The Problem of Empiricism in Comparative Political Research by Muslims: A Research Agenda lkeodore I? Wright, Jr. The Islamic critique of the dominant Euro-American paradigm in the study of politics has so far focused on the subfields of political philosophy, as in the articles of Abul-Fadl: of public administration,2 and of international relation^.^ Little attention has been paid by Muslim social scientists to compamtive politics, by which is meant the investigation of the internal political institutions and processes of countries. As the name of the subfield implies, it is also intended to promote the comparison of political systems and processes across national and cultural boundaries in search of some useful generalizations about which structural arrangements are the most likely to promote whatever values, including Islamic ideals, the analyst may employ as hisher criteria for evaluation. True, there have been various books like Ahmad’s which explicate the Islamic political ideal as exemplified in the practice of the Prophet and the four rightly-guided caliphs4 as well as books translating the Arabic terminology of Islam into its modern equivalents, such as M . Ahmed‘s Islamic Political System in the Modem Age,5 but these give little guidance to a political Theodore P. Wright, Jr., is a professor of political science at State University of New York at Albany, New York. ‘Mona Abul-Fadl, ”F’amdigms in Political Science Revisited: Critical Options and Muslim Perspectives,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 6, no. 1, supplement (September 1989): 3-46; “Contrasting Epistemics: Tmhid, the Vocationist and Social Theory,* American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 7, no. 1 (March 1990): 15-38. 21bnomer Mohamed Sharfuddin, “Toward an Islamic Administrative Theory,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 4, no. 2 (December 1987): 229-44. 3!4MulHm-d AbiSulayrm%, “Islamization of Knowledge with Special Reference to Political Science,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 2, no. 2 (December 1985): 263-89. ‘Murntaz Ahmad, ed., state, Politics and Islam (Indianapolis: American Trust Publications, 1986). 5Manzoo~ddin Ahmed, Islamic Political System in the Modern Age: Theory and Pmctice (Karachi, Pakistan: Saad Publications, 1983) does not really deliver what the title promises. Ausaf Ali’s “Approach to the Islamization of Social and Behavioral Sciences,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 6, no. 1 (September 1989): 37-58, while it proposes an Islamic conceptual framework, does not bridge the gap of “how to do empirical research.” Wright: The Problem of Empiricism 41 scientist wishing to conduct research into the empirical reality of present-day Muslim-ruled polities other than to condemn their deviation from the ideal Qur’anic model. For instance, must a contemporary Muslim political scientist reflexively castigate Pakistan for h o l m “free and fair elections” to its legislative bodies and praise the late president Zia ul-Haq for instituting an appointive mjlis al shiirii to perform legislative functions simply because Western observers tend to disapprove of this on the gmunds that an appointive legislature does not meet the modern conception of democratic representation?6 It shall be the endeavor of this paper to undertake a critique of the concepts and value assumptions of the existing literature in the academic field of comparative politics in the hope of revealing the built-in European (”Judeo- Christian” or “secular-humanist”) biases and then to suggest an agenda of issues on which Muslim and non-Muslim scholars might agree. Among the unarticulated biases of Western comparative politics are: 1) secularism; 2) materialism; 3) analysis which distinguishes subcategories but often fails to integrate them in a “holistic” manner; 4) unilinear development according to a European historical model; 5 ) liberal individualism which values freedom and democracy over order and community; 6) quantification instead of qualitative methods; ’7) egalitarianism; 8) empiricism; and 9) pragmatism. Among the few sympathetic American studies of existing Muslim political practices which avoid these biases have been Clark’s on the zakah system in Pakistan,’ Vogel’s dissertation on the Saudi judicial system,8 Kennedy’s study of the Wiki ordinances in Pakistan, SutcWs study on the compatibility of Islamic values with economic development in Jordan:O and Wright’s analysis of the Shahbano Begum case which dealt with the maintenance of Muslim divorcees in 1ndia.ll l k o Arab doctoral students have written such doctoral 6Theodore P. Wright, Jr., “American Foreign Policy and Elections in Pakistan,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies XI, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall 1987): 73-82. ’Grace Clark, “Pakistan’s Zakat and Ushr as a Welfare System,” in Islamic Reassertion in Pakistan, ed. Anita Weiss (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 3-95. 8Frank Vogel, “Islamic Law and Legal System: Studies of Saudi Arabia,” Ph.D. dissertation in progress, Harvard University. 9Charles H. Kennedy, lslamization in Pakistan: Implementation of the H u d d Ordinances,’’ Asian Survey XXVJII, no. 3 (March 1988): 3m-K; “Islamic Legal Reform and the Status of Women in Pakistan,” Journal of Islamic Studies 2 , ‘no. 1 (1991): 45-55. loClaude Sutcliffe, “Is Islam an Obstacle to Development: Ideal Patterns of Belief versus Actual Patterns of Behavior,” JoumZ of Dateloping Areas 10 (October 1975): 77-82. Naim Nusair, in “Human Nature and Motivation in Islam,” Islamic Quarterly XXIX, no. 3 (1985): 148-163, deals with the same problem but on the basis of revelation. ”Theodore P. Wright, Jr., “The Shahbano Begum Case: Women’s Rights vs. Muslim Personal Law in India,” in Developing Countries, edited by Claude Wlch, Special Studies no. 155, Council on International Studies and Programs (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1989), 119-44. 42 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences Y:I dissertations at the State University of New York at Albany: Khalaf on dwiiniyah and Al-Mutairi on &zj administration, neither of which fits into the straightjacket of Wkstern categories.’2 It was one of the five charges against “conventional” comparative politics by MacridkP in 1955 that the field showed its true parochial nature by focusing almost exclusively on the nations of Western Europe. The “behavioral” school of political science in America14 did add thereafter many newly independent Asian and African countries to the “data base” from which it formulated hypotheses and generalizations for te~t ing?~ But the concepts, categories, and typologies used to analyze them were still entirely European in origin, even if subdivided into liberal-democratic and Marxist-Leninist branches?6 For example, three of Almond‘s supposedly universal structural-functional categories have been criticized as being in reality simply neologisms for the familiar Anglo-American branches of government.” Not until the 1980s did Wiarda, in his article T m r d a Non-Ethnocentric Theory of Development,’”* suggest that it was worth investigating what he called “indigenous models of development,” meaning a change towards something phenomenologically better. Among these, he specifically mentioned Islamic as well as Gandhian, African tribal, Latin American corporatist, and Confucian-Maoist examples. However, Wiarda did not carry his relativist deconstruction to the next logical step, i.e., he did not include non-Western values as measures by which the indigenous (for instance, Muslim) political analyst might judge the changes which he had empirically observed. Thus he ridicules as ludicrous the condemnation of the Wstern model of development by Iran’s religious leaders, who called it sinful and satanic, and excoriates the Islamic punishments as “comic-opera and brutal” in the same manner as the Western media?g The problem then is how to construct a mode of conducting empirical 12Jassem Khalaf, ‘Kuwait Legislative Assembly: A Study of Its Structure and Function,” Ph.D. diss. State University of New York at Albany, 1984; H e m Al-Mutairi, “An Islamic Perspective for Public Service with Reference to the Hajj Research Center,” Ph.D. diss. SUNY Albany, 1987. ”Ray C. Macridis, The Study of Compamtive Government (New York: Random House, 1955). %0bert Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science,” American Political Science Review LV, no. 4 (December 1961): 76372. 15Harry Eckstein and David Apter, eds., Comparative Politics: A Reader (New York: Free Press 1963), 23. ‘*Louis Cantori and Andrew Ziegler, eds., Comparative Politics in the Post-Behavioml Em (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988), 73-6. “Lawrence C. Mayer, Redefining Comparative Politics (Newbury Park: Sage, 1989), 67. ”Howard Wiarda, ed., New Directions in Comparative Politics (Boulder: Mstview, 1985), I9Edward Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon, 1981). 1 - 5 0 , especially p. 137 on Islam. Wright: The Problem of Empiricism 43 research on Muslim societies which is untainted by cultural bias with respect to either the concepts or the basis of evaluation. Language itself is an impediment to this undertaking in that the translation of terms from English, the tongue of most contemporary social sciences, to Arabic and vice versa is never exact because of the difkrent cultural connotations with which words are encumbered. For instance, should one translate “reform,” a positive term in English, to biduh, a negative term in Arabic? And, “secularism” in English is understood as “Godlessness” in Arabic.2o The behavioral school has attempted to escape this dilemma, but only within the European context, by coining neologisms or jargon” with Greek or Latin roots (i.e. , “interest aggregation”). However, this patently does not solve the problem for comparison outside that culture. Operationalism, by which is meant the definition of concepts in terms of the operations to be performed in their use, is another way to accomplish intercultural, intersubjective communication (i.e., the economist’s per capita gross national product), but this assumes a common understanding of materialist values and the frame of reference. But can these techniques for reducing bias assume agreement between East and Ws t on empiricism itself, that is, on actual observation rather than divine authority or pure reason, as u basis, if not the preferred or only basis, for acquiring knowledge? It is Abul-Fadl’s main thesis in “Contrasting Episterhics’’22 that all paradigms, including the secularist, contain an element of faith which compels the social scientist to take a “leap of faith“ to comprehend a religiously based paradigm. While, as I have noted above, most of the writing in the Islamization of Knowledge school inspired by the late a1 FlniqiZ3 has relied on nonempirical methods, there is a tradition in earlier Muslim scholarship, represented by Ibn Khaldiin, which was based on strictly empirical ob~ervation.~~ To rescue this branch of study from the charge of being “un- is la mi^,^' I would suggest the relevance of the much-castigated “fact-value” 2oBernaTd Lewis, Zhe Political Language of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, zlLawrence C. Mayer, op. cit., 285. zzAbul-Fadl, “Contrasting Epistemics,” op. cit. ; Catholic support for revelation as a basis for social science analysis is illustrated by Joseph McKenna’s article “Ethics and Wr: A Catholic View,” Zhe American Political Science Review LIV, no. 3 (September 1960): 647-58. z3Al Finiqi in his Islamization OfKnowledge, Geneml Principles and Workplan (Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1982), 28, asserts dogmatically that “the unity of truth (tawhid) prescribes that no claim on behalf of revelation may be made which goes counter to reality; . . . no contradiction, difference or variation between reason and revelation is ultimate.” 24Bogdan Mieczkowski, “Ibn Khaldun’s Fourteenth-Century Views on Bureaucracy.” American J o m l of Islamic Social Sciences 4, no. 2 (December 1987): 179-99. Akbar S. Ahmed also cites al Biruni as the first anthropologist in Toward Islamic Anthropology.“ ibid., 3, no. 2 (December 1986): 217. 1988), 117. distinction of Weber and the logical-positivist philosophers. They asserted that fact and value stem from and require different types of discourses, for while values, including supernatural beliefs, indubitably influence or motivate human behavior, they can never be scientifically proven right or wrong by reference to facts, and, conversely, facts are inherently undemonstrable by reference to values. The closest one can come to connecting the two worlds of discourse is through “if . . . then . . .” statements: “if you want such and such values, scientific observation of facts shows that such and such a method or policy is most probable to achieve or maximize those values.”25 Thus if Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini (or, fbr that matter, China’s Mao Zedong) placed a high value on the suppression of narcotic addiction, whether because it is prohibited by revealed law or because it is socially deleterious, then the social scientist ought to be able to show if executing drug dealers (which both countries practice) achieves that goal-value more effectively than “public education,” counselling, or other nostrums of liberalism which value “human rights” as an ultimate value.26 Even if the liberal methods were demonstrated by the social scientist to be more effective, a believer muld prefer methods prescribed by divine law regardless of “cost-benefit ratios: and that fervently held belief might in fact alter behavior in the desired direction. Can we bridge the gap between social scientists of different fiths by conducting an empirical search for social and political conditions which in either value system are considered bad and focus on the relationship between alternative policies and mutually desired improvements? What I am proposing to Muslim comparativists is that they examine the Muslim world, both past and present, and then describe as objectively as possible those actual characteristics, if any, which distinguish Muslim “political culture” from the non-Muslim world, diir a1 Isliim from diir a1 kufi, not just to denounce Muslim practice for its departures from Islamic values but to accurately understand and predict what the practice is and will be in order to move it towards the Islamic ideal. This, I take it, is what A. Ahmed has advocated in his recent book Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society.27 Most Muslim critics of Western social science seem z5Vemon Van Dyke, Political Science: A Philosophical Analysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 9. I believe that A. Rashid Moten misinterprets the Wberian ideal of a value-free political science as if it ignored values and reduced itself to the crude empiricism of “facts speak for themselves.“ See Moten’s “Islamization of Knowledge: Methodology of Research in Political Science: American J m m l of Islamic Social Sciences 7, no. 2 (September 1990), 169. 26“Twenty seven drug pushers executed in Iran,” The Nation (Lahore), December 6, 1990: 1. Marc Blecher, China: Politics, Economics, Society (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1980), 50. z7Akbar S. Ahmed, Discovering Islam (New York Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Seyyid Vali Reza Nasr seems to argue the same position in “Islam and the Social Sciences,“ Hamdad Islamicus XIII, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 83-92. Wright: The Problem of Empiricism 45 to be unaware that Euro-American scholarship, even in natural science, was until comparatively recently (perhaps a century ago) motivated by or at least carried on by believing Christians who hoped that their work would promote Christian values even if it modified Christian dogma. I would speculate that the shift to materialistic motivations and secular-humanistic values in this century is in part a product of the disproportionate role played in this transformation by scientists and social scientists (Marx, Freud, Einstein) of Jewish origin (if not as regards matters of belief or practice), uninterested in advancing specifically Christian, let alone Muslim, visions of the good life.28 What I suggest first is a quantified survey, where possible, of actual conditions and institutions in Muslim polities compared to all others, to see if indeed there are any significant differences which might be attributed to Islam. Impressionistically, I put forward the following areas for investigation, even though the terminology in English may seem somewhat pejorative to Muslims: 1 . A preponderance of military over civilian rule. This was also the norm in classical and medieval European culture, but the two roles have been gradually separated in the West as a result of specialization of function. Since intellectuals and academics are seldom if ever skilled in the use of violence, except for a few revolutionary terrorists like Frantz Fanon, they naturally champion civilian control of the military and decry miliary coups d’etat.29 Various measures might be applied to compare the outcomes of military and civilian rule in Muslim and non-Muslim states. Mode of succession to rulership. Because the Qur’an, like the Roman Empire, did not supply an unambiguous criterion for legitimate succession to the combined religious/secular office of khukfuh, the khihfuh soon relapsed into such pre- Islamic tribal Arabic practices as dynastic inheritance; because of royal polygamy, assassination and fratricidal civil wars of succession were more frequent than in Europe or China, both of which had clear rules of prim~geniture.~~ With the arrival of modem doctrines of popular sovereignty, election 2 . Z8John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Stmuss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York Basic Books, 1974). ”Except for Samuel Huntington in Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), who blames “praetorian” rule on weak civilian institutions. 30Robbins Burling, The Passage of Power: Studies in Political Succession (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1974). 46 The American ~ourna~ or isiamic ~oci ic l ~ C I C I I S C ~ 7.1 of the effective sovereign has largely replaced heredity in the West with the exception of Latin America which, like the Muslim world, is much given to military rule. The electoral method of succession has not worked well in much of the postcolonial Third World despite the replacement of monarchy by nominal republics in most.31 Is this because of the backwardness of the non-European world, or have some rulers attaining power by means other than free and fair elections been just as, or even more, effective and legitimate than the elected rulers of those states?32 As is often said by behavioralists in other matters, “that is an empirical question.” A particularly well-known difference between Muslim and non-Muslim states has been the lack of separation between religion and the state in the former, now expressed as “secularism” in the West. Historically, religious and political authorities were in uneasy harness in both civilizations until the deadlocked religious warfare of Europe, capped by the French kwlution, produced the compromise of mutual toleration and the stepby-step withdrawal of the established Church from the performance of many sociopolitical functions. Whether even by secular tests human beings are better off in this situation is, again, a matter to be measured and not simply The role of religion in politics may be inherently different in the respective faiths as compared by Smith.34 A quite recent category for contrasting Muslim and non- Muslim societies is the role of gender in politics. Islam, especially in practice, provides one of the most gender- differentiated societies in the world to the intense indignation of Western and a few Muslim feminists.35 Women have been practically excluded from rulership and many other public roles by custom if not so strictly by the Shari‘ah, while Wstem and communist bloc women have achieved a considerable 3 . 4 . 31J~nathan Kandell, “Prosperity Born of Pain,’’ New York Emes Magazine, July 7, 1991, l4ff. (about Chile after sixteen years of General Pinochet’s rule). 32Richard K. Betts and Samuel Huntington, ”Dead Dictators and Rioting Mobs; Does the Demise of Authoritarian Rulers Lead to Political Instability?,” Zntenrarionul Security X, no. 3 (Witer 1985-86): 112-46. asTheodore P. Wright, Jr., “The Shahbano Begum Case:’ op. cit. 34Donald E. Smith, India ar a Secular W e (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1%3), 40 and more broadly his Religion and Political Development (Boston: Little & Brown, 1970). 3sAnita Weiss, “Implications for Women,” in Weiss, op. cit., g-114. Wright: The Problem of Empiricism 47 5 . degree of equality of both opportunity and condition in this century. What Western social scientists seldom consider is the cost of this unnatural destruction of a biologically based division of labor on the family; the nurture of children, the sick, and the elderly; and the performance of volunteer services and transmission of culture.36 Official and stateenforced puritanism. This characteristic was not unique to Islam, for it was shared by the other Semitic faiths until well into the twentieth century. Then, just as Muslim ''fundamentali~m"~~ was reviving in the Western states and universities in the throes of the sexual revolution gave up almost all legal sanctions against fornication, adultery, homosexuality, pornography, obscenity, blasphemy, usury, alcohol, and, perhaps won, addictive drugs. The functionality of the now removed age-old religious limitations on such human behavior should be apparent to all but the most inveterate liberals, with the spread of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) in the late twentieth century. But the latter are so dominant in academia and the media that few scholarly studies have been devoted to the social and individual ill-effects of such permi~siveness.~~ A few scattered feminist articles on the causal connection between pornography and rape and a widely reviewed study of the consequences of divorce on children are exceptions.3g Instead, we are now burdened with a new w e of absolutist "human rights" policies and organizations for which there is no empirical basis.40 One aspect of Western modernity shared with both Islamic ideals and, to some extent, with Muslim practice is the value of class equality. Nobody is born inherently and spiritually inferior, as is taught by Hinduism. However, the West and 6 . 36David Popenoe, "Family Decline in the Swedish Welkre State," Public Interest, no. 102 (Winter 1991): 65-77; Brenda Hunter, Home by Choice: Fwing the Effects of Mother's Absence (Portland: Multnomah, 1991). "AWul Rahman Momin, "On 'Islamic Fundamentalism,' the Genealogy of a Stereotype," Hamdad Zslamicus X, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 35-46. 38Theodore P. Wright, Jr., "Morality and the Law: A Conservative View,m in Momlity and the Law, edited by Manzoor Ahmed (Karachi: S. M. Mir, 1986). 390. Ziliman and J. Bryant, "hrnogmphy, Sexual Callousness and the Trivialition of Rape," Journal of Communimtions 32 (Fall 1982): 10-21. Judith Wallerstein, Second &ances: Men, Wmen and Children a Decade afier Divorce (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989). 'OA key article in this literature, Rhoda Howard and Jack Donnelly, "Human Dignity, Human Rights and Pblitical Regime," American Poliricd Science Zb&w (September 1980): 801-17, has no empirical evidence whatsoever. the Muslim world have diverged since the French Revolution on the issue of the status and treatment of religious minorities. While Muslim states historically treated at least the ahl al kit& (people of the book) better than Christian rulers did Jews and Muslims befbre the landmark events of 1789, the reverse has been the case ever since where the status of dhim- has been retained. The unexamined empirical question is whether religious minorities are actually worse off in various ways when they are protected second-class citizens than in supposedly secular states like India.41 Transnational loyalties. It has been argued, for instance, by Hindu nationalists in India that Muslim minorities are always more loyal to the Muslim ummah (community) than to the nation-states in which they reside because of their religious obligation to spread the faith and, by implication, to expand &r al Z~liirn.~~ This charge of dual loyalty was formerly laid against Catholics in Protestant majority countries and is feared by the Zionists in the diaspora who so fervently support the state of Israel. It is based on assumptions of nation-state ethno- religious homogeneity which seem no longer supportable in an era of mass migration and instant comm~nication.~~ Treason, of course, is another matter, but few if any cases of Muslim treason towards India have been substantiated. The dream of Arab national unity appears more plausible than the Islamic unity for which the Khilafat Movement in British India strove in vain in 1919. A new test of the relative attractiveness of the ummah and one’s adopted nation has arisen among Muslim migrants to Europe in the wake of the Salman Rushdie controver~y.~~ Empirical tests of assimilation vs. separatism among various Muslim and non-Muslim migrants over several generations need to be administered. Individualism vs. collective identity. Whether the strong Muslim allegiance to a patriarchal and extended family and 7. 8. _______ 41Theodore P. Wright, Jr., and Omar Khalidi, “Majority Hindu Images, Stereotypes and Demands of the Muslim Minority in India: The Backlash,” delivered at the International Conference on Muslim Minority-Majority Relations, New York, 24-26 October 1989. 421mtiaz Ahmed, “Pakistan and the Indian Muslims,” Quest 93 (Januarykbruary 1975): 39-47, for refutation. ‘”.D: Smith, “The Myth of the ‘Modem Nation’ and the Myths of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 11 (January 1988): 1-26. “Theodore P. Wright, Jr., “The Rushdie Controversy: The Spread of Communalism from South Asia to the West,” Plural Societies, forthcoming. Wright: The Problem of Empiricism 49 9. 10 clan is distinctive of Muslims or only a ”traditional” attribute like China’s, likely to be eroded by the acids of modernity, it clearly has some social benefits when compared to the ultra- individualism of the postnuclear-family West, especially for African-American~.~~ These relative gains and losses need to be measured by unbiased social scientists rather than by liberal ideologues. A consequence of the strength of kinship ties, of course, is nepotism and other forms of “corruption.” Only Nye46 has pointed out the possible benefits to the economy of this much-deplored phenomenon. Perhaps the practices and institutions it represents should be reevaluated with a view to assigning quotas of positions and other benefits to kinship groups proportionate to their numbers rather than just as ”merit” assignment to individuals or geographd areas. Indian caste quotas, however, show the drawbacks of such schemes. High birth rates. An empirical characteristic of Muslim societies everywhere is their tendency to have a higher birth rate and rate of increase than the non-Muslims among whom they live either as a majority or a minority. This fact may take on political significance when it leads to an “ethnic numbers game.”47 Finally, since the Qur’an is written in Arabic, that language has a place of special prestige in all Muslim societies whether it is the mother tongue or not, which suggests comparison with the language politics of both Muslim-controlled governments and those in which Muslim minorities lack power. 48 In all ten of these areas there is, I submit, a need for empirical research by Muslim social scientists or sympathetic outsiders to recast the perceptions of reality in objective terms which are less biased or invidious than the contemporary modern discourse of comparative and development politics. 45Theodore P. Wright, Jr., “Inadvertent Modernization of Indian Muslims by Revivalists,” Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Afsairs 1, no. 1 (Summer 1979): 80-92 regarding the Black Muslims of America. 46Joseph Nye, ‘‘Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis,” American Political Science Review LXI, no. 2 (June 1967): 417-27. “Theodore P. Wright, Jr., “The Ethnic Numbers Game in South Asia: Hindu-Muslim Conflicts over Family planning, Conversion, Migration and the Census,“ in Culture, Ethnicity and Identity, edited by William C. McCready (New York The Academic Press, 1983). 405-27. 48See dissertation by Abdel Hameed Mansouri on the problem of French vs. Arabic in education and government employment in Algeria, S.U.N.Y. Albany, 1991. 50 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 9:l As Winkel has observed: "The key to a para%m shift is the shift in questions . . . and problems to be solved . . . As we rhapsodize about science, do we not consider that the vast majority of technologies and scientific products are designed to solve problems that modernity itself caused?"49 49Eric A. Winkel, "Paradigm and h s t modem Politics from an Islamic Perspective,'' American J o u m l of Islamic Social Sciences 8, no. 2 (September 1991): 255.