The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought By Mohammad Arkoun (London: Saqi Books, 2002. 352 pages.)

Abstract

Mohammad Arkoun’s eight essays appearing in The Unthought in Contemporary
Islamic Thought are gates leading into a city. In this case, the
city is the deeply multifarious metropolis called Islam – a source of identity
and pride for its adherents and, equally, a source of concern and
curiosity for those outside of its periphery. Throughout his life, Arkoun
has placed himself on the ramparts and straddled the walls, leading some
to call him an enemy spy and others to think of him as a brave pioneer
into the unknown. The past few years have seen an unheralded evaluation
of Islam’s role in this globalized world. Arkoun’s eight essays, reflecting
a lifetime in the field of Islamic studies, concern themselves with a host
of 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 that
he believes are plaguing Islam. He defines unthought as the power employed
by the traditional ulama and ideological Islamic states in order to guarantee
that a deeply dogmatic and unapproachable version of Islam is protected
from all intellectual and scientific analysis. Arkoun uses unthought to refer
to “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 of
outline 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 the
Qur’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, commerce
and children” (p. 44). The scope is indeed overwhelmingly broad. Arkoun
wants 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 become
heavily loaded by “legalistic instrumentalization, and the ideological manipulations
of contemporary political movements” (p. 45).
On the one hand, he is concerned about the loss of critical Qur’anic
reading; however, he is equally wary of carte-blanche dismissals of Islam ...