Arab-Islamic philosophy : a contemporary critique / by Mohammed ʻAbed al-Jabri ; translated from the French by Aziz Abbassi.

Published in French as: Introduction à la critique de la raison arabe. Originally written in Arabic.

Text in English; translated from the French.

Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction by Walid Hamarneh --- Author's Introduction --- Part One: A Different Reading of the Tradition Discourse. 1. The Present Shortcomings -- 2. For a Scientific Critique of Arab Reason --- Part Two: Philosophical Thinking and Ideology. 3. Historical Dynamics of the Arab-Islamic Philosophy -- 4. The Rise and Fall of Reason -- 5. The Andalusian Resurgence --- Conclusion: The Future Can Only Be Averroist.

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 fourteenth-century 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.