Mohammed Arkoun
Islamic tradition should be studied with the tools of modern scholarship to uncover what it has never allowed itself to think.
Placement
Algerian-French scholar at the Sorbonne: a “critique of Islamic reason” that uses the human sciences to bring the unthought (impensé) of Islamic tradition into view.
Key ideas
- Critique of Islamic reason
- Applied Islamology
- The unthought
Influence
Influenced by 3
Miskawayh
influenced by
Arkoun translated Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character into French (1969) and wrote his doctoral thesis on him (1970), on which he based his account of an Arab humanism of the tenth century. M. Arkoun, Traité d’éthique (1969); Contribution à l’étude de l’humanisme arabe au IVe/Xe siècle: Miskawayh, philosophe et historien (1970)
Evidence: AI draft
Miskawayh › c. 932–1030
Michel Foucault
influenced by
Arkoun applied Foucault’s notions of episteme and archaeology of knowledge to classical Islamic thought, asking what each period made thinkable and unthinkable. M. Arkoun, Pour une critique de la raison islamique (1984); Rethinking Islam, tr. R. D. Lee (1994)
Evidence: AI draft
Michel Foucault › 1926–1984
Jacques Derrida
influenced by
Arkoun adopted Derrida’s deconstruction to expose the logocentric closure of classical Islamic reason and its official closed canon (Pour une critique de la raison islamique, 1984). M. Arkoun, Pour une critique de la raison islamique (1984); Rethinking Islam, tr. R. D. Lee (1994)
Evidence: AI draft
Jacques Derrida › 1930–2004
Works
Applies linguistics, history and anthropology to Islamic thought to bring out what orthodoxy left unthought.
Position
Arkoun called for a “critique of Islamic reason”: the human sciences – linguistics, history, anthropology – should be applied to the Qur’an and tradition, as they had been to the Bible. His “applied Islamology” addressed the problems of living Muslim societies rather than philological curiosities. Orthodoxy, he argued, had formed by closing an official corpus of texts and leaving much “unthought” (impensé) or even “unthinkable”; this must be recovered. He criticized fundamentalism and Western orientalism alike, and saw Judaism, Christianity and Islam as “societies of the Book” with shared structures. Inspired by Foucault, Derrida and the Annales historians, he found more echo in the West than in Muslim countries.
Life & context
Mohammed Arkoun was born in 1928 in Taourirt-Mimoun, a Berber village in Kabylia, Algeria. He studied Arabic literature in Algiers and Paris, where he wrote his doctorate on the humanism of the tenth-century thinker Miskawayh. From 1961 until 1993 he taught at the Sorbonne, latterly as professor of the history of Islamic thought, with visiting posts worldwide. He died in Paris in 2010.
Further main works
- The Humanism of Miskawayh (Contribution à l’étude de l’humanisme arabe au IVe/Xe siècle, 1970)
- Readings of the Qur’an (Lectures du Coran, 1982)
- Rethinking Islam (1994; French original Ouvertures sur l’islam, 1989)
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