Muslim Selbstverständnis: Ahmet Davutoğlu answers Husserl’s crisis of European sciences

Abstract

In formulating his understanding of Islamic history, thought and politics, the Turkish Muslim thinker Ahmet Davutoğlu adopts the German philosopher Edmund Husserl’s formulation of phenomenology – or, philosophy of consciousness. Both Husserl and Davutoğlu perceive a crisis in humanity and identify its causes in scientism and logical positivism, against which they develop their respective phenomenological alternatives. This article places in parallel Husserl’s stylised history of Western thought and Weltanschauung method with that of Davutoğlu’s Muslim worldview, in order to illuminate the latter’s putatively comprehensive interpretation of Islam, diagnosis of the ills of secularism, modernisation, and crisis of values he finds in Muslim societies; and his prescribed treatment for those ills: the privileging of ontology over epistemology, and the full unfolding of core theological concepts of revelation, monotheism, and prophecy. Davutoğlu seeks to reconcile tensions and disputes within Islamic intellectual traditions concerning the nature of God and God’s attributes, and the tension between mysticism and rationalism, and the historical and the atemporal. In summary, Davutoğlu’s intervention in Islamic traditions is interesting in the effort it makes to appropriate elements of both Husserl and GWF Hegel for the purpose of reconciling a phenomenological reading of Islam with established Islamic authorities and commitments.