Chapter Nine - Mohammed Arkoun and the Idea of Liberal Democracy in Muslim Lands

Summary

Few of the thinkers treated in this volume can qualify as steadfast theorists and advocates of liberal democracy in Muslim parts of the world the way Mohammed Arkoun does. In the past four decades he has created a large corpus to broach the idea of pluralism, tolerance of difference and free thinking, all aimed at shifting the discourses of Muslims. Arkoun is a staunch advocate of social and political transformation in a liberal direction in the Muslim world, and for him the key way to achieve this revamp is through change in cultural and ideational spheres. Even though he is an eminent scholar of Islam and Islamic history, he insists that scholarship should not be confined to descriptive and narrative presentation of facts, beliefs and rituals in the past or contemporary period of Muslim lives. Rather, Arkoun maintains, the task of thinkers and scholars of Islam is to problematize the domain of knowledge and to reflect on historical conditions in order to dismantle and debunk cognitive systems and related ethico-juridical norms and codes to free the Muslims from the ideological traps in which they have been incarcerated for centuries. In Arkoun's discourse, knowledge is the foundation upon which norms and legal institutions are built and, as such, to change the latter, the former has to undergo a fundamental transformation. For this reason he has devoted his considerable intellectual ability to bringing about change in the sphere of knowledge and epistemology in the context of Muslim societies.

In its classical period, Arkoun argues, Islamic civilization was sufficiently selfconfident to integrate intellectual elements from foreign cultures such as Iran, Greece, Mesopotamia and India, which enriched its thinking and assured its creativeness and vibrancy by keeping its intellectual channels open and alive. But beginning in the 13th century, Islamic intellect embarked upon a process of stagnation that culminated in its loss of intellectual pluralism and humanist momentum, which has intensified since the 19th century encounter with Western imperialism even after the emergence of postcolonial nation states in the Muslim world. As such, Arkoun maintains, the Islamic world is in a dire need of an intellectual renaissance to bring it into the modern world and reinvigorate its vital pulse. He has been very active in the examination and critique of Islamic thought and Muslims’ consciousness in order to contribute to a true renaissance of intellect among Muslims around the world.