PART 1 - RETHINK ISLAMIC BELIEFS

PART 1 - RETHINK ISLAMIC BELIEFS
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Islam holds historical significance for all of us, but at the same time, our understanding of this phenomenon is sadly inadequate. There is a need to encourage and initiate audacious, free, productive thinking on Islam today. The so-called Islamic revivalism has monopolized the discourse on Islam; the social scientists, moreover, do not pay attention to what I call the "silent Islam"-the Islam of true believers who attach more importance to the religious relationship with the absolute of God than to the vehement demonstrations of political movements. I refer to the Islam of thinkers and intellectuals who are having great difficulties inserting their critical approach into a social and cultural space that is, at present, totally dominated by militant ideologies.

The main intellectual endeavour represented by thinking Islam or any religion today is to evaluate, with a new epistemological perspective, the characteristics and intricacy of systems of knowledge-both the historical and the mythical. I would even say that both are still interacting and interrelated in our modem thought after at least three hundred years of rationalism and historicism. There is no need to insist on the idea that thinking Islam today is a task much more urgent and significant than all the scholastic discussions of Orientalism; the ultimate goal of the project is to develop-through the example set by Islam as a religion and a social-historical space-a new epistemological strategy for the comparative study of cultures. All the polemics recently directed against Orientalism show clearly that so-called modem scholarship remains far from any epistemological project that would free Islam from the essentialist, substantialist postulates of classical metaphysics.

Islam, in these discussions, is assumed to be a specific, essential, unchangeable system of thought, beliefs, and non-beliefs, one which is superior or inferior (according to Muslims or non-Muslims) to the Western (or Christian) system. It is time to stop this irrelevant confrontation between two dogmatic attitudes - the theological claims of believers and the ideological postulates of positivist rationalism. The study of religions, in particular, is handicapped by the rigid definitions and methods inherited from theology and classical metaphysics. The history of religion has collected facts and descriptions of various religions, but religion as a universal dimension of human existence is not approached from the relevant epistemological perspective. This weakness in modern thought is even more clearly illustrated by the poor, conformist, and sometimes polemical literature on the religions of the Book, as we shall see.

Thus presented, the enterprise of thinking Islam today can only be achieved-if ever-by dynamic teams of thinkers, writers, artists, scholars, politicians, and economic producers. I am aware that long and deeply rooted traditions of thinking cannot be changed or even revised through a few essays or suggestions made by individuals. But I believe that thoughts have their own force and life.

Some, at least, could survive and break through the wall of uncontrolled beliefs and dominating ideologies. Many other problems must be raised and solved because Islam has regulated every aspect of individual and collective life; but my wish here is to indicate a general direction of thinking and the main conditions necessary to practice an itihdd [-my intellectual effort to find adequate answers-] recognized equally by Muslims and modern scholars.

I. Tools for New Thinking

Periodization of the history of thought and literature has been dictated by political events. We speak currently of the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman periods. However,there are more enlightening criteria that we can use to distinguish periods of change in the history of thought. We must consider the discontinuities affecting the conceptual framework used in a given culturals pace. The concepts of reason and science ('ilm) used in the Qur'an, for example, are not the same as those developed later by the “falasifa” according to the Platonic and the Aristotelian schools. However, the concepts elaborated in Quranic discourse are still used more or less accurately today because the “episteme” introduced by the Quran has not been intellectually reconsidered.

“Episteme” is a better criterion for the study of thought because it concerns the structure of the discourse-the implicit postulates which command the syntactic construction of the discourse. To control the epistemological validity of any discourse, it is necessary to discover and analyze the implicit postulates. This work has never been done for any discourse in Islamic thought (I refer to my essay "Logocentrisme et verite religieuse selon Abu al-Hasan al-'Amiri," in Essais sur la pensee islamique, Maisonneuve-Larose, third edition, 1984). This is why I must insist here on the new episteme implicit in the web of concepts used in human and social sciences since the late sixties.

It is not possible, for example, to use in Arabic the expression "problem of God," associating Allah and mushkil (problem); Allah cannot be considered as problematic. He is well-known, well-presented in the Quran; man has only to meditate, internalize, and worship what Allah revealed of Himself in His own words. The classical discussion of the attributes has not been accepted by all schools; and finally the attributes are recited as the most beautiful names of Allah (asma' Allah al-husna) but are neglected as subjects of intellectual inquiry.

This means that all the cultures and systems of thought related to pagan, polytheistic, “jahili” (pre-Islamic), or modern secularized societies are maintained in the domain of the “unthinkable” and, consequently, remain “unthought” in the domain of "orthodox" Islamic thought or the thinkable. In European societies since the sixteenth century, the historical role that the study of classical antiquity played in initiating the modern ideas of free thinking and free examination of reality is significant; based on this link we can understand the intellectual gap between Muslim orthodoxy and Western secularized thought (cf. Marc Auge, Le Genie du paganisme, Gallimard, 1982).

Tradition, orthodoxy, myth, authority, and historicity do not yet have relevant conceptualizations in Arabic. Myth is translated as “ustura”, which is totally misleading because the Quran uses the word for the false tales and images related in "the fables of the ancient people," and these “asatir” are opposed to the truthful stories (qasas haqq or ahsan al-qasas told by God in the Quran. The concept of myth as it is used in contemporary anthropology is related more to “qasas” than to “ustura”, but even anthropology has not yet clarified the difference between myth and mythology, mystification and mythologization, as well as the semantic relationship between myth and symbol and the role of the metaphor in mythical and symbolic discourse.-between myth and symbol and the role of the metaphor in mythical and symbolic discourse.

We still approach these concepts and use them with a rationalist positivist system of definitions, as the Qur'an did with asitfr al-awwalin (pre-Islamic mythology of the ancient people). However, the Qur'an created a symbolic alternative to the competing mythical and symbolic constructions of the ancient cultures in the Middle East. Our positivist rationalism criticizes symbols and myths and proposes, as an alternative, scientific conceptualism. We have neither a theory of symbol nor a clear conception of the metaphor to read, with a totalizing perspective, the religious texts. Religious tradition is one of the major problems we should rethink today. First, religions are mythical, symbolic, ritualistic ways of being, thinking, and knowing. They were conceived in and addressed to societies still dominated by oral and not written cultures. Scriptural religions based on a revealed Book contributed to a decisive change with far-reaching effects on the nature and functions of religion itself. Christianity and Islam (more than Judaism, until the creation of the Israeli state) became official ideologies used by a centralizing state which created written historiography and archives.

There is no possibility today of rethinking any religious tradition without making a careful distinction between the mythical dimension linked to oral cultures and the official ideological functions of the religion. We shall come back to this point because it is a permanent way of thinking that religion revealed and that social, cultural, and political activity maintained.

Tradition and orthodoxy are also unthought, unelaborated concepts in Islamic traditional thought. Tradition is reduced to a collection of "authentic" texts recognized in each community: Shi'i, Sunni, and Khariji. If we add to the Qur'an and Hadith, the methodology used to derive the Shari'a and the Corpus juris in the various schools, we have other subdivisions of the three axes of Islamic tradition. I tried to introduce the concept of an exhaustive tradition worked up by a critical, modern confrontation of all the collections used by the communities, regardless of the "orthodox" limits traced by the classical authorities( Bukharia nd Muslim for the Sunnis; Kul'i,Ibn Babuye, Abu Ja'far al-Tusi for the Imamis; Ibn 'Ibad and others for the Kharijis). This concept is used by the Islamic revolution in Iran, but more as an ideological tool to accomplish the political unity of the umma. The historical confrontation of the corpuses, and the theoretical elaboration of a new, coherent science of Usul al-fiqh and Usul al-din, are still unexplored and necessary tasks.

Beyond the concept of an exhaustive tradition based on a new definition of the Usul, there is the concept of tradition as it is used in anthropology today - the sum of customs, laws, institutions, beliefs, rituals, and cultural values which constitute the identity of each ethno-linguistic group. This level of tradition has been partially integrated by the Shari'a under the name of 'urf or 'amal (like al 'amal al-fasi in Fas), but it is covered and legitimized by the usuli methodology of the jurists. This aspect of tradition can be expressed in Arabic by taqilid, but the concept of exhaustive tradition can be expressed by the word sunna only if it is re-elaborated in the perspective I mentioned.

Likewise, orthodoxy refers to two values. For the believers, it is the authentic expression of the religion as it has been taught by the pious ancestors (al-salafalsilih); the "orthodox" literature describes opposing groups as "sects"( firaq). For the historian, orthodoxy refers to the ideological use of religion by the competing groups in the same political space, like the Sunnis who supported the caliphate legitimized afterwards by the jurists-and who called themselves "the f ollowers of the tradition and the united community" (ahl al-sunna wa-al-jama'a). All the other groups were given polemical, disqualifying names like rawafid., khawarij, and baitiniyya. The Imamis called themselves "the followers of infallibility and justice" (ahl al 'isma wa-al-'adala), referring to an orthodoxy opposed to that of the Sunnis.

There has been no effort (ijtihad) to separate orthodoxy as a militant ideological endeavor,a tool of legitimation for the state and the "values" enforced by this state, from religion as a way proposed to man to discover the Absolute. This is another task for our modern project of rethinking Islam, and other religions.

by Mohammed Arkoun

[Mohammed Arkoun (1928–2010) was a leading scholar of Islam, teaching in France. For more than thirty years he applied academic disciplines of the West to the history and literature of the Muslim world and its ancient traditions. He was known as an advocate of a new Islamic modernism and humanism.
Arkoun was born in Great Kabylia, Algeria, a nation with past colonial ties to France. His native language was Berber. Reared in French schools, he became fluent in French and then learned Arabic as a third language. He studied at the Faculty of Literature of the University of Algiers and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He joined the faculty of philology of Strasbourg University in France (1956–59), teaching also at Lycée Voltaire, Paris, and Lyon II University (1969–72). In 1972 became professor of the history of Islamic thought at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University.