I. The Narrow Canon and Its Keepers
Every tradition has its gatekeepers. In the case of Islamic philosophy, they operate on two fronts simultaneously and the damage they do, compounding across centuries, is rarely acknowledged as a coordinated problem.
The first front is familiar: the Western academic framework that effectively ends the history of Islamic philosophy with Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the twelfth century. On this account, the Islamic tradition served as a transmission belt, preserving Greek philosophical texts during Europe’s intellectual contraction, and passing them westward when the Latin world was ready. Having served that function, the tradition is understood as having exhausted its philosophical purpose. What came after: the School of Isfahan, Mullā Sadrā, the vast literature of Ottoman and Safavid philosophical theology, the jurisprudential and mystical traditions of the Malay-Islamic world, is either consigned to specialist footnotes or dismissed as the twilight of a tradition that had already said everything it had to say.
The second front is less often named, because it operates from within. An internal Sunni-centric orthodoxy has consistently disciplined alternative lineages into the margins of what counts as Islamic thought. Shi’i philosophical traditions, particularly those that engage in sophisticated cosmological and noetic inquiry, are dismissed as “mysticism” or, in more hostile framings, heresy. The Nusantara Islamic tradition, produced across the vast Muslim communities of Southeast Asia, is categorised as “local knowledge”, interesting for anthropologists but peripheral to Islamic philosophy properly understood. The cumulative effect of these two forms of gatekeeping is an impoverished canon that serves neither historical accuracy nor the intellectual requirements of the present.
This essay argues that recovering the excluded traditions is not merely an act of historical justice. It is an epistemological necessity. The Islamic intellectual tradition is not a fixed and finite archive. It is a living enterprise whose full resources have not yet been brought to bear on the questions that define intellectual life in the present. Recovering those resources requires, first, naming the mechanisms that excluded them, and second, reading the excluded traditions on their own terms rather than in translation to the categories that marginalised them.
II. The Mechanics of Epistemic Subordination
The concept of the captive mind, developed by the Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas across a series of foundational papers in the 1970s, provides the most precise available vocabulary for the structural problem (Alatas, S.H. 1972, 11; 1974, 692). Alatas defined the captive mind as the product of higher institutions of learning “whose way of thinking is dominated by Western thought in an imitative and uncritical manner”, an intellectual formation constitutively unable to raise original problems because the very choice of what counts as a problem is determined by the Western centre of gravity (Alatas, S.H. 1974, 692).
His son Syed Farid Alatas has extended this analysis in a series of more recent papers, identifying what he calls “hegemonic orientations” in knowledge creation: Eurocentrism, sectarianism, traditionalism, androcentrism, ethnonationalism, and nativism, all of which distort the production of knowledge, and some of which predate European colonialism while continuing to shape intellectual life long after its formal end (Alatas, S.F. 2022, 9–10; 2024). The crucial insight is that Eurocentrism and internal hegemonies are not separate problems with separate solutions. They are reinforcing structures. The Sunni-centric dismissal of Shi’i philosophical traditions as heresy provided the internal architecture into which Orientalist contempt for “mysticism” could be installed. The effect was to compound the exclusion: what internal orthodoxy had already marginalised, Western scholarship then confirmed as marginal, and what Western scholarship had already dismissed, internal orthodoxy could invoke as evidence of illegitimacy.
Syed Farid Alatas describes what an autonomous social science tradition requires: consciousness of the psychological and structural obstacles that mental captivity and intellectual imperialism present, combined with the capacity to generate original problems from within the bedrock of indigenous reality rather than waiting for Western validation (Alatas, S.F. 2024). Applied to Islamic philosophy, this means approaching the Shi’i and Nusantara traditions not as peripheral annexes to a canon centred elsewhere but as primary sources of intellectual resources that address questions the canon itself has struggled to formulate.
Rizvi and Bdaiwi, in their 2024 special issue on decolonising Islamic intellectual history from Shi’i thought, make the same distinction that has proven decisive in earlier sections of this essay: between decolonisation as a historical and political process, and decoloniality as an ontological and epistemological shift (Rizvi and Bdaiwi 2024, introduction). The former is about changing institutional arrangements. The latter is about changing the fundamental categories through which a tradition understands itself and its purpose. Recovering the Shi’i and Nusantara traditions is a decolonial act in the second, more demanding sense.
III. The Shi’i Philosophical Heritage: Beyond the Mysticism Label
The most persistent mechanism for excluding Shi’i thought from the philosophical canon is the label “mysticism,” applied in such a way as to place Shi’i intellectual traditions outside the domain of rational inquiry. This is not a neutral descriptive category. It is a disciplinary boundary that encodes a distinctively Western account of what rationality is and what it excludes.
The binary at stake is the European Enlightenment’s insistence on an “irreducible rationality” that demarcates the domain of legitimate knowledge from the domain of religion, spirituality, and metaphysical speculation. Within this framework, the Islamic philosophical tradition is evaluated positively to the extent that it anticipates the Enlightenment’s separation of reason from revelation, and negatively to the extent that it refuses that separation. Ibn Rushd is celebrated precisely because his reading of Aristotle can be detached from its theological context and offered to the Latin West as a secular philosophical resource. Figures whose work is constitutively theological, whose philosophy cannot be extracted from its metaphysical and spiritual commitments, are categorised as mystics rather than philosophers.
What this framework cannot see is that the Shi’i tradition’s refusal of this separation is not a failure of philosophical sophistication. It is a different philosophical thesis: the claim that the highest form of knowledge integrates rational inquiry and spiritual formation, that the intellect and the illuminated soul are not competing faculties but aspects of a single cognitive capacity, and that the tradition of inquiry from Ibn Sina through Suhrawardi to Mullā Sadrā is developing this thesis with increasing rigour across several centuries.
The Shiraz Circle, centred on thinkers like al-Dashtaki in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, provides a case study in what gets lost when this tradition is excluded from the canon. Al-Dashtaki’s engagement with the Avicennan tradition represents not the decline of Islamic philosophy after its supposed Golden Age but its continuation and development. Khaled El-Rouayheb’s detailed scholarship on Ottoman and post-Avicennan intellectual history has demonstrated the empirical bankruptcy of the decline thesis: serious rationalist philosophical inquiry continued in the Islamic world well into the seventeenth century and beyond (El-Rouayheb 2015, 340–360). What was interpreted as decline by Western scholars who shared the Enlightenment’s account of rationality was in fact a philosophical development that the Enlightenment framework was unable to recognise as such.
The tradition of esoteric lettrism, associated with figures such as al-Bursi and Dihdār Shirāzi, offers a further illustration. Western and modernist Muslim scholarship has routinely dismissed lettrist practice as occultism: a category designed precisely to exclude certain forms of inquiry from the domain of legitimate knowledge. But as Rizvi and Bdaiwi’s scholarship makes clear, lettrism in the Shi’i tradition functioned as a sophisticated cosmological and epistemological discipline: an inquiry into the structure of language, reality, and the relationship between them that took seriously the Quranic insistence that the divine word is not merely a vehicle of content but a constitutive dimension of reality itself (Rizvi and Bdaiwi 2024). Reading lettrist scholarship through its own epistemic framework rather than through the binary of rationality and superstition reveals a tradition of rigorous inquiry that the narrow canon has simply declined to see.
The eschatological philosophy of al-Sijistani offers a third dimension of what recovery would yield. His inquiry into temporality, into the concept of the barzakh (the intermediate state between death and resurrection), and into the cyclical nature of existence, is not a retreat from philosophy into religious speculation. It is a philosophical engagement with questions about the nature of time, the structure of the soul, and the relationship between historical existence and eschatological fulfilment, questions that remain live in contemporary philosophy. Approaching this material as philosophy rather than as theology or mysticism changes what can be seen in it.
What the Shi’i tradition offers, across these different domains, is what might be called an “intuitive rationality”, a form of rational inquiry that does not begin from the Enlightenment’s hard separation between reason and revelation but from the conviction that the highest exercise of reason requires a corresponding formation of the soul. This is not a rejection of rational argument. It is a different account of what the conditions for genuine rational inquiry are. The claim is philosophically substantive and historically specific, and it deserves engagement as such.
IV. The Nusantara Synthesis: Adab, Hikmah, and the Geography of Islamic Thought
The systematic marginalisation of the Nusantara Islamic tradition in global Islamic intellectual history is a different but equally consequential form of epistemic closure. If the Shi’i tradition is excluded by being labelled mystical, the Nusantara tradition is excluded by being labelled local, of interest to anthropologists and area studies specialists but peripheral to what Islamic philosophy is understood to be about.
This is a colonial construction. The Nusantara, the great archipelago of island communities stretching from the Malay Peninsula through the Indonesian islands to the Philippines, was not a peripheral backwater of Islamic civilisation. From the thirteenth century onward, it was an active centre of Islamic learning, linked to the Haramain and to the broader Indian Ocean networks of scholarship, producing important scholars and texts in theology, jurisprudence, Sufi thought, and the natural sciences. The Jawi manuscript tradition, written in the Malay language using the Arabic script, constitutes a vast archive of Islamic intellectual production that remains poorly integrated into mainstream accounts of Islamic thought.
The colonial educational hierarchies that Darmawan and others have documented systematically reduced this heritage to the category of “non-scientific” local knowledge (Darmawan 2024). Dutch colonial education in the Netherlands East Indies, and British colonial education in Malaya, replaced indigenous educational institutions with systems designed to produce colonial administrators and economic auxiliaries. The result was not merely institutional displacement. It was a severing of the intellectual genealogy through which Nusantara scholars understood themselves as part of a continuous tradition of Islamic inquiry. Subsequent generations of Muslim scholars in Southeast Asia have been required to acquire their Islamic learning through Western-mediated channels, principally the orientalist scholarship of Snouck Hurgronje and his successors, rather than from within the living tradition (Woodward 2025, 111–115, Studia Islamika).
The Nusantara synthesis rests upon three pillars that distinguish it from other regional expressions of Islamic thought. The first is adab, understood in its deepest sense not merely as ethical comportment but as “right action derived from right knowledge”, an insistence that the ethical and the intellectual are not separable domains (Darmawan 2024). A scholar without adab does not merely fail morally; his knowledge is defective as knowledge, because knowledge produced without the corresponding ethical formation cannot achieve the integration of the intellect and the real that is the condition for genuine understanding.
The second pillar is tawhid as a scientific principle. In the Nusantara tradition, the divine unity is not merely a theological claim about God’s nature. It is a constitutive principle of inquiry: the conviction that the study of the natural world, of society, and of the human person must be conducted within a framework that affirms the underlying unity of all reality. This is a direct challenge to the modern Western separation of the natural sciences from ethics and metaphysics. It insists that knowledge production cannot be value-free, not because it should be politically committed, but because the very structure of reality as divinely ordered makes the separation of factual from normative inquiry a form of epistemic distortion.
The third pillar is hikmah, wisdom, understood as the application of intellectual rigour to lived experience in a way that encompasses practical ethics, political thought, and the science of the household in a unified framework. This integration of what modern Western thought separates into distinct disciplines, namely economics, ethics, and politics, reflects a vision of intellectual life in which these domains are aspects of a single inquiry into the right ordering of human existence.
The work of Shaykh Nawawi al-Bantani in the nineteenth century illustrates how this tradition continued to produce significant scholarship even under colonial pressure. His texts, widely used across the Nusantara Islamic world, systematically integrated classical jurisprudential reasoning with the ethical and cosmological commitments of the Nusantara synthesis. Recovering this tradition does not mean returning to its specific institutional forms. It means restoring access to the intellectual framework it embodies, so that contemporary Muslim scholars in Southeast Asia can understand themselves as participants in a living tradition of inquiry rather than as belated recipients of a tradition centred elsewhere.
V. The Failure of Islamisation of Knowledge and the Path Beyond
The Islamisation of Knowledge (IoK) project, launched in the 1970s under the intellectual leadership of scholars including Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas and Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, represents the most sustained modern attempt to address the epistemological crisis this essay has been describing. Its failure is instructive.
The IoK project was premised on the correct diagnosis that modern Western knowledge systems are not epistemologically neutral, and that Muslim scholars have uncritically absorbed their categories and assumptions. Its proposed remedy was to “Islamise” existing disciplines, bringing Islamic ethical and theological frameworks to bear on economics, psychology, political science, and other fields inherited from the Western academy.
The problem was not with the diagnosis but with the prescription. Khawar’s analysis demonstrates that in practice, the IoK project often resulted in what she calls “halal-washing”: the application of an Islamic veneer to knowledge systems whose underlying ontological commitments remained unchanged (Khawar 2023). The Homo Islamicus of Islamic economics retained the rational preference-maximising structure of the liberal Homo Economicus, with the addition of religious constraints rather than a fundamental reconstruction of what it means to be an economic agent (Khawar 2025). The Islamic “psychology” that emerged from the IoK project similarly retained the categories and methods of Western psychology while adding Islamic references, rather than asking what psychology would look like if begun from within the Islamic tradition’s own account of the human soul.
The deeper problem was that the IoK project attempted to Islamise the content of knowledge without sufficiently interrogating the structural conditions under which knowledge is produced. Syed Farid Alatas’s framework of autonomous knowledge points toward a more adequate response. An autonomous social science tradition does not Islamise existing disciplines. It cultivates the capacity to generate problems, concepts, and methods from within the bedrock of indigenous intellectual reality (Alatas, S.F. 2024). The starting point is not Western disciplines waiting to be Islamised, but the Islamic intellectual tradition itself, read on its own terms, and capable of producing new knowledge from its own resources.
This is what recovering the Shi’i and Nusantara traditions actually enables. The Mulla Sadrā tradition’s account of consciousness and selfhood is not an Islamised version of Western philosophy of mind. It is a distinct philosophical programme that addresses the questions modern philosophy of mind is asking from a fundamentally different set of premises. The Nusantara tradition’s insistence on the unity of knowledge and ethics is not a theological constraint imposed on modern scientific inquiry. It is an alternative epistemological framework that takes seriously the criticism, made from within the Western tradition by Heidegger, Schrödinger, and others, that modern science’s structural separation of factual and normative inquiry produces a truncated account of reality.
VI. Relationality Over Relativism: What Pluriversal Islam Means
The argument of this essay could be misread as advocating a form of cultural relativism: the claim that different Islamic traditions are equally valid and that no tradition’s claims should be assessed from the outside. That is not the argument.
Rizvi and Bdaiwi’s distinction between relativism and relationality is decisive here (Rizvi and Bdaiwi 2024, introduction). Relativism holds that different traditions are each internally valid and mutually incommensurable. Relationality demands something more demanding: an interdependent conversation that contests the totalising epistemic claims of modernity without retreating into the position that all claims are equally valid and equally immune from criticism.
A pluriversal Islamic intellectual tradition is not a tradition that has given up on the claim to truth. It is a tradition that recognises that the truth is approached from multiple angles, through multiple intellectual lineages, with different emphasis but with a shared conviction that the inquiry is a shared one. The Shi’i tradition’s insistence on intuitive rationality is not incompatible with the Nusantara tradition’s insistence on the unity of knowledge and ethics. They are different articulations of a shared resistance to the Enlightenment’s fragmentation of the unified intellectual enterprise that the classical Islamic tradition had developed.
This shared resistance is what makes “pluriversal Islam” more than a pluralist slogan. It is an intellectual programme: the recovery of the full range of the Islamic tradition’s philosophical resources, their engagement with each other in a genuine conversation rather than a policed hierarchy, and their deployment in addressing the questions that define the present moment. The question of what artificial intelligence means for the nature of mind and moral agency, the question of how environmental crisis is understood within a framework of divine stewardship, the question of how political legitimacy is grounded in a tradition that does not begin from the social contract: these are questions that the narrow canon as currently constituted cannot adequately address. The fuller tradition can.
Syed Farid Alatas, extending his father’s framework, identifies the Tawhidic paradigm as the epistemological anchor for this programme (Alatas, S.F. 2024). The unity of the divine is not merely a theological claim. It is the epistemological principle that underwrites the unity of knowledge: the conviction that the different domains of inquiry, natural science, ethics, metaphysics, jurisprudence, and aesthetics are aspects of a single intellectual enterprise oriented toward the same reality. This is not mysticism. It is a claim about the structure of knowledge that has significant consequences for how inquiry is organised and what counts as a genuine intellectual achievement.
VII. The Work of Recovery in Practice: 2026 and Beyond
What does it actually mean to recover these traditions in practice, for scholars working today? The answer requires a decisive shift from mere archival preservation to a proactive claim of epistemic sovereignty, one that is already underway in different registers, and one whose constituent parts are now, for the first time, mutually visible.
Reading the Primary Archive. Recovery requires reading primary texts on their own terms, free from the transmission-belt narrative of the Western academy. The Shi’i philosophical tradition from Suhrawardi through Mullā Sadrā is available in both Persian and Arabic, and a growing body of translation and commentary scholarship from Corbin, Nasr, and Rustom has made this tradition increasingly accessible to those without direct competence in the classical languages (Nasr 1968; Corbin 1964; Rustom 2012). The work in 2026 has moved, however, beyond translation toward application: toward asking how the categories of intuitive rationality address present crises rather than simply recovering what they once said.
A vital model for this work is found in Allamah Tabataba’i, whose mid-twentieth-century engagement with Marxism and Liberalism remains under-studied as a template for how a tradition can critique global hegemonies without losing its ontological footing (Tabataba’i 2024 critical ed.). Where Iqbal conceded too much to Western modernity by adopting its framework as his medium of argument, Tabataba’i engaged with Marxist materialism and liberal individualism from within the metaphysical framework of the School of Isfahan, demonstrating that a tradition formed in intuitive rationality can interrogate the claims of secular philosophy on philosophically equal terms rather than merely asserting its own superiority.
The Digital Nusantara and Epistemic Sovereignty. The year 2025 marked a significant turning point with the large-scale digitisation of pesantren libraries across Southeast Asia. These projects are more than technical achievements; they are acts of decoloniality that reclaim the archive from institutions that held it at a distance. By making millions of Jawi manuscripts, traditionally marginalised or held in European collections where their accessibility to Southeast Asian scholars was structurally constrained, directly available to Global South researchers, these digitisation initiatives bypass what might be called the orientalist filter: the requirement that indigenous knowledge pass through Western institutional mediation before it counts as scholarship. The creation of this digital Nusantara forges a direct link between contemporary students and their intellectual genealogies, enabling the autonomous knowledge production that Syed Farid Alatas identified as structurally impossible under conditions of academic dependency (Alatas, S.F. 2024).
A particularly significant development within this digital recovery is Nor-Afidah Yusof’s 2025 research into the intellectual agency of Malay women in Jawi manuscripts (Yusof 2025). By demonstrating that women were active participants in the philosophical and scientific discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Yusof shatters the androcentric gatekeeping that has operated as a second layer of exclusion within the Nusantara tradition itself. The Nusantara has been doubly marginalised: externally by Western orientalism, and internally by a patriarchal scholarly tradition that erased its own female voices. Recovery of the tradition requires recovery on both fronts simultaneously. This is decoloniality that takes Syed Farid Alatas’s warning about internal hegemonic orientations, including androcentrism, seriously rather than selectively (Alatas, S.F. 2022, 9–10).
Reading as Philosophy, Not Anthropology. Recovery requires the intellectual formation that Alatas calls autonomy: the capacity to engage with a tradition on its own terms, asking what problems it is addressing and what philosophical moves it is making, rather than assessing it by the standards of a different tradition’s problems and moves (Alatas, S.F. 2024). This means treating the Nusantara principles of adab and hikmah not as historical curiosities suitable for anthropological description but as rigorous methodologies for present inquiry. When the barzakh or the lettrist sciences are approached not as occultism but as inquiries into the structure of temporality and language, they open into live philosophical debates about consciousness, ecological ethics, and the moral accountability of technological power that the narrow canon cannot adequately frame.
The Pesantren Model as Institutional Counterfactual. The pesantren tradition of Indonesia offers the most sophisticated model for how this work can be institutionally organised. The pesantren is not simply an educational institution. It is an organisational form that integrates intellectual formation with ethical formation, in which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of character are understood as aspects of a single process (Woodward 2025, 123–124). As Woodward argues, this model provides a vital counterfactual to the fragmented disciplinary structure of the Western academy, a demonstration that the integration of knowledge and ethics is not a pre-modern remnant but a coherent institutional possibility (Woodward 2025, 131–132). It sustains a space in which the acquisition of knowledge is never separated from its moral and spiritual purpose, providing precisely the consolidative knowledge that Alatas identified as the second pillar of an autonomous social science tradition (Alatas, S.H. 2002, 153–155).
Recovering the pesantren model is not a call to abandon modern institutional forms. It is a call to understand what those forms have lost, and to ask whether the intellectual formations they produce are adequate for the recovery that the Islamic tradition requires, and that the present crisis of knowledge demands.
VIII. Conclusion: The House Has More Rooms
The narrow canon has done a specific kind of damage. It has persuaded a generation of Muslim scholars that the philosophical resources available to them consist of what Western orientalist scholarship has determined is worth keeping: Averroes and al-Ghazali, the usul al-fiqh tradition, and selected elements of Sufi theology sufficiently detached from their philosophical context to be presented as spirituality rather than epistemology.
The house of Islamic intellectual history has many more rooms than this. The Shi’i philosophical tradition from the School of Isfahan to the contemporary Iranian philosophical scene is a room of extraordinary richness that the narrow canon has kept locked. The Nusantara tradition, encoded in millions of Jawi manuscripts across the archives of Southeast Asia, is a room that colonialism has not merely locked but systematically convinced its inheritors is not worth opening.
The work this essay describes is the work of opening those rooms, not to archive what is inside them but to live and think within them. Syed Hussein Alatas’s autonomous social science tradition offers the intellectual framework for this work: the cultivation of the capacity to raise original problems from within indigenous intellectual reality, without waiting for Western validation and without being constrained by the hegemonic orientations of either Eurocentrism or internal orthodoxy (Alatas, S.H. 1974, 700; Alatas, S.F. 2024).
A pluriversal Islam is not an Islam that has abandoned the claim to truth. It is an Islam that has recognised the full scope of the tradition through which truth is sought, a tradition that extends from the great centres of Abbasid learning through the School of Isfahan and the Nusantara synthesis to the present, and that has more to say about the questions of the present than either its internal gatekeepers or its external assessors have been willing to acknowledge.
The door that must be wider is not only the door of the Western academy. It is the door of the tradition itself.
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