First of all let me thank you for your kind words and these paragraphs which you quoted, because they express exactly what I tried to be and what I tried to do for many years, as a professor, a scholar and as a citizen of the Islamic world. All the Islamic world interests me. I am traveling throughout the Muslim world. At the same time I would claim that I am a full citizen of the European community through my French citizenship. This means that I share, totally, two historical solidarities which I cannot separate. I am not looking to one world staying on the other road which I claim to my world. This may be something which relates to the Algerian experience.

Or you can say to my Magrebain experience: Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco. These countries are Mediterranean countries. They share the history of the Mediterranean area as a whole. And the area as a whole has a geo-historical identity which is related at the same time to all what has been developed through history under the name of Greek thinking, Roman culture in the Mediterranean area. If you visit Tunisia, Libya or Algeria you will find a lot of well preserved ruins that you can visit, like you visit ruins in Italy, France, Spain etc. They are there, they have existed for centuries.

This is extremely important to know. It is not well known. And claiming to belong to the history of the Mediterranean area, if we understand by Mediterranean area this whole area stretching from the River Indus and you come to the West, including Iran. Ancient Iran played a major role in shaping the intellectual frame and the spiritual frame in which cultures developed and expanded in the whole Mediterranean area.

But there is ideology. There is the ideological use of history. And there has been in this Mediterranean area, which has deep common references, intellectual, spiritual, ethical references to which Europe belongs totally, I emphasize totally. 

Europe has its roots in the biblical teachings, in the gospel teachings the substance of which is in the Koran. We will see this if we go to the history of religions in the Mediterranean area and we stop looking at religions as we do, through the systems of knowledge, through the separated presentations of history which has been split, but according to ideological developments, especially (and I am speaking as a historian), since the emergence of Islam. Islam emerged as a theological challenge and it became very soon a historical power in the Mediterranean area. There have been reactions to the theological challenge from Judaism and Christianity which existed in the Mediterranean area in the Middle East which existed for centuries before Islam emerged.

It is normal that these communities would react against the challenge because there is a theological challenge in the Koran. When the Koran says to Jewish communities "You have altered the scripture". This is a theological challenge. They had to react. But they reacted at the same time politically, ideologically and theologically, which means intellectually.

Our problem is depth, the way in which we handle history of thought in the Mediterranean in all our universities on the Muslim side and on the European side. It is ideologically more than scientific. This is my contention and I can sustain it. I have references. I am not saying this on any polemical level. This is the reality through which we are passing through since the emergence of Islam as a double challenge. An ideological challenge, which means cultural and intellectual and you have all the polemics written in the medieval ages between Jews, Muslims and Christians. That we can read and interpret.

There is this challenge through history of a polemic exchange. Theological systems have been built my Muslims as a strategy to refute those of Jews and Christians. On the other side, of course, Jews and Christians built their own theology to contain or protect themselves when Islam became powerful politically, to protect themselves against the power which Islam exercised, for seven centuries at least in the Mediterranean area.

So when I say that I am a double citizen I say it in this approach of the history of thought in the Mediterranean area. What we are facing today is the Palestinian problem, the Algerian struggles in the Mediterranean area after more than 100 years of colonization. What is happening in the Middle East since the 19th century. All these are events related to the same history which we do not approach yet in this open space in this open mind to re-write for example the history of theologies.

Theologies as we still use them among the three communities are intellectual and cultural systems or mutual exclusion. This is a problematic definition which contains the methodology to study the history of theologies. How there systems which are designed to support the beliefs in each community. But these systems are at the same time designed to exclude the other from the benefit of truth because the definition of truth is necessarily one for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

So here we are in the heart of the debate. For centuries we have been trained through theological systems as well as through philosophical systems as developed in Europe since the16th century. How are the Europeans teaching the history of philosophy? You know it. You can now to any one of the departments all over Europe or America. You study the history of philosophy starting from classical Greek philosophy. You jump from this period you jump over the Middle Ages can come to Descartes, Spinoza to Liebnitz and you go that way. Nothing has happened in philosophy from the 7th century until the 13th century, according to the presentation of the history of philosophy as it is still given. We have to notice this. Now there are some who are speaking about Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina. But this is marginal. It is not integrated in the full space of what I call the general historical Mediterranean space.

To re-assemble, to re-assess the trends of thought whether it is in the theological line or the philosophical line, as it went through history with the major contribution of philosophy written and thought of in the Arab language as was written between the 7th and the 13th century in what I call the Islamic context. Philosophy generated an interaction between the religious line of thinking with the fikr, law, kalam, theology on the one side and philosophy on the other during that time. This is what I call the ideological rupture which has even been imposed through the universities until now, in this Mediterranean space to which Europe belongs and to which Islam as a tradition of thought belongs. Islam is also a system of beliefs, according to what the Koran said.

So we have to take things like this. There is no other way to take them. I do not see, and I am speaking scientifically, my challenge is on the scientific level. How do we write the history of thought in the Mediterranean area. Any colleague can come from the Islamic side or from the European side and demonstrate that we can do otherwise. To write this history, to think about it and discuss it. It is a matter of discussion. It is a methodological issue and an epistemological issue that we will have to discuss.

It cannot be from the beginning of course any kind of polemical issue as it is currently when we approach these issues. When I started this lecture by saying I am a European. If I said this in Tehran or in Cairo they would ask who is this Moslem who is coming to speak to us. From the beginning there is this reflex of immediate rejection because of the way we teach our traditions and our thinking has generated in our minds, in our way of representing the past the dimension of what I call the unthinkable.

We cannot think that way. As long as we do not unlearn what we have learned through our so-called traditions. Un-learning is a process. It is an education, I can assure you. I know it and I have many examples of it. We have to unlearn what theology is about, what religious law is about, what identity is about when we speak of 'mine' and 'theirs'. We have to unlearn this as we have learned things in the frame of what I call mutual exclusion. So if we accept this and it is open for debate. As long as we carry on the debate with the appropriate tools.

How do we approach this issue. The problem is not one of Islam and democracy, or of Christianity and democracy or Judaism and democracy. You can add Buddhism and democracy. This is a wrong approach for me. It is a wrong questioning and a wrong problematisation of the issues which are both related to religion as a whole and to democracy as a whole.

There is another challenge. I put it as a challenge. My other contention here is that to move intellectually and to move culturally we have to move in the complexity created by struggling traditions for being in harmony with the representation of their past. They are struggling with the trends and the powerful forces of what we call modernity. Struggling with the interaction of all these traditions on the one side and the claim of modernity to be the universal alternative to all religions and to produce the meaning of the life of human beings, to produce and to sustain the political, ethical, legal, and spiritual order of all human societies.

These two claims are made by religions and modernity. In my view and through my experience, because I used this as a practical daily suffering. It is not an intellectual pleasure to play with all these concepts and methodologies. It is suffering. I say if we want to move in this complexity we have to learn an exercise which I call subversion. Subverting all intellectually all the inherited systems of thinking, be they religious or modern.

This means that I am careful about modernity. Many people think I am supporting modernity and secularism as an alternative to get rid of religious traditions. This is absolutely wrong. This is not my position. And many from the left side who are supporting modernity say just the opposite. Arkoun is just a reformist like all Muslims. He is going back to very ancient texts and trying to teach us something which is over and is an obstacle to modernity and secularism.

These are the forces which are struggling and working in all our societies. I know it every time I give a lecture because I experience it. That is why I call for subversion, making things upside down. Okay. There is political subversion as you know. It is not my way. I am very peaceful person. I cannot kill a fly as we say in French. 

But intellectually there is something to be done. And subverting is not destroying or throwing away. Absolutely not. It is first understanding what has happened and what is there in the Koran. What is there? Everything is given in the Koran. We just open the book and we find all solutions. And we select the verses from the Koran. There are verses which are impossible to integrate in any type of democratic vision of a society and we leave them aside. But we select some verses on which of course we can build something which will be in the line of democratic thinking. These I call manipulation of the religious texts. It is not a coherent use of the religious texts. This is not just done my Muslims. It is done by Jews in the same way. It is done by Christians mainly those in Western Europe. 

We know, especially since the war in Yugoslavia, that there is a part of Christianity which is orthodox Christianity. It developed in Eastern Europe, Russia, Greece and Yugoslavia. There was a schism between the orthodox church and the catholic church in 1055. It was a major schism inside the church on theological issues which generated a different vision and a different culture, similar to that between Shia and Sunni Islam. 

All these things matter and must be considered today to understand how we have to deal with religions. Not with Islam apart, not with Christianity apart, not with Judaism apart, with each one defending his own orthodoxy to use it mainly to defend his own political struggles and for political legitimization.

When I talk about what to do with the Koran as a Muslim I am raising the issue with which I am not going to deal with in this lecture. It is an issue for the Islam and Democracy project. I am happy this centre exists. I think it is the only one of its kind in Europe, a center in a university developed to think about ways to introduce in Muslim societies an appropriate culture, a whole culture, to support democracy, to make democracy possible. Without this culture it will still take a very long time to bring some democracy to our countries. There is no democracy without an appropriate culture.

I should explain what I mean by an appropriate culture for democracy. When I talk about what do with the Koran I am raising the issue about the cognitive status of the Koranic discourse. This is the question. This question makes it impossible to manipulate the verses separately without dealing with the first radical issue which would legitimate or de-legitimate (I don't know what will happen). We have to take the risk.

What will happen after I am able to bring an answer with appropriate research to the question what is today taking into account of course the whole traditional of thinking developed by Muslims since the first emergence of the Koran until today.

What kind of cognitive step did the Muslim theologians and thinkers take when they postulated in their commentaries. It is a full history. When the exegetes in Medieval ages interpreted the Koran for bending what we call Islamic law, they had to develop linguistic research about language. They had to develop a historical knowledge to know the history of the text and the language. They had to develop rhetorical tools to know the rhetoric of the discourse. So you see it is a complete research which led us to raise the issue of the cognitive status of the Koranic text and of the commentaries which itself constituted a corpus of knowledge, a body of knowledge which itself is built on the basis of a cognitive system.

This means that when we write history of thought it is wrong and not helpful to write just the history of separate ideas. We have to look to the systems which are commanding in each time of history. The ideas used by people either in philosophy, theology, ethics or law.

We are not yet used to coming down to the history of systems of thought to deconstruct these systems and to see which are the epistemological systems on which this knowledge is built. This is new. We do not do it yet. Some are doing in some universities in Europe and America, they do exist. But they are just emerging. It is not fully shared, especially by the students. I know because when I teach this to my students they did not hear the same thing in the linguistic department or the history department. They are not prepared. They have heard it for the first time from me and I cannot fulfil all the jobs of my colleagues. This is what I call the integrated, cognitive approach in our teaching. It does not exist.

And when I refer to the cognitive status of the Koran I say the same thing. What is the cognitive status of the Bible for Jews? They do not raise the question. What is the cognitive status of gospels? They raise it but not on the level yet which I am trying to present which is as systematically, comparative approach. Every time I develop something about the Koran I immediately say careful, what about the Bible, what about the gospels? Is the Koran isolated in its own problems? Not at all.

If we take the issue or religions using this approach we will not think continuously about our traditions and our values. We will try to think about religious anthropology. This means religion viewed through anthropological categorizations. What about the sacred today in secularized society? What about methodology and myths? 

I cannot enter into the problem of Islam and democracy like this. It is a problem meant for the dichotomy building of ideological answers. It is not meant for unlearning and doing something else in the space liberated after I have unlearned.

Let us see what it means when I say critique of Islamic reason and what reason does today and what reason did in all times since the emergence of the Koran. I told you I do not dismiss the heritage - the "turath". I take it, it is my own. But it is my responsibility to determine how I have to understand it how I can make it work for human beings today operating in the present history. This is how I have to use my reference to traditions and to Allah.

Something about democracy. First democracy today and as it has been from the beginning in Athena with philosophers, democracy is not an answer. We think democracy is an answer as well as we thought and still think that religions are an answer. In that way we are treating democracy just as we treated religions. 

In their essence neither religions, nor democracy which is an alternative to religions are definite answers. There cannot be definite answers. There can only be a questioning which means a debate. We have to question and to debate altogether, first on the way we question.

And you see that you may raise many questions which are irrelevant. Once we agree on some relevant questions that we can all share in a democratic way then we will have to debate. Democracy is this exercise. It is a collective exercise which cannot exclude anyone living in the society. This has not been the case so far, either with religions or with the parliamentary, representative style of democracy, as we have experience it in European democracies which are not many compared to the number of societies aspiring today to become democracies.

Democracy is still an exceptional experience and it is still a project for the future because it still has to be designed not for some people in some societies. You have to remember that in Europe they have proclaimed human rights since the 18th century. Women didn't participate or benefit from these human rights and they did not vote in France until 1945. That was two centuries after the declaration of human rights. This simple fact shows how democracy is imperfect and imperfectly developed.

What the Europeans did is absolutely the opposite of the fundamental principles written in the constitutions of European democracies in the 19th century. And it continues today in some aspects. That is why here to my position is critical. I am viewing something else which is not yet ready. It is far from being ready. Since all that I told from the beginning, the way that we teach at the top level of our universities essential issues related to the history of thought. Is there any possibility for a living, active democracy without us thinking, and sharing this thinking by your people? There is not. But this thinking has not yet been enhanced. It isn 't in the programmes of the scientific researchers and the social sciences. I would criticize social sciences as they are still looking at other cultures with ethnographic categories and not with anthropological definitions which I gave on how to approach religion as a whole.

How can we pretend to export any democratic model as we heard in the discourses which developed in Europe about democracy for other countries