INFORMATION ETHICS IN ISLAM AND THE MODERN LIBRARY SYSTEM A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PRIVACY, INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM, AND KNOWLEDGE RESPONSIBILITY

Abstract

The information ecosystem that has now been formed in a modern library is ethically complex due to the surveillance of the digital form, mediation of algorithms, epistemic fragmentation, and contentious truth regimes. Privacy, intellectual freedom, and fair access commitments are manifested in ethical codes of professional ethics raised by the American Library Association (ALA) and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). However, to a great extent, all these frameworks rest on the secular liberal-democratic theory. With these conventions, the Islamic civilization developed a complete-fledged moral epistemology that contextualizes the knowledge under a context of divine accountability, interpersonal justice, and general well-being.

In this paper, Amanah (trust), Adl (justice) and Satr (privacy) and Haqq (truth) and modern professional library ethics will be provided with a serious comparative analysis over Islamic information ethics. The investigation, which is founded on the mixed-method plan and is not premised on the statistical package, incorporates both qualitative research in the content of jurisprudence and the survey of Sindh, Pakistan librarians by hand. These findings imply that there are structural intersections in the privacy protection and epistemic responsibility, and ontological differences in the limits of the intellectual autonomy and ethical authority. The paper proposes an intercultural normative integration model of library ethics within the Muslim majority environments, and makes a theoretical contribution to the discourse of world information ethics.