Focused Definition
For Arkoun, tradition is not a completed mass of meanings nor a fixed repository of identity, but a historical construction shaped through codification, selection, interpretation, and institutional struggle. It is therefore not taken as a final reference, but as material for understanding and critique, containing what is living and what is concealed, what is fertile and what is constrained.
Its Place in the Project
Tradition occupies a central place in Arkoun’s project because it is the field in which the relation between text and history, meaning and institution, memory and power becomes manifest. Through it, he works to expose orthodoxy as the force that arranged tradition into a narrow normative form and pushed many questions out of visibility. Tradition is therefore associated in his thought with the concepts of historicity, discourse analysis, the unthought, and power-knowledge. He does not call for a break with tradition, but for freeing it from museum-like reading and defensive use, so that it may once again become an open field for questioning rather than a closed fortress of identity.
Example or Witness
This concept becomes apparent when Arkoun reads the history of Islamic codification not as an innocent preservation of knowledge, but as a process of selection, arrangement, and filtering that produced what came to be regarded as “tradition.” What is left unsaid, excluded from debate, and forbidden from inquiry are all part of the history of tradition itself, not external to it. Here, tradition becomes a subject for uncovering what was excluded from it, not merely a set of inherited texts.
See also: Tradition (concept page)