A prophet of civilisation

The voice of prophecy is often considered to be the antithesis of the voice of civilisation. The urgency of the first is nourished in austerity and its authority seems as elemental as wind or fire. The reflective sophistication of the second, nourished on dishes from every corner of the known world, derives its authority from law, philosophy and the arts and sciences, themselves carried by long caravans of learning across vast tracts of land, ocean and time.

However, for Mohammed Arkoun, the important French-Algerian thinker who died two weeks ago, there was no necessary incompatibility. It was his life’s work – most of it carried out at the Sorbonne – to show that the truths of Islam were falsified when its voices of prophecy, law and reason were heard in isolation from each other and, in turn, divorced from culture. In making his arguments, he illuminated the common terrain shared by Judaism and Christianity and attracted the respect and friendship of such staunch humanists as Jean Daniel, a fellow French-Algerian, of Jewish background, who founded Le Nouvel Observateur.

Partly, his attractiveness had to do with personal charm. His appearance was striking because, unlike many Muslim theologians, he was clean-shaven and with a mane of hair, all silver waves and high crest, that looked impossibly distinguished. There were often several people hovering round him during conference coffee breaks, but he could make each snatched conversation seem like a real tête-à-tête. And he had an impish sense of humour.

He could also be a riveting seminar performer. I remember one hot afternoon, seated beside him, after too good a lunch. As the speakers droned on, I felt like the fly that Dickens described in Hard Times, staggering drowsily on a sunny windowsill under the weight of the sugar it had overeaten. In my stupor I longed to be swatted.

Then Arkoun began to speak. At first my attention was transfixed by his lower lip: Full and fleshy it was nonetheless remarkably agile, curling and quivering with Gallic disdain as he described a politically bleak moment in the history of mediaeval Arab thought, then unrolling back lightly into a smile. But having first started to follow the motions, the words began to sink in. I still credit his intervention with changing my understanding of the interplay between philosophy, history and sociology.

In an age where there has been no shortage of Muslim thinkers eager to show how Islam has been misunderstood by its own adherents, he was truly original.

By the second half of the 20th century, the intellectual and political ferment associated with the 19th century’s Arab renaissance, the “Nahda”, had reached a critical moment. Independence had been achieved and there was a wide range of critiques of traditional society, each fingering culprits and indicating solutions, from determinedly liberal and Marxist approaches to appeals for religious reform if not revolution.

Revolutions – some real, others merely self-declared – spread across the Arab world. In Arkoun’s native Algeria, the revolution was real and, for a time, cosmopolitan, exercising an influence on Third World movements everywhere. A certain modernising impulse was shared by zealous secularists and fundamentalists alike. Both were agreed that the cobwebs of tradition, vestiges of superstition and paganism, needed to be swept aside; a common motif in the Arab world as elsewhere till today.

Arkoun stood apart from this – in one sense literally, as from the 1960s he was based in Paris. He had a masterly command of Arabic and wrote an important primer (in French) on the history of Arab thought; but he was a Berber from Kabylia, not Arab. He was capable of separating, as many others could not, the religious experience of Islam from its major carrier, Arabic. And he began to use the latest discoveries in French linguistics to undertake an unusual cultural and historical analysis.

He also refused to go along with the widespread tendency to regard the Islam practised in the North African countryside (including the mountain region where he was raised) as heterodox at best. He had warm memories of the democratic councils run by the village elders as well as of religion practised in an oral culture, exercising the power of myth and wisdom, not law. He could see that the modernising impulse was denying lived religious experience in name of literacy, and eagerly drew on the disciplines of anthropology, semiotics and modern historiography to show what was being lost.

In this, he was not being nostalgic or folkloristic. He was insisting that the best tools of scholarship should be used to scrutinise organised power as well as religion. The struggle between the creation of meaning and power was his chosen theme.

He understood thought to involve all the senses. His point was that Islam had never really been thought through as all attempts were hobbled by a desiccated understanding of thinking and experience. He was accused of trying to secularise religion but he was trying to do more than just show how human beings spin Revelation. He wanted to show how prophetic truth grows on them.

He could not have paid such tribute to prophecy without the luxury of living in civilisation. Nor could he have illuminated Islamic civilisation – and, by extension, the Christian one – without the accomplishments of the Enlightenment. Indeed, one of the questions raised by the life-work of this cosmopolitan man is whether we should talk of civilisations as Islamic, Christian or Confucian, or only in the singular – as human civilisation.

ranierfsadni@europe.com