Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (Arabic:محمد عابد الجابري,romanized: Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī; 27 December 1935 – 3 May 2010) was one of the best known Moroccan and Arab philosophers; he taughtphilosophy, Arab philosophy, andIslamic thought inMohammed V University inRabat from the late 1960s until his retirement. He is considered one of the major philosophers and intellectual figures in the modern and contemporary Arab world.[1] He is known for his academic project "Critique of Arab Reason", published in four volumes between the 1980s and 2000s. He published several influential books on the Arab philosophical tradition.[2]
He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from theUniversity of Mohammed V in 1967. He also obtained a PhD in philosophy from the same university in 1970.[5][7] His master's thesis was on the philosophy of history inIbn Khaldun and his doctoral dissertation was also on Ibn Khaldun.[3] He died inCasablanca on 3 May 2010.[8]
Jabri was a "fervent advocate" forArabization. In his eyes, bothBerber languages andcolloquial Arabic were inadequate as serving as a national unifier. Jabri went as far as advocating for thecomplete destruction of Berber languages and he advocated for their banning from schools, radio and television:[4]
The complete purging of French as a language of civilization, culture, and communication, and the extermination of Amazigh and Arabic dialects should be the ultimate goal of the Arabization process, and this goal will not be attained unless actions are put in place to generalize and to focus education in far-flung rural and mountainous regions, and classical Arabic must be the only language to be employed in schools, in television and radio programming, and a comprehensive prohibition must be enforced on the use of any other language or dialect in these domains.[9]
Al-Jabri, Muhammad Abed (1995).Mas'alat al-Huwiyya: al-ʿUrūba wa-al-Islām wa-al-Gharb (مسألة الهوية: العروبة والإسلام والغرب) [The Issue of Identity: Arabism, Islam and the West]. Center for Arab Unity Studies.
Al-Jabri, Muhammad Abed (1998).Ibn Rushd: Sīra wa-Fikr (ابن رشد: سيرة وفكر) [Ibn Rushd: life and thought]. Center for Arab Unity Studies.
al-Jabri, Muhammad Abed (January 1999).Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique. Translated by Abbassi, Aziz. Center for Middle Eastern Studies; University of Texas Press.ISBN0-292-70480-1.
al-Jabri, Muhammad Abed (2008).Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought. I. B. Tauris.ISBN978-1845117498.
al-Jabri, Muhammad Abed (2010).The Formation of Arab Reason: Text, Tradition and the Construction of Modernity in the Arab World. I. B. Tauris.ISBN978-1848850613.
Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi:Towards a Critical Arab Reason - the Contributions of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri
Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History. London, Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2004.ISBN0-7453-2169-0ISBN0-7453-2170-4 PP. 256–278.
