Hikma falls under the category of ‘Philosophical Thought’, and signals the reparative and therapeutic intent of our core curriculum. Among the key findings of the Habib Liberal Core is the dramatic distortion and disorientation of the cognitive and cultural maps of our societies and traditions. Hikma aims to repair some of the conceptual damage done by both colonial-modern and modern-national processes and structures: a regenerative and therapeutic purpose (‘therapeutic’ in the proper sense of healing) intimately associated with philosophy since antiquity: in the Muslim context, the connection between healing and philosophy is explicitly given in the simultaneous meanings of the words, ‘hikma’ and ‘hakim’ – who is at once a wise person or philosopher, and a medical doctor or healer. Core 202: Hikma thus seeks to conceptually reorient us towards a more salutary inheritance and future, both individually in the intimacy of our selves, as well as in our relations with others – indeed with existence and the cosmos as such. In effect, this is to restore and regenerate the conceptual architecture that makes ‘Islam’ a sapiential – i.e., a wisdom-oriented, a philosophical – tradition.
