(Dis)Enchanting modernity: Sufism and its temporality in the thought of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Taha Abdurrahman Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed

Abstract

This article analyses the place of Sufism in the thought of two prominent Moroccan philosophers, Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1935-2010) and Taha Abdurrahman (b. 1944), and investigates how it constitutes, in diametrically opposing ways, a core element of their vision regarding modern Islamic rationality. It explores how the reformative impulse in both their projects is guided by different understandings of the demands of modernity on Arabic Islamic culture. The interpretations of these demands range, on the one hand, from al-Jabri's imperative of disenchanting Islamic reason to, on the other, Abdurrahman's call to reinvigorate its spiritual and ethical dimensions. This article first explores the authors' treatments of Arabic Islamic cultural time and its relation to the global temporality of capitalist modernity. It then investigates how their contrasted understandings of the demands of modernity condition their positions on the mystical tradition of Islam, its internal forms of thinking time, and its desired/undesired place in modernity.