The Meaning of the Concept in this Book
Religion here is neither a fixed truth nor a closed concept, but an anthropological, historical, and cultural phenomenon in which religious and worldly dimensions are intertwined. In this atlas, its understanding is linked to historical and comparative study, and to interpretation that does not reduce it to a single function, nor confine it to a clerical or political dimension.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
The concept of religion appears within a broader argument that holds that critical humanism can only emerge by reconnecting Islam with reason, freedom, and history. For this reason, the concept is directly tied to criticism of politicization, to distinguishing between the religious and the worldly, and to warning against neglecting critical ijtihad, since the closure of ijtihad leads to the breakdown of the conditions that make it possible to understand religion as a living and open reality.
Religion also appears within Arkoun’s atlas’s discussion of traditional education, sectarianism, violence, and the limits of rhetorical reform. The issue is not merely to describe religion, but to show how it is understood and how it is instrumentalized, and why reforming the tools of reading and education becomes a condition for understanding it outside domination and ideologization.
How It Operates within the Atlas
This concept functions as a point of intersection among several paths: religious anthropology, comparative history, critique of reason, and humanism. Through it, the idea becomes clear that monotheistic religions share general structures, but that their understanding differs according to method: is religion read as a multi-dimensional human experience, or as a closed system governed by a single end?
Within the atlas, religion is also connected to the question of educational and cultural reform. The text links a more open religious and philosophical education with reducing violence, fanaticism, and sectarianism, and makes humanism a critical and educational project rather than an abstract slogan. Religion therefore does not appear here as an area separate from history, but as a domain shaped within its epistemic and social conditions, and one that may deviate when reduced to ideology or authority.
Related Pages
- Religion as a General Anthropological Phenomenon
- Religion Is Understood Anthropologically and Deconstructively, Not Reductionistically
- The Distinction between the Religious and the Worldly
- Religion Is Instrumentalized Politically and Clerically
- Reforming Religious and Philosophical Education Contains Violence and Intolerance