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The dominant theme me comes across in Bennabi’s writings is how essential it is to cultivate ideas. He argued that proficiency and efficacy in nurturing ideas is a vital sign of intellectual and cultural development. In elaborating the role of ideas in the development of civilization, he went to the extent of saying that a civilization ptospers only by the depth of its guiding ideas. I am in accord with Shaykh Diraz of al Azhar when, writing in his preface to Bennabi’s book The Qur’anic Phenomena, he praised him for the =titude of his judgment, the zeal of his conviction, the precision of his terminology, and the beauty of his style. Apart from their profound intellectual implications, the pronouncements of Bennabi caw deep personal meanings for me. These attributes of Bennabi’s writings make him one of the most erudite intellectuals of the Muslim world. Moreover, what I discern in these attributes is that they rightly portray him in his totality. To me he is not an intellectual or a recluse, simply captivated by the bliss of his own awakening and without an organic link with his faith. Most assuredly, his pen symbolizes his faith, his convictions, and his ideological strategy. More than anything else, it serves as a constant reminder of the inevitability of the inner struggle for both personal and collective evolution. Civilizations do not become great, acquire power, or wane by some mysterious flux of nature. A civilization is the translation of ideas into intellectual capacity and material means to organize one’s environment. Ideas make the practice of power possible. Ideas devise the practical tools for living in the world. And ideas question whether we have attained our goal or failed our potential. Bennabi tells us that those who do not have the moral courage to grasp the guiding ideas of their civilization have not only the repetition of history but their irrelevance to the mamh of time as their future. The Qur’an, the raison d’etre of the ummah, is not a mere invitation; it is the imperative to think and ...

Our understanding of science itself as a body of knowledge and as a system of analysis and research has changed over the last decades, just as over the last two centuries, or especially after the age of Enlightement in Europe, science has become more powerful, more sophisticated and complex. It is rather difficult to determine where science ends and where technology begins. In fact there is a gmwing awareness that the physical or nam sciences, as a means of studying and understanding nature, are relying on the more “humanistic“ and cultural approaches adopted by the social sciences or the humanities. The tradition of natural science is being challenged by new discoveries of the non-physical and non-natural sciences which go beyond the physical world. Certainly research is vital for the growth and development of all sciences that attempt to discover and understand the “secrets” of nature. The validity of any scientific theory depends on its research and methodological premises and even that-its proposition or theories (in the words of a leading cosmologist and theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking) -is tentative. Hawlung says: “Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.” The history of Western science is rooted in the idea of finding the ’truth’ by objectivity. Nothing can be believed until there is a scientific proof of its existence, or until it can be logically accepted by the rational mind. The classical scenario of scientific work gives you an austere picture of heroic activity, undertaken against all odds, a ceaseless effort to subjugate hostile and menacing nature, and to tame its formidable forces. Science is depicted ...