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Theory, Culture & Society
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300230
2006; 23; 177 Theory Culture Society
S. Sayyid
Islam and Knowledge
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Problematizing Global Knowledge Science/Alternative Science 177
T
he confident expectation among the social
sciences late in the last quarter of the 20th
century was that Islam would wither away
as the global advance of westernization brought
secularization and modernization in its wake. Not
only has Islam failed to follow the trajectory
pursued by variants of Christianity, namely
depoliticization and confinement to the private
sphere; it has, in contrast, forcefully re-asserted its
public presence in the world. This re-assertion is
often presented in terms of geopolitical or cultural
challenges to the integrity and dominance of the
western enterprise. The mobilizations in the name
of Islam also present an epistemological challenge
for the naturalized order of western hegemony. In
other words, the invocation of Islam tests the
power/knowledge complex that underpins the
western order, questioning not only its power but
also the knowledge intrinsic to the exercise of that
power. The question of accommodating Islam in
the world order and within the domestic policies
of states constituted by the current international
system has tended to obscure the depth and inten-
sity of the philosophical aspects of this challenge.
It is not only that the persisting relevance of Islam
suggests that the history of the world cannot
simply be reconfigured as a scaled-up version of
the history of the West, but the evocation of Islam
as a horizon implies a deep decolonisation of
western power/knowledge.
The most common role assigned to Islam in
narratives of world civilization can be understood
through the metaphor of postal workers. The
historical contribution of Islam is to post the
classical heritage of Greece and Rome to its
rightful heirs in Renaissance Europe. This
movement is mapped out with more or less preci-
sion from Asia Minor to Andalusia. This mapping
of course is also a narration of the identities of
Islam and the West in terms of their destiny. Rather
than replaying the Orientalist fantasy of such
accounts, it might be more interesting to try and
sketch out another way of seeing the relationship
between Islam and the construction of the world.
To this end, it is not helpful to think in terms of
contributions in which different communities of
literature give something to the common good;
such a narrative betrays a positivist conception of
knowledge in which knowledge is objective and its
uncovering and recovering can be simply trans-
posed from one culture to another: assumptions
such as this lead to rather simple-minded quests for
the Zulu Tolstoy or the Muslim Martin Luther.
Muslim sources see the beginning of a distinct
body of knowledge with the collection of the
Ahadith, the sayings of the Prophet (pbuh) as
reported by his close companions and wives.
Classical Muslim scholarship organized its
production of knowledge under various disciplines
such as fiqh (jurisprudence), falsafa (philosophy)
and tafsir (hermeneutics). It important to make a
distinction between Islamic knowledge and Islam-
icate knowledge. The former refers to the knowl-
edge of the semantic order initiated by the
revelations of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh),
while the latter (following Hodgson, 1977)
consists of all those working within a political and
social order dominated by the signature of Islam.
As such they would not have to be Muslims (i.e.
those who would identify themselves as part of a
community centred on the Prophet Muhammads
(pbuh) mission).
Both Islamic and Islamicate knowledge were
influenced by the way in which the Muslim
Ummah came to a dominant conceptualization of
the relationship of the Divine with the human, in
which the gap between the two could not be
closed. As a consequence Divinity and humanity
did not necessarily share an ontological space,
which meant that no amount of human mapping
out reality could threaten the independence and
viability of the Divine. It could be argued that the
development within dominant strands of Christi-
anity of the possibility of closure between the
Divine and the human through the category of
incarnation had the effect of establishing a kind of
ontological continuity between these realms,
which meant that human production of knowledge
could subsume (and threaten) the ontological
space occupied by the Divine. One of the ways in
which the different conceptions of the Divine are
played out is that until recent times in the history
of the Muslim Ummah, there were few cases in
which human knowledge is presented as defiant of
the Divine or able to subsume the Divine. The
different conception of the relationship between
the Divine and the human can be seen as
contributing to different epistemological histories
that engulfed Islamdom and Christendom.
Islam and Knowledge
S. Sayyid
Keywords Eurocentrism, historiography, Islam,
power/knowledge
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Islamic knowledge has managed to maintain
its institutional linkages and still performs a signifi-
cant role in Muslim communities as a means of
linking readings of the Islamic canonical texts with
their selective dissemination in other discourses.
Islamic knowledge also includes more recent
scholarship that sees in the revelation of Islam and
the development of its canon (Quran, hadith,
sunnah) a methodological and epistemological
resource. In other words, the canon is mined for
its metaphysical and ethical content, but is also
invoked as a scholastic tool. This Islamic epistem-
ology is the product of an episteme that is now
confined to narrow corners of medressas, and
networks of various tablighs, etc.
The Islamicate production of knowledge came
to an end around 1800. It was not replaced
through a Darwinian struggle in which better
knowledge replaced poor knowledge it was not
the replacement of Islamicate memes with
European memes, but the gradual erosion of the
politicalmilitary complex that sustained that
knowledge producing complex. In the absence of
the politicalmilitaryeconomic complexes that
could undergird the production of Islamic and
Islamicate knowledge, we have seen the retreat of
these forms of knowledges from being part and
parcel of a wider literate culture to isolated sites,
where they are institutionally disempowered.
The production of Islamicate knowledge has
become more or less colonized by the western/
modern episteme. In the context of the study of
phenomena associated with Islam this has meant
the hegemony of Orientalism and its alter-ago anti-
Orientalism. Orientalism sees Islam as governed
by an essence, which is distinct from other cultural
formations of its scale. Anti-Orientalism denies
any essentialism to Islamic or Islamicate phenom-
ena; this, however, is only accomplished by the
implicit and disavowed acceptance of Western
exceptionalism as constructed through the disci-
plines associated with the social sciences. What
remains common to both Orientalist and anti-
Orientalist accounts is a belief in the idea that the
history of the West is the destiny of the world.
Thus Orientalism signifies a field of study that sees
the transhistorical nature of Islam as its proper
object. Anti-Orientalism rejects any possibility
that Islam and the Islamicate world that its
venture brings into being can have any substantial
specificity (Sayyid, 2003: 3146).
The possibility of breaking with Orientalism
(and its alter ego) in order to articulate an Islami-
cate epistemology is unlikely to emerge from
various attempts to use Islamic knowledge as
means of establishing an authentic epistemology for
Muslims. Such attempts are marred by a positivism
which seeks to establish an isomorphic relation
between Islams sacred discourses (principally, the
Quran) and the general field of discursivity as
accounted for by (western) scientific epistemology.
These attempts are often motivated by the desire
to present Islamic knowledge as the precursor of
contemporary science; however, in the project to
demonstrate the primacy of Islamic epistemology,
they paradoxically enshrine its secondary relation-
ship to the discourse of science, thus making the
sacred text vulnerable to technologization.
Various debates around concepts such as
religion, secularism, feudalism have become
important sites exposing the limitations of
western historiography. Too often representations
of Muslims worked within western historiography
as counter history which tacitly confirmed the
supremacy of the western enterprise. With the
abandonment of the project in which history
figured as grand narrative, and the abandonment
of a western telos (or rather its displacement), the
possibility of writing a global history that is not
centred on any particular cultural formation
beckons. It is in this global history that the
semantic universe of Islam demands to be
acknowledged with its own distinct trajectory and
its own conceptual and analytical vocabulary (see
Blankinships (1991) proposed outline).
Can there be a distinct Islamicate epistemology
that is separated from both the traditional
episteme and western episteme? Such an Islami-
cate epistemology is only possible with the culti-
vation of a Muslim historical sensibility, in other
words, a deep decolonization that resutures
Muslim narratives of historical continuity with the
past. What Islamicate history might look like after
deep decolonization remains a question of specu-
lative fiction or futurology. It will be, however,
useful to remember that it is unlikely to be a
picking up of narratives which were abandoned in
the 19th century, nor is it likely to entail a retreat
to the power/knowledge complex that emerged
with the compilations of the companions of the
Prophet (pbuh). An Islamicate epistemology could
only proceed with a postcolonial critique of the
Age of Europe and thus it could not be a recovery
of pristine Islam but rather the articulation of the
post-western. It is possible to point to a number
of developments which herald the post-western
without necessarily being motivated to do so. First,
there is the difficult and contested emergence of
attempts at a non-teleological world history. Some
of this is associated with the California school of
world history (Goldstone, Pomeranz), and the
work of people like Andre Gunder Frank and
James Blaut, who have all contributed to unravel-
ling the standard narrative of western modernity
and exceptionalism. Second, in philosophy, the
rise of post-structuralism has entailed the
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Problematizing Global Knowledge Science/Alternative Science 179
deconstruction of western metaphysics, including
the uncovering of the ignoble disavowals of the
great western philosophers. Third, the expansion
of postcolonial critique has meant a departure
from issues of literary and cultural representation
towards the analysis of the political institution of
social orders. These three developments provide
an epistemological conditions of possibility for the
articulation of the post-western. Whether this
post-western would be formed by a new multicul-
turalist ecumenical globalism or a world of
contending grossraums remains to be seen.
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W
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S. Sayyid is a University Research Fellow in Post-
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