Redirecting postcolonial theory : Arab-Islamic reason, deconstructionism, and the possibility of multiple critique

Abstract EN

This article makes three central claims.

First, it explores the extent to which critical revisions done on pre-colonial Arabic and Islamic Humanities by Mohamed al-Jābirī and Mohamed Arkoun may respond to a process of re-envisioning non-Western Humanities as part of the pedagogical and political concerns of postcolonial theory.

Moving into Arkoun’s hermeneutic act of shattering the traditional boundaries of revelation, the second line of argumentation reinserts deconstructionism, seen as a nexus in interdisciplinary discourse between postcolonial theory and Arab-Islamic critique.

The article concludes that reorienting an alternative notional framework for a sub-field across these two disengaged disciplines must compel a move towards “multiple critique.” The latter meshes the study of the Islamicate worlds and the analysis of their interconnected Western lineages by augmenting inquiries concerning medieval classical knowledges, while sustaining a theoretical resistance to Western ethnocentric Orientalism.