Horizons of Thought

Vol.1, No.2, Spring & Summer 2015

Ahmad Murad Merican / Professor Department of Management and Humanities, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak                                                                 Malaysia amurad_noormerican@petronas.com.my

Received: 2014/10/5 - Accepted: 2015/2/1

Abstract

The paper seeks to examine the corpus of Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi in light of establishing new ways of constituting the Human and Social Sciences. It is based on the assumptions that the existing social and human sciences are anthropocentric in nature, and were produced within a culture and civilization that place man as the centre and the measure of things. That crucible which has become the origin for the production of knowledge operated within a chaotic West in the early modern and the modern periods. Thus knowledge produced has been secular and disenchanted and sees man as a material object par excellence. As a result, modern man has lost his sense of origin, why he lived and wither he was going. The Infinite Wisdom to Man does not return to the Primordial, but develops a Faustian trajectory. This paper reattaches the Mawlana’s corpus to academic and intellectual levels as it informs daily life and consciousness. We need to reconsume the tenets of a ‘devolutionist’ History, Art, Sociology, Anthropology, and Philosophy.  It asks what can the Mathnawi and the Fihi Mafihi contribute to the Humanities from the Islamic perspective.  How can it be used to restructure another mode of knowing? What disciplines can the Rumi corpus produce (or reproduce)? The significance of this paper is that it suggests a universalization, and thence, a deethnicization  of the Social and Human Sciences, thus embracing the universal while mitigating the uniqueness of man in both his microcosmic and macrocosmic environments.