The Meaning Within Arkoun’s Project
For Arkoun, the relationship between power and knowledge names the way ideas take shape within institutions of education, jurisprudence, the state, symbols, and hierarchies of recognition. Religious knowledge, like other kinds of knowledge, acquires its presence both from its content and from the conditions that allow a discourse to become normative, or that push another discourse to the margins. Arkoun therefore reads the history of ideas together with the history of legitimacy: who teaches? who issues legal opinions? who has the right to interpret? And how does a reading become authoritative?
At this point, the concept helps explain the historical formation of orthodoxy and trace the path that made some readings into authority rather than merely one opinion among others. Through it, Arkoun explains the confinement of independent reasoning, the use of religion in producing political legitimacy, and the formation of boundaries between what is permitted and what is forbidden in the religious sphere. For this reason, the concept stands alongside orthodoxy, the unthought, and discourse analysis.
How Does the Concept Work?
For Arkoun, this concept works as a tool for examining the conditions that grant knowledge the power of acceptance. The question therefore goes beyond the content of what is said to include the speaker’s position, the language in which the speaker speaks, the symbolic protection on which they rely, and the historical context that allows one discourse to appear while preventing another from appearing. Meaning thus settles when sustained by a network of education, legal opinion, institution, and symbol.
Power appears here in direct coercion, but also in what seems self-evident and neutral: repetition, sacralization, the manufacture of authority, and the distribution of interpretive powers. In this sense, the concept converges with critique of reason, with historicity, and with discourse analysis, because it returns knowledge to its social and historical conditions and opens the question of time, institution, and recognition within every claim to truth.
Where Does It Appear in the Books?
The concept appears clearly in Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Rootedness, where fundamentalism is read as an intellectual stance and as a transformation of origins into a closed epistemic and historical authority. In this book, the concept is present directly, because the argument links the closure of independent reasoning, the monopolization of interpretation, and the production of legitimacy.
In Islamic Thought: Critique and Independent Reasoning, the concept appears in a more foundational form than in the analysis of a single phenomenon. The critique here is directed toward the conditions that make religious knowledge capable of becoming a fixed norm, and for that reason the concept is connected with independent reasoning, critical secularization, and the role of the intellectual, within a broader horizon of reconstructing understanding.
As for When Islam Wakes Up, the concept takes a form tied to censorship, interpretation, and the regulation of the contemporary religious sphere. The focus here is on the work of symbolic and social censorship in directing reading and in determining what may appear in the public sphere and what remains outside it.
In From Manhattan to Baghdad, the concept emerges within questions of violence, legitimacy, and democracy, that is, at the intersection of religious discourse and global political transformations. Here, the site of the argument shifts to the relationship between religion and politics, and to the construction of a position toward the West and the globalized world.
It also appears in The Human Formation of Islam, but in a calmer and more layered form, since it is linked to the formation of Islam within language, power, memory, and representations. In this book, power is read as part of the conditions that produce collective meaning and determine the way revelation, jurisprudence, and symbol are present.
It is also prominent in Battles for Humanism in Islamic Contexts, where the concept is connected to education reform and to the critique of ignorance and fanaticism. Its angle here is slightly different: it describes the operation of power in knowledge while at the same time opening the question of confronting it through education, reason, and historical responsibility.
Related Concepts
- orthodoxy: because it represents the form in which a dominant reading settles when it turns into a norm.
- the unthought: because it reveals the silence and boundaries that power produces around possible questions.
- discourse analysis: because it studies how power is fashioned within language itself.
- historicity: because it places knowledge within its own time and prevents it from being frozen into a final form.
- critique of reason: because it opens an inquiry into the conditions that make knowledge susceptible to domination or exclusion.
Limits of the Reading
The concept of power and knowledge illuminates the relationship between understanding, institution, and legitimacy, but in reading Arkoun it needs other concepts as well: historicity, humanism, discourse analysis, and the unthought. Texts are not read through power alone, and religious and political transformations require a broader tracing of the path of meaning: how it takes shape, how it moves, and how it becomes a norm or exits the field of questioning.