Mohammed Arkoun (Muḥammad Arkūn, 1928-2010) was a professor of the history of Islamic thought at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), who advocated a radical paradigm shift that would allow for the rethinking of Islam as a cultural and religious system and subvert ideological and dogmatic constructs with hegemonic claims. Arkoun was born in 1928 into a traditional religious, relatively poor family in Taourirt-Mimoun, a Berber village in Great Kabylia, in northern Algeria. His father was a shopkeeper in the wealthy French settlement of ʿAin al-Arbāʿa, east of Oran.