Conference: Religion on Borders Stockholm 19-22 April 2007

THE APPLIED ISLAMOLOGY OF MOHAMMED ARKOUN

Carool Kersten
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London

Conference: Religion on the Borders: New Challenges in the Academic Study of Religion
Stockholm, 19-22 April 2007

International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR)

Sdertrn University College

Panel Session 246: Islamic History and Thought I Friday, 20 April 2007
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Introduction The topic of this paper forms part of my research into the innovative approaches to the study of Islam as a field of academic inquiry developed by three Muslim thinkers: the French-Algerian historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun (1928-), the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi (1935-), and the Indonesian Islamicist Nurcholish Madjid (1939-2005). I have selected this trio because I consider them representative of the new Muslim intellectuals, frequently mentioned in the literature on contemporary Muslim intellectual history. Characteristically they combine solid knowledge of Islams civilisational heritage with a similar familiarity with recent achievements of the Western academe in the human sciences. In this regard, I suggest that their innovations are informed by the very liminality or marginality of the positions which culturally hybrid thinkers such as Arkoun occupy in the interstices of civilisations and their respective intellectual milieus. My project is embedded in the wider setting of the apparently problematic relationships which Islamicists maintain with the generic study of religions and with area studies programmes dealing with various parts of the Muslim world. These, what I have termed, awkward relations become even more acute when dealing with a world religion like Islam in its interregional dimensions. I believe that the alternative research approaches developed by thinkers like Arkoun have pointed to a new way forward for the study of Islam both historical and contemporary -- in global contexts and the border situations that come with it. This because they advocate more openness, both to the great diversity in religious manifestations and towards methods developed in a variety of human sciences over the last half a century or so. 1

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In the course of his scholarly career, Mohammed Arkoun has defined, refined and implemented an alternative approach to Islamic Studies, which he calls 'Applied Islamology'. 2 This was accompanied by the development of an apparatus of terms and concepts to which Arkoun attaches very specific meanings. Although I cannot altogether avoid it, I will try not use too much of this jargon in this presentation, which incidentally I believe to be one of the causes for the reluctant reception of Arkouns suggested research programme by scholars both inside and outside the Muslim world.3 Arkoun introduced Applied Islamology in the 1970s, as a critical examination of what he called Islamic thinking or Islamic reason. 4 I regard it as an important ancillary to Arkouns broader and abiding humanist concerns that permeate his oeuvre. 5 The programme is in fact a double critique of -- on the one hand -- Islams cultural configuration of the classical age for such configurations Arkoun coined the term logosphere, inspired by Derridas notion of logocentrism. 6 On the other, Arkoun also challenges the Western academic specialisation he refers to as Classical Islamology. 7 According to Arkoun, for the preceding fifty years this discipline had uncritically subscribed to the postulates of the classical Islamic logosphere I mentioned earlier.8 It should be noted, however, that Arkoun is not unappreciative of the achievements of Classical Islamology, acknowledging also his own debt to the data it has provided.9 Moreover, he regrets the over-easy polemical assaults it was subjected to on purely ideological grounds by the antiOrientalism camp inspired by Edward Said.10 When a Pragmatic Islamology, driven by a younger generation of Islamicists with backgrounds in social sciences rather than philology, succeeded in marginalising Classical Islamology in the 1980s and 1990s, Arkoun
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included their approach into his critique as well.11 He argues that especially scholars with Muslim backgrounds just like the great intellectuals of the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) -- have a propensity to falling into the trap of continued ideological manipulation of the Islamic logosphere by totalitarian regimes in the present-day Muslim world.12 Alternatively, Applied Islamology was envisaged as an epistemological reflection that aiming to: (1) critically re-read the so-called exhaustive Muslim tradition, free from the dogmatic definitions of the existing literature; and (2) historicize contemporary Muslim discourse in order to unveil its ideological prejudices. Ideology critique is one of the major tasks of Applied Islamology, says Arkoun.13 To develop such a method of critical modern analysis for Islamic Studies, Arkoun suggests drawing on the achievements made in the course of the twentieth century in the Western human sciences. 14 These advances were the result of an increasingly critical self-examination of the assumed progress made in Western rationalist thought since the sixteenth century.15 Before briefly discussing the scope of work which Arkoun defined for Applied Islamology, and providing a few examples of how it draws on Western scholarship across a broad spectrum of the human sciences, I want to trace the programmatic origins of Applied Islamology. Roger Bastides Applied Anthropology The designation Applied Islamology is derived from the book Applied Anthropology (1971) by the French ethnologist and sociologist Roger Bastide (1898-1974).16 Unfortunately, neither Arkoun nor his commentators have ever elaborated on how Bastides work -- apart from
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its title -- influenced the Applied Islamology project. 17 This is regrettable because some of the ideas informing Arkouns project reached him along unlikely routes at least when regarded from the viewpoint of Classical Islamology. Tracing the travel of such ideas across the borders of academic disciplines will show how the study of Islam can profit from drawing on a variety of human sciences. As Said and Mandaville have argued elsewhere, this is particularly relevant in this time of both ideologically polarising and globalising trends. Conceived as a critique of development theory, Bastide designed 'Applied Anthropology' towards the end of his career in order to formulate a solid social theory for dealing with the phenomenon of acculturation in cultural 'border situations' characterized by hybridisation. In spite of its somewhat dry ring, Applied Anthropology was actually inspired by some very imaginative approaches to the social sciences, and by Bastides own work on Afro-Brazilian religions, with which he became acquainted during his stay in Brazil from 1938 to 1954. There Bastide was associated with the University of So Paolo, a vibrant academic environment which had hosted scholars like Claude LviStrauss (whom Bastide succeeded), Georges Gurvitch, and the Annales School historians Fernand Braudel and Lucien Febvre. 18 The totality of that Brazilian experience was highly influential on Bastides work in the social sciences, also from a theoretic point of view. In regards to the latter, two other works by Bastide are relevant as well: The Social Origins of Religion, written in 1935, so before his move to Brazil; and his monumental The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations (1960, English translation 1978). While the data on Afro-Brazilian religions which Bastide collected are not

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germane to this presentation, the objective of that study s, because it envisaged: [] to analyze, within a single conceptual framework, individuals, cultures, and social and economic infrastructures, and to clarify the dialectic relationship between the historical transformation of these infrastructures and the religious phenomena in question.19 Looking at these three studies helps us discerning Bastides scholarly concerns and approach, and determine how that was carried over into Arkouns Applied Islamology: Bastide saw religion as a central part of mankinds ongoing cultural activity; the anthropology of religion was, for him, a matter of going beyond the chaos of religious facts in order to understand man as the manipulator of the sacred, and constructor of symbolic worlds.20 This position reflects Bastides appreciation of Durkheims view of religion as embedded in the totality of social structures, in contrast to Marxs and to some extent Webers as well economic reductionism.21It also acknowledges the contributions made by LviStrauss to structural anthropology. 22 But rather than constancy and structure, Bastides key interests were in transformation and change, exemplified by phenomena like acculturation and interpenetration of civilizations. That is why he preferred Comtes views of cultural evolution, the Bergsonian fluid sense of life, and Lvy-Bruhls sensitivity to the sheer wealth of cultural diversity and the associated questions of understanding and interpreting systems of symbols. 23 The

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latter directed Bastide also to the philosophy of Cassirer, the depth sociology of Gurvitch, and Kardiners notion of basic personality, which in France was further developed by the phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne.24 Bastide viewed acculturation as a dialectics between values and social structures, and therefore preferred the expression interpenetration of civilizations to the term syncretism, which he regarded as a too mechanical juxtaposition of cultural traits borrowed from two different civilizations.25 For that same reason, Bastide suggested in The African Religions in Brazil finding a balance between the cultural concerns of anthropology and sociologys interest in group dynamics and social structures when trying to make sense of the phenomenon of acculturation, because in a world where races, ethnic groups, and civilizations mix, the question arises how a more complete theoretization of such phenomena can be achieved.26 In this respect, Bastide saw anthropology and sociology as each others complement, with the concept of collective memory acting as the binding factor, because this immediately forces us to take a sociological view of the problem of acculturation. Civilizational clash and interpenetration does not occur in a vacuum but in clearly determined social contexts.27

In Applied Anthropology, Bastide further explores the theoretisation of acculturation. He contrasts this cultural phenomenon with the social process of integration, and with the concept of enculturation, which is the transmission of a given culture from one generation to another -- and which can actually form an obstacle to the acculturation process. Mapping some of the other complications, Bastide notes that technical and material elements of cultures are easier transferable than the symbolic

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such as religious ones. In addition it is important to realise that cultural systems are not always completely coherent and not static. In connection with the trans-global dimensions of Islam with which I am concerned in my research, it is also of interest to note that Bastide stresses the omnipresent existence of international contradictions; in which both cohesive centripetal and disintegrating centrifugal forces are at play. 28 While Bastides book was influential from a theoretical point of view, actual Applied anthropology was first pioneered by Anglo-Saxon scholars; by the English using their colonial empire as a vast laboratory, and in the United States, where internal social problems with first nation and with immigrants groups provided opportunities for experimentation.29 Bastide underscores also that the complexity of the practical issues at hand, make it necessary that projects are undertaken by multidisciplinary teams, consisting not only of academics but also administrators working in the field of development. A Detour into Brazilian LusoTropicology It was however in Brazil that Bastide had encountered Applied Anthropology as part of an innovative scholarly undertaking called Lusotropicology. 30 Gilberto Freyre, an ethnologist and sociologist from Recife, famous for his colourful portrayal of Northeastern Brazilian plantation society in The Masters and the Slaves (1946), was then the leading advocate of Lusotropicology. 31 It envisaged dealing with the bio-social and cultural relations of man with the tropics and of foreigners in Freyre case the Portuguese with the indigenous population and imported slaves. 32 Although he uses the neologism tropicology, Freyre actually did not regard this undertaking as something entirely novel.

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He traces the first centres of Lusotropical knowledge to Portugals university in sixteenth-century Coimbra, and early colonial outposts like Goa and Recife. 33 And just as Bastide followed Comte from practice to theory, Freyre traced tropicology to the works of such authors as Cames and Mendes Pinto.34 These writings, emerging in a climate which Panikkar had referred to as Portugals renascence of philosophy, were based on experiential knowledge rather than metaphysically-founded I would even add logocentric -- epistemologies. 35 Freyre had no hesitation seeing in Cames a forerunner of Deweys pragmatism. Even more pertinent --in the context of this examination of the genealogy of Applied Islamology -- is his assertion that what he calls a pragmatic increase of the value of existence resulted from the contacts between Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula even before the Age of Discovery. This Arab-Islamic knowledge was not so much a matter of theoretical acquisition as the outcome of human intercourse.36 Freyres approach resonates with Bastides intellectual inclination. In a 1956 meeting in France, attended by Gurvitch and Bastide, his programme was hailed as a new scientific humanism. 37 Freyre sees the favourable response to his Lusotropicology as part of the reorientation in European social thought since the early 20th century, a change of direction in the human sciences reflected in the works of Croce, Bergson, and Weber, and following in the tracks of what Freyre calls the Hispanic science of Man, which is also characterised by [] its personal rather than impersonal quality. It is Nietzschean, Bergsinian [sic!], Freudian and qualitativist rather than Durkheimian and quantitavist. It stresses those situations in space-time in which Man never ceases to be a person to turn into a Durkheimian thing.38
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One final aspect that I wish to highlight is that Bastide examined Lusotropicology in a chapter entitled Defence and illustration of Marginality. In part also inspired by his work on the marginality of those affected by psychopathological conditions, Bastide underscores the role of cultural marginals as leaders of the acculturative gambit. 39 For this he refers to the growing influence in North-American sociology of the view that simultaneous integration into two cultures, far from being considered as marginality, is seen by sociologists as a normal evolution and a progression by progressive internalisation of the values, ideas and norms seen as superior.40 I see this as an affirmation of my contention that the work of the new Muslim intellectuals mentioned at the beginning holds much potential for a change of direction in the field of Islamic Studies, because of their marginal position on in the interstices of cultures.

For similar reasons, I believe it possible to discern an affinity between Freyres Lusotropicology and Arkouns Applied Islamology, because the echoes of Northeastern Brazils hybridism extend also to the cosmopolitanism which Arkoun had mapped in his PhD study on ArabIslamic humanism in 10th-century Buyid Baghdad, and his subsequent work -- historical and contemporary -- on the cultural interpenetrations of the Mediterraneans Christian northern shores and its Muslim Eastern and Southern rims. This applies also to his concern with the ethnic complexities of what he calls the Maghribian space.

The suggested research programme of Applied Islamology

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Arkoun arrived at a compilation of Applied Islamologys research programme by following a via negativa, in the sense that, in order to excavate Islams accumulated exhaustive tradition, researchers would have to address what the Islamic logosphere of the Classical Age and the discipline of Islamology have either ignored, neglected, rejected out of hand, or failed to examine critically. 41 The result was a 14-point agenda which leapfrogs through some key cognitive fields and moments of Islamic intellectual history.42 In regards to the Quran, and the earliest Islamic history covering the embryonic community in Medina, the generation of the Companions, and the formation of the Caliphate and the Imamate this means introducing an investigation of the triple dialectics governing the cognitive triangle connecting language-history-thought. What this came down to was tracing the psycho-socio-cultural processes of differentiation of an Islamic social imaginary (a term borrowed from Castoriadis) resulting from, on the one hand, the Medina experience and continuous meditation on the Quran, and on the other the different social imaginaries of ethno-cultural groups which the new Islamic power sought to integrate but never really could.43

Apart from a greater awareness of the role of language, Applied Islamology insists on introducing a distinct anthropological angle into Islamic studies in order to stave off the logocentrism of the established, politically sanctioned official discourse, and highlight the existence of non-written oral legacies within Islamic civilisation. In this respect, Arkoun just like Bastide before him -- points to the important work done by Georges Balandier on oral cultures in Africa.44

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Moving to what can be considered the core of logocentrism: the Islamic sciences, Islamic philosophy, and the rational sciences, Arkoun suggest that the progress made in structural linguistics, the field of semiotics with its study of myth and metaphor, sign and symbol, but also in psychology must be availed of if Islamology wants to move beyond is current philological preoccupations. With such a toolbox it also becomes possible to see the connections between poetry and philosophy, two fields which in the Islamic intellectual tradition had withdrawn behind watertight separators. However, when drawing on the achievements made in the study of language, the homologue functions of both poetry and philosophy can be discerned, as both try to transfigure reality through linguistic means (using particular a lexicons, rhetoric, and style).45

Echoing Freyre and Bastide, Arkoun insists that Applied Islamology is a practical science, consisting of a variety of levels of analysis: linguistic, historical, psychological, sociological, philosophical and theological. 46 It will require the solidarity of a team effort, by an international collective composed of what Arkoun calls scholars-thinkers (chercheur-penseurs) to move this project forward.47 To back up this multidisciplinary exercise one finds frequent references to structuralist linguists and anthropologists such as Benveniste and Lvi-Strauss; as well as Northrop Fryes Great Code (Arkoun deplores that the subfield of Quranic Studies is lacking such a seminal work);48 the notion of basic personality studied by Kardiner and Dufrenne;49 and the concept of imaginaire social, used by the philosopher Constantin Castoriadis and historians of the Annales School, such as Georges Duby. 50

The research programme for Applied Islamology was initially defined in the mid-1970s, but Arkoun would return to it in later writings, further
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articulating its interpretative objectives. In a 1997 essay on the state of affairs in Islamic Studies in the French academe, for example, he seems to follow Paul Ricoeur example of entering the field of hermeneutics through the narrow gate of structuralism.51 I read Arkouns statement that [a]ccurate description must precede interpretation; but interpretation cannot be attempted today without a rigorous analysis, using linguistics, semiotic, historical, and anthropological tools,52 as an attempt to emulate in his comprehensive reworking of the field of Islamic Studies Ricoeurs generous or charitable interpretations, which enabled this leading hermeneutician to reconcile seemingly opposing philosophical positions into a creative synthesis.53 The Next Stage: The Religious Phenomenon

By the turn of the century, Arkoun broadened his area of concern from the critical examination of the Islamic legacy to the religious phenomenon in general. Just as when he made the case of opening up Islamic Studies to the full range of the social sciences and humanities, Arkoun adamantly maintained that religion is a simple social fact among others, a position that shows again how close he is to Bastide, and Durkheim.54 Arkoun was led to widening his interest to encompass the religious as such by his long-time engagement in inter-religious dialogues and his dissatisfaction with the apologetic, polemic and polite respectful attitudes which govern such meetings. What he found lacking was a critical theology which would engage religious reason with clarity and rigour.55 To this end Arkoun introduced in the late-90s the notion of emerging reason.56 Taken as a philosophical subversion of the use of reason
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itself, its emergent or emerging aspect lies in the expectation of a continuous critical assessment of the postures of human thought.57 This critical faculty is needed: [] for managing the violence inherent in the structures of truth promoted and defended by the three historical present postures of reason: the (theologico-ethico-judicial) religious posture, the scientific teletechnological posture that manages globalization, and the philosophical posture still in the grip of the postulates of the modernity of the classical age.

And he continues:

It was in order to make the reason operating in the social sciences descend to all the sites where the warring dialectic called Jihd vs. McWorld [] manifested itself that I have defended since the 1970s the scientific practice of an applied islamologie.58

In regards to religious studies, emerging reason can contribute to finding a comparative history of the theologies for the three Abrahamic religions. As an attempt thereto, Arkoun refers to Gisel and Evrards La Thologie en postmodernit; a study where the reader encounters the scholar-thinkers, identified earlier by Arkoun as capable of opening up the whole field of human, social, and even exact sciences to theology. 59 Arkoun admits that at present it remains very much a question whether Islamic thought would be open to such a critical theology. 60 However, given the fact that in the geohistorical and geocultural space of the West it is possible to find, at one and the same time the greatest leaders of the
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community of scholar-thinkers, one would hope that at least there Islamicists and Muslim scholars alike would join together into this experiment.61

Conclusion

This paper has tried to argue that Arkoun's approach to Islamic Studies is not only eminently suited for dealing with the history of Islam in the border situations' of the culturally hybrid settings of, say, the Mediterranean and Muslim Southeast Asia. But the expansion of his interest towards the study of the religious phenomenon and anthropology of religion may also ease the insertion of Islamic Studies into the generic field of the study of religions.

REFERENCES Arkoun, Mohammed (1973) Essais sur la Pense islamique. Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose. Arkoun, Mohammed (1975) La pense arabe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France Arkoun, Mohammed (1982) L'humanisme arabe au 4 e/10e sicle : Miskawayh, philosophe et historien. 2nd edition. Paris: Vrin [1970] Arkoun, Mohammed (1984) Pour une critique de la raison islamique. Paris: ditions Maisonneuve et Larose. Arkoun, Mohammed (1995) Islamic Studies: Methodologies In: John Esposito (ed.) The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, Vol. 2, 332-40 Arkoun, Mohammed (1997) The Study of Islam in French Scholarship In: Azim Nanji (ed.) (1997) Mapping Islamic Studies: Genealogy, Continuity and Change. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 33-44 Arkoun, Mohammed (1998) Social Science as Challenge to Islam: Introductory Reflections In: George Stauth (ed) Islam a Motor or Challenge of Modernity. Hamburg: Lit Verlag, pp. 197-220

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Conference: Religion on Borders Stockholm 19-22 April 2007 Arkoun, Mohammed (1998) From Inter-Religious Dialogue to Recognition of the Religious Phenomenon Diogenes 182 (46:2), pp. 123-52 Arkoun, Mohammed (2001) Contemporary Critical Practices and the Qurn In: Jane Dammen McAuliffe (ed.) Encyclopaedia of the Qurn. Volume One A-D. Leiden etc.: Brill, pp. 412-30 Arkoun, Mohammed 2002) The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought. London: Saqi Books Arkoun, Mohammed (2005) Humanisme et islam: Combats et propositions. Paris: Vrin Arkoun, Mohammed (2007) The Answers of Applied Islamology Theory, Culture and Society 24:2, pp. 21-38 Ayadi, Mohammed El, Mohammed Arkoun ou lambition dune modernit intellectuelle In: Collectif (1993) Penseurs maghrbins contemporains. Casablanca: ditions Eddif, pp. 43-71 Bastide, Roger (1973) Applied Anthropology. London: Croom Helm Ltd [French original: 1971] Bastide, Roger (1978) The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations. Baltimore ; London: Johns Hopkins University Press [French original: 1960] Bastide, Roger (2003) The Social Origins of Religion. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press [French original: 1935] Cleary, David (1999) Race, nationalism and social theory in Brazil: Rethinking Gilberto Freyre. Cambridge (Mass): David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University Freyre, Gilberto (1956) The Masters and the Slaves: a study in the development of Brazilian civilization. New York: Knopf [Portuguese original: 1931, 4 th ed.:1946] Freyre, Gilberto (1961a) Portuguese integration in the tropics: notes concerning a possible Lusotropicology which would specialize in the systematic study of the ecological-social process of the integration in tropical environments of Portuguese, descendants of Portuguese and continuators of Portuguese. Lisbon: Realizao Grafica da Tipografia Silvas Freyre, Gilberto (1961b) The Portuguese and the tropics: suggestions inspired by the Portuguese methods of integrating autochthonous people and cultures differing from the European in a new, or Luso-tropical complex of civilisations. International Congress of the History of Discoveries. Lisbon: Executive Committee for the Commemoration of the Vth centenary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator.

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Conference: Religion on Borders Stockholm 19-22 April 2007 Gnther, Ursula (2004) Mohammed Arkoun: Ein moderner Kritiker der islamischen Vernunft. Wrzburg: Ergon Verlag Mandaville, Peter (2001) Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma London: Routledge Nist, John (1967) The Modernist Movement in Brazil: A Literary Study. Austin: University of Texas Press Reagan, Charles E. (1996) Paul Ricoeur, His Life and His Work. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press Ricoeur, Paul (1985) Narrative and Time. Volume 2. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press [1984] Ricoeur, Paul (1986) Fallible Man New York: Fordham University Press [1965, first English translation; 1960, French original] Ricoeur, Paul (1995) Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press Said, Edward (1984) Traveling Theory in: Said (1984) The World, the Text and the Critic. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 226-47
1

Arkoun mentions names like: Barthes, Bourdieu, Derrida, Frye, Gadamer, Geertz, Greimas, Habermas, Levinas, Lvi-Strauss, Ricoeur (Arkoun 2005: 202). 2 First mentioned in: Arkoun 1973: 9, it was then elaborated in 1976 in an essay Pour une islamologie applique (Arkoun 1984: 43-63), cf. also: Arkoun 2007: 37 n. 8. 3 Comprehensive listings can be found in Arkoun 2002; Arkoun 2007. Arkouns biographer has provided a glossary of key terms (in German) (Gnther 2003: 263-73). At times, Arkoun has noted this lack of response himself (Arkoun 1984: 17-8; Arkoun 2000: 125; Arkoun 2002: 11, 32). More specifically, Arkoun observed that Islamicists were contend with acquiring precise knowledge without concern for theorizing (Arkoun 1984: 49), or practicing cumulative scholarship rather than critical engagement (Arkoun 1997: 42, cf.). 4 Cf.: Essais sur la pense islamique (1973); La Pense arabe (1975); Pour une critique de la raison islamique (1984); Rflexion sur la notion de raison islamique(1987); Penser lislam aujourdhui (1993); Pour une histoire reflexive de la pense islamique(2004). 5 As evinced by the recurring theme of Humanism in his writings: L'humanisme arabe au 4e/10e sicle: Miskawayh, philosophe et historien (1970); From Islamic Humanism to the Ideology of Liberation (1993); Peut-on parler dhumanisme en contexte islamique? (1999); Humanisme et Islam: Combats et propositions (2005). Cf. also his own observations that what is at stake is a philosophy of the human person (Arkoun 1984: 38), and that his research is first and foremost a humanist quest (Arkoun 2005: 8). 6 Arkoun 1973: 9. The term was first used in a booklet entitled La pense arabe, cf., Arkoun 1975: 51ff. Later Arkoun produced a fuller definition: A logosphere is the linguistic mental space shared by all those who use the same language with which to articulate their thoughts, their representations, their collective memory, and their knowledge according to the fundamental principles and values claimed as a unifying weltanschauung (Arkoun 2002: 12). This notion is closely connected to two other terms: the unthought and the unthinkable (see below). 7 Arkoun 1984: 43. On Arkoun as a double critic cf., Gnther 2004a: 4, 18, 107, also Ayadi 1993: 59. 8 Arkoun 1973: 8-9; Arkoun 1984: 43-44. 9 Arkoun 1973: 8; Arkoun 1984: 60-1; Arkoun 1997: 42; Arkoun 2002: 9, 11 n. 1.

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Arkoun 1984: 48; Arkoun 1997: 33. For comparable critiques of anti-Orientalist discourse, cf. J.J. Clarke, (1999) Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought; Arran Gare (1995)Understanding Oriental Cultures Philosophy East and West 45:3, pp. 309-29; Richard King (1999) Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and The Mystic East; David Kopf (1980) Hermeneutics versus History JAS 39:3, pp. 495-506. 11 Arkoun 2002: 10. 12 Arkoun 1997: 43; Arkoun 2002: 15; Arkoun 2005: 145-6. On the ideological orientations of the Nahda intellectuals, cf. Arkoun 1975: 96ff; Arkoun 1984: 10-11, 27-8. 13 Arkoun 1973: 9-10; Arkoun 1984: 57, 60-1: Arkoun 1997: 41. 14 Arkoun 1984: 51; Arkoun 1997: 40 and 42. 15 Arkoun 1984: 8-11, 47, 50; Arkoun 2002: 32. 16 Arkoun 1973: 9. 17 Arkoun 1984: 48-9; Gnther 2004: 123, n. 41. 18 Cf. Richard Prices Foreword in Bastide 1978: vii. 19 Bastide 1978: x. 20 Bastide 1978: ix. 21 Bastide 1978: 3-6. 22 Bastide 1973: 166; Bastide 1978: 9. 23 Bastide 1973: 1-8, 118; Bastide 1978: ix, 1-7; Bastide 2003: viii-ix, xxviii-xxix, 78, and 167. 24 Bastide 1978: 4-8, 11; Bastide 2003: 157-61. 25 Bastide 1978: x. 26 Bastide 1978: 12. 27 Bastide 1978: 383. Cf. also the observation that it is never cultures which are in contact but rather individuals (Bastide 1973: 41). 28 Bastide 1973: 41-50. 29 Bastide 1973: 21-2. 30 Bastide 1973: 87-93. Bastide spells it Luso-Tropology, I prefer to follow Freyres Lusotropicology. 31 The first Portuguese edition appeared in 1931. With this work, Freyre established himself also an exponent of the Modernist Movement, which was transforming not only the Brazilian art world, but the intellectual scene in the widest sense, since the 1920s. An accessible study of Modernism is: John Nist (1967) The Modernist Movement in Brazil: A Literary Study. Although it focuses on literature, Nist mentions Freyre in several instances (Nist 1967: 41, 95, 110, 112, 129, 148). For an assessment of Freyre influence in circles of the Brazilian social sciences, cf. Cleary 1999. 32 Freyre 1961a: 9-10; 41-2. 33 Freyre 1961a: 5-6. 34 Os Lusadas and Peregrineo, cf. Freyre 1961b: 111-28; 129-38 respectively. 35 Freyre 1961a: 24-6. 36 Freye 1961a: 37-8, 42. 37 Freyre 1961a: 103. 38 Freyre: 1961b: 10. 39 Bastide 1973: 94. 40 Bastide 1973: 96. 41 Arkoun 1984: 44, 55. For this Arkoun has introduced the terms the unthought and the unthinkable. This pair has permeated Arkouns thinking since the mid-1970s. In every culture, an intricate interplay of political and social pressures determines what a tradition of thought allows us to think in a particular period of its evolution. [] A number of ideas, values, explanations, horizons of meaning, artistic creations, initiatives, institutions and ways of life are thereby discarded, rejected, ignored or doomed to failure by the long-term historical evolution called tradition or living tradition according to dogmatic theological definitions. Voices are silenced, creative talents are neglected, marginalized or obliged to reproduce orthodox frameworks of expression, established forms of aesthetics, [...] (Arkoun 2002: 11-2). The unthought is made up of the accumulated issues declared unthinkable in a given logosphere (Arkoun 2002: 12); When the field of the unthinkable is expanded and maintained for centuries in a particular tradition of thought, the intellectual horizons of reason are diminished and its critical functions narrowed and weakened because the sphere of the unthought becomes more determinate [] (Ibid). 42 Arkoun 1984: 11-2. 43 Arkoun 1984: 15. 44 Arkoun 1984: 15; Bastide 1978: 383.

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45 46

Arkoun 1984: 12-25. Arkoun `1984: 34, 53-4. 47 Arkoun 1984: 20, 48, 53; 1995: 332-40; 1997: 33; 2000: 134-5. 48 Arkoun 2001: 425. 49 Arkoun 1973: 242; Arkoun 1982: 14; Arkoun 2002: 86 50 Arkoun 2002: 19, 274; Gnther 2004: 100-4. 51 It must be noted that, although Ricoeurs philosophy has been influential, Arkoun has also criticised Ricoeur for holding an ethnocentric outlook (Arkoun 2000: 140-1). 52 Arkoun 1997: 43, and also Arkoun 2002; 130; cf. Ricoeurs observation to explain more is to understand better (Ricoeur 1985: 32; Ricoeur 1995: 11). 53 Reagan 1996: 74; Mark Wallace in Ricoeur 1995: 1. 54 Arkoun 2000: 129; cf. Bastide 2003: xxvii, 57-9; Bastide 1978: ix, 1-10 55 Arkoun 2000 129-34 56 Sometimes Arkoun calls it emergent reason. Arkoun 2000: 124; Aroun 2002: 22-9 57 Arkoun 2002: 23-4 58 Arkoun 2000: 125. emphasis in the original) 59 Arkoun 2000: 131-2 60 Arkoun 2000: 132 61 This plea for solidarity recurs in Arkouns work, cf. note 467 above

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Carool Kersten