Renewing Islamic thought requires critiquing dogmatism, adopting a multidisciplinary historical reading, and freeing the relationship between religion and modernity

Formulation of the claim

For Arkoun, renewing Islamic thought requires dismantling the dogmatic enclosure that has closed

Explanation

He links the Qur’an to Arkoun’s project frees thought through a critical historical method and revelation, Islam, and history as topics for scientific rereading and the contemporary crisis as revealing a political and cultural deadlock that needs to be dismantled to affirm that the impasse of Islamic thought is not a passing symptom but an intertwined historical, epistemic, and political structure. Accordingly, overcoming this impasse requires redefining the role of the critical intellectual in isolation, freeing the study of religion from both orthodoxy and Orientalism, and building a critical secularization that does not abolish the spiritual but reorganizes it. The book also shows that rights, politics, and identity are not understood from a fixed religious essence, but from the history of social and symbolic formation revealed by comparative, multidisciplinary reading.