Today we can hardly come across a book or article written in English...

Today we can hardly come across a book or article written in English, Arabic, Turkish or Bahasa Malaysia that does not have recourse to Foucault, Kuhn, Feyerabend or Lyotard to denounce the philosophical underpinnings of modern science.[^28] From the academic papers of Muslim graduate students to the writings of the so-called 'ijmalis' led by Ziauddin Sardar, the names of numerous philosophers of science sweep through the literature with indigenous additions from the Islamic point of view.

To put it mildly, this has led to the overemphasis of epistemology and methodology among many Muslim thinkers and young scholars while questions of ontology and metaphysics have been either left out or taken for granted. The concept of Islamic science, in this point of view, is centered around a loosely defined epistemology, or rather set of discrete ideas grouped under Islamic epistemology whose content is yet to be determined.

In many ways, the idea of Islamizing natural and social sciences has been equated, by and large, with producing a different structure of knowledge and methodology within what we might call the epistemologist fallacy of modern philosophy.

The crucial issue has thus remained untouched: to reduce the notion of Islamic science to considerations of epistemology and methodology, which are without doubt indispensable in their own right, is to seek out a space for the Islamic point of view within, and not outside, the framework of modern philosophy.

Ismail Faruqi's work known under the rubric of Islamization of knowledge is a good example of how the idea of method or methodology ('manhaj' and ‘manhajiyyah’, the Arabic equivalents of method and methodology being the most popular words of the proponents of this view) can obscure deeper philosophical issues involved in the current discussions of science.

Even though Faruqi's project was proposed to Islamize the existing forms of knowledge imported from the West, his focus was exclusively on the humanities, leaving scientific knowledge virtually untouched. This was in tandem with his conviction that the body of knowledge generated by modern natural sciences is neutral and as such requires no special attention.

Thus, Faruqi's work, and that of IIIT after his death, concentrated on the social sciences and education.[^29] This had two important consequences.