ReOrienting the Global Study of Religion - Syed Farid Alatas

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Zoom: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/85088959718

Chaired by: Armando Salvatore, McGill University

9:00-10:15 AM (EST/UTC -5)

Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore

“Ibn Khaldun and Autonomous Knowledge Production”

In order for theory to be relevant to the Third World/Periphery/South it needs to be challenged. The nature of that challenge is the deparochialisation of theory. The discipline of sociology and other social sciences have been slow to do this. Recently, however, there have been efforts to address the problem by way of the critique of canons and foundational theories of the discipline. This paper is a contribution in the direction of such critique to render the disciplines less parochial. This paper is divided into three parts. First it introduces the theme of silencing that manifests itself in the recounting of the voyages of discovery that began mere decades after the death of Ibn Khaldun. The paper then turns to the reconstruction of Khaldunian theory in the context of modern historical and area studies. The idea here is to provide a structure that may be used to construct social theory from the works of those thinkers from the South that are considered to be potential sources of alternative, non-Eurocentric theory. The thinker under consideration here is Ibn Khaldun. The paper ends with a discussion on autonomous knowledge as a more productive and critical way of thinking about knowledge production as opposed to the decolonization of knowledge. Ibn Khaldun is seen to be relevant to the challenge of hegemonic orientations other than Eurocentrism.