Re-envisioning Islamic Scholarship

Jasser Auda

Paperback, 284 pages

9781800119772

 

Maqasid Methodology as a New Approach

 

Re-envisioning Islamic Scholarship is a pioneering and timely contribution that deserves wide readership. Jasser Auda masterfully focalises the Quran and Sunnah in a work that integrates scholarship across time and disciplines to demonstrate the connectivity of human thought and action within a purposeful universe of infinite possibilities.

 

Through a five-step holistic methodology, he urges scholars and practitioners in all fields of knowledge and endeavour to seek revelational guidance by performing continuous cycles of reflection on the revelation that reveal this connectivity.

 

Here, the maqasid or objectives of revelational guidance manifest through a process of emergence that is premised on deep understandings of the concepts, objectives, values, commands, universal laws, groups and proofs that implicitly or explicitly shape our understandings and help re-envision research agendas, educational institutes and organisational strategies.

 

In a world that has become accustomed to individualism, inequality, fragmentation and loss of meaning this book is a paradigm shift, a beacon of light and a very welcome guide to a better future for humanity.

 

Contents

 

1. Introduction

Connectivity, wholism and emergence

Why maqasid?

Future orientation

Critical orientation

Comprehensive orientation

 

2. Limitations of Contemporary Approaches in Islamic Scholarship

Identification of limitations versus schools and trends

Imitation

Partialism

Apologism

Contradiction

Deconstructionism

 

3. Re-orienting the Islamic Worldview

Knowledge

Logic

Conceptualisations

Re-defining Islamic History

Envisioning the future

 

4. The Methodology

Discovering methodology from revelation

Methodology and framework

Quran and Sunnah

Arabic language

Purpose

Critical engagement

 

5. Composite Framework

 

6. Re-envisioning Islamic Studies via the Maqasid Methodology