Rethinking Islam

"A Berber from the mountainous region of Algeria, Mohammed Arkoun is an internationally renowned scholar of Islamic thought. In this book, he advocates a conception of Islam as a stream of experience encompassing majorities and minorities, Sunni and Shi'a, popular mystics and erudite scholars, ancient heroes and modern critics. A product of Islamic culture, Arkoun nonetheless disagrees with the Islamic establishment and militant Islamist groups; as a student of twentieth-century social science in the West and an admirer of liberalism, he self-consciously distances himself from Western Orientalists and Western conceptions of liberalism.^ This book-the first of Arkoun's works to be widely available in English-presents his responses to twenty-four deceptively simple questions, including: Can one speak of a scientific understanding of Islam in the West or must one rather talk about the Western way of imagining Islam? What do the words "Islam, " "Muslim, " and "Qur'an" mean? What is meant by "revelation" and "tradition''? What did Islam retain from the previously revealed religions-Judaism and Christianity? What did it retain from the religions and customs of pre-Islamic Arabia? In answering these and other questions, Arkoun provides an introduction to one of the world's great religions and offers a biting, radical critique of Islamology as it has been practiced in both East and West. This is a book for the beginning student of Islam and for the general reader uneasy with media images of Islam as a monolithic, anti-Western, violence-prone religion.^ It is also a book for specialists seeking an entré into Arkoun's methhodology-his efforts toapply contemporary thinking about anthropology, philosophy, semiotics, history, and sociology to the Islamic tradition and its relationship to the West. It is a book for anyone concerned about the identity crisis that has left many Muslims estranged from both a modernity imposed upon them and a tradition subverted for nationalist and Islamist purposes"--provided by publisher.