Wednesday's Read: The Unthought In Contemporary Islamic Thought

Arkoun, Mohammed. The Unthought In Contemporary Islamic Thought. (London: Saqi, 2002)

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Algerian-born Berber scholar of Islam, Mohammed Arkoun (1928 - 2010), shares a certain amount in common with Egyptian Qur'anic scholar Nasr Abu Zayd, (1943 - 2010 نصر حامد ابو زيد) and other contempory Islamic thinkers trained in secular universities. Abu Zayd earned his BA, MA, and PhD in Islamic Studies from Cairo University, and Arkoun started at the University of Algiers and then moved on to the Sorbonne, completing his doctorate in Arabic Language and Literatures.

Both men's main work applies "Western" secular analytic forms and methodologies to the study of Islam. In other words, both men were chiefly interested in the potential intersections and cross-applications between the two intellectual traditions they inherited, that of Islam and that of the Western-Enlightenment-influenced nahda. Abu Zayd developed and promoted a humanistic hermeneutic of the Qur'an, thereby fundamentally reconceptualizing it as a text. In a similar vein, Arkoun, whose work is widely-available in English for the first time in The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (2002), applies broad secular methodological and analytical categories to Islam, including sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology. His aim is to create a critical review of the exegetical, theological, and jurisprudential traditions of Islam, thereby "liberating reason" from dogma. He begins his critique by looking at “revelation” as a category common to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. By examining revelation in this light, as a form of thought, Arkoun finds ways to explore it comparatively through the various disciplines listed above. He proceeds to bring other major themes to the fore throughout the rest of the book, including non-belief; the political state; civil rights; the individual, human rights; the concept of the person, citizen, and subject.

This approach is markedly distinct from that of a lengthy theological tradition that conceptualizes the Qur’an as “uncreated”[1] and that does not seek, for example, to historicize its revelations. Through his work Arkoun is thus also mounting a criticism of a scholastic tradition in which students are trained to memorize Qur’anic tracts and hadith, to become well-acquainted with fiqh, but are not trained in the critical application of these ideas to society at large. As Kassab explains:

[F]or Arkoun, both epistemological systems and power systems play a crucial role in drawing the boundaries around what he calls a given ‘logosphere’ – a horizon of givens constituted by a language and a culture. These systems present preferences as necessary truths and use power to impose ideological limits to the activity of thought, producing a whole realm of the unthought. Changing the unthinkable into a thinkable is the task of critique.”[2]

Within Muslim tradition, Arkoun appears to be hearkening back to the Mu’tazilites.

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[1] The predominant concept of the uncreated Qur’an, an issue that spawned philosophical debates among Islamic jurisprudents during the medieval era, is also why Abu Zayd’s approach elicited so much ire.

[2] 179.