I. A Riad in Fez, a Haveli in Lahore
Muhammad Faruque, writing in The Philosophical Forum in 2024, offers an image that deserves to be held in mind. Imagine, he says, living in an old Riad in Fez or a Haveli in Lahore, and then being forced into a glass high-rise apartment. The new building offers amenities. But its sealed facades sever the inhabitant from the rhythms of heat, light, and natural sound that shaped the architecture of the old house, the very rhythms that shaped the people who lived in it. You might bring beautiful objects from the old home: window panes, oil lamps, plant pots. Stripped of their context, these objects no longer speak their language. They have become decorative remnants of a world whose internal logic has been dismantled (Faruque 2024, 354).
This is, Faruque argues, what has happened to the Muslim mind. The architecture of Islamic thought, its metaphysics, its epistemology, its understanding of the relationship between knowledge and ethics, its conviction that the pursuit of truth is inseparable from the formation of a complete human being, has been structurally replaced by a different set of presuppositions. Those presuppositions claim to be universal. They are not. They are, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argued in Provincializing Europe, the particular intellectual inheritance of a specific European historical experience, elevated to the status of universal reason by a series of historical contingencies that included, not incidentally, the political and military domination of most of the world (Chakrabarty 2008, 26–27).
The Muslim intellectual who has absorbed this displacement often does not notice it. He offers his prayers as a Muslim. But his mental architecture, the categories in which he thinks about politics, science, social organisation, history, and the human self, is structured by assumptions that originate elsewhere and that are, in significant respects, incompatible with the tradition he believes himself to inhabit. This is what Faruque means by “epistemic colonialism”: colonialism that continues after the formal end of political occupation, colonising minds rather than territories, doing so not through coercion but through the more durable mechanism of apparently neutral categories of knowledge (Faruque 2024, 355–356).
The diagnosis is not new. Faruque himself acknowledges that Allama Iqbal made a version of it a century ago (Faruque 2024, 363). What is new, or what ought to be new, is the response. Iqbal’s response, which was to reinterpret Islam in light of modern knowledge, to read Bedil through Bergson, al-Jili through Hegel, and Sufi metaphysics through Einstein, is on Faruque’s reading itself a form of capitulation (Faruque 2024, 363; Iqbal 2013, 7–8). It accepts the Western episteme as the standard against which the Islamic tradition must justify itself. The very framework that needs to be interrogated has been accepted as the medium of interrogation.
The question this essay addresses is simpler, and harder, than the one Faruque poses. The question is not merely what epistemic colonialism is, or even how we identify it. The question is what classical Islamic thought actually contains that a decolonised Muslim intellectual life would draw upon. The architecture of the old Riad is not lost. Much of it survives in texts that have been systematically marginalised, misread, or simply left unread by the inheritors of the tradition they constitute. The work of recovery is urgent. It requires knowing what you are recovering, and why it matters for the present.
II. The Legitimacy Problem and Its Islamic Resolution
Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1985) addresses a problem that most Western historians of modernity prefer not to confront directly. The problem is this: modern Western civilisation did not simply emerge from nowhere. It emerged from medieval Christendom through a series of ruptures, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, that required it to justify itself without reference to the theological framework it was dismantling. Modernity needed to be legitimate. But the sources of legitimacy it could draw upon were precisely the ones it was in the process of rejecting (Blumenberg 1985, 65–66).
Blumenberg’s argument is that modernity solved this problem through what he calls “reoccupation”: it took the structural positions that theological concepts had held in medieval thought and filled them with secular content. The Christian concept of providence became the secular concept of progress. The theological conviction that history was moving toward a divinely ordained end became the Enlightenment conviction that history was moving toward the end of superstition and the triumph of reason. The content changed. The structure remained. And the structure inherited from theology gave modernity a kind of borrowed legitimacy that it could not have generated from its own premises alone (Blumenberg 1985, 48–51).
Caner Dagli, in his 2024 book Metaphysical Institutions: Islam and the Modern Project, extends this analysis to the Islamic world with precision. The Muslim world, he argues, faces a version of Blumenberg’s problem in reverse. Islamic civilisation built its institutions, legal, political, educational, and aesthetic, on a coherent metaphysical foundation. That foundation understood the cosmos as a hierarchically ordered whole, with divine reality at its summit and the human person understood in relation to that summit. The political order derived its legitimacy from its orientation toward justice (‘adl), which was itself understood as a quality rooted in the divine nature. Knowledge was understood as inseparable from ethics, because knowing rightly was held to require a corresponding formation of the self (Dagli 2024, 23–25).
When the modern project arrived in the Muslim world, through colonialism, through the adoption of Western educational systems, through the prestige economy of Western academic institutions, it did not arrive as an explicit theological challenge that Muslims could recognise and respond to theologically. It arrived as technique: administrative technique, military technique, scientific technique, economic technique. It presented itself as neutral, as modern, as simply what a properly organised society does. In presenting itself this way, it quietly replaced the metaphysical foundations of Islamic institutions with different ones, materialist, instrumentalist, and progressive, while allowing the institutional forms to remain superficially intact (Dagli 2024, 31–34).
The result is what Dagli calls “metaphysical institutions without metaphysics”: a university that teaches Islamic jurisprudence using the pedagogical methods, assessment frameworks, and disciplinary boundaries of a Western secular institution; a state that invokes Islamic legitimacy while operating on the structural assumptions of the Westphalian nation-state; a public discourse that appeals to Islamic values while thinking entirely within the categories of liberal political theory. The words have been preserved. The architecture has been replaced (Dagli 2024, 38–41).
This is a more precise version of Faruque’s Riad metaphor. And it points toward something that the purely critical project of decolonial theory cannot supply: not just a critique of Western epistemology, but a positive account of what the alternative metaphysical architecture actually was and what it would mean to inhabit it again.
III. What Pan-Islamism Actually Knew, and What It Missed
The first generation of modern Muslim intellectuals who confronted this displacement produced a body of work that is too often treated with uncritical reverence. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Syed Ameer Ali, and Muhammad Iqbal were formidable minds grappling with a real crisis. Their response, to demonstrate that Islam was compatible with reason, progress, and modern governance, was strategically understandable. It was also, in retrospect, a significant intellectual concession.
Al-Afghani’s argument that Islam is uniquely rational, that it encourages scientific inquiry, that it is compatible with democratic governance, was made in response to the implicit charge that Islam is irrational, anti-scientific, and despotic. The charge was Eurocentric and historically illiterate. But in accepting the charge’s terms of reference, al-Afghani implicitly accepted that “rational,” “scientific,” and “democratic” were standards established by the Western Enlightenment against which Islamic civilisation must be measured and found acceptable. The defence was brilliant. The concession embedded within it was enormous.
Iqbal went further. In The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), he undertook the most ambitious attempt in the modern period to reconcile Islamic theology with Western philosophy. The project was genuinely extraordinary in its range and ambition. But Faruque identifies precisely the problem: when Iqbal reads al-Jili through Hegel, or explains Sufi metaphysics in terms of Bergson’s philosophy of time, he is accepting that Hegel and Bergson provide the more fundamental framework, and that the Islamic material must be translated into their terms to be intelligible (Faruque 2024, 363–364). The movement is always from the Islamic tradition toward Western philosophy, never in the other direction. As Faruque notes, Iqbal’s framework “essentially asks us to subject the entire Islamic intellectual tradition to the litmus test of Western modernity” (Faruque 2024, 364).
What would it mean to move in the other direction? To read Hegel through Ibn Rushd, subjecting Hegel’s teleological account of history to the critique that a careful reader of Averroes would bring to it? To read Bergson’s philosophy of duration through the Islamic metaphysics of time developed by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi or Mullā Sadrā (Sadr al-Din Shirazi 1981, vol. 3)? This is not a purely polemical gesture. It is an epistemological claim: that the Islamic tradition contains resources for addressing the questions that Hegel and Bergson were addressing, and that those resources, developed within a different set of metaphysical commitments, produce different and in some respects more adequate answers.
The Pan-Islamist generation did not, for the most part, make this move. They could not make it fully, because they lacked the philological and philosophical training in the classical tradition that would have made it possible. The tragedy is not that they failed. They did not fail. They produced important work under impossible conditions and kept the question of the Islamic intellectual tradition alive in an era when colonial power was dismantling the institutions in which that tradition had been transmitted. The tragedy is that their successors treated their work as a terminus rather than as a beginning, and that the project of reading Islamic philosophy on its own terms, rather than in translation to Western categories, has been taken up seriously only by a small number of scholars writing mostly for each other (El-Rouayheb 2015, 357; Chittick 1989, xv–xvi).
IV. The Classical Tradition and What It Contains
What does the Islamic intellectual tradition actually contain that a decolonised Muslim intellectual life would draw upon? The question requires more than a catalogue. It requires an account of the tradition’s internal logic: what it was trying to do, and why that project remains relevant.
The starting point is a conviction about the unity of knowledge. In the Islamic philosophical tradition, from al-Kindi and al-Farabi through Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd to Mullā Sadrā and Shah Wali Allah, there is a persistent insistence that the different branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, jurisprudence, natural science, and ethics, form a unified whole oriented toward a single end: the understanding of reality as it is and the formation of a self capable of that understanding. This is not mere piety. It is an epistemological claim with far-reaching consequences (Nasr 1968, 21–23; Chittick 1989, 3–5).
Al-Farabi, writing in the tenth century, distinguished between the theoretical intellect and the practical intellect and argued that the highest form of political life was one in which the ruler was also a philosopher, not in the sense of being academically trained, but in the sense of having achieved the intellectual formation that made genuine wisdom possible (al-Farabi 1985, 228–231). The Virtuous City (al-Madina al-Fadila) is not simply a political ideal. It is a metaphysical claim about the relationship between correct governance and correct understanding of reality. Politics, for al-Farabi, could not be separated from epistemology, because the legitimacy of political authority depended on its orientation toward truth.
This is, in the most fundamental sense, incompatible with the modern Western account of political legitimacy, which grounds the authority of the state in social contract, popular sovereignty, or procedural rationality, all of which are explicitly indifferent to whether the political order is oriented toward truth. The modern state claims no epistemological authority and makes no claim about the nature of reality. It does not ask what a human being is for. It asks only what rules can be agreed upon without requiring prior agreement about what human beings are for (Dagli 2024, 44–47).
The Islamic tradition asked the prior question. Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century Tunisian historian and social theorist, offered what is arguably the most sophisticated account of political legitimacy produced in any tradition before the modern period. His concept of ‘asabiyya, the solidarity or group feeling that makes collective political life possible, is not a celebration of tribalism. It is an attempt to understand what makes political authority durable, and his answer is simultaneously sociological and normative: political authority endures when it is grounded in a form of solidarity that transcends mere interest, and that solidarity is most powerful when it is oriented toward something beyond itself, toward a conception of justice that is not merely procedural but metaphysical (Ibn Khaldun 2015, 97–100, 123–125).
Ibn Khaldun’s account of the rise and fall of civilisations is often read as a cynical political sociology. It is better read as a sustained argument that political order without metaphysical grounding is inherently unstable, because it lacks the resources to generate the solidarity that sustains it over time. The modern state, on this reading, faces a legitimacy crisis that it cannot resolve on its own terms, because the terms on which it has constituted itself do not include the resources for generating genuine solidarity. This is, in essence, the crisis that Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age was trying to diagnose from within the Western tradition (Blumenberg 1985, 65–75). Ibn Khaldun diagnosed it six centuries earlier from within a different one.
Mullā Sadrā, writing in seventeenth-century Persia, offers something different but equally important: the most sophisticated account of consciousness and selfhood produced in the Islamic tradition, and an account that has direct relevance to contemporary questions about the relationship between neuroscience and subjectivity, between scientific description and first-person experience. His doctrine of al-wujud al-dhihni (mental existence) and his account of the unity of the intellect and the intelligible constitute a theory of consciousness that does not reduce the knowing subject to its neurological substrate, not because Sadrā was ignorant of natural philosophy, but because his metaphysical framework gave him the resources to hold the biological and the experiential dimensions of the human person in a relation that materialist reductionism cannot accommodate (Sadr al-Din Shirazi 1981, 3:24–31; Rustom 2012, 41–45).
Faruque is right that Heidegger’s critique of “calculative thinking” and Schrödinger’s admission that science is “ghastly silent” about what matters most to human beings both gesture toward the same problem that Islamic philosophy addressed systematically (Faruque 2024, 370–371; Schrödinger 2014, 95). But they gesture from within a tradition that has lost the metaphysical vocabulary for addressing it. The Islamic tradition retained that vocabulary, developed it across fourteen centuries of sustained philosophical work, and contains what may be the most sophisticated pre-modern account of the relationship between consciousness, knowledge, ethics, and reality available in any human tradition (Nasr 1976, 187–189; Chittick 2019, 3–7).
The persistence of this tradition long after the so-called Golden Age corrects the Eurocentric decline narrative that Faruque targets directly. El-Rouayheb’s detailed study of seventeenth-century Ottoman intellectual history demonstrates that a serious and prolific rationalist enterprise in the Islamic world continued well into that century, challenging the standard claim that Islamic intellectual life collapsed after al-Ghazali’s critique of philosophy in the eleventh century (El-Rouayheb 2015, 340–360). Al-Ghazali himself was not against science as such; his critique targeted specific metaphysical claims made by the philosophers, not the practice of rational inquiry (Faruque 2024, 369; al-Ghazali 2000, 2–5).
V. The Limits of Secular Science as a Framework for the Self
Faruque devotes considerable attention to the epistemological overreach of Western science, and rightly so (Faruque 2024, 367–373). What he identifies is a specific form of intellectual overextension: the extension of scientific method, which is legitimately powerful within its proper domain, into the domain of metaphysics, ethics, and self-understanding, where it lacks the conceptual resources to operate adequately.
Erwin Schrödinger put this with unusual frankness: science “gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity” (Schrödinger 2014, 95; cited in Faruque 2024, 371). This is not an anti-scientific statement. It is a statement of limits. And it is precisely the limits that the Islamic philosophical tradition identified as the boundary between natural philosophy and the higher sciences of metaphysics and ethics.
Heidegger’s claim that “science does not think” is a more provocative way of making the same point (Heidegger 1968, 8; cited in Faruque 2024, 370). What he means is that the mode of inquiry characteristic of modern science, which he calls “calculative thinking,” operates within a framework of presuppositions that it cannot itself examine, because its method is constitutively oriented toward measurable outcomes and predictive control. The questions about the nature of the framework itself, about what kind of thing reality is, what kind of being the knower is, and what the relationship between knowledge and ethics consists in, fall outside the domain of calculative thought. They require what Heidegger calls “meditative thinking” (Heidegger 1966, 46).
The Islamic tradition had names for these different modes of knowing. The distinction between ‘ilm al-yaqin (certain knowledge), ‘ayn al-yaqin (knowledge by direct witnessing), and haqq al-yaqin (knowledge by identity with the known) in the Sufi philosophical tradition, as articulated most fully by Ibn ‘Arabi and his commentators, constitutes a theory of knowledge that is incompatible with the epistemological presuppositions of modern science, not because it rejects empirical inquiry, but because it situates empirical inquiry within a larger account of what knowing is and what it is for (Chittick 1989, 148–153; Rustom 2012, 30–35).
The relevance of this for contemporary debates about artificial intelligence is more than superficial. The dominant framework for thinking about AI assumes that intelligence is fundamentally computational, that thinking is information processing, and that the question of whether a sufficiently complex information-processing system is conscious is either a meaningless question in eliminativist positions or one that will eventually be answered by neuroscience in physicalist positions. Both assumptions rest on the metaphysical presupposition of materialism, which the Islamic philosophical tradition has strong reasons to reject (McGilchrist 2021, 16–20; Sadr al-Din Shirazi 1981, 3:24–31).
Mullā Sadrā’s account of consciousness as wujud (being) rather than as a property of matter, his argument that the soul is “bodily in its origination and spiritual in its subsistence,” and his theory that the knowing act involves a genuine ontological union between the intellect and the intelligible form of the object known, together constitute a framework that takes the first-person character of conscious experience as irreducibly real (Sadr al-Din Shirazi 1981, 3:44–47; Rustom 2012, 42–44). This is not mysticism in the pejorative sense. It is a rigorous metaphysical argument, developed through sustained engagement with Aristotle, Avicenna, and Suhrawardi, that takes consciousness seriously in a way that materialist neuroscience structurally cannot.
VI. Pluralism Without Relativism
There is an objection to everything argued so far that needs to be addressed directly. The objection is that the call to recover the Islamic intellectual tradition risks a kind of intellectual parochialism: in rejecting the Eurocentric universalism of the Enlightenment, one merely substitutes an Islamic parochialism. If Western reason is not universal, why should Islamic reason fare better?
Faruque’s answer, “cultural and epistemic pluralism” understood as the recognition that fundamental questions of philosophy, science, and spirituality have been addressed by major cultures, and that there are multiple valid epistemological frameworks to address the questions of truth, knowledge, and being, is the right answer (Faruque 2024, 364). But it needs to be defended more carefully than the term often suggests. Pluralism, as typically understood in the liberal tradition, tends toward relativism: if there are multiple valid frameworks, none can claim priority over the others, and the most one can say is that each is valid “for” those who hold it.
This is not what the Islamic philosophical tradition understood itself to be doing. Al-Kindi’s dictum, which Faruque rightly emphasises, that “we ought not be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us,” rests on the conviction that there is truth to be acquired, that it is not merely a cultural preference, and that different traditions can approach it with varying degrees of adequacy (al-Kindi 1974, 58; Faruque 2024, 368). This is not relativism. It is intellectual hospitality grounded in metaphysical confidence.
The contemporary decolonial theorist who argues that all knowledge systems are equally valid, or who invokes non-Western traditions as a club with which to beat Western epistemology without being particularly interested in what those traditions actually contain, is making a different and weaker argument. It is, as Faruque notes, often an argument prosecuted with the very conceptual tools of Western theory: Foucauldian power analysis, Derridean deconstruction, Wallersteinian world-systems theory (Faruque 2024, 365; Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 105–110). The form of the critique is decolonial. The resources are borrowed from the coloniser.
The Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane offers a sophisticated contemporary articulation of the alternative. Against both the wholesale adoption of Western modernity and its wholesale rejection, he proposes what he calls an ethics of epistemic plurality rooted in the Islamic concept of ikhtilaf (principled difference): the recognition that difference in intellectual tradition is not a defect to be overcome but a constitutive feature of genuine knowledge production (Idrissi 2024, 4–6). Crucially, this position does not slide into relativism, because it is grounded in the Tawhidic affirmation that reality is ultimately one. Different traditions approach that single reality from different angles, with different instruments. The diversity is real. The reality toward which they converge is also real.
Mughal pluralism, the sulh-i kull, or peace with all, that Faruque invokes through the figure of Akbar’s court, offers an historical illustration of this position (Faruque 2024, 374; Kinra 2020, 45–47). Abu al-Fazl’s introduction to the Razmnama, the Persian translation of the Mahabharata commissioned by Akbar, presents the engagement with Hindu philosophical and literary traditions not as a concession to relativism but as an expression of intellectual confidence: the conviction that serious engagement with other traditions deepens rather than threatens one’s own (Asif 2020, 90–91). The Islamic intellectual tradition, at its best, has always understood itself this way. It absorbed Greek philosophy, Persian political theory, and Indian mathematics not because it had abandoned its own commitments but because those commitments, centrally the conviction that the pursuit of truth is an obligation of the human person, required taking seriously whatever bore on the truth, wherever it came from.
VII. The Language Barrier and the Work of Recovery
None of what has been described in the preceding sections is accessible to the majority of contemporary Muslim intellectuals. Faruque identifies the central obstacle clearly: the language barrier (Faruque 2024, 374). The classical Islamic philosophical tradition was produced in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. The overwhelming majority of Muslim intellectuals working today, including those in Muslim-majority countries, have no working knowledge of these languages at the level required to read the classical texts philosophically rather than devotionally.
This is not a natural condition. It is the result of a specific colonial intervention: the replacement, systematised by Macaulay and his counterparts across the colonised world, of indigenous educational traditions with Western-language curricula. Chakrabarty has described the result with particular clarity: “one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most modern social scientists in the region. They treat these traditions as truly dead, as history” (Chakrabarty 2008, 5–6; cited in Faruque 2024, 357). The same is true of the Muslim inheritors of the Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman philosophical traditions. The interlocutors that Muslim social scientists look up to are a Hegel, or a Marx, or a Weber rather than al-Farabi, Ibn Khaldun, or Mullā Sadrā.
Dagli’s account of “metaphysical institutions without metaphysics” gives this observation its full institutional weight (Dagli 2024, 38). A madrasa that teaches Islamic jurisprudence using the pedagogical methods of a Western seminar, with individual assessment, disciplinary specialisation, and the separation of knowledge from ethical formation, is producing something structurally different from what a madrasa understood itself to be doing in the tradition it nominally continues. The form remains. The substance has been reorganised according to different principles.
The recovery that Faruque calls for, what he describes as a “grand translation movement” to retrieve the resources stored in millions of manuscripts in various Islamic languages (Faruque 2024, 374), is necessary but not sufficient. Translation into modern languages is the beginning of the project. The harder work is what comes after: learning to read those texts philosophically, which requires inhabiting a set of conceptual commitments different enough from those of Western modernity that simply reading the words is not enough. You have to understand what problem the text is trying to solve, and that problem is formulated within a framework of assumptions that the contemporary reader, educated in Western categories, does not naturally share.
This is where the work of scholars like Henry Corbin, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, William Chittick, and Mohammed Rustom becomes indispensable (Nasr 1968; Chittick 1989; Rustom 2012). These scholars have done the work of inhabiting the classical tradition closely enough to explain it in contemporary terms without reducing it to those terms. Their work is available. It is not read by most Muslim intellectuals. The reason returns us to Dagli’s point: the institutions of Muslim intellectual life have been organised around different priorities, and the internal hierarchy of intellectual prestige within those institutions does not reward engagement with classical Islamic philosophy (Dagli 2024, 38–41).
What would it actually mean to carry out the work of recovery in the present? Not as a nostalgic return to a pre-modern world that no longer exists, and not as a political programme for the imposition of Islamic law on states constituted on different principles. As intellectual work: the project of learning to think from within a tradition that has resources for addressing the questions of the present that the dominant tradition of Western modernity does not have.
It means, first, the development of genuine philosophical literacy in the classical tradition, the ability to read al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Khaldun, Mullā Sadrā, Shah Wali Allah, and Allama Iqbal’s actual sources not as historical curiosities but as intellectual interlocutors. This requires institutional support: programmes, fellowships, publishing ventures, and spaces of sustained conversation that make such literacy possible.
It means, second, the development of what Faruque calls a translation movement (Faruque 2024, 374): not merely the translation of classical texts into modern languages, though this is necessary, but the more demanding work of explaining what those texts were trying to do, in terms that a contemporary reader educated in Western categories can engage with seriously. This is the work of scholars like Chittick, Rustom, and Nasr, and it needs to be continued and extended beyond its current institutional home in a handful of Western religious studies departments.
It means, third, the application of classical resources to contemporary questions, not by forcing contemporary questions into pre-modern frameworks, but by asking what a thinker formed in the classical tradition would bring to the questions that define intellectual life in the present. What does Ibn Khaldun’s account of political legitimacy have to say about the crisis of the liberal democratic order? What does Mullā Sadrā’s theory of consciousness contribute to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and the nature of mind? What does the Islamic tradition’s sustained engagement with the relationship between ethics and epistemology, the conviction that knowing rightly requires being rightly, have to say to a moment in which the separation of knowledge from ethics has produced the forms of technological power that Schrödinger already foresaw as deeply troubling (Schrödinger 2014, 95; McGilchrist 2021, 16–20)?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are a research agenda. And they are, in the most precise sense, the agenda of an intellectual tradition that knows itself to be in possession of genuine resources and is not ashamed of that knowledge: because, as al-Kindi said of truth, there is no disparagement of truth, nor belittling of him who speaks it, nor of him who conveys it, wherever it comes from (al-Kindi 1974, 58).
VIII. Conclusion: The Riad, Revisited
Let us return to Faruque’s image one more time. The old house, the Riad in Fez, the Haveli in Lahore, has not been demolished. It has been vacated and allowed to fall into disrepair while its former inhabitants were moved into high-rise apartments and told that this was progress. The beautiful objects, the window panes, the oil lamps, the geometric tilework, have been kept, but as ornaments, stripped of their functional connection to the architecture that gave them meaning (Faruque 2024, 354).
The architecture is recoverable. The texts that constitute the classical Islamic intellectual tradition are available, more available than at any point in the past century, thanks to the digitisation of manuscript collections, the translation projects of the Library of Arabic Literature and similar initiatives, and the growing number of scholars who have dedicated their intellectual lives to making this material accessible. The intellectual tradition is not dead. It has been structurally marginalised. That is a different condition, and it admits of a different response.
The response is not nostalgia. It is not the claim that everything in the classical tradition is correct and everything in the modern world is to be rejected. It is the more demanding claim that the Islamic intellectual tradition constitutes a genuine alternative to the Eurocentric epistemology that has been presented as the only possible framework for serious thought, an alternative that has resources for addressing the questions of the present that the dominant tradition, for all its power, cannot adequately engage.
Blumenberg showed that Western modernity constructed its legitimacy by occupying the structural positions of the theology it displaced (Blumenberg 1985, 65–75). Dagli has shown that the Muslim world’s adoption of modern institutions involved a parallel displacement of the metaphysical foundations that gave those institutions their internal logic (Dagli 2024, 38–41). Faruque has shown the dimensions of the epistemic colonialism that resulted and called for the liberation of the Muslim mind from its Eurocentric constraints (Faruque 2024, 374–375).
The next step is harder than the diagnosis. It is the actual work of recovery: learning to think again from within the tradition, not about it from outside. Learning to read Ibn Khaldun as Ibn Khaldun read the world, not as a historical curiosity that anticipated Weber. Learning to engage with Mullā Sadrā on the nature of consciousness not as pre-modern speculation but as a serious contribution to the most pressing questions of the present age. Learning, in al-Kindi’s spirit, that the worth of an argument lies in what it is worth, a standard that no tradition owns and every tradition can meet when it brings its best resources to bear.
The Riad is still there. The task is to go back in, not to live as our ancestors lived, but to remember what they built, why they built it, and what it was designed to do that the glass tower cannot.
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