DEFINING AND MAPPING KNOWLEDGE IN ISLAM
Dr Syamsuddin Arif
International Islamic University Malaysia
Nothing truer can be said of Islamic civilization than what the late Professor Rosenthal has accurately observed: it is a civilization where knowledge triumphs. Knowledge has proven to be ‘a unique cultural term’ as well as ‘a powerful and, perhaps, the most effective rallying force’. Knowledge was a major factor that has given Muslim civilization its distinctive shape and complexion. Indeed, “there is no other concept that has been operative as a determinant of Muslim civilization in all its aspects to the same extent as ‘ilm [knowledge]”.
This article will re-examine the concept of knowledge in Islam, focusing on how it is understood and mapped by Muslim scholars of different streams of thought across the centuries. While it does not claim to break new ground, the present essay will hopefully contribute something to the ongoing debate on the Islamization of knowledge.
Defining Knowledge
To start with, let us ask: “What is knowledge?” When confronted with this question, most of us would be annoyed, refuse to answer, or simply ignore. Some might say: knowledge is what you know. But this isn’t a definition, strictly speaking, but rather a tautology–merely saying that knowledge is knowledge, and so doesn’t tell us anything. The Oxford English Dictionary (which must have been prepared by a good team of learned authors) lists three meanings for the word “knowledge”: (i) information and skills acquired through experience or education; (ii) the sum of what is known; (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.
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Consider the first one. Can one say that knowledge is information? One might think so, but I beg to differ for at least two reasons. First, information can be true and false, so if knowledge is information, then knowledge includes both true and false information. But how can one claim to know something when one is misinformed or ill-informed about it? Second, if we agree with the Cambridge English Dictionary that information is ‘facts about a situation, person, event, etc.,’ then facts equal knowledge. However, facts are not knowledge and knowledge is not to be confused with facts. Indeed the same Dictionary tells us that ‘fact’ is “something which is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which
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See Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, edisi baru (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007), 2 dan 340-1.
Online Oxford Dictionaries, http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0447820 (ed. April 2010).
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