INTRODUCTION

Thinking the Unthinkable and the Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought

Nous vivons une époque étrange, dominée par une idéologie douce et une pensée molle: aux uns le savoir dur et la science, aux autres les apparentes évidences du social et du culturel; à chacun, enfin, les mystères du ‘vécu’ et les interrogations sans réponse. Il faudra bien jeter un pont entre ces trois continents à la dérive, sous peine de les voir livrés à leurs formes respectives et peut être complices de totalitarisme.

Marc Augé,Le Monde, 3/9/1999.

All human knowledge, insofar as a man is a ‘member’ of a society in general, is not empirical, but ‘a priori’ knowledge. The genesis of such knowledge shows that it precedeslevels of self-consciousness and consciousness of one’s self value. There is no ‘I’ without a ‘we’. The ‘we’ is filled with contents prior to the ‘I’.

Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, 1980, p. 67.

What this book proposes is a way of thinking, rather than essays in traditional scholarship based on primary sources. Not that I do not use such sources extensively, but my interpretation of them is informed by a strategy which differs from that usually employed for the purpose of providing a descriptive, narrative, factual and cumulative presentation of what they contain. My intention is to combine a critical review of modern studies devoted to early and contemporary periods of what is generally called ‘Islam’, with the systematic deconstruction of the original texts used in these studies as sources of genuine information. Primary and secondary texts are not read in order to discuss the facts themselves, but toproblematize1 the epistemic and epistemological framework underlying the articulation of each discourse. This cognitive strategy has never been used before in interpreting the types of discourse produced by Muslims to express their Islam, or in approaching them as a subject of study, alongside the Western literature on Islam and Muslim societies. From this perspective,historical epistemology has a priority over the purely descriptive, narrative presentation of what ‘Islam’ teaches, or what Muslims say, do or achieve as social and historical protagonists. To what extent are these protagonists aware of the ideological dimensions of their discourse and historical actions? Which cognitive structures do they use for the purpose of interpreting their religion, applying it to their actual life or reshaping it on the basis of historical pressures? To what extent do they develop a critical relationship with their past and their present in order to have better control over their future, and how relevant, effective and creative would such a relationship be? These questions constitute the itinerary of this self-interrogation. Such an itinerary can be proposed and achieved only by those who accept the need to combine respect for the rules of scientific research with the capacity to submit to philosophical criticism every stance of reason, every intellectual initiative and every question arising therefrom.

For a time, during the late 1970s, I called this appro