Analysis of Muhammad Abed al-Jaberi in the Kalami Critique of Religious Heritage

The cause of the Islamic societies retardation in comparison to the western societies, according to al-Jaberi, is irrational view to the world. Therefore, the realization of progress in the Arabic-Islamic thought needs a rational scheme in all the theoretical issues. The essential characteristic of such rationality is critique which begins with the critique of the theoretical instruments and heritage ruling the Arabic culture that is reason. But al-Jaberi’s definition of reason is based on a positivist attitude which the unseen and revealed knowledge has no way to this realm and he is ignorant of the notion of reason latent in the Islamic heritage. He regards the Arabic reason as the same physics of the Arabic text and considers the retardation of civilization in the Arabic culture in relation of the contemporary Arabic language with atmosphere current in the pre-Islamic (Djāhilī) and the relation of Qur’an to that atmosphere. He ignored the difference between the epistemology of Arabic-Islamic sciences and the natural and experimental sciences that are two different realms in nature of subject and method. By structure critique, al-Jaberi categorized the rational system in three systems of explaining, argument and mysticism and divided reason into three parts; while the realms of Jurisprudence, Kalam, mysticism and philosophy are various manifests of this reason and al-Jaberi ignored the single and organic structure of this reason.