By MARY-JANE DEEB
Mohamed Arkoun, emeritus professor of Islamic philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, a visiting professor at the Ismaili Studies Institute in London and editor of the academic journal Arabica, spent a week at the Library in October to discuss Islam as both a Western religion and a political tool in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
In an Oct. 10 session with the Madison Council, the Library's private sector advisory group, he said that it is important to reconsider first the concepts of Islam and the West. He suggested that scholars think of writing a "relative history" of the post-World War II period.
The Sept. 11 events, he argued, are part of a series of crises rooted in the postwar history of the Arab world. The war of independence in Algeria (1954-1962), for example, shaped the way Muslims used religion not as a system of belief and thought, but as an ideology of protest and resistance. Today, he maintained, Algeria is still paying the price for the politicization of religion.
Mr. Arkoun suggested that there exists "an anthropological triangle" that includes a disintegration of the Muslim tradition of thought, the use of the Koran as a tool for a liberation struggle and the use of religion by governments as a means of legitimizing their power. Those three elements together have led to today's violence in the Muslim world.
"Islam must be brought back as a tradition of thinking," a tradition that emerged over a thousand years ago in the "Mediterranean space." For Mr. Arkoun, Islam is part of the Greco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian traditions that emerged on the shores of the Mediterranean. He reminded his audience that Muslim scholars revived the works of the Greek philosophers by translating and teaching the works of Aristotle and Plato, and thus contributed to the European Renaissance.
Mr. Arkoun said that there are numerous books on "Islamic fundamentalists" that shed no light whatsoever on Islam. On the contrary, they lead people to think that violence is inherent in Islam. Violence, he argued, is part of human society, and those who believe that theirs is the only "true religion" often resort to violence against people who hold different beliefs.
During a meeting with members of Congress in the Members' Room on Oct. 11, Professor Arkoun discussed the use of Islam as a political instrument and some of the causes behind the rise of Islamic militant movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Sens. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) and Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) and Reps. Charles Taylor (R-N.C.), Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), Rush Holt (D-N.J.), John LaFalce (D-N.Y.) and Tom Petri (R-Wis.) attended.
Later that day, Mr. Arkoun met with members of the Library's Scholars' Council, which was holding its first meeting to advise Dr. Billington on future appointments for five senior chair positions at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library.
The Librarian asked Professor Arkoun to briefly answer one question: "What is the one thing you want Americans to know about Islam?"
Mr. Arkoun responded that Islam is "part of the monotheistic tradition of the divine," that all three monotheistic traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) "were born in the Near East," and that this knowledge should prevent us from conceptually separating Islam from the Western tradition of thought.
A member of the Scholars' Council, Bronislaw Geremek, the former foreign minister of Poland and currently a scholar of medieval European history at the College de France, asked: "If in the Koran there is no contempt for human life, why is it that Muslims today seem to value life so little?"
Professor Arkoun answered that in all religions and civilizations there is a separation between those who belong to the orthodox tradition and those who are outside it. Although the Spanish Inquisitors valued the lives of Catholics as a whole, they did not value the lives of either those Catholics they deemed heretics or of those who belonged to other religious groups. He added that even Aristotle, who upheld the principles of democracy in ancient Greece, accepted the concept of slavery for a conquered people.
On Oct. 12, Professor Arkoun and this writer gave a joint presentation on "The Use and Misuse of Religious Concepts: War and Jihad in Islam."
Professor Arkoun discussed the way "the corpus of religious tradition" we have today was transformed over time. The "divine logos" (the word of God) was transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad and collected into a volume known as the Koran, only after his death. The Koran was not arranged in any chronological order and lacked the basic vowels and diacritical marks that were added later. The hadith, or the Prophet's sayings, which is part of the body of religious materials that make up the Muslim tradition, also were collected and selected after Muhammad's death. Thus, the basic texts in Islam were affected by the people who worked to put them together. In other words, an interpretation of sacred texts took place from the very start of Islam and continued for several centuries.
Then, Mr. Arkoun argued, the realm of interpretation (or ijtihad) was closed. Official bodies such as states decided that those texts would no longer be interpreted. Yet, those interpretations continued because, as Mr. Arkoun put it, "Islam is theologically Protestant and politically Catholic," meaning that while Islam can be interpreted by every person who reads the Koran, the state has put a stop to such interpretations and allowed only one version to be taught and disseminated.
This writer described how Osama Bin Laden had interpreted Koranic text to justify a jihad, or religious war, against the "infidels" in the West. She referred primarily to the videotaped message sent by Bin Laden to the media on Oct. 7, on the first day of the U.S. retaliatory attack on Afghanistan. She talked about the various forms of jihad in Islam, the main one being the struggle against one's own sinfulness. She also described the importance of bin Laden's choice of words, his attempt at depicting Islam's holy shrines as being under siege, implying that Islam itself was under siege and that it was the duty of every Muslim to defend his religion. Finally, she talked about the political significance of the choreography of the Oct. 7 video, in which bin Laden and his associates are seated on the bare rock in fatigues and traditional costume—in sharp contrast to the palatial settings where Muslim heads of state exercise their power. This was meant to appeal to the Muslim masses by identifying with their poverty and plight.
Mohamed Arkoun was a member of the board of the Agha Khan Prize for Architecture (1995-1998) and is himself the recipient of numerous international awards, including the prestigious French decorations of the Officier de la Legion d'Honneur and Officier des Palmes Academiques. He has lectured and taught worldwide and is widely published. His books include L'Islam hier-demain (1978), La pensee arabe (1979), Essais sur la pensee islamique (1983), Lectures du Coran (1991) and Islam, Europe and the West (1996).
Mr. Arkoun's three visits to the Library in the past year have been made possible by a generous grant from Raja Sidawi, a member of the James Madison Council.
Mary-Jane Deeb is an Arab world area specialist in the Library's African and Middle Eastern Division.