The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought
Mohammad Arkoun’s eight essays appearing in The Unthought in ContemporaryIslamic Thought are gates leading into a city. In this case, thecity is the deeply multifarious metropolis called Islam – a source of identityand pride for its adherents and, equally, a source of concern andcuriosity for those outside of its periphery. Throughout his life, Arkounhas placed himself on the ramparts and straddled the walls, leading someto call him an enemy spy and others to think of him as a brave pioneerinto the unknown. The past few years have seen an unheralded evaluationof Islam’s role in this globalized world. Arkoun’s eight essays, reflectinga lifetime in the field of Islamic studies, concern themselves with a hostof issues enveloping the world of Islam: Qur’anic studies, revelation,belief, authority, power, law, and civil society.The idea of unthought is a creative encapsulation of those diseases thathe believes are plaguing Islam. He defines unthought as the power employedby the traditional ulama and ideological Islamic states in order to guaranteethat a deeply dogmatic and unapproachable version of Islam is protectedfrom all intellectual and scientific analysis. Arkoun uses unthought to referto “an Islam that is isolated from the most elementary historical reasoning,linguistic analysis or anthropological decoding” (p. 308).The first essay, “A Critical Introduction to Qur’anic Studies,” is a sort ofoutline of his ideas. It expresses Arkoun’s suggestion that “we need to artic -ulate the cognitive, critical strategies used by social sciences of the ‘metamodern’sort to analyze, in thorough fashion, the structure and form of theQur’an, the ‘differentiated corpora of Meccan and Medinan revelation, the‘psychology of knowledge,’ the notions of sin, virtue, and interpersonal rela -tions, and finally everything from society, law, culture to warfare, commerceand children” (p. 44). The scope is indeed overwhelmingly broad. Arkounwants the preferred current mode of analytic evaluation in the social sciences– deconstruction, hermeneutics, and their various poststructuralist relatives– to be applied to Islamic studies. The Qu’ran, he argues, has becomeheavily loaded by “legalistic instrumentalization, and the ideological manipulationsof contemporary political movements” (p. 45).On the one hand, he is concerned about the loss of critical Qur’anicreading; however, he is equally wary of carte-blanche dismissals of Islam ...