Abstract

Ismā’īl Rājī al-Fārūqī was deeply troubled by the crisis of knowledge in Islam today, especially the bifurcation between revealed Islamic knowledge and acquired human knowledge. Current knowledge is largely conceptualized and interpreted through a Western secular world view but accepted as universal. The modern educated Muslim is thus torn between the wonderful material progress of secular education and the rigidity of a traditional Islamic education which has not engaged with the challenges of modernity.In an attempt to reconcile Islam with modernity, to enable Muslim social science students and graduates to gain an Islamic perspective on knowledge, Fārūqī developed the concept of ‘Islamization’. The ‘Islamization of knowledge’ is the synthesis of old and new within an Islamic epistemological framework. The notion was enthusiastically received by Muslim educationists in the West and in the Muslim world.This chapter explores Fārūqī’s idea of the ‘Islamization of knowledge’; reviews the criticisms, modifications and alternatives put forward by other Muslim scholars, especially the shift in nuance to ‘integration of knowledge’; and concludes with a new proposal.