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Mohammed Arkoun – further information on his philosophy Mohammed Arkoun, one of the most prominent
modern philosophers in the Arab world and an active advisor of many
political, academic, religious decision makers for Islamic studies and systems
of education, is explicitly opposed to
the thesis of the 'clash of civilisations' that has been made to look so
inevitable. His approach is to bring up through
archaeological “excavation” of the systems of thought and literatures emerged
and spread in what he calls the Mediterranean
historical space, the common anthropological ground of what is
instrumentalised ideologically since 1492 (discovery of America and expulsion
of Muslims from Spain) to construct the two imaginary poles “Islam” and the
“West”. Each pole has constructed the other as the enemy; this mutual
exclusion became a more obsessive system of thought and representations since
1945 until today. This re-reading of history of systems of theological,
political and philosophical thought and cultural production through all
Mediterranean space needs to be developed and taught in all contemporary
societies. Arkoun stands for more than just a dialogue
between cultures, religions and philosophical attitudes; he uses a comparative anthropological and
historical approach to propose a common commitment of the scientific
community to open new horizons of meaning, interpretation, and understanding
to build a world space of solidarity between peoples, civil societies and
their respective states equally converted to a governance grounded in that
common anthropological soil recognised by a scholarship and commonly shared
by a world-wide consciousness of the process of concrete construction with
the European Union revolutionary experience. Indeed, such a humanist vision
has been felt and intellectually sketched by Ibn Rushd with the mental tools
and cultural frames available in his time. In his works, Arkoun scrutinises the cultures' common past and their present
mutual disapproval and condemnation that results mostly from what he calls
institutionalised ignorance spread at an unprecedented large scale especially
during the last 5O years. As an example of this new humanist vision, the
Emeritus professor goes deeper in his archaeological digging the common universe
of Ibn Rushd, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas as the three symbolic Figures
that will help to go further in the common effort to (re)activate the
necessary intellectual solidarity that will enable us to rethink with new
intellectual paradigms, all the communitarian and nationalist systems of
“values” still used to legitimise so-called “just wars”. Mohammed Arkoun's main focus, however, is
on Islamic cultures. He criticises them for being unable or unwilling to
share and contribute to the construction of scientific and intellectual
modernity. After the death of Ibn Rushd (1198), the intellectual project so
strongly and clearly inaugurated by him following other thinkers before, has
just been abandoned by the successive generations in all Islamic contexts
until the second half of 20th century. He calls for rethinking radically the concept of
“Islam” to put an end to so many arbitrary ideological and even
phantasmagoric manipulations by all types of social actors, Muslims and
non-Muslims. Arkoun defends a more nuanced position
about the current assertion that Islam never knew the separation between
state and religion. He is convinced that the French concept of laïcité refers to a very original and rich
historical endeavour to solve the problems related to authority and power,
spiritual and secular spheres of human needs and activities, ways of
producing secular law and dealing with the human experiences of the divine…
It is a critical way of thinking, communicating, teaching, handling
knowledge, behaving in a space of citizenship. It recapitulates all the
positive irreversible conquests of intellectual and cultural modernity. For
Arkoun, laïcité cannot be presented as an ideology aiming the negation, or
any kind of hostility to religions as spiritual and ethical ways of education
for human being. Laïcité protects religious freedom as the modern expression
of the freedom of each individual consciousness. All the philosophy of human
rights is included in the way of thinking and acting concretely in a modern civil
society. Thus, Arkoun's provocative thesis is that Islamic thought and society have
never had and desperately need their
own renaissance to revolutionise the "Closed Official Corpus"
that Islam has become especially in the last 40 years. |