250526P - THE FUTURE DIRECTIONS OF THE KNOWLEDGE INTRGRATION MOVEMENT

Presented at the Faculty of Quran and Sunnah Studies, UNIVERSITI SAINS MALAYSIA on 28th May 2025 by Professor Omar Hasan Kasule MB ChB (MUK), MPH (Harvard), DrPH (Harvard).

1.0 ISLAMISATION OF KNOWLEDGE (IOK) 

• The movement to Islamize knowledge became prominent at the turn of the 15th century hijri 1978/1980 and was contemporaneous with similar movements in all areas of Muslim life: economics, politics, social reform, etc.
• IOK started as a wish, a vision, and a dream, but was soon concretized into definite tracks: de westernization of academic disciplines and adding Islamic values and concepts to knowledge. An offshoot of the movement focused on modernizing or strengthening classical Islamic sciences.

2.0 ISLAMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE (IOK) vs INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE (IOK)

• The term ‘Islamization’ caused a lot of polemical arguments because of the implication of imposing Islam on Muslim and non-Muslim societies, and was gradually replaced by the term integration of knowledge starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
• A parallel movement to integrate knowledge arose in the European and American intellectual circles and was generally a rebellion against an empirical source of knowledge that denied other sources of knowledge. The westerners realized that medicine, engineering, and other disciplines needed input from religions, cultures, and human non-rational thoughts, psychology, and emotions.

3.0 RETURN TO ISLAMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

• Integration of knowledge in the Islamic sense converged with the Western one in the difference in what we integrate into empirical knowledge. Muslims wanted to integrate values from the Qur’an and Sunnah. 
• It may be time to return to the term Islamization of knowledge to emphasize ideological distinctiveness. 
• The term Islamization of knowledge is still sensitive, and other terms have been mentioned and can be pursued to be pragmatic

4.0 BALANCE SHEET OF IOK

• The main achievement of IOK is the setting up of integrated schools and universities all over the world. This has been accompanied by the production of integrated curricula and integrated teaching materials. In the areas of banking, finance, and food, integration has been achieved by setting up working institutions.
• The remaining challenge is inadequate research to develop the concept of IOK and to move from adding Islamic values to existing knowledge or subtracting non-Islamic ones to creating new integrated or Islamised knowledge to become creators and innovators and not consumers of knowledge by others.