Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Jabiri studied philosophy at Muhḥammad V University in Rabat, Morocco, where he got his PhD in 1970. He had been a school teacher since 1957 and after successive promotions he became professor of philosophy at that university in 1971. Al-Jabiri has been involved in politics and journalism, and he is the main editor of the journal Fikr wa-Naqd (Thought and criticism) published in Rabat. His philosophy has to be understood in the context of the effort to modernize his country while at the same time preserving its cultural identity.

Al-Jabiri is a prolific writer; his large project, The Critique of the Arab Mind, is in three volumes: Formation of the Arab Mind (1984), Structure of the Arab Mind (1986), and The Arab Political Mind (1990). Al-Jabiri emphasizes the concept of cultural legacy (turāth) and analyses different readings of it. The fundamentalists...