Contrasting Epistemics

Abstract

Rationale and Context The idea of a Contrasting Episteme, as it is conceived in a series of essays on this theme: is suggested as an approach to grounding the matrix of inquiry in the social sciences in a new spatial zone of conceptual affinities. By carrying the debate in the disciplines to its epistemic foundations, and by conceding the possibility of divergences within these foundations along the lines of basic types, it becomes possible to postulate alternative valid conceptions of social science compatible with different intellectual traditions of inquiry. In the field of the Islamization of knowledge, a critical awareness of such alternatives is all the more necessary for partisans and skeptics alike. Given the critical reconstructionist orientation of that movement it is important to know what it finds objectionable in a given system of knowledge (and its products), and on what basis it justifies its claims to an alternative system, as well as to define the contours of such an alternative. The claim that the prevailing intellectual tradition which conditions the various disciplines of social and humanistic studies is anaemic in values, or that it is contested simply in terms of value-incompatibility, is too facile to justify a movement for cultural reconstruction on the scale envisaged. It leads to the naive contentions that all that Islamization requires is to add a dose of Islamic values (which ultimately constitute a universal and general ...