Rethinking Science, Philosophy, And Religion For Contemporary Islamic Higher Education: From Islamization To Integration Of Knowledge

• M. Amin Abdullah

  Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University Yogyakarta

  Author

ABSTRACT

This paper stems from my long-standing concern with the fragmentation of scholarship in Islamic higher education. In many cases, religious studies, science, philosophy, social sciences, and the humanities are still understood as separate fields. Yet, the profound changes of the past 150 years—advances in science and technology, globalization, population migration, literacy development, environmental crises, climate change, and growing awareness of human dignity, equal citizenship, interfaith relations, and gender equality—demand a more integrative, inclusive, and interdisciplinary scientific paradigm. This paper emphasizes the need for a shift from the Islamization of Knowledge to the Integration of Knowledge. The Islamization of knowledge was once a crucial response to the dominance of modern-secular epistemology, but in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, an overly defensive, apologetic, and exclusive approach is no longer adequate. The term Integration of Human Knowledge is introduced. Islamic higher education needs to build a scientific ecosystem that brings together revelation, reason, spiritual experience, scientific method, philosophy, ethics, and social responsibility. Within this framework, philosophy serves as a critical bridge that protects religion from narrow dogmatism and science from instrumentalism without a humanitarian focus. This paper concludes that the future of Islamic higher education depends heavily on the courage to develop an integration-interconnection paradigm that connects bayani, burhani, and irfani in a creative, critical, and transformative manner.

  Keywords : integration-interconnection, integration of knowledge, Islamization of knowledge, science and religion, philosophy of science, Islamic higher education.

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