My excellent friend Ziauddin Sardar – a former colleague from New Scientist and now founder and editor of Critical Muslim – has summarized the mind-shift that’s needed as follows:
“We need to move from disciplinary enclaves to integration of knowledge. This journey begins with the acknowledgement of (a) the limitation of disciplinary perspectives that cannot deal with complex problems and issues and that (b) complex problems need complex approaches that can only be gained through multiple perspectives; (c) multiple perspectives need many different modes of knowing; (d) different ways of knowing cannot be supplied by a single culture but require plurality of cultures, each with its own definition, notions, and concepts of knowledge and ignorance; (e) the total abandonment of the ignorant belief that Western culture is the only culture entitled to produce knowledge and is the only culture that has produced knowledge”.
From: Ignorance: Critical Muslim 43, 202, p 13.
Share this article:
Leave a Reply