Wednesday's Read: Arab Thought

Arkoun, Mohammed. Arab Thought. (New Delhi: S. Chand, 1988)

This rare book is nearly impossible to find through online searches. I was extremely lucky to be able to procure it through interlibrary loan, and the copy that finally arrived today, after several months wait, was well-worn and battered.

Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010) was born in the Kabylia region of then French-occupied Algeria. A native Berber, he learned of his minority status and subject-class position vis-à-vis Arabs only after moving to a village near Oran at the age of nine (see here). It was there that he began learning Arabic and French. Arkoun was highly influenced by his uncle, who was, like many throughout North Africa, a devout adherent of a Sufi sect. It was through this exposure to popular folk religion and Islam that Arkoun gained his rich understanding of the many ways that religion influences people (see here). He embarked on a career characterized by his passion for, and sophisticated, original arguments in favor of, a shift in Islamic intellectual tradition.

His 1984 Pour une Critique de la Raison Islamique, whose title deliberately plays upon Immanuel Kant's famous work, is widely considered his magnum opus; a central piece that encapsulates his chief intellectual interests and contributions. Arkoun believed that the Islamic intellectual tradition had fallen into stagnation by the thirteenth century, and advocated that Enlightenment intellectual approaches including secularism, humanism, and modernism be applied to contemporary Islamic thought.