The Meaning within Arkoun’s Project
Mohammed Arkoun uses critique of reason to question the conditions that produce knowledge: what makes a meaning self-evident, a question legitimate, and another topic off-limits? In this sense, the concept turns toward the forms that make thinking repetitive, and toward the mechanisms that prevent questioning from touching what has become settled in the institution, jurisprudence, education, and language. Thus, in Arkoun, it appears linked to the critique of Islamic reason, and also to the critique of modernity when modernity turns into a technical or ideological certitude.
Within Arkoun’s project, this concept opens the way to historicity, discourse analysis, and applied Islamology. Here, critique does not stop at a single opinion; it traces how the legitimacy of questioning is constructed within education, jurisprudence, language, and the institution, and how other questions are pushed to the margins. For this reason, Arkoun’s critique of reason is connected to concepts such as the unthought, power and knowledge, and discourse analysis, because it reads knowledge together with its social and historical conditions.
How Does the Concept Work?
For Arkoun, critique of reason functions as a way of returning thought to its conditions, not merely to its results. It reveals how presuppositions are built, how reading becomes repetition, and how the boundaries between the permitted and the forbidden are managed within tradition and the institution. From here, the concept directs attention to what makes an idea seem natural and final before it is examined in its history, its language, and its institutional location.
This concept is connected to historicity, because reason in Arkoun is formed within time, language, and power, and cannot be read as a fixed essence outside these conditions. The critique therefore opens questions of codification, reception, interpretation, closing off ijtihad, and all that relates to the relationship between knowledge and legitimacy. From this perspective, the concept draws close to orthodoxy, secularization, and humanism, because each reveals a dimension of how the field of understanding is organized.
Where Does It Appear in the Books?
The concept appears most clearly first in Islamic Thought: Critique and Ijtihad, where critique comes to the fore as a condition for reviving ijtihad and as a stance toward ready-made forms of objection. In this book, the concept turns to the manner in which Islamic thought is formed: how it is produced, how it is taught, and how its questions are closed off. Its presence therefore seems foundational and direct rather than a later application.
It appears in a different way in Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Grounding, where critique takes on a meaning more directly in contact with closed certitude. Here it is devoted to dismantling the illusion of a return to a fixed origin that settles history, and it is directly linked to the issue of closing off ijtihad and turning the origin into a final authority.
As for Readings in the Qur’an, critique of reason becomes an examination of the act of reading itself. Here it emerges in opposition to an exegesis that treats the text as a ready-made meaning, while the book insists on the historicity of reception, context, and language. In this place, the concept works to question a reading that halts the movement of understanding and conceals its conditions, without turning the field of tradition into a single undifferentiated mass.
The concept acquires a different dimension in When Islam Awakens, where it is tied to the contemporary crisis and to transformations in consciousness, power, and surveillance. At this point, critique of reason moves from its theoretical form to an analysis of the mechanisms of closure: how institution, interpretation, and memory intertwine, and how confronting thought becomes a confrontation with the very instruments of regulation.
In Battles for Humanism in Islamic Contexts, the concept appears in a broader educational and ethical sense. Here, critique extends to ignorance, fanaticism, and educational reform, so that the liberation of reason becomes linked to the formation of a human being capable of understanding, dialogue, and responsibility.
The concept also appears clearly in From Manhattan to Baghdad, but in a form more closely connected to the political and global present. Here Arkoun activates critique of reason in the face of violence, misunderstanding, and reactive responses, and its presence appears closer to a direct intervention in the contemporary crisis than to a methodological foundation.
Related Concepts
- the unthought: names the field that has been excluded from questioning, so that critique of reason becomes a search for what tradition has silenced or what the institution has kept outside circulation.
- power and knowledge: shows how ideas are formed within conditions of recognition and regulation, not within abstract freedom.
- discourse analysis: shows how utterance is understood through its structure, context, and institutional location.
- historicity: places reason and concepts within their own time, so they are read through the path of their formation rather than as truths outside history.
- orthodoxy: explains how understanding turns into a closed standard that limits the movement of questioning.
- secularization: relates to the critique of the intertwining of the sacred and power when they monopolize the public and epistemic spheres.
Limits of the Reading
For Arkoun, critique of reason opens the door to critical understanding, but it leaves the form of reform and the limits of the relationship between tradition and modernity, or between religion and politics, in need of detailed examination in history, institutions, and readings. The concept therefore remains an entry point into rebuilding the question, not its conclusion.
See also: Critique of Reason (brief definition)