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Introduction address at the Conference in Maldives Conference July 2018 by Professor Omar Hasan Kasule MB ChB (MUK), MPH (Harvard), DrPH (Harvard).
The start of the 15th century of hijra (circa 1980 CE) was a time of reflection all over the ummah on reform (islaah) and renewal (tajdiid). Several intellectual and social initiatives started at that time and one of them was reform and renewal in the areas of thought (islaah al fikr) and human knowledge (islaah al ma’arifat). Many Muslim intellectuals have been working for the past 3+ decades on these two issues as contributions to the overall reform and renewal effort.
The need for thought reform arose because of intellectual failure to articulate the ever-lasting message of the Qur’an and sunnat in the contemporary time-space context to be able to resolve contemporary problems. This arose from the recent neglect of intellectual research (ijtihad) that was very active in the golden era of Islam. The task at the start of the 15th century was therefore to start research programs that would define the current thought problems and propose solutions for them based on Qur’an and Sunnat. The thought problems spawn all areas of human activity including social, economic, and cultural dimensions. Over the past 3+ decades, books have been published and conferences have been held to present the reform of thought (islah al fikr): causes and solutions. The present conference in the Maldives is in the series of these efforts.
This conference is rightly titled ‘International Conference on the role of Islamic thought, culture. And civilization in building peace, harmony, and tolerance in South Asia’. South Asia with more than a 1.5billion citizens is an important region demographically and culturally both locally and in other parts of the world where South Asians have migrated and settled down. The conference will explore and expose how Islamic thought has over the past 14 centuries played a leading role in molding the culture and civilization of the region as well as contributing to peace and harmony in the past, the present, and the future. The conferees will address specific issues of applying Qur’anic and sunnat guidelines to reform Islamic thought by getting rid of misunderstandings (that breed extremism) and contributing to future peace and tolerance that are the bedrock of human, social, and economic development.
It is appropriate that the conference is being held at the Islamic University of the Maldives (IUM) which from its name, vision, and mission is part of the solution to the Muslim knowledge crisis. The crisis manifests as duality in the education system between traditional modern knowledge each with a different worldview. The duality leads to confusion in thought as well as to division among the elites of the ummah who graduate from the different and parallel education systems and have different and sometimes opposing views of social development. IUM and other universities of the same genre are working to solve the crisis of duality in education by Integration of Knowledge (IOK).
IOK requires developing an integrated epistemology that combines values from the Qur’an with paradigms developed from human experience. This will lead to an integrated curriculum and an integrated educational system.
Finally, I want to emphasize the complex interplay between thought and knowledge. It is futile to engage in the chicken and egg argument on what comes first because we will never reach a consensus. What is clear is that thought, philosophy, and epistemology play their role in the genesis of knowledge. Knowledge is needed to provide valid premises on which thought can be based. We, therefore, need to concentrate on reforming thought (islah al fikr) and reforming knowledge (islah al ma’arifat) because of their respective roles (in the past and in the future) in developing society, culture, and civilization in South Asia. The great intellectual luminaries gathered at this august conference will enlighten us in these roles.