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Chapter 5 of 512 min read
الشخصية والتعليم والطريق الطويل
Among the many things that distinguished Ja'far Sheikh Idris's contribution to the Islamization debate from those of other participants was his unflinching realism about what the project requires and how long it takes. In an intellectual environment often prone to utopian enthusiasm — where the declaration of a project was confused with its accomplishment and where institutional founding was mistaken for intellectual achievement — Sheikh Idris maintained a steady insistence on the gap between aspiration and reality, and on the actual conditions necessary for closing that gap.
This realism was not pessimism. It was grounded in a deep understanding of what genuine intellectual transformation requires, and in the recognition that the correct response to a long road is not despair but patient, purposeful travel. The correct response to the vastness of the task is not to abandon it but to understand it clearly enough to pursue it effectively.
The most important thing to understand about Islamization, Sheikh Idris consistently argued, is that it is not a programme to be implemented but a transformation to be grown. This distinction is not merely terminological — it has profound implications for how the project should be pursued and what counts as progress.
A programme can be implemented by decision: you can decide to redesign a curriculum, establish an institution, issue a policy document, or reorganize a government department. These things are genuinely within human capacity to accomplish relatively quickly, given sufficient authority and resources. And they may be valuable steps on a longer journey. But they are not Islamization in themselves. Islamization is not a programme — it is a transformation of the intellectual life of Muslim scholars, at the level of deep assumptions and foundational frameworks, from secular to Islamic premises. This transformation cannot be accomplished by institutional decision. It can only be grown, through patient cultivation, in individual scholars who have done the sustained intellectual and spiritual work necessary to achieve it.
The analogy to agricultural growth is apt in several dimensions. Growth requires the right conditions — soil, water, light. You cannot force a plant to grow faster than its nature allows by pulling on it. You can create better or worse conditions for growth, but you cannot substitute institutional pressure for the actual process of development. Similarly, the deep intellectual transformation that genuine Islamization requires cannot be hurried. It requires time — decades, not years — of sustained engagement with both the Islamic tradition and the secular disciplines being engaged. It requires the right conditions: institutions that genuinely support this kind of work, communities that value it, and scholars who have the personal formation to sustain long-term intellectual effort without the distraction of immediate practical results.
Ja'far Sheikh Idris identified three conditions that are genuinely necessary — not merely helpful but necessary — for Islamization to make real progress. The absence of any one of them means that what is called Islamization will be something else: label-changing, political positioning, or superficial synthesis rather than genuine intellectual transformation.
The first condition is scholars who have genuinely mastered both the Islamic intellectual tradition and the secular disciplines they are engaging. The emphasis on genuine mastery at both levels is crucial. Superficial knowledge of either tradition — Islamic knowledge restricted to a few citations from the Quran and hadith, or secular knowledge restricted to a few buzzwords from the relevant discipline — produces synthesis that is superficial in proportion to the superficiality of the knowledge. A genuine Islamic economist must be capable of engaging with the best contemporary economic theory on its own terms — not caricaturing it, not picking out the most obviously absurd versions of it, but engaging with the most sophisticated and defensible versions of it — and then, from a position of genuine understanding, making principled Islamic judgments about what it gets right and where it goes wrong. This requires real expertise in economic theory. At the same time, he must be capable of engaging the Islamic tradition at a level of real depth — not merely citing Quranic verses and prophetic hadith that mention economic topics, but engaging with the full tradition of Islamic legal and ethical reasoning about economic life, including the sophisticated discussions of maslaha, maqasid al-Shariah, and the principles of Islamic commercial law. This double expertise is rare and takes decades to develop.
The second necessary condition is educational institutions capable of producing such scholars. This is not simply a matter of establishing universities with Islamic-sounding names and requiring students to take courses in Islamic studies alongside their secular disciplines. It requires institutions with a genuinely different educational philosophy — one that starts from Islamic epistemological foundations rather than secular ones, that integrates the Islamic sciences with other disciplines not as additions but as foundations, and that produces graduates who have genuinely internalized Islamic intellectual frameworks deeply enough to apply them rigorously. Such institutions do not currently exist in significant numbers. They would require faculty who have themselves achieved the double mastery described above — which creates a bootstrapping problem: you cannot have the institutions without the faculty, and you cannot easily have the faculty without the institutions. This is one reason why the project necessarily proceeds slowly.
The third necessary condition is a community that values this kind of scholarship and is willing to support it. Genuine intellectual transformation does not produce quick results. The institutional and political pressures on Muslim educational institutions — to demonstrate relevance, to produce graduates who can find employment, to respond to the immediate crises facing Muslim communities — tend to crowd out the slow, demanding, apparently abstract work of foundational intellectual transformation. If Muslim communities and donors support only work that produces immediate practical results, the deeper work will not get done. Creating the conditions for sustained support of long-term intellectual work is itself a significant challenge that Sheikh Idris recognized and addressed.
Rushing Islamization — attempting to produce results faster than the underlying conditions allow — produces specific, predictable pathologies. Sheikh Idris identified several of them with characteristic clarity.
The first pathology is label-changing without substance: taking a secular academic framework and putting Islamic vocabulary on it, without examining or modifying the foundational premises. A text on Islamic economics that uses the terminology of Islamic finance but analyzes economic behavior using homo economicus assumptions and efficiency criteria is not Islamized economics — it is secular economics with Islamic window dressing. The window dressing may be sincere — the author may genuinely believe he has produced something Islamic — but the test is not sincerity, it is whether the foundational premises have been examined and modified where they conflict with Islamic ones.
The second pathology is the importation of secular frameworks wholesale, followed by post-hoc rationalization. This is more sophisticated than label-changing but equally problematic. An Islamic scholar who has absorbed Marxist, Keynesian, or postcolonial frameworks — absorbed them deeply, not merely superficially — and then attempts to Islamize them by finding Quranic verses and prophetic hadith that seem to support them is doing the process backwards. He is starting from secular conclusions and working backwards to Islamic justifications. Genuine Islamization starts from Islamic premises and works forward to conclusions, even when those conclusions happen to overlap with secular ones.
The third pathology is the political hijacking of Islamization. When Islamization becomes a political slogan — when movements use the language of Islamization to mobilize political support or to dress existing political agendas in religious garments — the intellectual content is hollowed out and replaced by political content. The resulting "Islamization" is evaluated by its political utility rather than its intellectual rigor. Scholars who produce genuine but complex and nuanced intellectual work are displaced by spokesmen who produce simple and politically useful slogans. The distinction between genuine Islamic intellectual contribution and effective political communication is obscured.
Sheikh Idris was not dismissive of political engagement — he understood that Muslim communities have legitimate political interests that must be pursued in the political realm. His point was that the intellectual project of Islamization is distinct from, and more fundamental than, the political project of establishing Islamic governance, and that confusing them damages both. The Islamic governance that emerges from a community that has not genuinely undertaken Islamization at the intellectual level will be Islamic in name but secular in structure — which is precisely the pathology Islamization is meant to address.
Intellectual transformation — real transformation at the level of deep premises and conceptual frameworks — necessarily proceeds slowly. This is not a contingent fact about current conditions that could be changed by better management or more funding. It is a feature of what intellectual transformation is. Concepts and frameworks are not changed by instruction in the way that facts are transmitted. You can tell someone a fact and have them know it immediately. You cannot tell someone a new conceptual framework and have them inhabit it. Inhabiting a conceptual framework is an achievement that requires extensive practice, sustained engagement, reflection on cases, exposure to challenges and the working-out of responses, and ultimately a kind of intellectual formation that resembles the formation of character more than the acquisition of information.
Sheikh Idris drew on the historical example of Islamic philosophy's engagement with Greek thought. The translation movement began in earnest under the early Abbasid caliphs in the eighth century. The productive engagement with Greek philosophy — the generation of genuinely Islamic philosophical responses that were neither wholesale adoption nor wholesale rejection — took centuries. Al-Kindi died around 873 CE. Al-Farabi died in 950 CE. Ibn Sina lived until 1037 CE. Al-Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifah, the most important critical engagement with the philosophical tradition, appeared in 1095 CE — nearly three centuries after the translation movement began. Ibn Rushd's Tahafut al-Tahafut, the response to al-Ghazali, appeared in 1180 CE — more than four centuries after the beginning of serious engagement.
This history illustrates the genuine timescale on which serious intellectual transformation operates. The contemporary situation requires a similar patience. The pace of secular transformation has accelerated dramatically compared to the slow movement of ideas in the medieval world — the secular colonization of Muslim minds has happened in decades rather than centuries, carried by mass education, mass media, and the global dominance of Western academic institutions. But this makes the challenge more urgent, not more susceptible to shortcuts. The response to accelerated intellectual change is not a faster but shallower Islamization — it is a more urgently pursued but equally deep one.
Sheikh Idris did not leave his realism as pure diagnosis. He identified practical steps that individuals, institutions, and communities can take to advance genuine Islamization, even under the difficult conditions described above.
For individuals: the most important thing any individual can do is to pursue genuine depth rather than breadth in both traditions. It is better to be genuinely expert in Islamic sciences and one secular discipline than to have superficial knowledge of many things. The scholar who has achieved real depth in both the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence and one specific domain — economics, or psychology, or history — is better positioned to do genuine Islamization work than the generalist who knows a little about everything. Specialization in service of a unified Islamic purpose is more productive than undifferentiated breadth.
For institutions: the most valuable thing educational institutions can do is to take the formation of scholars seriously as a long-term project, protecting the time and space for deep intellectual work from the pressures of immediate practical relevance. This is counter-cultural in the modern university environment, which rewards rapid publication, external funding, and demonstrable impact. It requires institutional leadership committed enough to the long-term project to resist these pressures.
For communities: the most important thing Muslim communities and philanthropists can do is to support work whose value cannot be demonstrated in the short term. This requires a degree of intellectual trust — confidence in the judgment of scholars who are pursuing intellectual depth rather than immediate practical results — that is difficult to sustain in an environment of urgent practical need. But without this support, the scholars who could do the most important work will be diverted to activities that produce faster, more visible, and more politically useful results.
Ja'far Sheikh Idris consistently returned to a point that is easily overlooked in discussions of Islamization: the project is not primarily or ultimately an intellectual project. It is a spiritual one. The goal of Islamization is not the production of intellectually impressive Islamic alternatives to secular frameworks — though these are necessary and valuable. The goal is the production of Muslims who know and serve Allah more fully, more genuinely, and more effectively. The intellectual work is in service of this spiritual goal, not an end in itself.
This means that taqwa — God-consciousness, the awareness of Allah's presence and accountability before Him — is not merely a desirable personal quality in Islamizing scholars. It is a prerequisite. An intellectual Islamization pursued without genuine taqwa will inevitably become an exercise in academic prestige, institutional positioning, or political utility. The scholar who undertakes this work without genuine God-consciousness will, consciously or unconsciously, allow his intellectual conclusions to be shaped by desires for recognition, institutional advancement, or political influence — precisely the secular motivations that Islamization is meant to transcend.
Taqwa keeps the work honest. The scholar who genuinely fears Allah will not claim to have Islamized a discipline when he has merely relabeled it. He will not declare victory for institutional reasons when the intellectual work is not done. He will not allow the pressures of community expectation, political urgency, or donor preference to distort his honest assessment of where Islamic intellectual life actually stands and how far it has yet to travel. He will be willing to say what is difficult to say: that genuine Islamization is further away than we would like, that the existing work, while valuable, falls short of its aspirations, and that the long road ahead requires more patience, more depth, and more genuine Islamic formation than is currently common among those who invoke the project's name.
This honesty, grounded in taqwa and expressed with the confidence of genuine knowledge, is itself a contribution to Islamization. In an environment of premature claims and superficial achievements, the scholar who honestly assesses the distance between aspiration and reality, and who continues working with patience and depth despite that distance, provides a model and a standard. He demonstrates what genuine Islamic intellectual life looks like: rigorous, humble, patient, and deeply anchored in the awareness of Allah. This is the personal embodiment of what Islamization of knowledge, in its deepest sense, means — not an institutional programme but a way of being a Muslim scholar in the modern world.