A Critique of Modernist Synthesis in Islamic Thought Special Reference to Political Economy

Abstract

Is it the realm of theoretical constructs or positive applications that
defines the essence of scientific inquiry? Is there unison between the
normative and the positive, between the inductive and deductive
contents, between perception and reality, between the micro- and
macro-phenomena of reality as technically understood? In short, is
there a possibility for unification of knowledge in modernist epistemological
comprehension? Is knowledge perceived in conception
and application as systemic dichotomy between the purely epistemic
(in the metaphysically a priori sense) and the purely ontic (in the
purely positivistically a posteriori sense) at all a reflection of reality?
Is knowledge possible in such a dichotomy or plurality?
Answers to these foundational questions are primal in order to
understand a critique of modernist synthesis in Islamic thought that
has been raging among Muslim scholars for some time now. The
consequences emanating from the modernist approach underlie much
of the nature of development in methodology, thinking, institutions,
and behavior in the Muslim world throughout its history. They are
found to pervade more intensively, I will argue here, as the consequence
of a taqlid of modernism among Islamic thinkers. I will then
argue that this debility has arisen not because of a comparative
modem scientific investigation, but due to a failure to fathom the
uniqueness of a truly Qur'anic epistemological inquiry in the understanding
of the nature of the Islamic socioscientific worldview ...