"What Arkoun's critique of the authority structures fails to recognize,

is that authority does not only derive from formal institutions, but also from other systems of meaning such as academicism. Furthermore, modernity itself functions as an appendage to liberal ideology, which is not without its hegemonic interests. Leonard Binder has raised the pertinent question of whether the critique of Muslim liberals has not been a 'form of false consciousness, an abject submission to the hegemonic discourse of the dominant secular Western capitalist and imperialist societies, an oriental orientalism, or whether it was and is practical, rational and emancipatory' (1988, p. 5).

-Farid Esack, Qur'an, Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity Against Oppression, p. 72