Osman Bakar

The main aim of this paper is to provide an introductory discussion of the issue of the human need for a cultural symbiosis in the contemporary global community and of the constructive role that religion could play in delivering this global need. We will, however, be examining the issue at hand mainly from the perspective of Islam, since it happens to be the religion with which we are most familiar. But our chosen theme of discussion here with an emphasis on Islam is also influenced by other considerations. We realize that the perspective of Islam on the issue in question is little known to many non-Muslims even though it is important in its own right, thus meriting a serious study by scholars.

Today, Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity and also the fastest growing. Moreover, for various reasons, Islam is increasingly recognized even by its critics as having the capacity to positively influence world events and global affairs and the future direction of world history. More often than not, Islam’s influence is perceived negatively. The association of Islam with violence, as portrayed by many circles today, is a good illustration of this widespread misperception of Islam. In these circumstances, it is therefore important to highlight Islam’s positive teachings drawn from its rather rich treasury – spiritual, intellectual, and cultural – that could give a big helping hand to the present humanity in its task of realizing the goal of cultural symbiosis in this sharply polarized world.

Karim Douglas Crow

The Arabic term al-aql / ―intelligence/understanding/ reason‖ is one among half-a-dozen of the most important concepts occurring throughout Islamic experience and thought. From the beginning of the Islamic era, it had been an opaque term, and Muslim scholars did not always agree that ‘aql was univocal in meaning. In its early Islamic unfolding the concept of ‘aql comprised the intersection of primarily Arab and Qur‘anic as well as Biblicic components with Hellenic and Iranian traditions. ‘aql became the carrier of multiple overlapping or diverging meanings, if not already before Islam among the old Arabs; it assumed particular significances in ethics, humanistic studies (adab), prosody and rhetoric, law, theology, philosophy, as well as in spiritual and metaphysical speculations.1

A review of the Islamic understanding of ‗reason‘ and ‗rationality‘ would have to deal with the chief disciplines wherein rationality played an extensive role: legal theory (usul al-fiqh), speculative theology (kalam), philosophy (falsafah) and rational spirituality (hikmah & ‘irfan). Attention should also be given to pronounced anti-rationalist features of Traditionalism. Language and ideas take political and theological expression through discourse, narrative, literary genre or technique, and community setting.2

Yamin Cheng

The idea that religion is one segment of a total dimension of human existence, or that it is a product of the human mind and the human condition, is an idea of recent times. This idea could be traced to the Enlightenment and the Social Sciences, two Western intellectual movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively. Contemporary Muslim intellectuals attributed to Western imperialism and colonialism for the introduction of an idea of religion nurtured in Enlightenment thought and the Social Sciences into the Muslim understanding of religion. If we are to gauge to what extent this Muslim attribution is true it is then instrumental for us to understand the fate of religion in Western history.

Today, everyone is well acquainted with the word ‘religion.’ Mention the word ‘religion,’ and one would utter the name of one or more of the great religions of the world – Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism. Repeat the word for clarification, and one would point to a mosque, or a church, or a temple, or a priest, or a monk, or a nun. No one would point to a school and then say that it is a religious building; or to a schoolteacher and then say that the teacher is a religious person. Must learning be considered a religious act only if it means studying the Qur’an, or the Bible, or the Vedas? Must a person be called a religious person only if he or she puts on attire that is often associated with religion, but not if he or she wears a traditional costume or in the case of man, a modern-day coat and tie?

Osman Bakar

Classification of Knowledge in Islam: Items to be discussed

• Welcome to the world of Islamic architecture of knowledge 
• Classification of knowledge as an landmark in Islamic intellectual history 
• Historical overview of classifications of knowledge in Islam 
• Why is classification of knowledge important to the Islamic mind? 
• When and why did classification of knowledge stop as an intellectual activity in Islamic civilization? 
• The relevance of the Islamic idea of classification of knowledge to the contemporary world 
• The need to revive the Islamic tradition of classification of knowledge

Mona Abaza, London, UK: Routledge Curzon, 2002. 304 pages.

Professor Mahmoud Dhaouadi is a sociologist at the University of Tunis, Tunisia. As part of his Fulbright Research on “the State of American Sociology Today,” he interviewed Professor Smelser on January 5, 2001, director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Here are some excerpts.

DHAOUADI: Based on my own observations and impressions, one talks more about sociology as a discipline having a crisis, than about psychology or political science. How do you respond to that?

SMELSER: I heard this kind of talk among sociologists. Among the questions raised in their frequent conversations are: What is the field about? What are the boundaries about? Is it (sociology) fragmented? Is it practiced … etc?