EDITORIAL

Abstract

It is with a great sense of pride that we announce the quarterly publication of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences with this issue. We started in 1984 with two issues a year, and in 1990 added a third. We are now glad to provide issues of AJISS corresponding to the four seasons of the year. We have been encouraged to increase our journal‘s frequency due to the overwhelming response and appreciation of its uniqueness on the part of individual scholars, institutions, contributors, and subscribers. May Allah bless our well-wishers and help us to further enhance the scholarly role of AJISS. In this issue, Amriah Buang introduces a hitherto neglected subject to the Islamization of knowledge: human geography. Asserting that this field has reached an epistemological impasse, she describes the nature of the contending philosophies currently characterizing human geography and thereby highlights those difficult-to-reconcile epistemological points of contention. Buang briefly recounts the nature of structuration theory, which is proposed by some geographers as a solution to the present impasse, and then subjects it to a preliminary Islamic evaluation. In an earlier issue (AJISS 8:2, September 1991), Fazal Khan proposed a theoretical perspective on the process of the Islamization of the entertainment video medium with special reference to Pakistan. In this issue, he explores some empirical basics of the Islamization of the enculturation model based on his study of youth viewers of Pakistani television. Theodore Wright, Jr., critiques the concepts and value assumptions of existing literature in the field of comparative politics in order to bring out the built-in Eurocentric bias which it has acquired through its Judeo-Christian and secular-humanist orientation. He suggests a research agenda for Muslim and sympathetic non-Muslim specialists with the intent of recasting the perception of reality in terms which are objective and thus less biased than those currently found in the contemporary modern discourse of comparative and developmental politics. Wright’s concerns are well appreciated and his agenda should be taken seriously by Muslim researchers, but dependence on empirical data alone is not going to solve the problem. Muslim social scientists must participate in advancing Islamic positions on current issues based on the Qur’an, the hadith literature, and the insights gained from their expertise. For example, while an unbiased study of the preponderance of ...