The Place of Truth in Religious Epistemology."A study of Mohammed Arkoun's attempt on Islamic mind"

Abstract

This study, and form a philosophical aspect, tries to attempt the issue of truth, its criteria, and its identifying systems; nevertheless in the religious epistemology. It showed that truth is contingent on its history, which entails the historicism of such truth producing mind. Truth, as such, is integrated in the processes of change and transformation that affects ideas, morals, and institutions in a way that no belief or intellectual approach can claim to itself the origin or the total ownership of truth. This study, and form a philosophical aspect, tries to attempt the issue of truth, its criteria, and its identifying systems; nevertheless in the religious epistemology. It showed that truth is contingent on its history, which entails the historicism of such truth producing mind. Truth, as such, is integrated in the processes of change and transformation that affects ideas, morals, and institutions in a way that no belief or intellectual approach can claim to itself the origin or the total ownership of truth. The study aspired to analyse the starting points put forth by Mohammed Arkoun in his attempt on the issue of truth as it appears in the epistemological system of Islamic thoughts. It, also, highlighted the intellectually critical and methodological approach adopted by Arkoun in his critique of absolute ideation of truth in the Islamic thoughts, and the ability of getting such truth from the Quranic script. Arkoun, always, aimed to explain that every truth is relative and historical, and this applies to all religious discourse including the Islamic religious discourse.