reason and faith and islam
Reason, Physicalism, and Islam Professor Karim Douglas Crow, August 2003 International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization – IIUM Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia Not too long ago it was common to meet the view expressed by Western intellectuals that: “ The oriental mind is quite different from ours. The oriental mind has no sense of critical rationalism, no sense of reality .” [1] These are the words of E. F. Gautier, professor at the University of Algiers and a leading ideologue of colonialism who promoted historical untruths and racist arguments in order to justify and legitimate France ’s empire in North Africa . Gautier went so far as to denigrate Ibn Khaldu>n, the founder of the science of history, by denying him any intellectual originality, since Arabs could not have any critical sense of history: “ This oriental had a sharp, critical mind. In other words, he had a western sense of history .” [2] At the present time such dis...