Islamic Religious Philosophy: Towards a Comprehensive Approach

The challenge of going beyond the fragmented and nuclear approaches in understanding the Islamic founding texts and, accordingly, addressing the problems that face Muslims from a holistic perspective, has been the foremost concern of the modern Muslim reformist movement. With the decline of Muslim communities in thought and civilization in relation to the contemporary West, the modern reformist scholars thus want for a constant holistic system that governs Islamic thought and the thematic unity of Islamic founding texts. This was considered to be the starting point for reconnecting heritage and Muslim intellectual production with contemporary reality. Many contemporary scholars have shown a keen interest in studying the Quran by focusing on “rebuilding Islamic religious philosophy” according to Iqbal’s claim. The philosophy, which guides Islamic thought and methodology has attracted the interest of many scholars of the modern era. Consequently, several studies have been published, particularly in the context of the Islamization of Knowledge project (later renamed knowledge integration/complementarity), that have contributed to the critique of both traditional and contemporary approaches of Ijtihād. These researchers argued that the contemporary approach has not been liberated from the classical paradigm of Ijtihād in terms of conceptual reductionism and fragmentation of knowledge. They emphasized the necessity of complementing them, or better still, replacing them with new approaches to liberate the Islamic intellectual production from the narrowness of partiality and legal formalities. These studies present some suggestions to overcome the methodological defects. This includes highlighting the critical starting point for methodological reformation - to build the Islamic epistemology and methodology on the general governing philosophy of Islamic teachings. This general philosophy has been widely explored within the discussion of many terms, seemingly synonyms, the most recurrent being “Islamic worldview”. Nevertheless, after decades of interest in this area, the process does not seem to have succeeded to generate what may be considered an Islamic religious philosophy (or worldview) framing modern Ijtihād and Islamic thought. Moreover, the interest in this topic seems to have faded away from Islamic scholarship in the 21st century. This research project aims to shed light on the development of the scholarship in the field of Islamic worldview, its relevance, the reasons for its obstruction and the eventual ways of its resumption.