Mohamed Arkoun, The Challenge of Enlightenment and the Obsession with Renewal

Abstract

Arab-Islamic history has witnessed many periods of intellectual conflict. Those interested in studying this history will inevitably recognize the role played by Islamic heritage in fueling this conflict, as it has been an active presence at every stage and on more than one level. As such, heritage has always been a rich source of material for researchers, especially since it has made religious texts a subject of debate and disagreement. From this point on, Arkoun attempted to build his intellectual project on a critique of the Islamic mind, having observed that there were issues that had not been subjected to critical analysis, so that we could discern where the mind that speaks to humankind lies. Arkoun's primary concern was to move from backwardness to modernity, and the way to achieve this was to subject Islamism to applied sciences. That is, not being satisfied with the Muslim past, but rather going beyond it to reread religious texts and jurisprudential texts according to a new, contemporary, modernist methodology. "It is the duty of the social sciences to expose and dismantle fabricated eras of the past, distorted periods of the present, and illusory visions of the future, all of which are intended to imprison thought in constantly repeating alienations." Opening Islamic studies to the social sciences and the questions they raise along the way was a response to the Orientalists who dealt with heritage with coldness and selectivity, and to the classical faith-based mind that thought under the guidance of politics. To escape the crisis, Mohammed Arkoun proposes to create an epistemological break with heritage and to study it based on its reality, that is, to know heritage from the civilization that produced it, and to return to the silenced periods in the history of heritage and rethink what was not thought of in it.