A Critical Study of Muhammad Abed al-Jaberi's View on Shiism

To find the roots and causes of backwardness of Arab World، al-Jaberi has examined and criticized the religious discourses and their epistemic elements، and found the starting point of the ascension and decline of Arabic-Islamic culture in the age of compilation; the age during which Islamic thoughts have emerged around Qur''an in the form of various systems of Islamic Knowledge (religious intelligible) along with non-Islamic epistemic systems (religious unintelligible). According to al-Jaberi، the inborn religious epistemic systems which have been founded upon religious intelligible are the result of the scientific endeavors of Sunnites، and Shiism just represents the other unintelligible epistemic systems. He also through differentiating Arabic west from Arabic east; opines that the foundations of pure Islamic rationality must be sought for in the western lands of Arabic-Islamic world، and Iran must be seen as the cradle of eclectic philosophies and unintelligible religious systems. To escape from the current intellectual and civilizational decline، al-Jaberi claims that we should leave the ideologies of Arabic east and appeal to the current rationalism in the Arabic west which is a heritage of Averroes. The purpose of the paper is to criticize these aforementioned stands of al-Jaberi، based on the existed cultural and civilizational realities in Islamic World and also by showing his methodological lapses and fallacies.