Deconstructing Arab Epistemological Dependency

Abstract

In the past fifty years such projects that have deconstructed contemporary Arab epistemological dependency have given rise to a great deal of discussion. Deconsructing contemporary Arab epistemological dependency involves taking on a project to critically assess a noteworthy group of Arabic writings, evaluating or refuting their main theses. The findings of such projects have often been criticized, and criticism falls into two categories. The first is an assumption that the intellectual starts out reading texts from a preset position informed by a particular ideology, and therefore reads set of texts in a particular way. The second assumption is that the intellectual makes use of concepts and methodological frameworks developed by modern Western thought, and does not re-create frameworks according to the requirements of his or her own consideration of the matter at hand. Such criticism, however, should not lose sight of the positive results achieved by these deconstructionist projects, for they produced important debates regarding the reflection of Arab thought upon itself, and justified posing important questions of the relationship of text to the moment of reading the text. This study turns to two instances where such questions were asked: the inter-related formulations: heritage and renewal; and authenticity and contemporaneity.