2020/03/31 by Steve Yim · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Islamic Studies and History #Education and Islamic Studies #Islamic Finance and Banking Studies #Islam #Secularization #Fundamentalism #Islamic fundamentalism #Islamic studies #Secularism #Muslim world #Context (archaeology) #Religious studies #Pluralism (philosophy) #Political science #Sociology #Environmental ethics #Philosophy #Theology #Law #Epistemology #History #Politics
paper · doi:10.30532/mce.2020.13.1.53
openalex publication_date 2020/03/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Due to rapid secularization and the prevalence of a modern worldview, people in the West expected religions to disappear from human minds. However, such is not the case, as according to Peter Berger, de-secularization is occurring, and the influence of religious fundamentalism has become stronger since the mid- 20th century. For instance, the Islamic world has seen a rapid growth of fundamentalism.<BR> Today, the Muslim world is facing a challenge. The Muslim worldview has become rigid, while Muslim society is isolated from non-Muslim worlds. It is urgent to answer how the Islamic world might co-exist with other societies. Most ordinary Muslims want to live peacefully with non-Muslims. Many Muslim intellectuals, who want to reform the closed, Islamic worldview, are seeking another way for the future of Islam. The challenge from inside is to rediscover the Islamic identity, especially that of Islamic in-tellectuality.<BR> Nasr agrees that the crisis faced by Muslims in the contemporary, globalized context is caused by Western secularism, which rejects knowledge of the sacred. To overcome this, he argues for the re-sacralization of knowledge, which can be accomplished by rediscovering the rich legacy of Islamic philosophy and reconstructing Islamic intellectuality, which integrates both reason and spirituality. Nasr raises the critical issue of religious pluralism. Although Nasr believe that Islam is the true religion containing the absolute truth, he also accepts there are genuine revelations apart from Islam.