Possibility of Production of Islamic Social Science

The present paper is an attempt to explore the possibility or impossibility of development of an Islamic social science. According to some arguments based on epistemology and logic of scientific growth, the main hypothesis of the present paper is that the development of an Islamic social science is possible in some respects and impossible in some other respects. The impossibility is mainly related to practical aspects rather than essential ones. In practice, impossibility is related to obstacles such as time-effectedness, lack of religious knowledge in all fields, lack of attention to other sources of knowledge and lack of reliance on reason and decontextualization of social science. Attempts have been made in the present paper to offer a broader perspective of Islamic social science by placing this concept in a dynamic model of scientific growth (dynamic model of production of knowledge). This image like any other knowledge will be subject to change and development and hence its message is that our theoretical efforts for the definition of relationship between religion and science and growth of Islamic social theories will be an open-ended current. Hence, one cannot define it once for all and consider it a complete task. These definitions and redefinitions will be part of religious social science.