The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Islamization

Islamization is the process by which practices, laws, knowledge, meaning, or peoples convert, conform, or adapt to Islam. It can describe (1) the redefinition of various pagan, Abrahamic, or native practices against the backdrop of conversion and expansion and (2) the integration of cultural, political, legal, or scientific systems with Islamic doctrines, language, and ethics, or their production from an Islamic perspective. In addition to reassessing conversion itself, appreciation of Islamization as a process has allowed scholars to show formal and substantive continuities during and after conversion; to pursue synchronic comparisons of Islamic cultures; and to capture the specific transformations facilitated by the adaptation of social phenomena and categories into Islam’s normative and semiotic structures. An example of the last is the transformation during early Islam of various literary genres such as the metered Arabic lyric poem, called the qaṣīda, through the introduction of Islamic terms and themes. The significance and extent to which Islam is the product of the Islamization of pagan, Hellenistic, Christian, and Jewish thought and practice remains contested. Scholars on one side assume that all similarities between early Islam and its predecessors indicate “borrowing” or “influence”; those on the other side see Islam as a complete and total break with the past. More recent scholarship has shown how non-Islamic knowledge, myths, and histories were adapted, reorganized, and elaborated in Islamic milieus in areas as diverse as history, theology, philosophy, and zoology. “Islamization” has some baggage, particularly where “Islam” is reified or where one assumes that the designation of something as Islamic or non-Islamic by nature is self-evident. Similarly, the term not infrequently carries polemical undertones. For example, self-described Islamizing agendas assert an authentic Islamic identity and cast their opposition or their objects of conversion as non- or un-Islamic, while non-Muslim descriptions of a place as “Islamizing” tend to cast the place as vulnerable and Islamization as a threat.

Scholarship on contemporary politics and society has drawn attention to the performative, spectacular, and relational dimensions of attempts to “Islamize” the public, public space, or oneself. For instance, Farha Ghannam, an anthropologist specializing in Egypt and Jordan, uses the term in her Remaking the Modern to describe Islamic groups’ increasing displays of religious signs in homes, shops, and vehicles; the increasing numbers of educational and health services in their mosques; and their interactions with the general populace. Others have also highlighted the importance of visibility, where Islamization describes overtly religious practices and mosque construction projects. Finally, “Islamization of knowledge” describes a contemporary project to harmonize Islam with the modern sciences and anchor them in Islamic ethics. This enterprise can be traced to the writings of the Palestinian-American philosopher of Islam, Arabism, and comparative religion Isma‘il al-Faruqi, starting in the 1960s. Organizations that grew out of this project include the International Institute of Islamic Thought. As the anthropologist of science Christopher Furlow suggests in his article “The Islamization of Knowledge: Philosophy, Legitimation, and Politics,” such projects should be understood “within the broad context of decolonization and development and within the intellectual milieu of post-colonial negotiation between ‘nativizing’ cultural traditions and ‘transnational’ modernisms.”