There are many definitions attempting to summarise the essence of being human: a ’thinking animal’, a ‘speaking animal’ and so on. And here it would do no harm to add another definition derived from one of his features – and that is ‘distortion’. So we can justifiably define this man as Homo Pervertens, ‘Distorting Man’, one who distorts his sacred books in particular, in that no holy book has been untouched by his distortions
There are some who believe that the Islamic Sharīʻa is a fixed divine law that has not changed over the course of time or as a result of differing places and changing circumstances. For prayer is fixed and fasting is fixed ... The doctors of law produced many arguments to support this, some of them based on tradition such as the hadith and narratives such as that which runs: ‘What Muhammad has declared to be halāl remains halāl till Doomsday come, and that which he forbade is forbidden till Doomsday come.’
I would like first of all to pose this question: how does Muhammad Arkoun view Arab Islamic thought? What is the general picture he paints of it? This is the thing one has to pose first of all in order to grasp the general point of departure employed by this scholar in order to understand Arab Islamic thought and diagnose its crises, problems and historical impasses that it suffers from today.
There is a pervasive error that needs to be corrected: when we speak of the Qur’ān we confuse three phenomena that differ in their form and content. Indeed it may be that the error is not a temporary matter but rather one that is very fundamental and which Qur’ān studies have inherited - rational treatments included - whereby the results every time have been to the advantage of Salafist, fundamentalist thinking.
There are some who believe that the Islamic Sharīʻa is a fixed divine law that has not changed over the course of time or as a result of differing places and changing circumstances. For prayer is fixed and fasting is fixed ... The doctors of law produced many arguments to support this, some of them based on tradition such as the hadith and narratives such as that which runs: ‘What Muhammad has declared to be halāl remains halāl till Doomsday come, and that which he forbade is forbidden till Doomsday come.’
I would like first of all to pose this question: how does Muhammad Arkoun view Arab Islamic thought? What is the general picture he paints of it? This is the thing one has to pose first of all in order to grasp the general point of departure employed by this scholar in order to understand Arab Islamic thought and diagnose its crises, problems and historical impasses that it suffers from today.
There is a pervasive error that needs to be corrected: when we speak of the Qur’ān we confuse three phenomena that differ in their form and content. Indeed it may be that the error is not a temporary matter but rather one that is very fundamental and which Qur’ān studies have inherited - rational treatments included - whereby the results every time have been to the advantage of Salafist, fundamentalist thinking.
