A Comparative Critical Analysis of Jabri’s Arabic Reason and Arkoun’s Islamic Reason, and their Political Implications

Some intellectuals in the Islamic world seek to homogenize the tradition and modernity by purifying the former and providing a governmental model that fits modern life and is based on the tradition. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Mohammed Arkoun, two intellectuals of the Islamic world, have conceptualize the issue, respectively, as Arabic reason and Islamic reason. The question is why Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Mohammed Arkoun have talked about two different notions of reason—Arabic and Islamic—in the face of the rationality constructed from the Islamic tradition, and how such duality would affect the political and its governmental exemplification. The hypothesis of the present research is that Mohammed Abed al-Jabri sees the tradition in the cultural framework and identity elements such as language, social structures, and power relations within the Arabic society, while Arkoun sees it in a civilizational background and efforts made by ethnicities, cultures, and interactions with others, as well as religious authority and its Islamic principles