Photo: Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri

Homages have been paid to Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri, the Moroccan Islamic philosopher, critic and political ideologue for a socialist opposition party, who died in Casablanca this week.

"He was at once an intellectual critic of Arab-Islamic thought, a political man, and the thinker for the Socialist Union of Popular Forces", political commentator Mohammed Tozy told AFP on Tuesday.

"From the basis of his reading of two Arab thinkers, Ibn Khaldun and Averroes, he adopted a critical approach in his analysis of Arab thought", said Mohammed Darif, specialist in Islamic trends in Morocco.

Al-Jabri's thinking focused on the problem of "how to read and reread Arab-Islamic writings without making the facts sacred?", Darif added.

Born in 1935 in Figuig, southeastern Morocco, Al-Jabri studied in Syria and completed his thesis in 1970 on the history of Muslims according to Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406).

Al-Jabri had been a founding member of the Socialist Union of Popular Forces in 1975, and quickly became one of its key thinkers, but he took his distance in the late 1980s.

His two books, "Critique of the Arab Mind" and "Critique of Islamic Reason", marked Arab philosophy for several years.

According to Mohammed Tozy, there were three phases in Al-Jabri's thinking, which began with a close reading of Averroes (1128-1198) and tracing the roots of Arab reason.

He then pursued an encyclopedic reading of the main Arab-Islamic texts, before finally focusing on a "return to the self, dedicated to the study of the Koran, but with a realist, materialist outlook", Tozy said.

Al-Jabri published his last book on the Koran in 2007, in which he dissected the "sacred book" and contextualised the text.

World Philosophy Day paid him tribute in November 2006, alongside American philosopher Hannah Arendt, who died in 1975. AFP