Around 100 students successfully attended the third workshop of the newly established Kalam Architectonics School. Dr Amran Muhammed (Chief Executive of KRM Southeast Asia) lectured on the internal structure and methodology of kalam within history and as a science. A review of the lectures can be found on www.kalamresearch.com
The lectures commenced with an exposition by Amran in which he responded to a question raised prior to the class concerning the supposed decline of Sunni philosophy after Al-Ghazali in conjunction with the rise of Shiite philosophy through Al-Tusi, Al-Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra. Dr. Amran illustrated that this view is historically inaccurate as the Sunni schools of intellectual thought did not experience a decline rather it integrated into various Kalam traditions across the Maghreb and Asia. In the first half of the lecture, Dr Amran expanded on the idea of ‘Kalam as the Islamic Philosophical Methodology’, clarifying significant similarities between the structure of philosophy of Aristotle, the Peripatetic Philosophers and the Mutakalimun. Several questions were raised concerning the apparent dependence of the Muslim intellectual tradition on the Aristotelian tradition and possible alternative sources from the Persian, Chinese and Indian intellectual traditions. The second half of Dr Amran’s lecture was on ‘the Reception of the Science of Logic in the Muslim Intellectual Tradition’ where Dr. Amran emphasizes the essentially interactive response of the Islamic intellectual traditions to ‘the knowledge of the day’, such as logic. Within the intellectual schools of Islamic theology and philosophy, there was an explicit effort, and literature produced, in order to discern those logical axioms and refute those logical axioms which were in conflict with the Islamic creeds through demonstrative methods.
Dr Amran then proposes that the present day youth and academicians embrace the spirit of our previous scholars in engaging the current ‘knowledge of the day’ with the hope that Muslims today can make sense of the world they live in. Throughout the lecture, Dr. Amran mentions the neglect of traditional philosophers towards the techne aspect of human activities, focusing on the sophia and the praxis, whereas technology has become an inevitable part of humanity in the contemporary world. Thus, an effort should be made by Muslim philosophers and academicians likewise to establish Kalam and Technology discourse to deal with the challenges of present day technological developments. The Kalam Architectonics School is a series of lectures organized by ISSI and KRM with the cooperation of the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. For more information on the coming lectures of the Kalam Architectonics School. Visit http://www.issimalaysia.org.my/
