Argument Type: Critical

470 pages

• The restoration of foundational Islam is rejected
• Fundamentalism as forced conversion
• Islam has become an ideology of power
• Islamism as a protest identity
• The media and politics amplify Islam’s image
• Orientalism and Islamic discourses reinforce essentialism
• Liberation begins from within
• Puritanism as the preservation of purity
• European education erased religion and cultures
• Hagiographic education entrenches sectarianism
• Education and the university fuel misunderstanding
• Reductionist development excludes people
• Technological modernity increases the debt of meaning
• Modernity has surpassed materialist extremism
• Modernity is dominated by pragmatism
• Moral judgment is an neglected question
• Imposed solutions produce backlash
• Superstition weakens resolve
• Religion as an ideological tool of regimes
• Technocratic reason reduces the human being
• Exclusionary secularism excludes religion
• European positivist secularization is excessive
• The Muslim intellectual needs a cool diagnosis
• Modern societies produce their own mythologies
• Vital meaning is not provided by rationality alone
• The margins deconstruct Islamist discourses
• Some Orientalists contribute to it
• Liberating the Arab-Islamic spirit
• The politicization of Islam in contemporary discourse
• Multiple Arab diagnoses of the crisis
• Rejecting the dichotomy between the religious and the worldly
• Rejecting the mythical and ideological vision
• The conflict between reason and closed faith
• A gap between discourse and practice
• The inadequacy of previous strategies
• Erasing Islam’s historical dimension
• Revisiting ideological assumptions
• Critique of the myth of the Western model
• Critique of analogy as racializing
• Critique of dominant Western moralizing
• The North-South model is an ideological construct
• Principles of jurisprudence were ideologically recuperated
• Most interpretations fall into a historical fallacy
• Women’s reform runs up against tradition
• The exhaustion of ijtihad halts generative thought
• Fundamentalists use religion politically
• Consensus and analogical reasoning according to Arkoun
• Orientalism benefited scholarly inquiry
• Colonial Orientalism raises an epistemological problem
• Interpretive discontinuity has wide-reaching effects
• Research backwardness and cultural ruptures
• Oral teaching weakens critical reason
• Colonial education obscured historical understanding
• Stagnation appeared with the guardians of faith
• Dialogue with preachers is nearly impossible
• Lexical Arabic is detached from contemporaneity
• Extreme rationalism eliminates imagination
• Great scholars build faith
• Atrocity did not die with the triumph of the Enlightenment
• The text was transferred into closed sanctification
• Modern criticism is necessary for belated thought
• Wahhabism is a freezing of Hanbali doctrine
• School history in France was apologetic
• Turning human judgments into the sacred
• Confusing the Sharia with jurisprudence
• Clerics are the guardians of belief
• The terror of revolution and bloody violence
• Suppression of creativity continued after independence
• Arkoun’s critique does not negate the Qur’an
• Critique of Orientalism and superficial reading
• Critique of inherited traditional exegesis
• Critique of Islamic reason
• The crisis of contemporary reason
• Islamizing the sciences is a fundamentalist demand
• Patterns of interaction among minds
• The closing of ijtihad is the ruling of imitation
• Objections to Arkoun’s project
• Fundamentalism imposes an old model
• Theological systems produce clashes
• Islam grants an ontological privilege
• Orientalism constrains the study of Islam
• Later grounding became linked to fundamentalism
• Critical deconstruction of monotheistic traditions
• Western modernity empties the spirit
• Islamic discourse has closed itself within a dogmatic fence
• Victim discourse disables criticism
• Confusing struggle with privilege
• Religion and thought weaken as ideology
• Islamist reason is an ideological reaction
• Exploratory reason is threatened by rigidity
• Scientific-technological reason in its televisual form
• Dominant reason turns into domination
• European secularization lacks a spiritual alternative
• The social sciences neglect actual societies
• The fatwa is a sign of theology’s decline
• Sanctity was draped over a human work
• Sanctity conceals internalized standards
• The theological reading effaces origins
• The unthought in the Maghreb
• Taboos paralyze criticism
• Western hegemony limits comparative critique
• The attempt to prove modernity through texts is invalid
• Grounding the foundations has become impossible
• Renewing religion through critique of reason
• Politicizing religion deepens scientific deficiency
• Mobilizing fundamentalism with inherited imaginaries
• The failure of fundamentalist thinking has multiple causes
• The triumph of the material and the consumptive
• Dismantling traditional positions
• The supremacy of juridical-theological reason
• Distinguishing religious reason from theological reason
• The defensive posture of Islamic scientific reason
• Rejecting modernity is not a solution
• Conservative dominance hinders research
• The paralysis of Islamic studies
• The image of Islam among Europeans
• The atrophy of critical reason
• Kinship loyalties impede the individual
• The absence of historical critique of tradition
• Critique of reducing Islam to responsibility
• Critique of schoolbook Islam
• Critique of interpretive Orientalism
• Critique of ideological veneration
• Critique of modern modernity
• Critique of rationalist modernity
• Critiquing modernity does not mean rejecting it
• Critique of Western Qur’anic studies
• Self-critique before blaming colonialism
• Critique of technological and scientific reason
• Critique of sterile identity debates
• Critique of Islam’s ideological totalization
• The crisis of contemporary Islamic thought
• Reducing the intellectual to mere identification
• Invoking texts as final authorities
• Islamism’s exploitation of sacred language
• Monotheistic religions build systems of exclusion
• Orthodoxy imposes a single meaning
• Popular Islam is based on the veneration of saints
• Academic neglect reproduces distorted images
• Destructive ideologies shrink critical thought
• Western researchers prefer brief description
• Cultural truncation weakens doctoral students
• Excessive specialization weakens the role of the intellectual
• Traditional religious education entrenches sectarianism
• The East-West division is a sterile cliché
• A destructive generation of the human being
• Modern movements mix ideology with tradition
• Dialogue goes beyond politics and commerce
• Defensive rights discourse
• Scientific discourse exposes ideological manipulation
• Legal-theological discourse granted legitimacy to existing regimes
• Historical rejection of the historical method
• The dogmatic fence determines what can be thought
• The dogmatic fence closes off religious discourse
• Political conflicts were wrapped in theological language
• Critical secularization and secularist thought
• Secularization is not a rejection of religion
• The West reduced Islam to its popular forms
• Jurists turn symbols into closed truths
• The scientific and political understanding of religious movements failed
• Philology is a first stage, not an end, in the study of tradition
• Forbidden issues in contemporary thought
• Theologians will reject critical comparisons
• The distorted Western imaginary of Islam
• The shared imaginary magnifies Islam
• Societies live through an invisible, actual secularization
• Revelation has not been studied adequately
• The persistence of the fence in Arab societies
• The renewal of Classical Arabic
• The decline of the critical intellectual because of dogmatism
• Applying the Sharia faces practical problems
• Elite collusion with the state
• The limits of medieval reason
• The siege of free thought
• Confusing Qur’anic Islam with juristic Islam
• Rejecting the literature of the old sects
• Rejecting the reduction of critique to secularization
• Rejecting prior religious superiority
• Rejecting the protest discourse of jihad
• Rejecting formulations of the death of man and the death of God
• The condition for intellectual emancipation
• The image of the Muslim in Europe
• The absence of production in the major fields of tradition
• The critical task of the intellectual
• A wave of religiosity may obscure other needs
• Critique of the European horizon
• Critique of formal humanism
• Critique of classical Orientalism
• Critiquing modernity is not rejecting it
• Critique of dogmatic readings
• The dominance of clerics and Islamists
• Traditional religious institutions should be curtailed
• Rethinking is not Salafi reform
• The impossibility of making God a problem
• Orthodoxy bypasses the historicity of the text
• Official Islam criminalizes deviation
• Ritual Islam is dogmatic and ahistorical
• Contemporary Islam is emptied of spirituality
• Utopian Islamic reform
• Exclusion is mutual among sects