Dr Ibrahim Kalin - The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre

alone. The timeless wisdom is that reality is always more
than our epistemic constructions of it.
As a mark of modernity, reason has been constructed as
a self-regulating principle and the arbiter of truth from the
mathematical and physical sciences to social and political
orders. One modern tribute to it reads as follows: “The virtue
of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of
reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of
values and one’s only guide to action.” 5 But in reality, this rarefied
view of reason, so passionately defended by academic
philosophers, positivists and the self-proclaimed Enlightenment
rationalists, has never worked as expected. Nor has
it delivered what it promised, i.e., free individuals, rational
society, universal equality, scientific culture, reason-bound
politics or economic justice. This in itself calls for a deep
reflection about the reasonableness of the Enlightenment
project of pure reason. At any rate, elements of ‘anti-reason’
seem to have crept into the new world order promised by
the Enlightenment, and the modern capitalist society with
its evasive impersonalism, crude individualism and structural
violence, is a far cry from a rational social order.
Ever since the triumph of scientism in the late 19th and
early 20th century, reason as logic and rational inquiry has
been hailed as a trait of modernity not because we want to
grasp the reality of things in the Greek sense of the term but
5 Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New American Library 1964) p. 25.
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