ORDERING KNOWLEDGE, KNOWERS: Islamic Classifications of the Sciences and Malay Ecology Learning

Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Knowers examines how Islamic traditions classified the sciences and how those classifications shaped who counted as a knower. Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad argues that the ordering of knowledge in Islam was never merely a taxonomy: it bound together ontology, epistemology, ethics, spiritual formation, pedagogy, authority, and institutions into a living architecture of learning. Tracing this architecture from its classical formulations to the Malay-Indonesian archipelago, the book shows how it was translated, vernacularised, institutionalised, and reorganised across the Nusantara with no exact precedent. It explores how the region substantially received al-Ghazali's ethical ordering of the sciences while absorbing little of al-Farabi's demonstrative ordering, and what this inheritance has meant for the dayah, the pesantren, and the broader ecology of Malay Muslim learning. Ranging across Islamic philosophy of science, intellectual history, and religious authority in the digital age, this study offers a wide-ranging account of how communities have ordered knowledge and, in doing so, ordered themselves.