Arab-Islamic Philosophy : A Contemporary Critique

The distinguished Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, in this summary of his own work, examines the status of Arab thought in the late twentieth century.Al-Jabri rejects what he calls the current polarization of Arab thought between an imported modernism that disregards Arab tradition and a fundamentalism that would reconstruct the present in the image of an idealized past. Both past and present intellectual currents are examined.Al-Jabri first questions the current philosophical positions of the liberals, the Marxists, and the fundamentalists.Then he turns to history, exploring Arab philosophy in the tenth and twelfth centuries, a time of political and ideological struggle.In the writings of Ibn Hazm and AverroËs, he identifies the beginnings of Arab rationalism, a rationalism he traces through the innovative fourteenth–century work of Ibn Khaldun. Al-Jabri offers both Western readers and his own compatriots a radical new approach to Arab thought, one that finds in the past the roots of an open, critical rationalism which he sees as emerging in the Arab world today.