Taha Abderrahmane
Modernity is not a Western possession: its spirit of maturity, critique and universality can be realised in an Islamic, ethically grounded way, and the heritage must be judged as a whole.
Placement
Moroccan logician and philosopher in Rabat who objected to al-Jabri that the Islamic heritage has to be evaluated as an integrated whole and with its own methods, and who sought an ethical modernity: modernity has a “spirit” of maturity, critique and universality that can be realised outside Europe.
Key ideas
- Integrative evaluation of the heritage
- Spirit of modernity
- Ethics before reason: the question of ethics
- Trusteeship (itimaniyya)
Criticism
Criticizes 1
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri
criticised
Taha Abderrahmane faulted al-Jabri for dissecting the Islamic heritage into rival systems by imported standards, and proposed an integrative reading (Tajdid al-manhaj fi taqwim al-turath). Ṭāhā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Tajdīd al-manhaj fī taqwīm al-turāth (Casablanca); W. Hallaq, Reforming Modernity, 2019
Evidence: AI draft
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri › 1935–2010
Works
Against reading the heritage with borrowed tools and in fragments: it must be evaluated as an integrated whole and with methods drawn from its own disciplines of argument.
Modernity is not identical with its Western realisation: its spirit rests on the principles of maturity, critique and universality, which an Islamic modernity can realise in its own, ethical way.
Position
Taha Abderrahmane first became known as a critic of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri. In “Renewing the Method in Evaluating the Heritage” (1994) he objected that al-Jabri’s critique of “Arab reason” had cut the heritage into pieces with tools borrowed from modern European thought, keeping the rationalist Averroes and discarding Sufism and kalam. The heritage, Taha argued, must be evaluated as an integrated whole and with methods drawn from its own disciplines, such as the art of disputation and the theory of legal sources. In logic he developed a theory of argumentation suited to natural language and to dialogue. In ethics he defined the human being not by reason but by ethics: reason detached from ethical practice is incomplete, and he distinguished an abstract, a guided and a supported reason. “The Spirit of Modernity” (2006) separated the “spirit” of modernity – the principles of maturity, critique and universality – from its Western realisation, so that an Islamic modernity could realise these principles in its own, ethically grounded way. In later works he developed a “trusteeship paradigm” (itimaniyya), in which human beings act as trustees of what God has entrusted to them; from this standpoint he criticised both secularism and the political instrumentalisation of religion.
Life & context
Taha Abderrahmane was born in 1944 in El Jadida, Morocco. He studied philosophy at Mohammed V University in Rabat and then at the Sorbonne, where he wrote a doctoral thesis (1972) on the linguistic structures of ontology and later a doctorat d’État (1985) on the logic of argumentation and natural reasoning. For several decades he taught logic and the philosophy of language at Mohammed V University in Rabat. He has written about the role of spiritual experience in thought, drawing on Sufi sources. His books, written in Arabic, have been widely discussed in the Arab world and since the 2010s increasingly in English-language scholarship.
Further main works
- Language and Philosophy (Langage et philosophie, 1979)
- Religious Practice and the Renewal of Reason (al-ʿAmal al-dīnī wa-tajdīd al-ʿaql, 1989)
- The Jurisprudence of Philosophy (Fiqh al-falsafa, 1995–2005)
- The Question of Ethics (Suʾāl al-akhlāq, 2000)
- The Spirit of Religion (Rūḥ al-dīn, 2012)
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