ARKOUN AND ORIENTALISM: AN APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MODERNITY AND ORIENTALISM

Abstract

With th rise of the Western renaissance in the modern era and the subsequent advanced material civilization The intellectual struggle began between the West and the East, and Western intellectual production began to be concerned with Islam and Islamic heritage, And this production was found among the children of the Islamic world who are fascinated by this Western civilization One of the results of this civilization shock was that the Muslim modernists adopted the views of the Western Orientalists, and these oriental studies contributed to defining the positions of Muslim scholars, As some of them took a stance against the West, and some of them took this break with the Islamic heritage and adopted the positions of the West, And some of them revisited himself after this adoption and examined his assumptions with this thought, even if this examination was late, and this is the case of Muhammad Arkoun. The intellectual works of Muhammad Arkoun were known for their adoption of the approaches and axioms of Western thought, so that he called the group of his ideas what is known as criticism of the Islamic mind Considering that his modernist discourse is the intellectual alternative to the Orientalist discourse in Islamic thought, believing that his epistemological effort is an endeavor to enlighten Islamic thought, From this standpoint, the thought of Muhammad Arkoun faced a lot of criticism in the Islamic intellectual circles, and he was accused that his writings in their entirety are marketing the Orientalist discourse with a modernist vision, In contrast to this Islamic attack on Muhammad Arkoun, the reader may be surprised by his writings, especially the latter, when he finds him showing a kind of criticism of Orientalism, accusing him of shortcomings, and defaming him for the presence of the positivist and philological-linguistic approaches strongly in his studies, If we wish, we would say that Arkoun's recent books contain a desire to transcend the Orientalist discourse. This appears in his books such as: Islamic Thought, Criticism and Ijtihad, Towards a Comparative History of Monotheistic Religions, Islamic Thought, Scientific Reading, History of Arab and Islamic Thought... and other of his writings. Which makes a legitimate question about the nature of the relationship between Arkoun - as a model of the modernist school - with Orientalism. And about the real reasons that made him stand in a controversial position, Once, the Orientalist discourse adopts its evaluative approach and vision of the Islamic heritage, Once he criticizes him, accuses his approach of sterility, and blames him for failing to find solutions to the problems in which the Islamic world is stumbling.