Paradigms in Political Science Revisited

Abstract

We are at a crossroads where the time is ripe for the emerging Muslim thought to once again set the standard for universal participation and debate. My continual argument with Mona Abul-Fadl's concept of kairos in The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 1, (September 1989 supplement) is whether the openness of the discourse realm is a result of what Gai Eaton describes as the process of decomposition releasing explosive gases, where the "ripeness" is putridity, or a beneficial progress of ideas. Does postmodern deconstruction, decentralization, and destruction create a foothold for the remembering of Islam? Or will the Islamic discourse enter the scene to be trivialized and relativized in the encounter? From my perspective, I tie the movements of the paradigms to the political encounter with the other, where the self-described American establishment was forced to recognize the non-white, the non-male, the non-consumer. More sensitive to complexities, calmer in her approach, and without any reductionism or oversimplification, Mona Abul-Fadl recognizes the "mundane" links of ideas, but treats them with respect nevertheless. It is her insight to see in the tanzil, in the physical and already interpreted descent of the Qur'an and Sunnah, the one rope on which we may spin, in shaa Allah, the Islamic discourse for it to achieve grounding and affirmation in a world of chaos and alienation. We are in a time when a metacritique may now become possible, where the crisis in Western thought coincides with a dawning epistemic consciousness among Muslims. "We are living," she notes, "at the threshold of a critical era which is steadily being acknowledged as such. The designation 'post­modernity' indicates the direction of the transition away from the established canon of values and beliefs identified with the European Enlightenment." ...