Description
Book Synopsis 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 th
Table of Contents
- Introduction by Walid Hamarneh
- Author's Introduction
- Part One: A Different Reading of the Tradition Discourse
- Chapter I: The Present Shortcomings
- Chapter II: For a Scientific Critique of Arab Reason
- Part Two: Philosophical Thinking and Ideology
- Chapter III: Historical Dynamics of the Arab-Islamic Philosophy
- Chapter IV: The Rise and Fall of Reason
- Chapter V: The Andalusian Resurgence
- Conclusion: The Future Can Only Be Averroist
