

negatively with the Muslim cmqwst/r 

1988), 62-65 and R-et Savory (ed)., "christemiom VS. Islam: Interactian and Coexis- 

western sou~ces on the e 
between an economy of stance and  liberate ambiguity. Edw P Synan, "Theological 

'gMarshall G. S .  Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience und History in a WorJd 
Civiliuzfion, 3 vols. (chicago and Loadon: University of chicago Press, 1974), voL 1, pp. 
57-60. Fa a com and enlightenin review of this work, see Albert H o d ,  hhn in 
European llrougccambridge: Camkdge University Press, 1993), chapter 3. 

% includes observiog a more skeptical attitude to sauces chronicling the initial 
conquests and re- the alleged t e r n  of the conquerors. Cf. Fred M. Donuer on the 
problem of the htstoricty of texts in llre Ear& Ishmic Conquests (Princeton, NJ: Prince- 
ton University Press, 1981), 24647. 



338 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

Such an inquiry might pmvide the televant and much needed model 
for a contemporary social theory called upon to address the problems and 
to redFess the grievances of incmdngly hetemgeneous, multiethnic 
societies. Such a theory would be grounded in the norms of a historical 
practice as much as in the cognitive principles of a "knowledge cultme" 
with its tradition of leamed inquiry. This is possible because a tawhidi 
philosophical anthropology postulates, for its point of departme, a 
diversity and a difference within a framework of essential unity and 
affinity?' Within such an anthropology, the dynamics of self-realization 
are predicated on the interaction and complementarity of different cultural 
entities, each of which constitutes a moral entity in its own right and 
which is potentially capable of, and responsible for, fulfilling its morality 
in the course of its interaction with the "other/s." There m no privileged 
exemptions, or salvationist eschatologies mewed for any birth rights. 
Instead of dichotomy and polarities in a universe postulated on confronta- 
tion and competitive survival, a tawhidianthropology assumes, beyond 
a rationality, a legitimacy for its diversity and premises its principles of 
social interaction accordingly. Communities are not just left to be 
existentially acknowledged, as it were. They are entitled to their iden- 
tities, and partake of the mutual reciprocities, in terms of socioethical 
dues, and the legal rights and responsibilities that attend the web of 
mutual obligations. They do so within the bounds of an intragmup order 
that underlines a commonality assuring a threshold of solidarity and that 
is anchod in a transcendent moral gmund. 

Unlike contemporary social theory, whether in its neoliberal and 
radical mood or in its conservative refrain, thete can be no mom for 
parochialism. Rather, in a tuwhidi sociology, there is a matrix for a 
social jurisprudence that goes beyond instrumentality in preserving the 
gmundwork for a moral order that accommodates the principle of equity 
in a communal context of individual and collective diversity. A seemingly 
redundant discom on "rationality" and "legitimacy," such as that cul- 
tivated in contemporary social theory, has painfully little to say to 
emergent global needs in view of the reductionism that inhem in the 
dominant rationality and the m w  and egoistic utilitarianism of its 
ethics. 

In short, the pursuit of contemporary social theory, in its chamcteris- 
tic cdctual/confmntational modes of thought and inquiry against a 
hermeneutic of suspicion, can only leave it as ill-equipped as ever in 
dealing with a polyarchic model of intetdependence, whether global or on 
lower levels of community. The lag is particularly devastating in the case 

"Menyl Wyn Davies, Knowing One Another: Shaping an l s h i c  Anthropology 
(London: Mausell, 1989). 



339 

of an American academy and a socially conscious intellect, as it comes 
precisely at a moment when the ptessutes to live up to a calling as much 
'as to immediate profdona1 needs mount. With the competence of social 
theory in doubt before those issues that currently impinge on both the 
social conscience and the social order, this lag cannot be resolved by 
continuing to rely on an empirical efficacy and indulging the pragmatic 
sensibility for more social engineering in the absence of its substantial 
premises. The staying issues that defy a procedural or technical resolution 
include a range of pmblems of an essentially socioethical dimension, 
which are steadily politicized and which come to cast an entirely different 
light/shadow on mattes of M o m ,  individuality, and tolerance in a per- 
missive and amoral society?' 

Clearly, other aspects in the a m  of conflictual dynamics and group 
accofnmodafion could be addressed fmm within a reflexive social theory. 
These include the mechanisms needed for rechannelling or for mobilizing 
the tensions that arise fmm existing polarities. The parametes of social 
interaction need to be defined at a time when the boundaries between 
sociocultural entities, individuals and communities, the state and society, 
the national and the supm/intranational are in The Scales need to 
be relocated so as to determine at which point differences become dis- 
sonan- and the potential or inertia for complementarity is suffused into 
negative tensions feeding into hostility. Differences, variations, and grada- 
tiom are part of any social order. Yet these differences do not of them- 
selves translate into disparaties and antagonisms any more than the 
competitive impulse can be d u c e d  to an exclusive and exclusionary 
jingoism. 

*The ideas of sustainable growth a d  a sustainable society gained currency by the 
latter seventies and early eighties in the umtext of Third World and globalizatian litera- 
ture expreshg disillusion with a feed development aod modeanizaton agenda W i  
emphass to such umcepts as equity, mterdependence, ecology, morality, cammdty, and 
the aeral revaluation of valuq cf. The Center Cmnor Hold. Sociology in the tradition 
of Be& Berger, Robext Bellah, and h e r s ,  which was consided marginal or 
camta-culture in the sixties, assumed a new s y l h n c e  amid the newer voices. In the 
American se the terminus and home o much social theory, the situation is 

ded % anxiety over the values of western civilization amid the demographic y& m!&etbnicity Due to this, social theory jargon on cultural relativism 
became central to public b u m  and the media, developments that forced major debates 
on America's cultural wars in academia and litermy Cucles. Cf. "Polarizii American 
culture," in SociulSciena Md Modern Socicry 30, no5 (July/Augud 1993), special issue. 
See also Alan Bloom, Ihe Closing of rhe American Mind (New Ymk: Sion and 
Schuster, 1987) and Din& Dsouza, Illiberal Education (New York Free Press, 1991). 

for instcmCe, R. Munch, W d r s t d i n g  Modernity, where the search is for 
Cenying the theuy of social action (as voluntaristic and directid) be ond its current 

founding rathus around a 
an operati* categoly. 
withtryingthrssynthesrs, 



340 l'be American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

An objective inquiry would be a prudent inquiry, one that would 
entail a framework that does not prejudge or bias and anticipate the "find- 
ings" in one way or the other, to use the language of a conventional or 
"normal" sociology (Kh). But unlike conventional Sociology, it would 
not shun, or pretend to shun, a high ground of adjudicating or arbitrating 
referents by which it could provide for choosing and deciding on practical 
consequences. Such a framework would also be open to differentiating 
contexts in response to the complexity and variety in the human condi- 
tion, thus reflecting on the legitimacy and possibility of variable arrange- 
ments. Once the inflationary ego and its self-referential field of perception 
and pmmnption that underlie and feed the conflictd ethos am re- 
strained, then it would be possible to entertain horizons of purposeful 
engagement and reciprocity in the social world 

The challenges will continue to such a social theory, but the changing 
agenda would prompt changing emphases and priorities. Under what con- 
ditions would differences be precipitated into c o d v e  factots impinging 
on the nexus of the social order? Conversely, how could such differences 
be deployed to vitalize and integrate the Social entity? These are questions 
which almdy suggest value preferences. No inquiry can be value-free, 
nor should it. The issue is what kind of values are at stake in examining 
diversity and difference and what are the pertinent and enduring 
parametels within which such an inquiry is to be conducted and beyond 
which it would be futile, or meaningless, or both. 

The Matrix of Inquiry: A Sequel 

Beyond its implications for the disruption of trends within the pro- 
fession, a flawed matrix has other more general consequences in frag- 
menting the field of inquiry itself. One aspect is the distortion of realities 
perceived. An incidence taken from the medieval European encounter 
with the Islamic heritage, and the way in which it was processed in the 
culturefilter of its times, may be instructive. One persistent question here 
is how Europe emerged from this encounter virtually untouched by the 
metaphysics of a cultute from which it borrowed substantially in signi- 
ficant domains." The following passage gives a clue to both a manner of 

"A less typical but much needed perspective in cumnt literature is Roger Garauq, 
L'lslam habite notre Awnir (Park Desclee de Bmuwer, 1981), which assesses the Islrmuc 
umtribution to the European renaissance against its Islamic doctrinal and metaphysical 
underphmhgs and uses it as a precedent for a cultural dialogue. Cf. George Satton, The 
Incubation of Western Culture in the Middlc East (Washington: Library of Congress, 
1951). More t cal of the general literature in this ~KXI is John R. Hayes (ed.), The 
Genius of A r a & d i u t i o n :  Source of Renaissance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); R m  
Landau, me Arab  Heritage of Western Civiliu#ion (New York The L.eague of Arab 
States, 1975); Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (Seattle and London: 
University of Washington Press, 1987) where, however, the emphasis shifts to e-g 



Abul-Fadk Contemporary Social Theory: Tm&?f,t- Projections 341 

perception and a mode of reception. It comes from a work in a series 
devoted to exploring the spirit of western civilization and which might 
otherwise have been a significantly enlightening anthology on its subject: 

. . . the separation of intellectual from religious life, the ideal of 
many in universities taday, may be looked at through the his- 
torical experience and be better seen for what it is, not as a 
simple continuation of classical antiquity, but as a page taken 
from the history of 

The context of this comment is an intduction to Ibn Rushd (Aver- 
roes) and Ibn Sini (Avicenna), a selection already indicating how (nar- 
rowly) the “Islamic Tradition,” which is the title of this section in the 
book, was perceived. While neither of the great philosophers may have 
necessarily epitomized the “tradition,” and while both admittedly shared 
an admiration for Aristotle, yet it is inconceivable that they should be 
insulated from their historical and sociocultural medium-which was 
unequivocally Islamic (“Is1amicate”)-and to ignore its formative impact 
upon them. For example, Ibn S-hi had learned the Qur’an by heart by 
the age of twelve, and Ibn Rushd had received the usual training of his 
class in the range of Islamic sciences of his day before he went on to 
devour philosophy. Unlike the modernist Muslim “philosophes” and 
rationalists, their assumed “infatuation” with the classics was tempered by 
their anchoring formation in the Islamic tradition. The Aristotelianism of 
Ibn Rushd and the neo-Platonism of Ibn SinZ were mediatead, ultimately, 
through a residual originality in ways that ~IC inconceivable with their 
modem heirs and aspirants. 

To tmncate a tradition and attempt to cut off the Muslim classicists 
from their culture formations and resoumes, then, is symptomatic of more 
than an academic partiality or a mere individual eccentricity on the part 
of one commentator or another. Indeed, the paradigm of knowledge 
within the ~slamic legacy beats investigation,56 in view of an illustrious 

actual contact and evolving images of Islam, as with Norman Daniel, W d n b u r g ,  
Southern, and Albert H o d .  

5 5 W f l i  Bryar (comp.), llze Rebirth of Learning: llze First Twelve Centuries, The 
Sph% of Western Civilization (New Yorlc Putnam, 1968), 184. 

*Such an inquby should not be assumed un&r the materialist and historicist pre- 
dilection currently in vo ue among the radical revisionists who step in to f i i  the void in 
the absence of more auhentic and reliable ap roaches to Muslim historical and socio- 
cultural f i e m e m .  The value of a recent stufy in mixed cultural context lies precisely 
in its attempt to liberate itself from the dominant paradigm in addressing the situation of 
a Muslim population and that it seeks to construct a paradigm in terms of criteria that are 
i n t d l y  valid to the Islamic worldview. Kenneth Bauzon, Liberalism and the Questfir 
I s h i c  Identiry in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Acom Ress, 1991). I am indebted to 



342 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

pedigree and its continuity as well as because of the unrivalled cultural 
osmosis that o c c d  in it with the mixed soumx of antiquity, par- 
ticularly that of the Hellenic and Hellenistic varieties. An indelible 
imprint of this symbiotic moment was left at least on one level of the 
Muslim paradigm that identified with thefuZd@&. For the rest, it ended 
up permeating the tradition to diffemt degmx. Yet even at that level, the 
evidence does not warrant ignoring the elements of an authentic Islamic 
tradition that is predicated on its unique perspective on reality and its 
modes of repmentation and that cannot be subsumed under the western 
paradigms of rationality and authority without its perversion. 

More often, though, the very terms in which the tradition has been 
pmessed in the West from its sources have constituted a barrier to inter- 
preting its constituents and has served merely to isolate its episodes.57 In 
the case at hand, to perceive that sepamtion or fragmentation in the ateas 
of inquiry was the norm in Muslim culture may partly be due to a 
different understanding of what it is that constitutes a religious question 
and a Secular question?' While clearly there are radical differences be- 
tween the foundational and historical Islamic and Christian traditions on 
the matter, and while it is undetstandable that the culture-filter in western 
Christendom should operate within its own tradition, yet the question is 
that the authority or frame of inquiry here, in this as in other works on 
the subject, was such as to appropriate this assumption about the "other" 
in history without question. It left no mom for even raising the question 
of a possible difference in conceptions. 

Ralf Braibantii who is a J. B. Duke professor, for bringing to my attention this book upon 
its publication. 

nMoce than familiatity and access to the tradition, it takes courage and inkpity to 

Oliver Leaman attem to do in questioning the apropriateness of taking the work of 
the Islamicate JeonsgtSphilosoppher Moses Maimmdes' Guide to the Perphed as a 

question standard interpretations and dislodge miscoaStnr ed analogies. Yet, this Is what 

the other hand, the merent schools within the tradiiion and the differences 
between them, as well as the ambiguities inherent in distiuishiug naqli or shur'i 
sciences and the rationalist or 'aqfi sciences, the rift between the jizhifah and the 
jiqk-'," wexe among the factom that encouraged such facile conclusions, even among 
Muslim students and reflected in conventions of writing about the Islamic theory of 
knowledge, alkmately  confound^ it with one school or another, depding on the 
author's or predilections. See M. M. Sharif (ed.), A History of Muslim Philosophy 
2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Otto HarasowitZ, 1963,1966); C. A. Qadir, Philosophy und Science 
in the Islamic World (London: Croom Helm, 1988); S. H. Nas, "The Teaching of 
Philosophy" in Philosophy, Literature und the Fine Arts (Jeddah: King Abdul Aziz 
Univemity and Hodder and Stoughton, 1982) Islamic Eilucution Series. Edited by S.  H. 
Nasr and Science und Civilizdon in Islam (Cambridge: Harvd University Ress, 1968). 



Abul-Fadk Contempomy Social Theory: T m h ~ ~ h j e c t i o n s  343 

If this observation is extended to other domains, the same incidence 
of incongtuities will ctop up with disconcerting regularity. This is how 
it was possible to mutilate the spirit of empirical inquiry in the course of 
its transmission into the western cultural space. There, to use Maritain’s 
terms, as the “empiriological” tradition in the median culture was stripped 
of its metaphysics, so too the conaturalist orientation of a tradition of 
empirical inquiry was lost. “Conatumlism,” it may be recalled, is a 
Thomktic term used in the Summa Theologica to umvey the essentials 
of the innate sensibility @@ah) and is itself a token of the significant 
Islamic influences of the period shaping the scholastic tradition, mntrary 
to some devious attempts to evade the issue. 

Mote intimately impinging on our field as social scientists is the c8se 
of the positivist-and the positive-distortion of Ibn Khaldiin.5’ Again, 
here was a blatant case of cultural amputation, as the Muslim historian 
and theoretician was abstracted fmm his sociocultural setting and con- 
ceived in terms of an odd genius in a primitive culture that would anti- 
cipate the corning of modemity itself. Little could it be realized that Ibn 
Khaldin belonged to a lineage of great system-builders in a c u l d  
matrix that generated such atchitects. Like Ibn Taym-yah, al G k l i ,  al 
Kzi, or before them, I m h  al SKfi‘i, each would leave his synthesizing 
imprint in an area of knowledge that would have its relevance for a con- 
temporary Islamic social theory, we= it only to be adequately =interpret- 
ed and developed in the context of our times and needs. In the prevailing 
onentalizing scholamhip of our day, little could it be realized how the 
new science of human civilization (5lm a1 ‘umrbn a1 h h u r i  ”> was 
conceived in the spirit of such a synthesis. In this c8se, the new science 
drew on the inductive sciences coming fmm hadith scholarship, and the 
deductive sciences cultivated in the wili (w-1 a1 flfiqho tradition of 

%sights relevant to an epistemic perspective have recently come from Fuad Baali 
and Ali W d i  I h  Khaldun and I s h i c  Thought Styles (Boston: G. Hall, 1981) with a 
Social knowledge appmach, and Aziz Anne4 Ibn Khaldun in Modem Scholarship: A 
Study in Orientakm (London: Third World Center for Research and Publication, 1981), 
and Ibn Khakhn: An Essay in Reinterpretation (London: Routledge, 1982). AnneVspio- 
neering initiative at decoostructing semantic fields and paradigmatic contexts, both w&in 
the Muqaddimah itself and within the orientalist scholarship on Ibn Khaldun may well 
constitute the work of ”radii revisionist intent” he claims it to be, but it is certainly not 
a work without “malign intent.” With commmate skill, he reconsttucts the whole from 
the park, usin4 me$aphom of decente and dislocation, only to tear down an edifice 
dkmksed for its l o p d  limitations ~histor ic i ty .  Like the compllsive Nietzschean 
decadence that iasptles it, the work is totally alien to the spirit of the ttadition and 
worldvim it dissects. It tells us more about Anneh’s calibre as a scholar whose genius 
is more attuned to the orientalh he is critiquins than he realizes. The Kbaldunian 
r e p e m  of scholarship, as much as its original, retams its perennial value for scholarship 
in both the Islamic and the western tradit~ons. 

6pAppmpriately rendered hto German as ku-mhoiff. Cf. Heinrich Simon, Ibn 
Khaldrm’s Science of Human Culture, trans. Fuad Baali (Kashmit and Lahore: Sh. 
Muhammad &af, 1978). 



344 The Amencan Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

inquiry. Ibn Khaldih applied this integrated methodology to the domain 
of conventional historiography, which by his time had grown into a volu- 
minous body and tradition of a wealthy cumulation of historical narrative. 

Given the proclivities in the Islamic tradition of leaming to investi- 
gate critically the possibility of a methodological/systematic structure for 
verification and for evaluating the truth of the reported event or its trans- 
mitted narration, the conditions for the conception of the new discipline 
were rife. If it had not been Ibn Khaldih, it would have been another 
figure, although there were admittedly precipitating factom that made the 
Muslim West a hospitable medium for this development. As far as the 
objective concern for ascertaining the reliability of information goes, it 
should be remembered that this concern lay at the toots of a tradition of 
scholarship and devoted inquiry that had developed in the culture mode 
associated with historical Islam. Its direct impetus came from the 
orientation and habits of mind and the moral injunctions inculcated by the 
Qur’an and the Sunnah. The fitst stirrings in this direction of cultivating 
a tradition of inquiry activated by the concern for integrity and veracity 
was, not surprisinglyp’ developed in the immediate vicinity of the 
sciences that grew up around the Qur’an and the Sunmd~.~’ These would 
constitute the core and nucleus of an authentic and unrivalled tradition of 
learning in Islam-one that would be perverted in the course of its trans- 
mutation to another mode of cultural inquiry and immobilized alternately 
through fossilization and contamination within its immediate culture 
medium. 

neither the westemists 
and orientdists nor the Muslims who have followed, knowingly or 
otherwise, in their tracks. Rather, the pmblem lies in the matrix, which 
structmes all teseatch and inquiry in the field and which proves to be 
hopelessly inadequate whenever it comes to processing the semantics and 

The culprits in misrepresenting a tradition 

61To date, perhaps the exemplary source on this subject to bring out the nodality of 
the Qur’anic nexus for the multifaceted cultural efflorescence in its intellectual, spiritual, 
aesthetic, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions is Isma’il al Faruqi and Lois 
Lamya al Famqi, me Cultural A r h  of Islam (London and New York Macmillan, 1986), 

“Hadith scholarshi , connotin6 a tradition of meticulous, objective, and systematic 
inquiry, retains its si&cance for mtellectual reform: Z. S. Sardar, The Future of Muslim 
Civifi#ion (London: C m m  Helm, 1982). In modemist circles, the Sunuah was seen to 
pose certain methodological pblems that needed to be a d d r d  before it could be taken 
as a source for such reform: Yiisuf Qar&wi% K&a Nata‘cimal ma‘a a1 Sunnah 
(Hemdon, VA: IHT, 1992) addtesses this concern from within a tradition that mnahs 
intractable. Cf. Shaykh ‘AM al G W s ,  Hujrjlat a1 Sunnah (Hemdon, VA IlJT, 1993). 
The movement to critique and reconstruct the modem Islamic episteme takes its logical 
axis tiom a rediscovery of its authentic sources, including the authoritative Sunuah, in 
terms of new methodologies that m to be generated in this process of rediscovery in the 
context of modernity. TiWi J. al ‘Alwiini, Islrfh Mandihc a1 F i b  (Herndon, VA: IIlT, 
1992) and ‘ I h  al ‘Ilm: Muqaddimah (Hemdon, VA: mT, 1994). 

part 4. see in coajunctionwith chapters 4 and 5. 



Abul-Fadk Contemporaty Social T h q :  T'hdi Rejections 345 

the epidemic and social fields of experience in other c d w .  While the 
dimensions of relativism and universalism have been debated in contem- 
porary social theoryF the challenge is to rethink the matrix of inquiry 
against this pmblematique, not the reverse. This is particularly needed if 
the globalization of social theory is not to become simply another arm in 
the imperialistic epistemology* and if we are to supersede the present 
stage of cultural hegemony politics to a dynamic stage more conducive 

Rethinking contemporary social theory against a definition of its 
scope and the testitution of the vertical bearings knowledge and being 
implicit in conceptual vistas of a c o n t d n g  episteme has suggested limi- 
tations and constraints, as well as possibilities and opportunities. Neither 
the conflictual ethos nor the binary reductionist matrix need be unquali- 
fied parameters for a social theory which is preeminently historicist and 
lends itself to critical construction, as suggested in this essay. The q u i -  
sites for a more genemtive social theory call for a new understanding as 
well as a new resolve: an ability and a willingness to see, for example, 
that a dualistic and schismatic conception can hardly be expected to 
handle the load coming fmm a unitary conceptual matrix without splitting 
it, and the realization that a fragmenting and reductionist matrix cannot 
deal with the experiences and the meanings conceived in a holistic and 
integrated tradition without distortion. 

To be able to address the challenges attending the reconstruction of 
social theory, it will be necessary to reconsider the paradigm of inquiry 
with an eye on expanding current perceptions of the scientific community, 
or the Habermasian speech community, beyond a parochialism or neo- 
tribalism masquerading in the garb of a flawed sense of modernity. Once 
this has been accomplished, the necessarily expanded sphere of knowl- 
edge and inte~sts tcpresented in that community will reflect on a mrien- 
tation in the horizons of inquiry, and social theory could then capitalize 
on fresh cutrents of alimentation in addition to existing latent sources and 

to cultural parity. 

%f. Ernest Gellner, Relativism mrd the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- 
versity Press, 1985). 

"Abdel Wahab al Messiri ''Imperial& E istemology." On globalhation, see R. 
Robertson, "Mapping the Global Condition: Gfobalization as the Central Concept," in 
Global Culture: Nationalism. Globalization and Mademity, ed. M. Feathemtone (L~~don:  
Sage, 1990); I. Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth Century 
Purudigms (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991); Roland Axtmam, "Society, Globalization and 
the Comparative Method," History of the Social Sciences 6, no. 2 (May 1993): 53-74. 
Bearing in mind the ideological constraints and restricted audience he is addressiag, Samir 
Amin's recent writing also mvides some relevant insights from our contrasting e@+ 
temics tive, especta& where he contours the "developed Arab-Islamic version' 
of medimbutary  culture against its "peripheral western version" arad where he traces 
the construction of the EuroCentric culture: Eurwenrrisni, trans. Russell Moore (New 
York Monthly Review Press, 1989). 



346 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11:3 

energies. Needless to say, the revitalizating of social theory is a function 
of a qualitative expansion in the community of inquiry, without which it 
would be impossible to escape the vicious circle and voracious appetite 
(for wasteful energy consumption) that inhem in the morbid dynamism 
of the oscillating culture. 

An Overview from the Median Culture 

What can a perspective coming from the median culture offer to con- 
temporary social theory? Where the concern has so far been with locating 
some of the problem amis that could provide the negative stimulus or 
propellors to a shift away from the dominant paradigm, the focus for a 
sequel to this essay will be on the gravitational properties that might 
attract attention to the median culture as a potentially valid and promising 
source for testtuctUring the field. For the benefit of economy, three ams 
could be charted out. The f h t  one refers to epistemic sources and modes, 
the second to the framework for social order, and the last to relating 
practice to precept. A generative inquiry could thence be structured round 
thtee regenerative instances conceived in terms of mutually impacting and 
reinfonhg energy flows: teccmciliatian, rehabilitation, and reintegration. 

In the first instance, re8son is mxmciled to revelation once the latter 
has been rehabilitated as a reliable source of knowledge for rechatting the 
episteme. The next instance taka us beyond the polarizaticm of binaries 
juxtaposing the individual to the community, so that the fictive chasm 
sef#lrathg and fragmenting the units of social inquiry is bridged. The 
third instance sheds light on the yields of the shaping social theory as the 
cognitive and the affective dimensions of social inquiry are reintegrated 
to the benefit of a theory mnci led With practice. A nodal point on 
which to focus an overview in this perspective can be one where issues 
of rationality and legitimacy intemt. These are prominent among the 
issue areas that have come to engage social theory in the West over the 
past decade in the wake of the challenges posed by the disillusionment 
with modemity. They are also pivotal for an inquiry that takes tuwhid for 
its axis. 

The discourse in contemporary social theory is significant not only 
for the light it sheds on the substantive issues at stake, but also for the 
ethos or mood it conveys. The overall mood may be perceived tout court 
to be one of pervasive cynicism. With an infusion coming from its expo- 
sure to a paradigm of thought and conduct drawing on the much neg- 
lected and underrated so- of an alternative culture medium, social 
theory stands a chance of realizing its stunted potential as an a m  of 
practical moral inquiry and a guide to understanding and implementing, 
or bringing about, the global moral order in a world of increasing com- 
plexity, where there is no option of "going back" to a primeval simplicity. 



Abul-Fadl: cantemporary Social Theuy: Tuwh~Dmjections 347 

The task of a social theory rethought in the light of a tawhfdfepis- 
teme is to make this option a possibility. Contrasting epistemics is sug- 

. gested as a strategic access to this task of critical thought and comtmc- 
tion in the new paradigm of inquiry based in an expanded speech com- 
munity. By cultivating an awareness that goes beyond the current critical 
disaffection in the field against an exploration of the potential of the 
neglected sources, it would be possible to break the gridlock of the eter- 
nal returns and revisitations within the same closed circle which end up 
reinforcing the cynicism and disillusion. With an "Enlightenment" spared 
its "Despair,"65 and with the tensions between a "pessimism of the intel- 
lect and an optimism of the w i 1 P  duly mlved,  the stalemate in con- 
temporary social theory, whether in its conservative or its radical wings, 
would be overcome. If a change in mood is part of what an overview 
from the median cul- could bring to the current discourse, an important 
threshold in rethinking social theory would have been crossed. The 
condition, however, for landing on the right foot is to overcome the 
arrogance of our learning. 

=Cf. Geoffre Hawthome, Enlightenment Md Despair: A History of Social neory 
(cambridge: 1983;. 

66cf. Allen Carlin, "'Pessimism of the Intellect, optimisn of the Wilt.'" The expres- 
sion was first used by Gramsci.