BEIRUT: Reformist thinker Muhammad Arkoun passed away on Tuesday night after a long battle with cancer. Born to a Berber family in 1928 in Ayn al-Arbuaa, a town in Algeria’s Kaba’il region, Arkoun felt the weight of the French occupation first hand. His writing documented Algeria being uprooted from its history and culture and the view that Islam is trapped in discussions of outdated issues and has failed to address reality.
Arkoun’s work sought to combine Islam with modernity and in this he was inspired by the historic works of Islamic reform. He worked to distinguish between the sacred text and its different interpretations and he brought a human perspective to studies of Islam. He combined his Islamic studies with ideas of the European Renaissance and the French Revolution.
A linguist of the Koran who taught at Paris’ Sorbonne University, Arkoun did not write for a popular audience. Philosophically inflected and influenced by the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Arkoun argued that Islamic scholars didn’t address the history of the religion in a critical and scientific manner – the way Western scholars did with Christianity.
Islam, he said, is comprised as much by its practice as the Koranic scriptures. He stood against all orthodoxy, including the orthodoxy of Orientalism, and argued of the gap between the Koran and its interpretations. The Koran, he pointed out, called on people to seek knowledge, while Islamic scholars had imprisoned Islam within rigid structures.
Arkoun wrote in French and English as well as Arabic and his writings were at once western and Islamic. Mujahid and Takfiri screeds accused Arkoun of not being Muslim, as they did Egyptian intellectual Nasser Hamid Abu Zayd. Arkoun is the last of a group of significant intellectuals of Islamic reform that included Abu Zayd and Muhammad Abid Al-Jabri. He will be buried in his wife’s home town of Casablanca. – The Daily Star
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