From Islamization to Ethicalization: Ethics, Knowledge, and the Reconstruction of Social Sciences

اسلامائزیشن سے اخلاقی تشکیل تک: اخلاقیات، علم اور سماجی علوم کی تشکیل جدید

Abstract

The project of Islamization of Knowledge emerged in the late twentieth century as a critical response to the epistemic dominance of Western social sciences and their claim to value-neutrality. While this project successfully exposed the moral and metaphysical assumptions embedded within modern knowledge, it increasingly encountered conceptual resistance due to its perceived ideological framing. This article argues that the contemporary crisis of the social sciences marked by ethical fragmentation, normative ambiguity, and epistemic disorientation calls for a conceptual rearticulation of this project in the form of ethicalization. Rather than abandoning the foundational insights of Islamization, the article presents ethicalization as its epistemic maturation. Ethicalization reframes the reform of social knowledge around the inseparability of facts and values, foregrounding ethics as constitutive of inquiry rather than an external supplement. Drawing upon Islamic moral anthropology and the integrated roles of revelation, reason, and experience, the study demonstrates how ethical commitments shape social categories, methodologies, and interpretive frameworks. By situating ethicalization within broader debates in social theory, sociology of knowledge, and post-positivist methodology, the article positions it as a globally relevant framework capable of reconstructing the social sciences without recourse to ideological closure or civilizational imitation. The study concludes that ethicalization offers a coherent and intellectually responsible path toward restoring moral purpose to social knowledge in both Muslim and non-Muslim contexts.