Focused definition
Orthodoxy, in Arkoun’s usage, is not merely a label for a religious school or a settled doctrine; rather, it is the reading that presents itself as the correct and sole truth, and then acquires religious and epistemic authority that regulates both belief and understanding. In this sense, it is a historical mechanism for fixing meaning, not a neutral description of religiosity. It is also linked to scholastic jurisprudence and to the institution, as well as to the boundaries that determine what may be said and what ought to be silenced.
Its place in the project
This concept occupies a central place in Arkoun’s critique of the historical formation of Islam, because it reveals how a particular reading becomes a standard and excludes others. For this reason, orthodoxy is always adjacent to concepts such as power and knowledge, the unthought, historicity, and discourse analysis. It is also present in his concern with tradition as a field in which interpretive authority took shape, not as a single homogeneous mass.
Example or evidence passage
The concept becomes concrete when Arkoun shows how religion moves from a domain of living plurality to a domain of codification and monopolization, so that one reading settles in as the standard and closes the field to other readings. It also appears in his critique of the dogmatism of thought, whether manifested in a religious discourse or in a modernist discourse that claims to possess the final truth.