Falsafa, Tajdīd, and the Primacy of the Ethical II

Taha Abderrahmane, “Al-Faylasūf Ṭāhā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān: Sīrah Fikriyya | Būdkāst al-Sharq,” Al Sharq Youth, YouTube video, November 20, 2024, youtube.com.

For a complimentary and more academic biographical-intellectual sketch of Taha Abderrahmane’s life, see the introduction in Mohammed Hashas, “The Trusteeship Paradigm: The Formation and Reception of a Philosophy,” in Islamic Ethics and the Trusteeship Paradigm (Brill, 2020), 37–61. Aqil Azme’s notes accompanying a translation (in subtitles) of the same interview that is the focus of the present article—published independently after the first draft of this piece was complete—are also insightful. See Taha Abderrahmane, interview by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Nāṣir for al-Sharq Podcast, “Taha Abderrahmane: Philosophy, Language, Ethics, and the Renewal of the Islamic Tradition,” posted May 2, 2025, by ʿAqil Azme, YouTube, youtube.com.

Taha Abderrahmane, Fiqh al-falsafa 1: al-Falsafa wa-l-tarjama (The understanding of philosophy, vol. 1: Philosophy and translation) (al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 1995); Fiqh al-falsafa 2: al-Qawl al-falsafī (Vol. 2: On philosophical discourse) (al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 1999). The two-volume series argues that genuine engagement with philosophy demands a rigorous internal comprehension rather than imitation of Greek or Western models. Abderrahmane contends that the Arab-Islamic tradition possesses its own philosophical genius, recoverable only through its own methodological resources. Taha Abderrahmane, Suʾāl al-akhlāq: Musāhama fī al-naqd al-akhlāqī li-l-ḥadātha al-gharbiyya (The question of ethics: A contribution to the moral critique of Western modernity) (al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2000) mounts a sustained critique of Western ethical theory, particularly its Enlightenment foundations, arguing that by privileging autonomy and rationality, Western modernity severs ethics from its necessary grounding in religious consciousness. Against this, Abderrahmane advances the thesis that the human being is, before all else, a moral agent—and that morality cannot be meaningfully sustained without religion. For an extended engagement with the work’s argument, see Wael B. Hallaq, Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha (Columbia University Press, 2019).

Taha Abderrahmane, Tajdīd al-manhaj fī taqwīm al-turāth (Renewing the method in evaluating the tradition) (al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 1994) develops a sustained critique of the methodology of Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī, rejecting what Abderrahmane characterises as a “fragmentary” (tajzīʾī) reading of the intellectual tradition in favor of a “holistic” (takāmulī) one. Its central methodological claim—that tradition must be evaluated through mechanisms internal to it (āliyāt maʾṣūla) rather than through imported frameworks (āliyāt manqūla)—is foundational to his broader philosophical project.

Taha Abderrahmane identifies the spirit of modernity with universal ethical values—justice, truthfulness, trust, dignity, mercy—that constitute the moral telos of all human civilization. Any particular historical application inflects these values through its own traditions and cultures. The defining principles of secular Western modernity, for instance, are identified as maturity (rushd), criticism (naqd), and universality (shumūliyya). These are procedural principles that in origin are motivated by, and aim at, the universal values. However, Western modernity becomes ethically distorted when these principles are detached from their value foundations, leading to autonomy without justice, critique without truth, and universality without mercy. Islamic modernity, in turn, involves recovering the universal ethical values inflected through Islamic revelation and tradition. It is not a replication of Western models, but a renewal (tajdīd) rooted in the ethical and spiritual foundations of Islam, developing indigenous concepts and practices, and realizing a rationality that serves ethical action rather than dominating it. See Taha Abderrahmane, Rūḥ al-ḥadātha: Naḥwa al-taʾsīs li-ḥadātha Islāmiyya (The spirit of modernity: An introduction to founding an Islamic modernity] (al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2006).

Taha’s conceptualization of modernity sits in notable tension with his philosophy of language, whereby philosophical concepts are culturally embedded in the traditions that generate them, and where “the assumption of universality occludes crucial nuances.” Yet his modernity project is organized around the term ḥadātha—an Arabization of a distinctly Western self-description of a specific historical rupture, carrying embedded assumptions about linear temporality, the progressive break from tradition, and the normative valorization of the “new.” While he identifies tajdīd as the appropriate term for Islamic renewal, the universal orientation toward renewal he identifies across all civilizations is organized under ḥadātha rather than tajdīd. Taha is not unaware of this. He classifies ḥadātha as a manqūl (imported) rather than maʾṣūl (rooted) concept, but argues that imported concepts subjected to “confirmational critique” (al-naqd al-ithbātī)—whereby their underlying logic is stripped of foreign pathologies and verified through indigenous mechanisms—can become akin to a rooted concept. He further retains ḥadātha on strategic grounds: Muslim thought is enmeshed in a pervasive tīh fikrī (intellectual maze) generated by Western conceptual dominance, and engaging that maze requires working within its own language. Both justifications are substantive. Yet the tension remains: His own illustration of the dangers of conceptual borrowing—the wujūd/existence case, where Muslim philosophers attempted to re-root a Greek concept in Arabic semantic fields, producing “confusion and internal contradictions”—raises the question of whether al-naqd al-ithbātī can fully neutralize ḥadātha’s embedded assumptions. On his own terms, a concept’s genealogy is not easily evacuated by methodological procedure alone. See Part 1 for his philosophy of language: hashiya.org.

Taha Abderrahmane gives the example of Heidegger here: “Heidegger’s writings, especially his later work on language and spiritual purity, are imbued with meanings inherited from religious and mystical traditions. In fact, when reading his philosophy of language, one notices that he uses expressions and concepts nearly identical to those found among the Sufis. In my view, Heidegger was a believer without openly admitting it—at least outwardly. I even suspect that he knew this inwardly but chose not to declare it, given how clearly his thought reflects spiritual intuitions.” The question of Heidegger’s relationship to religious belief is extensively debated in the scholarly literature. His later work—with its resonances of Meister Eckhart, its language of Gelassenheit (releasement), and its evocations of the holy, the gods, and the divine—has often been read in quasi mystical, post-theological, or “poetic-religious” terms, though not as a straightforward affirmation of doctrinal belief. See John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Fordham University Press, 1986); and Ben Vedder, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion: From God to the Gods (Duquesne University Press, 2007).

The debt of Kant’s moral philosophy to Protestant Pietism is widely discussed, though its precise nature remains debated. Among the most important influences on Kant’s understanding of religion was his experience of Pietism, a reform movement within German Lutheranism that required a deep personal devotion, exacting self-examination, and a scrupulous moral outlook. The structural resonances between Pietist inwardness and Kant’s concept of the morally pure will—in which the value of an action derives entirely from the agent’s inner disposition rather than its consequences—are extensively documented in J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Zdravko Kobe, “Reason Reborn: Pietistic Motifs in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Problemi International 2, no. 2 (2018): 57–88.

Taha Abderrahmane, Dīn al-ḥayāʾ: Min al-naqd al-iʾtimārī ilā al-naqd al-iʾtimānī, Vol. 2/3: al-Taḥaddiyāt al-akhlāqiyya li-thawrat al-iʿlām wa-l-ittiṣāl (The religion of modesty: From imperative critique to trusteeship critique, vol. 2/3: Ethical challenges to the revolution of media and communication) (al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Fikr wa-l-Ibdāʿ, 2017). The work forms part of a three-volume series examining contemporary ethical challenges through the lens of Taha’s iʾtimāniyya (trusteeship) paradigm. This volume addresses specifically the ethical disruptions generated by the modern media and communications revolution, interrogating them from within the Islamic moral framework rather than through secular critical theory.

Taha Abderrahmane, Thughūr al-murābaṭa: Muqāraba iʾtimāniyya li-ṣirāʿāt al-umma al-ḥāliyya (Frontier posts of resistance: A trusteeship approach to the current struggles of the umma] (Maghareb Center for Civilizational Studies, 2018). For an annotated English translation of the first chapter of this work, see Taha Abderrahmane, “The Jerusalemite Murābaṭa: On the Frontier of the Islamic-Israeli Conflict,” trans. Monir Birouk, ed. Mohammed El-Sayed Bushra, Ummatics, March 3, 2025, ummatics.org.

The concept of al-sharr al-muṭlaq (absolute evil) is introduced in Thughūr al-Murābaṭa (2018), where the Israeli occupation of Palestine is described as resembling absolute evil in its operations, and has been elaborated in Taha’s subsequent lectures and writings. His account identifies al-sharr al-muṭlaq as a form of evil from which all lesser evils derive, distinguished by its aim not merely to maximize physical suffering but to violate fiṭra (innate human nature)—the primordial vessel of human values—across three registers: the desecration of human dignity, the denial of the sanctity of place, and the corruption of collective moral memory. Its defining feature, on Taha’s account, is its capacity for self-concealment—disguising itself as good within dominant public discourse, thereby generating pervasive moral confusion.

Sunan al-Bayhaqī, no. 20782; Musnad Aḥmad, no. 8952; Mustadrak Ḥākim, no. 4221.

Taha Abderrahmane, Rūḥ al-dīn: Min ḍīq al-ʿilmāniyya ilā siʿat al-iʾtimāniyya (The spirit of religion: From the narrowness of secularism to the capaciousness of trusteeship) (al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, 2012) mounts a simultaneous critique of Western secularism and political Islamism, approaching the religion-politics relationship through what Taha describes as a “spiritual” method that the secularist has forgotten and the Islamist has shirked. Its central argument turns on the human being’s constitutive “dual existence” (muzdawij al-wujūd)—a seen and an unseen dimension—and proposes iʾtimāniyya (trusteeship) as the appropriate framework for political and ethical life. For an extended engagement with the work, see Hallaq, Reforming Modernity, chapter 6, pp. 205–56.