This topic is used in the atlas as an entry point into the question Arkoun poses about the modes of production of religious knowledge, and about the limits that institution, language, and the imaginary have drawn for the work of reason within the Islamic field. What is meant here is not issuing a final judgment on tradition, but arranging the materials that show how the epistemic question itself takes shape, and how philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and history intertwine within it.
This topic appears in more than one of Arkoun’s books. In Islamic Thought: Critique and Ijtihad, critique is tied to the possibility of ijtihad and the renewal of reading tools, and the link between critique, the history of thought, the place of the intellectual, language, and science comes into view. In Where Is Contemporary Islamic Thought? the question advances from the standpoint of the blockage of contemporary thought and the limits of traditional reformism. As for Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Foundationalization, it connects critique to the closure of the origin and its transformation into an ultimate authority that prevents historical inquiry. The topic takes on a broader dimension in Toward a Comparative History of Monotheistic Religions, where critique is linked to comparison and to the question of the formation of religions in history. It also emerges in Readings in the Qur’an through a reconsideration of the relationship between text, reception, and the historical analysis of discourse.
Nearby topics include Historicity of Text and Discourse, the Unthought, and Applied Islamology, in addition to the concepts critique of reason, power and knowledge, and historicity.
Related reading paths:
This topic helps gather the materials that speak to the renewal of thought, epistemological critique, and the historicity of knowledge, without settling the meaning of Arkoun’s project in a single formula. It is an organizing title for reading a broad network of objections and proposals in Arkoun.