Zakiah Daradjat

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 7 focuses on Zakiah Daradjat, who was a moralist thinker. A key leitmotif of Zakiah’s career was the reformation of Muslims through what she termed religious-oriented psychology. She promoted the integration of sacred sources of Islam, Muslim psycho-spiritual traditions, and advances in modern European psychology into a new form of knowledge that could address the manifold challenges brought about by modernity. This was a departure from approaches to psychology that were either overly Western in orientation or Islamic in nature. Although Zakiah was not the first to put forward a faith-based psychology to overcome the mental and social problems affecting Muslims, she pioneered it in the Southeast Asian context, and advocated for its relevance on a sustained and practical basis. Religious-oriented psychology was not a mere science, nor a speculative discipline in pursuit of a comprehensive understanding of the inner workings of human minds. Religious-oriented psychology serves a wider function as a diagnostic tool that could refashion and vitalize Muslim minds toward the creation of a morally driven and divine-conscious society.