This topic in the Arkoun Atlas is tied to the question of who determines meaning, grants legitimacy to interpretation, and turns understanding into a binding norm. Within Arkoun’s project, knowledge does not appear as an isolated intellectual activity, but as knowledge formed within religious, educational, and political institutions, and subjected to the boundaries of recognition, censorship, and tradition. This topic therefore serves as a suitable entry point for organizing material that examines the relationship between text and authority, ijtihad and legitimacy, and knowledge and the institution.
This trajectory becomes clear in Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Founding, where the closure of ijtihad is linked to the transformation of the origin into a historical authority that prevents questioning. It also appears in Where Is Contemporary Islamic Thought?, when the contemporary crisis is read as a crisis of critique and the suspension of inquiry. In When Islam Awakens, the topic returns through the concept of orthodoxy and its relation to interpretive surveillance. As for From Manhattan to Baghdad, it links political authority, violence, and the discourses that lend symbolic legitimacy to power.
Among the concepts close to this topic are: power and knowledge, orthodoxy, the unthought, critique of reason, and discourse analysis. These concepts help explain how certain readings become a dominant reference point, and how others are excluded from the permitted field.
The reading paths associated with this topic begin with Power and Knowledge, then extend to Text and History in tracing the formation of meaning within context, and to A Quick Entry into Arkoun for those who want to gather the threads of the project before moving deeper into the books. It is also useful to consult Tradition and Modernity, because epistemic authority in Arkoun often appears at the moment of tension between inherited tradition and the horizon of modern critique.