Formulation of the claim
Brain drain, together with weak research structures, leads to the weakening of free research and leaves room for ideologues and junior bureaucrats.
Explanation
Arkoun sees these factors as not separate, but mutually reinforcing in obstructing the conditions for independent research. When the most capable researchers are absent and the scientific infrastructure deteriorates, the space for free work narrows, and it opens up to non-specialists.
The claim also indicates that the breakdown in knowledge does not arise from a single idea or a single position, but from an institutional environment that allows ideologues and junior bureaucrats to dominate a sphere that ought to be governed by research. Brain drain here is thus presented as part of a broader crisis in the production of knowledge.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s critique of the conditions under which knowledge operates in Islamic contexts, where weak research cannot be separated from the malfunction of the structure that supports it. It aligns with related theses in the book about the decline of the scientific sphere, and offers an example of how institutional obstacles become intellectual and epistemic obstacles.
Limits of the claim
This atom should not be taken as a blanket judgment on all institutions or all researchers; it describes a relationship between specific factors within a particular context. Nor does it reduce the crisis of knowledge to brain drain alone; rather, it situates it within a network of structural weakness and unscientific domination.