Editorial

Abstract

In this issue of AJISS, some of the changes that we plan to introduce to the journal‘s contents and layout begin to take shape. AJISS, from this issue onwards, will only accept and publish articles with endnotes. Each issue will include four main research essays or more, in addition to our expanded Book Review, Reflections, and other regular sections. It is our intention that AJISS will now seek to provide a historical dimension to the modem Islamic experience, especially that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lawal‘s “Islam and Colonial Rule in Lagos,” is an example of this category of research that will be appearing in future issues of the journal. To elucidate the need for this dimension, it may be helpful to explain a few aspects of modem Islamic intellectual history. The Islamic reform movement is, in many respects, the greatest intellectual endeavor of the Muslim mind over the past two centuries. Its emergence came against a backdrop of western encroachment and the inability of the Sufi-dominated Muslim world to respond adequately to such foreign challenges. Reformists emphasized renewal by revising the Prophet’s tradition against the stagnation brought about by a Muslim mind that had become enslaved to a blind and uncritical imitation of the ways of earlier generations (taqlid). They advocated, moreover, a synthesis of what is “Islamic” and what is “modem and western.” Today, Muslims and Islamic intellectualism are in greater need of comprehending and analyzing the context of the reform movement, the Islamic response to the weserrn challenge, and the sweeping modernization process that was to ensue. The main reason behind such urgency is that although the reformist model succeeded in upholding Islamic tenets and achieved a limited reconstruction of Islamic self-confidence, it can no longer provide a basis for renewal (tajdid) or answer the major questions confronting the contempomy Muslim world. The importance of al ‘Alwani’s most recent elaboration of the Islamization of Knowledge vision for renewal, “The Islamization of Knowledge: Yesterday and Today,” is that it goes beyond the reformist enterprise. By invoking the Qur’an and its absolute dominance over all other Islamic sources, the author suggests a new path for the development of an Islamic weltanschauung. Many pursuits of the Muslim social scientists have already shown that this process is effectively underway ...