Critique of the Theory of the Critique of the Arab Mind

The theory of the Critique of the Arab Mind emerges from an epistemological approach to the issue of the backwardness of the Muslim world. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri in his two works, The Formation of Arab Reason, and The Structure of Arab Reason (vols. 1 and 2 of Critique de la Raison Arabe) discusses the genesis and the presence, the approach and the method, the political and geographical proliferation of cognitive systems-in particular literalist, mystical, and philosophical/logical. In explaining how these systems interact with one another, he reaches the conclusion that the innate incompatibility of the aforementioned systems and the eventual defeat of the philosophical system has led to the formation of Arab reason-an uncreative reason that is utterly unable to produce original thought. Al-Jabri holds that the way out of this situation is to reconstruct the philosophy of Averroes, the Fundamentals of Abu Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī, a teleological system of Law, and the history of Ibn Khaldun. Some of the most important criticisms of Al-Jabri’s thought are: taking a secular approach, believing that religion is silent on worldly affairs, ignoring mystical intuition as one of the sources of knowledge, holding to the innate incompatibility of cognitive systems, not observing intellectual unbiasedness, having a biased method, taking an epistemological conclusion from historical evidence, holding Islamic mysticism to be a non-Islamic import and a form of escapism, and calling philosophy an ‘ideology’