The Islamic scholarly tradition has never truly operated within separate, isolated disciplinary boxes. The legacy of scholars who mastered fiqh alongside medicine, hadith, philosophy, and other fields shows that dialogue across disciplines has long been an integral part of Islamic intellectual history.

That spirit was brought to life in an academic discussion titled “Writing a History of Knowledge in the Islamic Tradition: Knowledge Across Disciplines,” held by the Graduate Student Family (KMP) of UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta on Thursday, August 20, 2026, at the Graduate School Hall. The discussion featured Prof. Islam Dayeh from Ghent University, Belgium, with Asep Nahrul Musadad, M.Ag., of UIN Sunan Kalijaga's KMP serving as moderator.

The discussion became an academic meeting point, bringing together scholarly perspectives from Indonesia and Europe while opening a conversation on how knowledge develops, intersects, and is used to address complex problems.

In his remarks, Director of UIN Sunan Kalijaga's Graduate School, Prof. Moch. Nur Ichwan, said the discussion's theme carries strong relevance to the Graduate School's intellectual mission. According to him, UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta's development into a university encompassing the social and natural sciences presents both a challenge and an opportunity to continue preserving the tradition of classical Islamic scholarship.

“Islamic studies must not be isolated from the broader humanities and social sciences. We need to engage with the classical Islamic intellectual tradition while also bringing it into conversation with contemporary theory and method,” he said.

This spirit has long been cultivated through various academic spaces within the Graduate School, including the Graduate Reading Space, which brings together readings of classical works with modern and contemporary Islamic thought. UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta's academic environment is also supported by scholars with backgrounds in traditional Islamic education, including experience studying at various centers of Islamic learning across the Middle East, Europe, the United States, Australia, and Indonesia.

In his presentation, Prof. Islam Dayeh invited participants to revisit how relationships between fields of knowledge were practiced within the Islamic intellectual tradition long before the term "interdisciplinary" became popular in the modern academic world.

He introduced a multi-year research project focused on polymathy and interdisciplinarity within pre-modern Islamic epistemic culture, examining how Muslim scholars connected different disciplines and reflected on the methods behind that crossing of knowledge.

For Prof. Dayeh, this history matters not only for understanding the past, but also for reconsidering how the academic world approaches the challenges of the present. Historical knowledge of how Muslim scholars once discussed questions of science, health, and the environment can serve as a source of inspiration for contemporary scholarly approaches.

One example he shared was the relationship between fiqh and medicine in debates over the consumption of cannabis, tobacco, and coffee. These debates show that issues we now understand through multiple lenses (law, health, ethics, and psychology) were already part of scholarly conversation within the Islamic tradition.

Prof. Dayeh also brought up the figure of Ibn al-Nafis, widely known as a physician and a key figure in the history of medical science. Yet behind that identity, Ibn al-Nafis was also a jurist of the Shafi'i school of law who wrote and taught fiqh, teaching it, in fact, within a bimaristan, or hospital.

This story shows just how porous disciplinary boundaries once were. Medical matters could intersect with fiqh and ethics, while a physician could, at the same time, contribute to the study of hadith and Islamic law.

According to Prof. Dayeh, one of the key concepts in his research is polymathy, the breadth of a person's command across multiple disciplines. Within the Islamic tradition, a range of terms describe the breadth of a scholar's knowledge, such as al-'allamah, al-'alim, al-hafiz, al-mutabahhir, and al-mutafannin.

But the more important question isn't simply which scholars can be called polymaths. What's more compelling is how that breadth of knowledge was used to solve problems, connect different fields, and fill the spaces between disciplines.

In this context, Prof. Dayeh drew a distinction between two central concepts in his research project: polymathy as the breadth of knowledge held by an individual, and interdisciplinarity as the relationship between different fields of knowledge. The two converge when a complex problem cannot be solved through a single field of knowledge alone.

For UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, this idea finds relevant ground. As a university that continues to bring Islamic studies into conversation with the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, and other fields, the tradition of cross-disciplinary dialogue is an essential part of building an academic ecosystem that is open and responsive to the times.

Beyond serving as an academic lecture, Prof. Islam Dayeh's meeting with UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta's academic community also opened the door to broader scholarly collaboration. Prof. Dayeh expressed hope that this encounter could grow into long-term collaboration, including the possibility of exchange programs or joint research opportunities for graduate students between Ghent University and UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta.

He also framed the discussion not merely as one-way delivery of material, but as a space of mudzakarah and muraja'ah, a scholarly conversation in which participants could share their own research experience, offer input, and jointly develop new ideas.

This spirit of dialogue was the very strength of the academic encounter. UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta became more than a site for the transfer of knowledge; it became a meeting point for different intellectual traditions, giving rise to new questions, perspectives, and possibilities for research.

Through forums like this, UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta continues to affirm its commitment as a university that both preserves the treasury of Islamic scholarship and remains open to developments in global knowledge. Tradition and innovation, Islamic studies and the sciences, local and global perspectives all come together within a single, living academic space; one that encourages the rise of a generation capable of reading the world's challenges more fully, across the boundaries of any single discipline. (humassk)