This internal deformation across a broad range of Muslim...

This internal deformation across a broad range of Muslim societies is the most important factor, coupled with the passivity and heedlessness of most Muslims, for forcing the issue of the concept and the role of reason and rationality within Islam onto the forefront of Muslim concerns.

Indeed, the question of Islam and rationality has the greatest significance for re-constructing and reforming Islamic civilization in order to ensure its future relevance and viability as a world force for peace, stability and material and spiritual growth.

But here we face a subtle and often overlooked point: Islamic teachings and thinkers conceived of ‘rationality’ in ways that vary from the present western conception, employing modes of conceptualization and discourse that at times depart radically from those now accepted by the West.

The great irony is that almost all Muslims today have forgotten this and unconsciously adopt the prevailing western conception of ‘reason’ as their conceptual default or format, oblivious of their own legacy and teachings on this central feature of human existence. There are many causes for this failure to cultivate and nourish the critical traditions of Islamic rationality among today’s political and religious elites within Muslim societies, some internal and others external.

One important factor involves the unthinking reception of types of Islamic discourse among a semi-educated constituency of Muslims heedless of the abuse of Islamic authority operated by religious or educational leaders uprooted from any recognizable historical intellectual tradition.

More pervasive in Muslim popular culture is the manifestation and acceptance of the stifling authoritarian Deformist discourse that seeks to enforce a type of narrow ‘intellectual despotism’ and consciously attempts to strangle any recourse to the intellectual legacy of Islamic rationalist disciplines.

Furthermore, the fragile and still marginalized attempts among certain circles and isolated efforts by individuals to promote a critical understanding facilitating an authentic re-appropriation and transformation of Islam’s legacy of faith-rationality and rational spirituality, still awaits the achievement of a critical mass with enough leverage to affect the popular culture of Muslim societies in all their varieties of social, educational, economic and political conditions.