Averroes, Kant and the origins of the Enlightenment : reason and revelation in Arab thought

289 Pages·2014·1.88 MB·English

by  Al Tamamy

Saud M. S. Al Tamamy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at King
Saud University (KSU), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He holds a PhD in Political
Theory from the University of Exeter, UK.

AVERROES, KANT AND
THE ORIGINS OF THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
Reason and Revelation in Arab Thought
saud m. s. al tamamy
Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
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Copyright © 2014 Saud M. S. Al Tamamy
The right of Saud M. S. Al Tamamy to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
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Library of Middle East History 46
ISBN 978 1 78076 570 9
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To my family:
Asma, my wife
Sara and Nora, my new-born daughters,
the hope of the future
To my big family:
The people of Saudi Arabia

CONTENTS
Introduction: Averroes and the Enlightenment 1
1 The state of the debate: Enlightenment in
contemporary Arab thought 21
2 Revelation and reason, and politics: Averroes’ account 61
3 Revelation and reason, and politics, in the Enlightenment:
Kant’s account 99
4 General comparison: Outlining the philosophical
projects of Averroes and Kant 153
5 Mutual dependency or supreme rationality?
Reason and revelation in Averroes and Kant 173
6 Conclusion: Searching for enlightenment 199
Notes 209
Bibliography 257
Index 267

INTRODUCTION
Averroes and the Enlightenment
Since the nineteenth century, Arab and Islamic scholars have devoted
countless hours to a single, traumatic question: how is the Arab-Islamic
world to overcome its failure to confront the dominance of Western
economic and military power? Within this question – which is both the
focus of this book and the reason for its being written – lie many more.
The problem is onion-layered: why is Arab-Islamic society characterized
by political oppression, socio-economic inequality, poor standards of
education and healthcare, and the dominance of religious and sectarian
fundamentalism? Is this failure inherent in the cultural heritage of the
Arab-Islamic world, or contingent on specific forces of repression and
regression? And if the Arab-Islamic world is to awaken to a brighter
future, must its rich heritage of philosophy, jurisprudence and literature
be jettisoned in an attempt to emulate the West?
Consideration of this question and its subsidiaries leads, inevitably, to
the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century European and North American
movement that united philosophers, poets and revolutionaries in opposing
the dogmatic forces of the Church and the state while privileging reason
and the rights of the individual. This movement created a paradigm shift
that forever transformed the entire basis of public, political, social and
intellectual life in the Western world. In comparing and contrasting the
Western and Arab-Islamic worlds, the question then becomes, why has
the Arab-Islamic world not yet experienced such a paradigm shift – an
Enlightenment of its own: an Arab enlightenment?
Once again, we return to the question of the shared cultural heritage
of the Arab-Islamic world. We no longer deal in such crude essentialisms
as a ‘national character’ or ‘essential Arab’, but any modern definition of
an individual must give primacy to the cultural context – the discourses,
laws, history – within which they are born and raised. It is not ‘a question