Mohammed Arkoun on the Status and Tasks of the Intellectual in Islamic Contexts

The article deals with the views of French-Algerian thinker and Islamic scholar Mohammed Arkoun on the task and status of the Intellectual in the modern islamic contexts. The goal of the article is explication of the concept of “intellectual in Islamic contexts”. To accomplish the goal of the research the following methodological steps were taken: 1) analysis and representation of the views of Franco-Algerian researcher concerning the phenomenon of the intellectual as such; 2) consideration of the notion of “Islamic intellectual field”; 3) hermeneutic analysis of the concept of “getting out from the dogmatic closure”; 4) investigation of the connections of Arkoun’s original concepts with common philosophical context of European and Arab-Islamic philosophies.
According to M. Arkoun, the Intellectual represents such an extraordinary social actor, who has the ability to use Reason in its proper sense (in Kantian sense), i.e. to overcome all the limits of thinking and consciousness drawn by the power of the dominant discourse. Franco-Algerian thinker named such overcoming as “the overcoming of dogmatic closures”. According to Arkoun, the Intellectuals nowadays are especially needed for the Islamic intellectual field. Arkoun believed that the reference point for contemporary Islamic intellectuals should be the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition.