Critique of Taha Abderrahmane’s Philosophy of Trustworthiness: The Interplay of Politics, Religion, Ethics, and Modernity

Abstract

This paper provides a critical analysis of Taha Abderrahmane ’s intellectual project across 6 sections, each of which concludes with a critique highlighting the contradictions in each ideas and the political motives behind them. The study begins by identifying the five basic assumptions upon which Abderrahmane built his intellectual project and defining the nature of his methodology and its seven pillars. It then examines the relationship between religion and politics in his project, focusing on how politics has been religionized or religion politicized, and the similarities between them in favour of the religion of righteousness. The third section discusses the relationship between religion and ethics, exploring how ethics has been religionized or religion moralized, turning ethics into merely a school of mysticism. The fourth section inspects the political role of mysticism. It demonstrates how the project relies on “mystical poles” to correct the relationship between Muslims and their religion, in contrast to the role assigned to jurists by the Muslim Brotherhood and Sufis, despite agreement on the centrality of the “mediator” concept, which Islam opposes. The fifth section deals with “the enslavement of logic to religious sciences,” and the contradictions that plague Abderrahmane’s use of logic and methods. The final section dwells on Abderrahmane’s contradictions regarding Western modernity, noting that his critique plays between what is and what should be, and is derived from modernity’s own critique of itself rather than from an authentic application of his religious doctrine to Western modernity (as he claims).