The secularist modernist bias of Western social sciences
Western 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.
The impact of the modernist secularist bias on the fundamental approach common to the disciplines of the social sciences is that the knowledge of social phenomena supplied by them is deliberately filtered to fit the typical liberal modernist paradigm. These so-called objective and value-free sciences then assume the role of a messianic cultural movement to mold the whole world in accordance with the perceptions and priorities of the dominant Western paradigm. These sciences prescribe an epistemology which forces its user to conceptualize both manners of experiencing as well as the modes of explaining man and the world around him, all in accordance with their given presumptions. The result of an uncritical adoption of this method of enquiry is that one immediately becomes hostage to the proselytizing project of secular modernity launched by Western powers for their own specific ends. These powers have assumed a self-commissioned apocalyptic mission to liberate humanity from 'ignorance', 'irrationality', 'superstition', and 'backwardness', and recast the world in their own favored secular modernist model of 'enlightenment', 'progress', and 'development'. (1)
The most important bias of secular modernity is that it holds as an a priori assumption the absolute superiority of the present over the past. Whatever is later in time is reckoned as 'modern' and regarded as unquestionably higher, more progressive, more precious, and more valuable than all that which pertains to the past, which is in turn dubbed and dismissed as pre-modern, retrogressive, ancient, and archaic. There also exists in the modern Western mindset an inherent antagonism between 'then' and 'now', 'ancient' and 'modern', 'old' and 'new'. The word 'modern' has been derived from the Latin root modo, meaning 'just now'. Thus, in the very term 'modernism', a necessary superiority of the present over the past has been arbitrarily presumed. This typical occidentalist bias reflects the Western weariness with its own past which it perhaps rightly calls a dark period. In their myopia, however, the occidentals universalize their prejudice toward a particular era of their own history. The ethnocentric bias and bigotry of the Western episteme thus insists on seeing and showing the entire history of humankind from its own narrow prism and shallow spectacles. Hence the excessive obsession of Western social thinkers with an absolute preference of the present over the past and their dogmatic adherence to this creed, which is religiously followed in all social research that takes for granted that whatever is prior in historical time has to be backward and blame-worthy and whatever is subsequent must be 'advanced' and praiseworthy. This dogmatic attachment to a fixed notion of temporality has ab initio blinded the vision of high modernist scholars.
Those who uncritically borrow wisdom from their occidental masters thus land in serious flaws and fallacies on account of a blind emulation of modernist and secularist academics. For example, a widespread though often unconscious understanding among the ideologues of high modernism alleges that, before the touch of the colonial baptizing hand, as it were, orientals lived in an abject condition of economic backwardness, intellectual insolvency, and in a deplorable state of cultural barrenness and civilizational void. They opened their eyes in the world of culture and civilization only when the white man emerged to bear their burden and conduct them to the shores of enlightenment and progress. (2) Muslim social scientists must, therefore, take great care when adopting the social scientific methods of the Western academy, for its implicit epistemological frameworks and modes of research are often deeply influenced by a definite teleological understanding.
In its obsession with dry rationalism and mechanical scientism, secularist modernism and its academic off-shoots take an impersonal, clinical, and laboratory approach to isolating and understanding the human condition. In the name of objectivity, modernity sets aside emotions and feelings, intuition and reflection, speculation and imagination, individual wisdom and experience, custom and convention, metaphysics and tradition, cosmology and religion, ethics and aesthetics, and esoteric and mystical vision. (3) At the price of its cultural legacy, modernity has engendered industrialization, urbanization, advanced technology, the nation-state, and life in the fast lane. It has established and dictated its own typical set of priorities for human beings: individual freedom, liberal democracy, detached experiment, neutral procedures, impersonal rules, and dry rationality. (4) The end result of modernization in human societies, notwithstanding the highly exaggerated claims of success by its votaries, has been reflected in such ruinations as the dissolution of the institution of marriage, the fluidity of the family and its constant decline, a self-centred individual completely estranged from his human relations and linkages, the erosion of perennial values by the monster of the media, excessive entertainment, distortion of reality through advertisements, the dissemination of pornography and prostitution, abuse of women in entertainment and advertisements, an increase in such deviant habits of moral turpitude as incest, homosexuality, and marital infidelity, drug abuse, AIDS, and alcoholism at an unprecedented scale. If one were to judge the merits of secular modernism by the results it has produced, then a very ugly picture of its performance inevitably emerges. Even if one were to assess this performance by strictly applying modernity's own preferred standards of success, progress, and human happiness, a very gloomy picture of the present and an utterly hopeless projection of the future of mankind is unavoidable.
