The Meaning of the Concept in This Book
Orientalism here refers to an approach to the study of Islam that is content merely to gather information or to reduce the Qur’an to earlier origins, without understanding its function within its context. For that reason, Mohammed Arkoun criticizes this pattern when it narrows the field of understanding and turns the text into material for reductive interpretation.
At the same time, he does not reject everything produced by modern Western scholarship, but rather draws on some of its achievements if their reductionism and epistemological limits are overcome.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
Orientalism appears within Arkoun’s argument, which holds that renewing the reading of Islam cannot be done with rigid interpretive tools. The problem is not external knowledge alone, but the way text, history, and reason are understood together.
From here, his critique of Orientalism is connected to a broader idea: removing the religious text from isolation and reading it scientifically in a way that brings together scholarship, history, and faith, along with an epistemological critique of the historicity of reason and tradition.
How It Works within the Atlas
References to Orientalism recur as a boundary that must be overcome in more than one place. It appears when it is said that Orientalism constrains the study of Islam, and when epistemological renewal is linked to breaking the solidarity between inherited readings and external reductions.
It also enters into the construction of the idea of a modern reading of the religious text that does not content itself with reducing it back to origins, but rather reconsiders the historicity of understanding itself. Thus, the critique of interpretive Orientalism becomes part of a broader critique of reducing Islam to responsibility, and of the call for a scientific reading of the text that removes it from isolation and frees it from reductionist Orientalism.