Abstract

Some contemporary Muslim scholars view Ibn Khaldun's fourteenth century classification of the sciences in the Muqaddimah as the model for reuniting the philosophical and religious sciences in an Islamic curriculum they perceive to be bifurcated by Westernization. This study shows that Ibn Khaldun, in line with al-Ghazzali appealed more to theological and pragmatic arguments than philosophical arguments to unite the two domains of knowledge. The question is raised in what sense the knowledge domains can be epistemically united in agreement with the Islamic doctrine of tawhid when Ibn Khaldun's faculty psychology, spiritualized cosmology, and habit view of science are philosophically inadequate and rejected by many contemporary Muslims. An effort is made to use R. Chisholm's contemporary foundationalist epistemology, and Ross's extension of Chisholm's theory to include testimonial knowing, as the theoretical basis for an epistemic reunification of Ibn Khaldun's knowledge domains. Chisholm and Ross's theories are criticized for making de se believing basic to de dicto and de re believing, assuming belief is a necessary condition for knowledge, and for their inability to account for "knowing how to" forms of knowledge. It is concluded that Chisholm and Ross's theories fail to achieve the desired epistemic unification and it is recommended that a coherentist understanding of tawhid and coherentist epistemology be investigated by Muslim scholars