Work · Philosophy in the Islamic World
The Formation of Arab Reason
First volume of the Critique of Arab Reason: how three rival systems of knowledge – bayan, irfan and burhan – took shape in classical Islam.
Introduction
The first volume of Muhammad Abed al-Jabri’s four-volume Critique of Arab Reason (1984–2001), published in Beirut in 1984. The Moroccan philosopher examines “Arab reason” not as a mental faculty but as the set of rules for producing knowledge that took shape in the “age of codification” in the eighth and ninth centuries. He distinguishes three epistemic systems: bayan (explication, based on text and analogy, in grammar, law and theology), irfan (gnostic illumination, in Sufism and Shia thought) and burhan (demonstration, in Aristotelian philosophy). Al-Jabri sees the rationalism of Averroes and the Maghreb as a model for Arab renewal. The Syrian thinker Georges Tarabishi answered with a multi-volume critique.
Connections
Builds on
- The Incoherence of the Incoherencec. 1180 · Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
- Muqaddimah1377 · Ibn Khaldun
Criticized in
- Renewing the Method in Evaluating the Heritage1994 · Taha Abderrahmane
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