There was some conversation at the 2nd Annual Defining Islamic Psychology conference this weekend about the de-colonization of knowledge and producing Islamic knowledge (psychology), versus merely Islamicizing knowledge (psychology) and again, the solution lies more in regaining confidence in Islam itself for it is this—our confidence in what we believe to be right and true that colonialism successfully undermined—that will give us the most bang for our buck in terms of what we “spend” of our various resources in the quest to produce a genuine Islamic psychology. Without dealing with the elephant in the room (our lack of confidence in Islam) virtually all other gestures and efforts will be nothing other than maintaining the position over us colonial mindsets and epistemologies hold by either confirming they are our masters in that we must focus exclusively on fighting the specters of colonialism or deeming them our masters to which we must capitulate lock, stock, and barrel.
The process of producing Islamic knowledge (in this case, #Islamicpsychology) will be less a process of operating on so-called Islamic principles but more about the confidence we have in those principles in the first place. #DefiningIslamicPsych pic.twitter.com/whRBPeGEq5
— Marc Manley (@manrilla) February 10, 2019