Rethinking Islam

The Islamic scholar and commentator Mohammed Arkoun is a product of Islamic culture, but is also in many ways at odds with the Islamic establishment and militant Islamist groups. At the same time, whilst he is a student of 20th-century social science in the West and an admirer of liberalism, as a thinker he consciously distances himself from western orientalists and western understanding of liberalism. In this work Arkoun applies contemporary thinking about anthropology, philosophy, semiotics, history and sociology to the Islamic tradition and its relationship to the West. Presented as the author's answers to 24 deceptively simple questions about Islam, the book explores the identity crisis that has left many Muslims estranged both from an alien modernity and a tradition often subverted for nationalist and Islamist purposes.