By and large educated Muslims do not dispute the importance and significance of thinking in their life and religion.
Since human creativity, whether exemplified as invention or innovation, has to do in large part with thinking, it is also commonplace that they regard it highly.
Problems and disputes begin to arise, however, when they come to address the details pertaining to thinking and, by extension, creativity.
For instance, in accounting for creative thinking, one often finds a growing number of them not only differentiating it from critical or logical thinking but also, primarily relying on the dominant view from without themselves, contrasting the former mode of thinking with the latter one.
While such a dichotomy, if maintained on heuristic grounds, may be very helpful, it brings them nowhere when reified.
On the contrary, any Muslim entertaining such a reification shall most probably end up having no other option than to choose one mode at the expense of the other whereas in reality they are in dire need of both.
That Muslims should avoid being trapped in this either-or mindset becomes particularly significant when they are involved in formulating, interpreting and implementing such important policies and documents as the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025: Preliminary Report.
It is stated therein that every student needs to master a range of important cognitive skills which include not only creative thinking and innovation but also problem-solving and reasoning.
In the immediate list that somewhat details the former category of cognitive skills, one finds among others “the ability to innovate, to generate new possibilities, and to create new ideas or knowledge.”
In contrast, enlisted in the list specifying what is meant by the latter category are “the ability to anticipate problems and approach issues critically, logically, inductively, and deductively in order to find solutions, and ultimately make decisions.”
Of great relevance in this move to avoid unnecessary bipolarization of creative and critical thinking is the holistic way thinking (al-fikr) had been viewed by many past authoritative Muslim scholars and logicians.
As we had explained on several occasions before, thinking was considered by them to be “the mental act of (1) arranging into correct and meaningful order (2) what one has already known in order to (3) attain what one is still ignorant of.”
It is clear that there are three central and constitutive elements embedded in such a perspective.
One constituent, indicated by (2) above, is the units of knowledge already in one’s possession—what one has already known—which is regarded as the “material,” or “matter,” of thinking.
As far as the retaining and reproducing of this constituent of thinking is concerned, strengthening and refining human memory and memorizing skills is of utmost importance.
Just as important is the strong will in oneself not only to gather more units of relevant knowledge but also to ascertain their veracity.
Another constituent, indicated by (1), is the way one mentally organizes those units of knowledge, resulting thus in certain patterns or arrangements in one’s mind.
It is the way one mentally relates one unit with another unit, or a group of other units of knowledge, in such a manner as to allow for new units of knowledge to become manifest.
It also concerns the numerous active compositions as well as decompositions of such units in one’s mind.
This second constituent of thinking is thus considered to be the “form,” or “structure,” of thinking.
In the detailed elaboration of the aforementioned scholars, one easily finds the defining role of human imaginative faculty (al-quwwah al-mutakhayyilah) in this structure-forming act of the mind.
That imagination was accorded a special function here is particularly significant given the prevalent tendency among today’s pundits of creativity to assign this faculty a pivotal role in invention and innovation.
The third constituent, indicated by (3) above, represents one’s mental progress, which is the successful movement of one’s mind to new units of knowledge (such as deriving right conclusions or making correct inferences or forming new ideas) after the foregoing first and second constituents have been obtained.
In short, thinking is like one putting the right form to the right material so that one will arrive at the right product or result.
As such, defects in thinking may well be due to the defects in its material or its form, or to flaws in both.
If such is how thinking is understood and formulated, in what way is logical and creative thinking different from each other?
And how, if at all, are they related to each other?
Based on the foregoing description, one may explain them in terms of the manner one focuses on the result; should one be more concerned with the novelty of and in (3) above, then one is focused more on creativity; but if one is more preoccupied with the correctness or validity of and in (3) above, then one is focused more on logic.
Yet, one may want to be concerned with the novelty of and in (3) above as well as its correctness and validity.
In such a case, at once one deals with both logic and creativity.