A CONTRIBUTION TO THE ISLAMIZATION PROCESS: AN ANALYSIS OF ALPARSLAN AÇIKGENÇ’S APPROACH TO KNOWLEDGE

Meryem Arı and Şevki Işıklı

ABSTRACT

Alparslan Açıkgenç, who is in search for a permanent solution against the Western civilization, defines the construction of the Islamic civilization as “a real issue that demands an urgent solution.” This is urgent, because on one side, the hegemony of the Western civilization based on the understanding of positivist knowledge and materialistic – mechanical being keeps leading to new tragedies, while on the other hand, the postponed reformation of what is Islamic causes postponement of universal salvation. Islam already exists as a civilization with the exact meaning of the word, but in terms of comfort provided by and the mission endowed by a civilization, it has excessively become/been made incapably. An Islamic civilization for repairing the humanitarian and social damages created by the Western civilization, solving the problems of Muslim societies and the universal salvation of humanity, may only be possible by “Islamizing” the approaches on being, knowledge and values within an Islamic view of the world. Açıkgenç shows that the categorical divisions that are positioned between emotion and intelligence, sensory and mental, physical and metaphysical, matter and soul, subjectivity and objectivity, knowledge and morality, daily experience and religious experience, intuition and the mind in an absolute sense but not reflecting the reality will be eliminated by Islamizing knowledge, and therefore, the division between being and knowledge may be prevented. In the sensory and the mental that are actualized in a certain world view, he involves religious experience which comes from intuition and moral maturation. He shows that division the understanding of knowledge necessarily causes divisions in humanitarian, physical and social being. He proposes Islamization of knowledge as a possible way to get over the multidimensional dichotomies of the Western civilization.