Editorial

Abstract

In this issue of AJISS, some of the changes that we plan to introduceto the journal‘s contents and layout begin to take shape. AJISS, from thisissue onwards, will only accept and publish articles with endnotes. Eachissue will include four main research essays or more, in addition to ourexpanded Book Review, Reflections, and other regular sections. It is ourintention that AJISS will now seek to provide a historical dimension to themodem Islamic experience, especially that of the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries. Lawal‘s “Islam and Colonial Rule in Lagos,” isan example of this category of research that will be appearing in futureissues of the journal. To elucidate the need for this dimension, it may behelpful to explain a few aspects of modem Islamic intellectual history.The Islamic reform movement is, in many respects, the greatest intellectualendeavor of the Muslim mind over the past two centuries. Itsemergence came against a backdrop of western encroachment and theinability of the Sufi-dominated Muslim world to respond adequately tosuch foreign challenges. Reformists emphasized renewal by revising theProphet’s tradition against the stagnation brought about by a Muslimmind that had become enslaved to a blind and uncritical imitation of theways of earlier generations (taqlid). They advocated, moreover, a synthesisof what is “Islamic” and what is “modem and western.”Today, Muslims and Islamic intellectualism are in greater need ofcomprehending and analyzing the context of the reform movement, theIslamic response to the weserrn challenge, and the sweeping modernizationprocess that was to ensue. The main reason behind such urgency isthat although the reformist model succeeded in upholding Islamic tenetsand achieved a limited reconstruction of Islamic self-confidence, it can nolonger provide a basis for renewal (tajdid) or answer the major questionsconfronting the contempomy Muslim world.The importance of al ‘AlwW’s most recent elaboration of the Islamizationof Knowledge vision for renewal, “The Islamization of Knowledge:Yesterday and Today,” is that it goes beyond the reformistenterprise. By invoking the Qur’an and its absolute dominance over allother Islamic sources, the author suggests a new path for the developmentof an Islamic weltanschauung. Many pursuits of the Muslim social scientistshave already shown that this process is effectively underway ...