The Islamization of Social Sciences in Nigeria

IntroductionThe Islamization of social sciences is part and parcel of developingand promoting knowledge that conforms to the norms of Islam. This canbe attained by motivating scholars to develop scholarship using an Islamicperspective through the introduction of new social science courses basedon Islam, Islamizing (i.e., rearticulating along Islamic lines) existing conventionalsocial science disciplines, and promoting the movement ofIslamic attitude to knowledge.The Islamization of Knowledge undertaking in Nigeria can be tracedto the period of the Sokoto Jihad leaders, whose scholarly writings coveredsuch aspects of life as politics, economics, and medicine. However, withthe passage of time and, more especially, with the coming of the Britishcolonialists and the concomitant infiltration of western scholarship, theIslamization of Knowledge pioneered by the Jihad leaders gradually beganto fade. At first, the North opposed vehemently the spread of the westernsystem of education, because it was linked with Christian missionary propaganda(Fapohunda 1982). As such, the emirs of the North and their subjectsstood fmly against this alien system, a stance that accounts for thedisparity in western education between the South, that had welcomed it,and the North.Unfortunately, like most other Muslim countries, Nigeria continues tosuffer from the colonial legacy of the West. In particular, its elites are theworst victims of colonization of mind by the West’s so-called secular ideology.Its education and other systems of life continue to be based largelyon the structure of that secular ideology.Education is the single most important instrument for grooming andchannelling a society in the desired direction. To rescue Muslim societiesfrom the yoke of western secular civilization and to reestablish Islamiccivilization requires the decolonization of the secularized minds and spiritsof the elites as well as of Muslim intellectuals (the ulama), professionals,and political leaders, on the one hand, and the training of youngpeople in Islamic knowledge and education, on the other. In order toreturn the society to the Islamic system of life, the first task is the Islamizationof the educational system (both formal and informal) for the Muslimsand the Islamization of the country’s ulama ...