Critical Thinking: An Islamic Perspective

by Muhammad Mumtaz Ali

Learning to think critically is crucial to a person's ability to distinguish truth from falsehood and benefit from harm. The Muslims, who were once at the cutting edge of world intellectual activity and creativity, have fallen into rote mental habits. While forgetting their own intellectual legacy they embarked upon a long process of uncritical emulation and adoption of Western culture.

But slavish copying of what someone else arrived at by creative processes will not make the copier creative. The issue is how to learn to think for oneself and develop one's own native abilities. Certain techniques of critical thinking are universal and can be applied by anyone, but a great deal of Western thought since the Enlightenment is based upon unfounded assumptions.

Dr. Mumtaz Ali's book explores and highlights the speculative proposals that underpin modern Western thought and contrasts it with the knowledge base of Islamic thought, which is built upon the foundation of rigorously preserve divine revelation. That revelation challenges the human mind and trains it to think critically within a framework of basic principles that allows the mind to 'cut to the chase'. It frees the mind from speculation about basis axioms in order to concentrate on a focused exploration of the universe and cultivation of civilization in all its facets.

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Dr. Muhammad Mumtaz Ali was born in Hyderabad, India in 1955 and graduated in 1974 from Osmania University in the same city. He received Masters in Political Science from Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India and later obtained MPhil and PhD in Islamic Studies from the same university while completing empirical investigation of his research in England during 1982-83. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Usuluddin and Comparative Religion, Kulliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Science, and Chairman of Committee for Postgraduate Studies of the department at the International Islamic University Malaysia. He has presented several research papers in national and international conference. He has been getting published in several journals in the area of contemporary Islamic thought. He is the author of several books.