This paper provides a critical analysis of Taha Abderrahmane’s intellectual project across 6
sections, each of which concludes with a critique highlighting the contradictions
in each ideas and the political motives behind them. The study begins by identifying the five basic
assumptions upon which Abderrahmane built his intellectual project and defining
the nature of his methodology and its seven pillars. It then examines the
relationship between religion and politics in his project, focusing on how
politics has been religionized or religion politicized, and the similarities
between them in favour of the religion of righteousness. The third section
discusses the relationship between religion and ethics, exploring how ethics
has been religionized or religion moralized, turning ethics into merely a
school of mysticism. The fourth section inspects the political role of
mysticism. It demonstrates how the project relies on “mystical poles” to
correct the relationship between Muslims and their religion, in contrast to the
role assigned to jurists by the Muslim Brotherhood and Sufis, despite agreement
on the centrality of the “mediator” concept, which Islam opposes. The fifth
section deals with “the enslavement of logic to religious sciences,” and the
contradictions that plague Abderrahmane’s use of logic and methods. The final section
dwells on Abderrahmane’s contradictions
regarding Western modernity, noting that his critique plays between what is and
what should be, and is derived from modernity’s own critique of itself rather
than from an authentic application of his religious doctrine to Western
modernity (as he claims).