Evaluating Our Lenses Given the overtly politicized nature...

Evaluating Our Lenses Given the overtly politicized nature of scholarship related to Islam in Academia (see Orientalism and Covering Islam among others by Edward Said), a note of caution must be heeded.

Most academic scholarship-here I do not intend the quality of the work, but merely that which is produced within the ivory tower of Western universities and other learning institutions)-on Islam is taught from a Modernistic lens-a belief system promoted through our Liberal Arts educational system that preaches that the only ultimate Truth is that there are no fixed Truths or constants, but rather everything is variable and based on opinion.

This seems self-defeatist if pondered; but in any case this is a belief system that was borne out of the European Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries mostly due to perceived contradictions between various aspects of Christianity and empirical science as well as the centuries old religious based conflicts between France and Britain.

This rationalist school of thought could really be traced as far back as the Greek philosophy of scholars such as Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, but its current day revivers were European philosophers such as Descartes, Nietche, and Kant (Kayum, 2010; Zarabozo (2), 2010).

Christian theologians called for “higher criticism” of the Bible and came to the conclusion that not all aspects were appropriate for all time; hence, followers of the faith could choose the aspects of the faith they personally deemed appropriate for their particular time and location. Such action was justified by a belief that religion is an evolutionary process (Zarabozo (2), 2010).

Bible scholars acknowledged (then and now) that the Bible was written by more than 40 authors many years after the time Jesus is believed to have died in Christianity (Dirks, 2010); accordingly, the Bible was no longer treated as an ultimate Truth in official discourse.

Some fruits of this movement were the reform movements that occurred, like various Christian reformations, and corresponding alternative belief systems being constructed to take the place of religion in many public institutions, like Darwinism.

Due to the aforementioned reasons, many academics and politicians concluded that the ideal solution was to secularize society and simply accept the parts of religion that not only did not contradict existing scientific theories, but that which also didn’t contradict their own cultural preferences.