Hermeneutical Foundations for Islamic Social Sciences

A brief review of some of the major proposals for the project of Islamic socialsciences are given. It is observed that in all of these proposals, interpretationand understanding are crucial. Hermeneutics is introduced in the broad senseof the study of interpretation and understanding, and a brief review of itsdevelopments is given, with an emphasis on the work of Gadamer. Some ofthe problems of the application of hermenteutics are discussed along withsuggestions about the rational evaluation of competing views that may beformulated in initially incommensurable languages. The idea of religioushermeneutics is next developed with reference to the positions that have beentaken by Bultmann, Plantinga, and Nasr; and on this basis three grades ofreligious hermeneutics are distinguished. An attempt is made to overcomesome problems for an Islamic hermeneutics with reference to proposals byWilliam Chittick and Leo Strauss. Problems with the application of an Islamichermeneutics are reviewed and solutions offered. The view that the objectivityof science precludes religious science is rejected in favor of the view thatobjectivity does not depend on neutrality but on articulation, the process ofmaking assumptions and presuppositions explicit and to formulate them withever greater precision (where this is appropriate). Complications that arise forthe application of an Islamic hermeneutics for the social sciences aresurveyed, and it is proposed that the application of an Islamic hermeneuticsfor the social sciences must be developed in a dialectical relationship to thescientific traditions whose secularity gave rise to the calls for sacred science and in particular for Islamized social sciences