Muslim reconstructions of knowledge and the re-enchantment of modernity

This article returns to the Muslim debate on the reconstruction of knowledge, known popularly though somewhat misleadingly as the Islamization of Knowledge. The debate on the reconstruction of knowledge points to an understanding of cultural modernity as a set of cognitive transformations that are co-requisites of institutional modernity. I partly review the debate, using the distinctive projects of S.H. Nasr and I. al-Faruqi as the focal point. Despite considerable differences in their reading of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, their projects (among others) amount to a critique of a modern Weltanschauung that severs the link between science and religion, between the natural and human sciences and between fact and value. But I contend that the debate on Muslim reconstructions of knowledge is best understood not as an Islamic critique of disciplinary knowledge per se, nor as an intra-Muslim discursive struggle amongst 'diasporic' intellectuals. Rather, the debate is best read as social theory that articulates an Islamic critique of modernity, a critique that implicitly engages in dialogue with Weberian theory and with the emerging literature on alternative modernities. The article suggests that the most pressing task of social analysis is comparative, hermeneutical-dialogical social theory, which recovers the normative and reformist impulsive at the heart of cross-cultural analysis.