"Arab-Islamic Philosophy" Mohammad Abed al-Jabri (1999)

Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique (Middle East Monograph Series) Mohammed 'Abed al-Jabri
The distinguished Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, in this summary of his own work, examines the status of Arab thought in the late twentieth century. Al-Jabri rejects what he calls the current polarization of Arab thought between an imported modernism that disregards Arab tradition and a fundamentalism that would reconstruct the present in the image of an idealized past.

Both past and present intellectual currents are examined. Al-Jabri first questions the current philosophical positions of the liberals, the Marxists, and the fundamentalists. Then he turns to history, exploring Arab philosophy in the tenth and twelfth centuries, a time of political and ideological struggle. In the writings of Ibn Hazm and Averroës, he identifies the beginnings of Arab rationalism, a rationalism he traces through the innovative fourteenthcentury work of Ibn Khaldun.

Al-Jabri offers both Western readers and his own compatriots a radical new approach to Arab thought, one that finds in the past the roots of an open, critical rationalism which he sees as emerging in the Arab world today.




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Title: Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique (Middle East Monograph Series)
Author: Mohammad Abed al-Jabri
Translator: Aziz Abbassi
Publisher: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 1999
Number of pages: 152
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Table of Contents

Introduction by Walid Hamarneh

Author's Introduction

Part One
A Different Reading of the Tradition Discourse

Chapter I: The Present Shortcomings

Chapter II: For a Scientific Critique of Arab Reason

Part Two
Philosophical Thinking and Ideology

Chapter III: Historical Dynamics of the Arab-Islamic Philosophy

Chapter IV: The Rise and Fall of Reason

Chapter V: The Andalusian Resurgence

Conclusion: The Future Can Only Be Averroist