EDITORIAL

Abstract

It is with a great sense of pride that we announce the quarterly publication
of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences with this issue. We started
in 1984 with two issues a year, and in 1990 added a third. We are now glad
to provide issues of AJISS corresponding to the four seasons of the year.
We have been encouraged to increase our journal‘s frequency due to the
overwhelming response and appreciation of its uniqueness on the part of
individual scholars, institutions, contributors, and subscribers. May Allah
bless our well-wishers and help us to further enhance the scholarly role of
AJISS.
In this issue, Amriah Buang introduces a hitherto neglected subject to
the Islamization of knowledge: human geography. Asserting that this field
has reached an epistemological impasse, she describes the nature of the
contending philosophies currently characterizing human geography and thereby
highlights those difficult-to-reconcile epistemological points of contention.
Buang briefly recounts the nature of structuration theory, which is proposed
by some geographers as a solution to the present impasse, and then subjects
it to a preliminary Islamic evaluation.
In an earlier issue (AJISS 8:2, September 1991), Fazal Khan proposed
a theoretical perspective on the process of the Islamization of the entertainment
video medium with special reference to Pakistan. In this issue, he explores
some empirical basics of the Islamization of the enculturation model based
on his study of youth viewers of Pakistani television.
Theodore Wright, Jr., critiques the concepts and value assumptions of
existing literature in the field of comparative politics in order to bring out
the built-in Eurocentric bias which it has acquired through its Judeo-Christian
and secular-humanist orientation. He suggests a research agenda for Muslim
and sympathetic non-Muslim specialists with the intent of recasting the
perception of reality in terms which are objective and thus less biased than
those currently found in the contemporary modern discourse of comparative
and developmental politics. Wright’s concerns are well appreciated and his
agenda should be taken seriously by Muslim researchers, but dependence
on empirical data alone is not going to solve the problem. Muslim social
scientists must participate in advancing Islamic positions on current issues
based on the Qur’an, the hadith literature, and the insights gained from their
expertise. For example, while an unbiased study of the preponderance of ...