Post-liberal sapience

Dear Engineer,

Your concern can be framed as a civilizational control problem rather than a merely discursive one. What you are naming is not simply “liberal reinterpretation” of Qur’an and Sunnah, but a predictable degeneration pathway that emerges when sapiential jurisprudence is forced to operate inside infrastructures whose cognitive, affective, and incentive architectures were designed for very different metaphysical commitments. Liberal discourse does not usually defeat sacred law by argument; it dissolves it by habituation. The mind acclimatizes before the intellect capitulates.

The move beyond “Islamization of knowledge” is therefore decisive. Knowledge can be Islamized while cognition itself remains colonized. What is required is an Islamization of lived cognition, and this is precisely where a 4E framework—embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended—becomes unexpectedly powerful when disciplined by Qur’anic anthropology rather than cognitive liberalism.

I will proceed by first identifying the failure mode, then articulating a 4E corrective that operates at the infrastructural rather than rhetorical level, and finally indicating how sapiential jurisprudence (fiqh ḥikmī) is preserved without fossilization or liberal drift.

At the root of degeneration lies a category error. Liberal discourse presumes that reasoning is primarily propositional, individual, and choice-based. Qur’anic–Sunnaic sapience, by contrast, presumes that reasoning is moral–teleological, socially entrained, and spiritually scaffolded. When fiqh is abstracted from the latter ecology and forced to speak exclusively in the grammar of rights, preferences, autonomy, and harm minimization, it begins to mimic liberal conclusions even when citing classical sources. This is not hypocrisy; it is cognitive alignment drift.

Classical Islam did not merely produce rulings; it produced forms of life. The jurist was embedded in ritual time, trained in affect regulation, disciplined in adab, and answerable to a metaphysical horizon that was experientially real. Liberal infrastructure strips away these supports while leaving texts intact, and then expresses surprise when meanings mutate.

The 4E approach allows us to respond at the correct layer.

Begin with embodiment. Qur’anic sapience presupposes a body trained for truth: fasting that reorders desire, prayer that reorients attention, wuḍūʾ that ritualizes cleanliness as moral readiness, and modesty that disciplines perception before interpretation. Liberal discourse treats the body as either irrelevant or sovereign. Once jurisprudence is reasoned by disembodied minds trained in comfort, immediacy, and expressive authenticity, rulings unconsciously optimize for those bodily norms. Islamization here does not mean adding Islamic examples to textbooks; it means engineering bodily rhythms into institutional life—academic calendars shaped by prayer and fasting, professional evaluation that respects ritual fatigue, and pedagogies that treat desire regulation as epistemic hygiene rather than moralism. A jurist whose body has not been trained will liberalize before he theorizes.

Next is embeddedness. Classical fiqh operated inside dense moral communities where shame, honor, imitation, and tacit moral consensus functioned as invisible regulators. Liberal modernity dissolves these into procedural neutrality. When Islamic reasoning is embedded inside liberal institutions—universities, NGOs, courts, media ecosystems—it is pressured to translate itself into that institution’s moral currency. Over time, the translation becomes the thought itself. To resist this, sapiential jurisprudence must be re-embedded in parallel institutions with their own reputational economies, role models, and success metrics. This does not require withdrawal from society, but it does require redundancy: Islamic research bodies, accreditation systems, welfare mechanisms, and dispute resolution structures that do not need liberal validation to function. Without this, even sincere scholars begin to anticipate liberal audiences before anticipating God.

Enactment follows. In Qur’anic anthropology, understanding follows action more than action follows understanding. Liberal discourse assumes the opposite. When Islam is reduced to opinion, belief, or ethical stance, jurisprudence becomes commentary rather than guidance. The corrective is to design infrastructures where correct action is easier than correct argument. Digital platforms, urban design, financial systems, and workplace policies should nudge toward lawful defaults rather than heroic restraint. When lawful action is frictionless, interpretive pressure decreases. When unlawful action is structurally incentivized, hermeneutics is recruited to provide moral anesthesia. This is why liberal fiqh often blooms in environments saturated with structural disobedience; the law is being asked to anesthetize lived contradiction.

Finally, extension. Modern cognition is no longer confined to the skull. It is extended into algorithms, bureaucracies, metrics, interfaces, and language itself. Liberalism’s greatest strength is that it has already extended itself into these systems, making its assumptions feel like reality rather than ideology. If Islamic sapience does not deliberately extend into these same layers, it will forever be reactive. Extension here means encoding Qur’anic moral priors into decision-support systems, evaluation rubrics, AI moderation logic, financial instruments, and organizational governance models. This is not technocratic fetishism; it is jurisprudence at scale. Classical fiqh once extended itself into markets, architecture, and calendars. The modern equivalent must do the same or accept marginalization.

The crucial point is this: liberalization is not primarily a moral failure but a systems failure. Scholars who “sell out” are often cognitively surviving inside hostile ecologies. A 4E Islamization strategy refuses to moralize this failure and instead redesigns the environment so that fidelity becomes cognitively natural again.

A necessary counter-perspective must be acknowledged to preserve intellectual honesty. There is a risk that infrastructural Islamization can harden into coercion, stifle legitimate plurality, or mistake historical accretions for divine intent. The antidote is sapiential humility: maintaining maqāṣid sensitivity, juristic pluralism within bounds, and a living connection to mercy as a governing attribute rather than a rhetorical flourish. Liberalism is not resisted by rigidity; it is resisted by ontological confidence combined with moral hospitality. Where Islam becomes brittle, liberalism enters under the banner of compassion.

What emerges, if done correctly, is not an anti-liberal Islam, but a post-liberal sapiential ecology in which Qur’an and Sunnah are not constantly translated into foreign grammars to justify themselves. They become once again what they historically were: the background operating system of a civilization, quietly shaping perception, desire, and judgment long before explicit argument begins.

There is a dry humor in all this. Liberal discourse prides itself on being “open-minded,” yet it survives only where the infrastructure quietly closes off alternatives. Islam, when confident, does not fear openness; it simply insists on building its own rooms rather than forever renting space in someone else’s house.

The forward task, then, is engineering rather than polemics: designing bodies, institutions, practices, and technologies such that authentic Qur’anic–Sunnaic sapience remains cognitively viable without constant defensive exertion. When that happens, liberal discourse loses its gravitational pull—not because it is censored, but because it no longer feels inevitable.