Arkoun

A distinguished scholar and thinker in Islamic Studies, Dr. Mohammed Arkoun, passed away recently, on September 14, 2010. He was 82 years old.

Professor Arkoun was, amongst a large list of job descriptions, a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. I happen to be in the first class at the IIS graduate program that will not have a class with Professor Arkoun.

I never had the chance to meet this man. But this man, I came to find, had an astonishingly huge impact on his students, colleagues, and fellow thinkers. At today's memorial service at the IIS, as I heard various faculty members and former students paint a picture of his life, I was humbled at their praise for the unquestionable spirit of Professor Arkoun's exploration of Islam.

He seems to have been a man that wanted to explore thought, the ways of thinking, and the ways of advancing thought in Islam. He also seems to have been a man who enjoyed theories, and pushing the boundaries of contemporary theories, especially within the context of Islamic Studies.

Professor Arkoun, posthumously, taught me that we live in a world where things have become constant, static, and perhaps even redundant. Behind every activity is a process, behind every process a reason, behind every reason a theory. But rarely do we question why we automatically - nay, mechanically - submit to such theories.

I quote one of his lectures at Gifford titled, The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought 2001:

As soon as we decide to put in historical and philosophical perspective any key problems of Islamic thought, we are confronted with all the difficulties inherent in the historical gap that separates the Islamic from the European frames of thought. These two adjectives, ‘Islamic’ and ‘European’ already contain a gap that is not only temporal but, more substantially, notional and cognitive. On the one hand, any cognitive statement must create for itself a place in a connotative and conceptual network strongly marked by the categorizations and the semantic structure of the religious discourse. On the other hand, we are sent back to a trajectory and procedures of thought enriched uninterruptedly from classical Greece and Rome legacy down to the present day by an intense educative dialectic between what I would call the rights of critical, independent reason which claims intellectual responsibility and those of religious reason, commanded by dogmatic postulates, principles and foundations.

I am likely to encounter Professor Arkoun's work, and the implications of his work, in my future classes. Moreso, I am likely to encounter him in the ways that I learn to learn.

May God rest Mohammed Arkoun's soul in eternal peace. Amen.

Carpe diem,
ak