The Meaning of the Concept in This Book
Modernity is presented here as a historical project for the liberation of the human condition, not as a completed truth or a finished model. For Mohammed Arkoun, it carries major achievements, but it remains an unfinished project, and it can turn into a repressive or utilitarian rationality if it is severed from its human and spiritual horizon.
Accordingly, modernity is not understood in this book as an alternative to be imported as is, nor as something to be wholly rejected. It is an open field for critique, expansion, and readjustment, so that it is not reduced to matter and technology alone, nor sanctified as the end of history.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
The concept of modernity occupies a central place in the book’s general argument because it links the critique of fundamentalism with the critique of incomplete modernization at the same time. The issue is not a confrontation between tradition and modernity as two closed poles, but the uncovering of the conditions and historical limits of each.
Through this concept, the book explains that modernization is not achieved by rapid importation, and that integrating tradition into modernity requires a historical critique of Islamic reason just as much as it requires a critique of modernity itself. The concept therefore appears here as a tool for understanding the contemporary crisis of meaning, the limits of politicization, and the consequences of an understanding that confines the human being to the material dimension alone.
How It Works within the Atlas
The concept of modernity functions within the atlas as a connecting node between several paths: the critique of Islamic reason, text and history, critical secularization, exploratory reason, and citizenship. Through it, Arkoun’s thesis becomes clear: European modernity is the product of multiple transformations and gradual growth, and at the same time it has two faces: it liberates from the authority of the Church, but it may also generate new crises and empty the spirit if it closes in on itself.
This concept also makes it possible to understand Arkoun’s position on fundamentalism and politicization; the problem cannot be solved by a fundamentalist response to modernity, nor by repeating modernity as a ready-made formula. What the Islamic field needs, in this view, is a modernity that can be generalized in Arab and Islamic contexts, but through a historical process that makes room for the human being, preserves faith as a personal matter, and gives the symbolic and spiritual dimension its place within modernization.