Arkoun Islam

To Reform or to Subvert?
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-86356-790-2
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 7, 416 Seiten

Reihe: Saqi Essentials S.

At a time when Islam is the focus of attention, vilified by some and a source of inspiration for others, Arkoun's is one of few voices that seek to go against the stream. His radical review of mainstream historiography of Islam draws on interdisciplinary analysis - historical, social, psychological and anthropological. As one of the foremost thinkers of the Muslim world, Arkoun is in a position to question dogmatic constructs from within, with respect and critical acumen. An understanding of this approach will lead to an emancipatory turn in the intellectual and political spheres of Muslim societies.

Mohammed Arkoun was Emeritus professor at the Sorbonne, Paris, and Editor of Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. He was the acclaimed author of several works on Islamic thought and Qur'anic exegesis, including Islam, Europe and the West and Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers.Professor Arkoun died in September, 2010.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Arkoun, Mohammad

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Thinking the Unthinkable and the Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought

.

Marc Augé, , 3/9/1999.

a priori precedes

Max Scheler, 1980, p. 67.

What this book proposes is a way of thinking, rather than essays in traditional scholarship based on primary sources. Not that I do not use such sources extensively, but my interpretation of them is informed by a strategy which differs from that usually employed for the purpose of providing a descriptive, narrative, factual and cumulative presentation of what they contain. My intention is to combine a critical review of modern studies devoted to early and contemporary periods of what is generally called ‘Islam’, with the systematic deconstruction of the original texts used in these studies as sources of genuine information. Primary and secondary texts are not read in order to discuss the facts themselves, but to problematize1 the epistemic and epistemological framework underlying the articulation of each discourse. This cognitive strategy has never been used before in interpreting the types of discourse produced by Muslims to express their Islam, or in approaching them as a subject of study, alongside the Western literature on Islam and Muslim societies. From this perspective, historical epistemology has a priority over the purely descriptive, narrative presentation of what ‘Islam’ teaches, or what Muslims say, do or achieve as social and historical protagonists. To what extent are these protagonists aware of the ideological dimensions of their discourse and historical actions? Which cognitive structures do they use for the purpose of interpreting their religion, applying it to their actual life or reshaping it on the basis of historical pressures? To what extent do they develop a critical relationship with their past and their present in order to have better control over their future, and how relevant, effective and creative would such a relationship be? These questions constitute the itinerary of this self-interrogation. Such an itinerary can be proposed and achieved only by those who accept the need to combine respect for the rules of scientific research with the capacity to submit to philosophical criticism every stance of reason, every intellectual initiative and every question arising therefrom.

For a time, during the late 1970s, I called this approach ‘applied Islamology’2 following the example set by a group of anthropologists who started the practice of ‘’. During the 1980s and 1990s, political scientists focused on political Islam, and in particular, fundamentalist movements, to such an extent that they succeeded in marginalizing classical Islamology, ignoring the methodological breakthrough offered by Applied Islamology. This situation applies both to classical Islamicists, long confined to the philological, historicist application of the most ‘representative’ classical texts, and to the new wave of Islamicists who have had no philological training in the main Islamic languages (Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu) and who have confined their research to socio-political issues considered from a short-term perspective. Applied Islamology insists on the need to practise a progressive-regressive method, combining the long-term historical perspective with the short-term perspective, because all of the contemporary discourse emerging in Islamic contexts, inevitably refers to the emerging period of Islam, and the ‘Golden Age’ of its civilization used as mythological references to reactivate ‘values’ – ethical and legal paradigms – which need to be reassessed according to what I call a ‘’. Not only do political scientists occupy key positions in academic institutions, they also have a strong relationship with the political decision-makers as well as a tacit solidarity with the most powerful media. As far as Islamic studies are concerned, the move from classical Islamology, dominated by the classical Orientalist and epistemology, to the pragmatic, factual, too often ideological practice of the social sciences by the political scientist, has had little material effect in improving the intellectual shortcomings of scholarship applied in the Islamic sphere of influence in research and teaching. It is my contention that Islam as a religion, a world vision perpetuated by a still living tradition, with a great variety of cultural, social and political expressions, remains, like all religions other than Christianity, a challenge to the social sciences. In the same way, social sciences, if applied properly, are a challenge to Islam, especially as a living tradition. For many reasons, the most decisive one being geopolitical, it can clearly be seen that the challenge has not yet been fully taken up by the opposing side. The intellectual and scientific reasons for what has been a recurrent failure since the nineteenth century will, I hope, be clarified, in this book.3

Although I often refer to the dialectic, creative tension between the thought and the unthought, the thinkable and the unthinkable, I feel there is still a need to explain this terminology which has always been unusual and remains so in current parlance and even in philosophical discourse. The question arises as to why there is such a focus on the achievements of reason, on the critical control of the rationalities it elaborates within the spatial limits assigned to the thinkable. What does a tradition of thought allow us to think in a particular period of its evolution, concerning a particular subject, within a particular domain of human existence? When we speak today about the modes of communication required by political correctness, we are clearly referring to limits imposed by political and social pressures on the innovative and critical faculties of reason. A number of ideas, values, explanations, horizons of meaning, artistic creations, initiatives, institutions and ways of life are thereby discarded, rejected, ignored or doomed to failure by the long-term historical evolution called tradition or ‘living tradition’ according to dogmatic theological definitions. Voices are silenced, creative talents are neglected, marginalized or obliged to reproduce orthodox frameworks of expression, established forms of aesthetics, currently received rules of judgement, evaluation, communication, transmission, teaching, relating to others … When social, economic, and political conditions change and new possibilities for creative thought and action open up, a struggle begins between the defenders of the living sacred and sacralizing tradition and the supporters of reformist or revolutionary change. This dialectic tension is at work, with differing intensity, in all societies, from the most conservative and traditional to our democratic, dynamic, ‘free’ societies. We know how horizons and themes of discourse change depending on whether a leftist or rightist majority accedes to power; not only are some laws changed, but the philosophical rationale underlying the creation of law shifts to a different thinkable.

When the field of the unthinkable is expanded and maintained for centuries in a particular tradition of thought, the intellectual horizons of reason are diminished and its critical functions narrowed and weakened because the sphere of the unthought becomes more determinate and there is little space left for the thinkable. The unthought is made up of the accumulated issues declared unthinkable in a given logosphere. A logosphere is the linguistic mental space shared by all those who use the same language with which to articulate their thoughts, their representations, their collective memory, and their knowledge according to the fundamental principles and values claimed as a unifying . I use this concept to introduce the important dimension of the linguistic constraints of each language on the activities of thought. When a language such as Arabic or English is currently used by different peoples, with different cultural backgrounds, it becomes a common logosphere which will affect the configuration of the faculties of the human mind and, consequently, will contribute to the creation of frontiers between the thinkable and the unthinkable, the thought and the unthought. This is evident in the case of the Arab philosophers who introduced the Greek philosophical thinkable into the Arabic language, thereby creating friction with the religious thinkable defended by the traditionalist builders of Islamic orthodoxies. Similarly, the...