Since the earliest period of Islamic history, Arab thought has been dominated by a reverence for tradition and textual analysis. In this groundbreaking work, the great contemporary Arab philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri seeks to chart a route towards modernity via the proposition that respect for textualism and tradition are not inconsistent with rationalism and that both history and philosophy are key to the evolution of knowledge systems and ways of reasoning in Arab culture. This book has been an enormous influence within the Arab world on the Islam and modernity discourse. It is...