On the anniversary of his death .. Mohammed Arkoun tells the details of his battle with al-Ghazali Mahmoud Abdullah Tahami

Algerian researcher and researcher Mohammed Arkoun
On the anniversary of his death .. Mohammed Arkoun tells the details of his battle with al-Ghazali
Mahmoud Abdullah Tahami
The Algerian researcher and thinker Mohammed Arkoun is considered one of the most important episodes in the series of enlightenment and modernists, who turned their studies towards heritage to remove the bad practices that may be attached by its members.
Arkoun, who was born on February 1, 1928, was born in the town of Taourirt-Memon, in the Grand Kabylie region of Algeria, where he spent his primary school period and spent his secondary school in Oran. Followed by his undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Algeria and then at the Sorbonne in Paris where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1968.
He worked as a professor at the Sorbonne University in 1961-1991 and was a visiting professor at many universities around the world. Since 2000 he has served as a scientific advisor to Islamic studies at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
The intellectual project of Arkoun concerned the critique of the Arab and Islamic mind, correcting its intellectual paths, and negating what it may have to do with its deviations or legends. It adopted the modern and contemporary scientific curricula of human sciences in general, and the study of religions and religious texts in particular, including history, anthropology, Sociology of knowledge, social psychology, knowledge ecology, linguistic decomposition, semiemiology, pyramids, etc.
Among them was Sheikh Mohammed al-Ghazali, who attacked him at a conference of the Ministry of Awqaf in Algeria in 1986 under the title "Islamic awakening and the Islamic community." Arkoun mentioned the incident in his famous book " Readings in the Koran, "considering that the attack as an extension of a sterile heritage model is an attempt to kill every attempt to renew and return to the traditional collective mind, similar to the son of Aqeel al-Hanbali, who sat Mu'tazlp and then announced repentance, denying them to survive himself, and Abi Hassan al-Ash'ari, who lived on the doctrine of Mu'tazila With a general eye and then repent from that doctrine and its reaction.
Arkoun considers this a "paradigm" or an intellectual model of the traditional Islamic group that presupposes repentance in every renewal attempt, denouncing Ghazali's attack on him, who asked Arkoun to repent and to return to his belief.
"I was personally subjected to similar tribulations during the Islamic Thought Forum in Algiers in 1986. The Egyptian Sheikh Mohammed al-Ghazali attacked me and ordered me to retreat and repent from a phrase in my book" Arab Thought, "which says:" The Qur'an is a letter with a legendary structure " Unfortunately, Dr. Adel Al-Awa, a translator of the book into Arabic, translated the phrase as follows: "The Qur'an is a mythical speech", a philosopher unaware of the difference between the word myth and the word stories, and the phrase should have been translated as follows: Structure ".
In response to al-Ghazali's warning, which he addressed to me with all violence in front of the audience of those present at the conference, I did not offer my repentance and apologies. But the dogmatic dogmatic guard of theology was given a lesson in linguistics, translation, religious interpretation and anthropology. Ended in the interest of the victim ".
Arkoun died on September 14, 2010 at the age of 82 years after suffering with the disease in Paris, and was buried in Morocco according to his will.