An analysis of Arab identity formation in the Islamic world A critique on Abed al-Jabari's methodology

Mohammad Abed Al-Jabari is searching for the roots by presenting a macro-narrative of the identity of the Arabs, and in order to find the roots of the decline of the Arab world, he methodically searches for the starting point of the excellence and decline of the Arab-Islamic civilization, in the era he calls "Tadwin". In his intellectual project, which he calls the critique of Arabic reason, Jabri also pays attention to the development of thought in the East of Islamic civilization, and ironically, he considers the causes of backwardness in the roots of the philosophies of the unreasonable religious and eclectic systems of the Arab East (Iran). The problem here is, in what way did he advance the project of criticizing the Arabic intellect? The purpose of this research is to systematically and accurately study the intellectual project of this thinker and analyze and evaluate his methodology in organizing the project of criticizing the Arabic intellect. The article tries to systematically extract the content of Abed al-Jabari's thoughts in the conceptual framework of structuralist linguistics, especially from the viewpoint of Mikhail Bakhtin, regarding issues such as Jabri's identification of the fundamental problematic of the contemporary Islamic world, his conceptualization of "intellect" and "heritage" and also the methodical extraction of form Linguistic-logical aspects of his thoughts, especially his way of reasoning and methodology in organizing his intellectual narratives. As a conclusion, this research shows the reader that Abed al-Jabari, as a modernist thinker, has his own special method in his intellectual project for modernization in Islam, which can be called "Structured Sharia". As a structuralist thinker, Jabri goes beyond the existing data in different fields such as politics, ethics, philosophy, etc. and shows what fixed structures (logical-linguistic structures) are hidden behind these visible variations that made these variations possible. Is. The great absence of this view is the lack of attention to "meaning". Structuralists substitute symbols for meaning and do not pay attention to how symbols convey what meaning. Structuralists, including Jabri, ignore what appeals to many cultural researchers: how do people understand and interpret their world? Considering this importance, what this thinker accomplished in his combined methodology 1. Sociological investigation of the formation process of the Arab intellect 2. Analysis of the "structuring process of the Arab intellect" based on social factors and cultural trends influencing the formulation of the order of Arab culture or intellect 3. The epistemological examination of the internal logic of Arab reason is to analyze its internal elements and relationships and its impact on the two specific realms of politics and ethics.