Mohammed Arkoun

Dzieła

• 1984Ku krytyce rozumu islamskiego

  Stosuje językoznawstwo, historię i antropologię do myśli islamskiej, by wydobyć to, co ortodoksja pozostawiła niemyślane.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• 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)
• For a Critique of Islamic Reason (Pour une critique de la raison islamique, 1984)
• Rethinking Islam (1994; French original Ouvertures sur l’islam, 1989)