Degree of Centrality: Preliminary

99 pages

• Arkoun within the lineage of the Enlighteners
• The horizon of fragility and uncertainty
• The three preliminary questions
• Contemporary Islamic discourse is widespread
• Violent discourse is dominant today
• Secularization is a topic not thought through enough
• The West offers greater freedom and broader inquiry
• French thought began to take Islam into account
• The Islamic reading of the Qur’anic text
• The non-Muslim reading of the Qur’an
• Three aims of the new study
• The shortcomings of previous strategies
• Critique of superficial knowledge about Islam
• Arkoun and the understanding of applied Islamology
• The French Revolution between admiration and repulsion
• Fear of transgressing taboos
• Arkoun’s Kabyle upbringing
• Motivations for the first dissertation
• Childhood curiosity about Jews
• The first phase of openness
• Mecca before Islam
• Arkoun’s task was historical, not religious
• The difference between the European and Islamic contexts
• Islam as a central example of the religious phenomenon
• Belief is broader than faith
• The humanist preface eases the shock
• The Qur’anic phenomenon and the Islamic phenomenon
• The social sciences suffer from a theoretical deficit
• Globalization imposes caution on self-definition
• The Qur’an is an absolute reference
• Christian theology allied itself with Greek reason
• The thinker analyzes and infers
• The history of European thought is necessary for understanding
• The fragmentation of rationality into specializations
• The exploratory postmodern mind
• The strength of scientific and philosophical reason in Europe
• Systems of knowledge change historically
• Myth is a general cognitive component
• Religious anthropology includes the three religions
• The sociological truth
• Philology is not an end in itself
• Philology is a necessary first stage
• Modern linguistics separates the word from the thing
• The transformation of the cultural field since the nineteenth century
• Studying religion historically
• The orality of revelation
• Understanding Arkoun requires the human sciences
• His critique of Orientalism stems from a colonial experience
• He is influenced more by sciences and methodologies than by individuals
• The global transformation is highly dangerous
• Western modernities are multiple
• The new reason needs material force
• The Qur’an crystallized a lofty symbolic language
• The differing significance of tradition and orthodoxy
• Textual criticism raises crucial questions
• The Hajj is a religious and human phenomenon
• Caution against preconceived definitions
• Symbolic imagination in the Middle Ages
• A critical return to the text
• Modern thought and the production of knowledge
• The Qur’an presents itself as the word of God
• The modern reading has two levels
• The comparative anthropological approach
• Revelation has two dimensions
• Orientalism’s focus on documents and neglect of imagination
• Modernizing the Qur’anic project
• Arkoun’s focus on Islam
• Classifying the categories in the sura
• The development of studies from philology to social criticism
• Defining the modern intellectual
• Three stages for reading the Qur’an
• Five features of the Islamic situation
• The question of reality as a fundamental philosophical framework
• Sura al-Tawba and the discourse of violence
• Sura al-Tawba and the critique of revelation
• The difficulty of changing entrenched patterns of understanding
• The difficulty of reading the modern Qur’an
• The need to benefit from classical Orientalism
• A lack of precise knowledge about societies
• The European Enlightenment and the social condition
• The tension between reason and sharia is a shared issue in medieval thought
• The authorship of al-Hawamil wa-l-Shawamil is not certain
• Avoiding sectarian polemics
• The four currents of the Islamic context
• The context of the composition of the book al-I’lam
• Conflict as a calculation of blows
• The title is linked to discussions of the event and Iraq
• The book is a dialogue about September 11
• Rejecting the reduction of September 11
• Displacing European modernity
• The flourishing of philosophy in the Golden Age
• Modern universal ethics
• Metaphysics and the critique of theology
• The lag of Arab-Islamic culture behind modernity
• Arkoun’s epistemic motivation
• The need to explore the rational tradition
• The meaning of broad classical literature
• The translator’s introduction confirms Arkoun’s revision
• The dominance of an old theology