The Meaning of the Concept in This Book
Islam is not presented in this book as a fixed identity or a single block, but as a historical and cultural space made up of multiple currents and interpretations. It is the field in which humanism, education, pluralism, and historical criticism are tested, and so it is understood as a structure open to rereading rather than as a closed truth.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
The concept is tied to the book’s argument, which holds that understanding Islam requires reconstructing the Islamic context itself, rather than merely relying on celebratory discourses or on reductive views that distort it from within and without. From here emerges its link to the questions of traditional imams, the priority of religious sciences, the rupture with ijtihad, the tension between reason and sharia, and then the need to connect Islam with reason, freedom, and history.
How It Works Within the Atlas
Here Islam functions as a focal point that brings together criticism of tradition and criticism of modernity at the same time. It allows one to trace themes such as Arabic humanism, modernity that arrived in a distorted form, freedom as a condition for contemporary societies, and the flourishing of Arabic humanism and then its decline with the closure of ijtihad. It also opens onto internal comparisons between language, logic, and lexicon, between the Greco-Semitic space, and between modern history and the open state, in order to show that Islam is read within a network of historical concepts, not outside it.