La controverse al-Ǧābirī–Ṭarābīšī: les modernistes arabes sous l’emprise du turāṯ: La controversia al-Ŷābirī–Ṭarābīšī: los modernistas árabes en las garras del <em>turāṯ</em>

Abstract

Between the 1980s and 2000s, a controversy arose between the Moroccan philosopher Muḥammad ‘Ābid al-Jābirī (1935-2010) and the Syrian thinker Georges Ṭarābīshī (1939-2016), two influential Arab modernists belonging to the same intellectual family. This polemic, which revolved around the root causes of (what both of them call) intellectual “decline” in the contemporary Arab world, developed in the wake of Ṭarābīshī’s calling into question of al-Jābirī’s research methods. Over the years, it gave rise to several works by the Syrian intellectual criticizing his colleague’s theory and formulating his own. The present article represents a study of thiscontroversy; it offers firstly a comparative analysis of the crossed paths and respective intellectual projects of these two Arab thinkers of the same generation. It eventually aims to explore, through the controversy, their different readings of turāth, or Arab-Islamic cultural heritage, and the epistemological and ideological foundations underlying their theories of modernization of Arab-Islamic thought. This research reveals the weight exerted by European Orientalist pedagogy especially on al-Jābirī’s project. The latter, in turn, imposes rather indirectly these same methods on his critic.