Mohamed Arkoun, a great philosopher and scholar, particularly on the role of Islam in the development of Maghrebi society and on the relationship of Islam and the West, died Tuesday September 14 in Paris and was buried the following Friday, September 17 in Achouhada cemetery in Casablanca. He was 82 years old. In Robert Altman’s cinema adaptation of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, the angel of death whispers to a woman weeping over the discovery that a loved one has died peacefully, “The death of an old man is not a tragedy.”

That struck me as fundamentally true. But I thought to myself that it doesn’t make it less painful to those close to him. And while it may not be a tragedy, it is certainly still a loss, especially when the man is a figure of the stature of Mohamed Arkoun. I remember reading his writing when researching my dissertation, and it returned to my mind in the weeks and months after 9-11. It comes to mind again now, as we see nasty rhetoric against heating up again in this country.

As the Algerian Minister of Culture noted in the obituary in Ennahar,

Mohamed Arkoun “believed in dialogue between cultures and civilizations of which he was an ardent activist” and “his sincerity and dedication to bringing people and religions together have made him a true messenger of peace and harmony between different societies.”

Though he wrote predominantly in French, he was highly regarded throughout the Arab world and beyond. According to The National, from the United Arab Emirates,

The Arab intellectual scene is wearing black this week. It could hardly afford to lose another of its few heavyweights, but it did. After Morocco’s Mohammed Abed al Jabri, Saudi Arabia’s Ghazi al Gosaibi and Kuwait’s Ahmed al Baghdadi – all dead this year – the Algerian thinker and critic Mohammed Arkoun passed away on Tuesday at the age of 82 in his Paris home after a long battle with illness.
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As the Arab and Muslim worlds continue to be misunderstood, both by ourselves and others, the sad irony is that our leading thinkers are disappearing just when we need them most. There is no new generation of Arab leading lights yet in sight to show us the way.

Arkoun’s work, mainly in French but widely translated into Arabic, English and other languages, tackled such sensitive issues as Arab modes of reasoning, Islam and secularism, and religious jurisprudence, from fresh epistemological and anthropological angles.

I couldn’t have said it better myself! Clearly the death of such an important thinker is a loss. A big loss at that!