Formulation of the Claim
Qur’anic discourse became a stable linguistic system from the fourth/tenth century onward.
Explanation
In Arkoun’s context, this claim means that the Qur’anic text was no longer read as material open to continuous historical formation, but was fixed within a specific linguistic and epistemic system. The stability of discourse here points to a moment of stability in formulation and reception, not to the completion of meaning or the end of signification.
This stability is understood as part of the transformation that led Qur’anic discourse to enter into more regular interpretive and linguistic frameworks, beginning in the fourth/tenth century. The issue, therefore, is not the time of the text’s revelation, but the history of the formation of the way it is spoken about and read.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom appears within the argument through which Arkoun works on the historicity of Qur’anic discourse and the manner in which its meaning was fixed within Islamic culture. It is connected to his discussion of the passage of the text from the horizon of revelation to the horizon of transcription and systematization, where discourse becomes less open to plurality and more subject to a stable linguistic and normative system.
Limits of the Claim
This claim does not mean that Qur’anic discourse lost its vitality or that it became rigid at every level of reception, nor that it reduces the Qur’an to a purely linguistic dimension. What is meant here is a description of a historical moment of stability in the structure of discourse, not a definitive judgment on all its readings.