This topic is one of the most systematically recurring keys in Arkoun’s atlas, because it organizes many of the project’s questions between inherited tradition and the horizon of modern critique. What is meant here is not placing tradition in opposition to modernity as if they were two fixed blocs, but tracing how tradition is reconfigured within the conditions of the present, and how modernity is tested from within Arab-Islamic contexts rather than treated as a ready-made model. For that reason, this topic serves as an entry point for arranging the material that brings together historical criticism, the reform of knowledge, and the rereading of texts and institutions.
This trajectory recurs in many books. In Islamic Thought: Critique and Ijtihad tradition appears as a field that requires freeing the tools of reading and ijtihad. In Where Is Contemporary Islamic Thought? the question is tied to the difficulty of entering modernity from within. And When Islam Awakens addresses the tension between tradition and modernity in the context of religious reform and the plurality of interpretation. As for Battles for Humanism in Islamic Contexts, it links this tension to the question of the human being, education, and plurality. In From Manhattan to Baghdad the political dimension of this tension emerges when global violence meets the crisis of local modernization.
Related concepts include: tradition, modernity, historicity, humanism, and applied Islamology. These concepts help show that tradition in Arkoun is not a preserved, static entity, and that modernity is not a direct import but a critical horizon that requires rebuilding the epistemic mediations.
The paths associated with this topic are clear in Text and History and A Quick Introduction to Arkoun, because they connect historical reading with conceptual critique. It is also useful to consult Power and Knowledge, since for Arkoun the tension between tradition and modernity is inseparable from the question of who has the right to interpret, and who determines the conditions of renewal.