A Comparative Study Between Reflexive Thematic Analysis in Social Sciences and Qur’anic Thematic Analysis in Qur’anic Sciences

Islamization of social sciences is a collective religious obligation (farḍ al-kifāyah) to serve the Muslim community. Thus, it is steadily progressing after being established last century. However, the Western secularly oriented social scientists as typically sceptical, especially the positivistic, or post-positivistic ones. Moreover, editors of established journals also are reluctant to acknowledge the application of traditional Islamic methodologies in the Islamization of Knowledge (IoK) researches due the methodological integrity issues such as the validity issues according to their practice. But then, Islam has a lengthy history of traditional methodologies dated back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. whose prophethood began in the seventh century C.E.  Since then, he had founded initial Thematic Analysis methodology in interpreting the Holy Qur'an with another relevant part of it intertextually, and his prophetic guidance (al-Sunnah), which is more developed in the Fundamentals of Islamic Jurisprudence (Usul al-Fiqh) for its significant role to the Islamic Jurisprudence (al-Fiqh al-Islamī). Thus, by rights it has to be equivalently recognized like other de/post-colonial/subaltern methodologies especially when it is being used in IoK movement that revers the revelation (al-Naqlī) above the human intellect (al-ᶜAqlī).  This paper is a comparative study between the Reflexive Thematic Analysis method that is commonly used in the Social Sciences and the Qur’anic Thematic Analysis (QTA – Al-Tafsīr Al-Mauḍūᶜī) methodology under the Qur’anic Sciences (ᶜUlūm al-Qur’ān). Some compatible methodological fusions allowable in Islam are suggested for the QTA to stay relevant in merging the Islamic Studies into the contemporary Social Sciences.