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Lafif Lakhdar
How will religious reform – by means of teaching and studying Islam via comparative religious phenomenology, philosophy and the Rights of Man – make of the Muslim an individual open to the ‘Other’?
By promoting the study of religions in the school and the university.
There is little doubt that womankind has suffered from oppression, persecution, domination, servitude and exploitation in all its various shapes and forms. Many of her rights have historically been ignored both in law and in practice. And this despite the fact that among the 282 Laws of Hammurabi, 92 were specific to women and included the right to buy and sell, to own goods, to trade, inherit and bequeath property.
In Arabic culture there is a commonly used phrase: “Even the whole Earth cannot change my word,”
Let us now pause a little and consider the great intellectual movement that influenced Arab Islamic thought for a number of centuries before such time as this, and intellect and reason, were entirely crushed by the Hanbalīs: the Muʽtazila school. Arkoun sees that there are two main premises that should guide our view when we consider the study of this famous intellectual movement in the history of Islam.
