Formulation of the Claim
Umayyad and Abbasid power used specific sciences and forms of knowledge to support its political legitimacy.
Explanation
Arkoun understands the relationship between knowledge and power here as one of instrumentalization: knowledge does not appear in a vacuum, but takes shape within the needs and requirements of the state. Thus, the presence of certain sciences in the early Islamic sphere is connected to what power needed in order to stabilize, organize, and persuade.
This does not mean that all those sciences were born as instruments of propaganda. Rather, Arkoun points out that their formation and orientation were also linked to a political context that called on them to serve stability and legitimacy. Accordingly, for him, the epistemic value of these sciences cannot be separated from the conditions of their historical emergence.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s broader thesis, which reads the history of Islamic thought as a history formed within a continuous entanglement of the religious, the political, and the epistemic. It illuminates one aspect of how power employs knowledge in constructing legitimacy, in keeping with his critique of the claim that intellectual discourses are wholly independent of their historical and social conditions.
Limits of the Claim
This atom should not be made to bear a general judgment that all Islamic sciences were merely instruments of power, or that they lost all independence or epistemic value. The intended point is narrower: to indicate a historical connection between the needs of the Umayyad and Abbasid state and the formation and practices of certain forms of knowledge.