Critical Presentation of Mohammad Arkoun's Islamic Reason and Comparative Studying of Islam

The Arkon's thought has a philosophical, literary, sociological, and historical dimensions influenced by the interdisciplinary atmosphere of modern, and more, post-modern human sciences. Saussure's semiotics, Foucault's Archaeological and Genealogy, and Derrida's deconstruction can be considered as the epistemic bases for his thought. His basic question is to explain the causes of the current backwardness of Islamic societies and the progress of the Western world. According to Arkoun, a modest modernity in the Muslim world was formed by the Mu'tazilite in the fourth century AH and before the formation of Western modernity. Investigating the causes of the failure of Islamic modernization and the emancipation of the Islamic world from the current abnormal situation, he presents the project of "critique of Islamic reason"; a project whose purpose, using the above-mentioned methods of human sciences, is to deal with unthinkable and not-thinking of Islamic heritage in order to boom it. By a critical analysis approach, the present research shows that the application of the critique of Islamic reason, due to the adoption of modernist and postmodernist foundations that contradict Islamic foundations, not only does not lead to the boom and revival of religious science, but the only outcome which is produced is the reconstruction of the Islamic heritage based on Western secularism. The definite consequence for the application of this method in the analysis of Islamic heritage is skepticism, relativity, considering the reason cultural, and double languishment of the tradition.