Rather than impose Western analytical categories on the Islamic worldview...

Rather than impose Western analytical categories on the Islamic worldview, the bearers of the new discourse try to discover its fundamental categories. One can safely argue that the new Islamic discourse, issuing forth from an Islamic framework, opens the door of ijtihad regarding both the modern Western worldview and the Islamic religious and cultural heritage. Given this radical generative approach, the new Islamic discourse is by necessity comprehensive.

While at the grass roots-level the bearers of the new Islamic discourse raise the slogan “Islam is the solution,” at the philosophical level they raise a more complex one, “Islam is a worldview.” Theirs is a discourse that stems from a comprehensive worldview from which different ethical, political, economic, and aesthetic systems are generated.

It is an Islamic discourse that deals with architecture, love, marriage, economics, city planning, the philosophy of law and history, modes of analysis and thinking, etc. It deals with the quotidian, the direct, and the political, as well as with the total and ultimate. Actually, the new Islamic discourse claims that it is addressed not to Muslims only, but to “all humanity.” In other words, it claims that its project for reform is an answer to the crisis caused by Western modernity.

In this respect, its claim is similar to the claim made by the Islamic discourse that prevailed during the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him. By virtue of their open-ended critical interactive approach to Western modernity, the bearers of the new Islamic discourse are able to benefit in a creative way from this modernity without being engulfed by it.

Issues such as class conflict, the necessity of an equitable distribution of resources, gender issues, and the influence of the environment on shaping man’s personality had been debated by Muslims before. However, the sensitivity and intense awareness of the new discourse vis-à-vis these issues have been enhanced, thanks to the interaction with Western modernity.

The bearers of the new discourse do not object to benefiting from this modernity in discovering the mechanisms of the solutions for these problems nor the solutions themselves, as long as such solutions do not contradict the Islamic paradigm. Opening up to the modern Western worldview and critically interacting with it have alerted the bearers of the new discourse to aspects that would otherwise have been difficult for them to realize.