Arab-Islamic Philosophy

<p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>