Concise Definition
For Arkoun, modernity is not a ready-made model to be transferred as is; rather, it is a critical historical horizon that opens up new possibilities in knowledge, politics, education, and freedom. It is an unfinished experience that carries major achievements as well as distortions, and for that reason it is neither to be sanctified as a final salvation nor rejected as an absolute foreign intrusion.
Its Place in the Project
Modernity appears in Arkoun’s project as a test of Islamic reason and of its epistemic and educational institutions. He links it to the critique of reason, to secularization, to educational reform, and to the reconstruction of reading tools, because entering modernity is not achieved through appearances or superficial importation, but through a transformation in the very conditions of understanding. Modernity is also tied, for him, to the question of legitimacy: who has the authority to interpret the world? And who determines what is legitimate and what is prohibited? For this reason, it stands in direct contact with power and knowledge, with the critique of orthodoxy, and with opening the way to renewed ijtihad.
Example or Evidence
This concept becomes especially clear when Arkoun criticizes bureaucratic modernization, which changes institutions from the outside without affecting ways of thinking. The existence of a modern university or administration does not automatically mean the existence of a modern mind. The point here is that modernity is not measured by slogans or tools, but by a society’s ability to produce critique, to accept historicity, and to free knowledge from defensive closure.
See also: Modernity (concept page)