Syed Farid al-Attas

Syed Farid al-Attas is a Malaysian sociologist and the Associate Professor in Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. He is known for his research on the East-West dichotomy, decolonization of knowledge, Islam, the Project of Islamisation of knowledge and Muslim intellectualism.^[1] His areas of interest are historical sociology, the sociology of social science, the sociology of religion and inter-religious dialogue.^[2]

He obtained his PhD in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1991. Farid lectured at the University of Malaya in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies prior to his appointment at Singapore in 1992. He is the son of Syed Hussein al-Attas, the nephew of contemporary philosopher, Syed Mohammad Naghib al-Attas and the grandson of the legendary Syed Mohammed al-Attas.^[3]

Views

Islamic state

Farid al-Attas believes one of the greatest dangers facing Malaysian society is the rise of Muslim extremism – Wahabism and Salafism – or legalistic thinking that reduces citizens to rules and regulation. He says "we can’t have an Islamic state because an Islamic state is not good even for Muslims. When I say that, I don’t mean that Islam is not good for Muslims. I mean the conception of an Islamic state which is a modernist idea is a chaotic idea”.

He explains that the proponents of the idea of an Islamic state mostly talked about Hudud laws which centred around criminal laws and the kind of state they envisage is a horrible state as it is a state presided by a punitive God, and not the God of Love, as envisioned by the Sufists or the God of the early missionaries who brought Islam to Southeast Asia and the Malay world

He says: "So being against Islamic state is not to be secular or to be against Islam, Muslims really need to understand that... They have to understand that the whole notion of the Islamic state is a modernist idea”. Syed Farid holds that the entire thinking of what constitutes a state in Islam and how the religion is brought into modern life needs to be debated and discussed but that is not being done because Islam is being politicised.^[4]

Islamisation of knowledge

He believes the Islamization of disciplines is a positivist approach that seems to have a mechanical view of how Islam is related to knowledge. Those concerned seem to approach the matter in terms of individual disciplines, and they imagine the possibility of Islamized disciplines. He says: "I have to admit that very little headway has been made in terms of Islamizing these disciplines. We don't really see an Islamic sociology. It is very difficult to understand what is meant by these Islamized disciplines: they have not been put into practice, and the work that has been done on the Islamization of knowledge according to that perspective tends to be very abstract, and I would even say rather vague".^[5]

Books

• Ibn Khaldun (Makers of Islamic Civilization), Oxford University Press, 2013
• Applying Ibn Khaldun: The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology (Routledge Advances in Sociology), 2014
• An Islamic Perspective on the Commitment to Inter-Religious Dialogue, Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies Malaysia, 2008
• Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism, Sage, 2006
• Democracy and Authoritarianism in Indonesia and Malaysia: The Rise of the Post-Colonial State, Macmillan, 1997
• The post-colonial state: Dual functions in the public sphere (Department of Sociology working papers), National University of Singapore, 1994
• Asian Inter-Faith Dialogue: Perspectives on Religion, Education and Social Cohesion (edited) (RIMA and the World Bank, 2003)
• Asian Anthropology, edited with Jan van Bremen and Eyal Ben-Ari (Routledge, 2005)

See also

• Al-Azhar University
• Medieval university
• Malays in Singapore
• Racial polarization
• Eurocentrism
• Asabiyyah

References

External links

• "Decolonising Universities" on YouTube
• Goodreads