The Crisis of Muslim Religious Discourse:
The Necessary Shift from Plato to Kant

By Lahouari Addi

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: September 25, 2023

Showing that Muslim societies are facing a crisis that is more cultural than religious, this book focuses on cultural representations through which social life is experienced in the Muslim world. It brings a new theoretical framework to address the secularization process that is underway and the contradictions it entails.

This volume will arouse a new debate on secularization and the relations between religion, culture and philosophy. The crisis Muslim societies are undergoing pertains to the culture and not to the Qur’an to the extent that people do not have access to the sacred in itself but only for oneself, meaning a cultural interpretation of the sacred. The Qur’an in itself is not an obstacle to secularization and modernization since any sacred text is experienced through culture. If we consider the European experience where secularization has first emerged, we see that culture has been transformed from medieval metaphysics to modern philosophy upholding a civic culture.

Discussing secularization through cultural representation, this book launches new ideas that fill an important gap in the literature on secularization. It is a key resource for any readers interested in religious studies, philosophy and the anthropology of religion.

Table of Contents

1. Plato and Plotinus in Medieval Abrahamic Theology
2. Islam and the Platonic Dualism
3. From Sufism to Islamism
4. Muhammad Abduh or the Failure of the Epistemic Transition
5. A Positivism Without Human Agency
6. Transcendence, History and Ethics: Contemporary Stakes
7. Shari’a, Fiqh and Muslim Law
8. Europe, Islam and Secularization

About the Author

Lahouari Addi is Professor Emeritus at Sciences Po, University of Lyon, and a member of the research center Triangle CNRS. Former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2002-2003). Professor Addi’s current research focuses on Muslim Law in the light of Moral Philosophy. Author of Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam (2017).

More information on: Routledge

The workshop discussed the epistemic condition in modernity in regard to contemporary Muslim thought. As its point of departure it took a comprehensive thesis by Lahouari Addi that appeared recently in a book “Crises of the Muslim religious discourse. The necessity to pass from Platon to Kant” (Louvain 2019). L. Addi joins both the debates about both the crisis of modern Muslim society in facing modernity (Abdelwahab Meddeb) and texts by and about authors writing in modern hermeneutical and critical perspectives about Islam and philosophy into a larger argument about the epistemic predicament of modernity and the lag of Muslim religious discourse.

The argument was not about Islam as a religion and as about Muslim’s relation to the sacred text, but about the religious discourse produced by religious institutions and Muslim states that informs the culture underlying contemporary religious practice. The argument was that this religious discourse has a metaphysical core that has not epistemically adapted to modernization. It namely remains based both on a sacred text and on metaphysical, cosmological and anthropological assumptions of Late Antiquity, in ways that are often unconscious to those who interpret the Text with Greek metaphysical notions.

Source: The Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences