The Secularist Modernist Bias of Western Social SciencesWestern social sciences in general bear a clear stamp of the modernist and secularist bias of the Western liberal academy. Adopting their typical mode of enquiry entails an ipso facto espousal of the liberal and secularist worldview with its epistemological and cultural preferences. Such an epistemological framework is largely confined to empiricism and its cultural perceptions are constricted by a Euro-centric view of history. It is a truism that an empirical mode of enquiry by its very nature cannot go beyond a partial perception of human existential reality. When this mode is further restricted by Western cultural dogmatics, it defies the perception of objective reality, precludes the cognition of significant subjective, introspective, and emotional dimensions of human behavior, and falls short of recognizing significant variables of cultural relativism. Therefore, this method is not only unfit to understand Muslim societies and their dynamics, it also fails to reach an adequate understanding of the various dimensions of human social behavior in general.
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Muhammad al-Ghazali
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