Formulation of the Claim
The prophetic experience frames the founding of Islam, just as it frames the beginnings of the formation of politics in Islamic history.
Explanation
Arkoun links the first prophetic experience to the field in which the Islamic community and its political practices took shape, so that politics is not understood as a later, separate addition to the religious foundation. Prophecy here is not an abstract doctrinal event, but a foundational historical framework in which religious meaning intertwines with the emergence of political life.
This connection is understood within Arkoun’s approach, which studies Islam at the moment of its formation, not only in its inherited forms. The prophetic experience thus becomes a starting point for understanding how the first authority was constituted, and how power and religious meaning were bound together from the outset within a single horizon.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s broader thesis, which treats Islam as a living history of formation, not as a completed system from the very first moment. It approaches the questions raised by the book about foundation, authority, and the beginnings of the historical formation of concepts and institutions in the Islamic field.
It is also connected to the clusters that discuss the relationship between prophecy and history, and between religion and politics, within a critical context that distinguishes between the founding event and the later readings that surrounded it with systematization and representation.
Limits of the Claim
This claim does not mean reducing Islam to politics, nor does it reduce the prophetic experience to a purely power-based dimension. It does not offer a detailed account of early political history so much as it defines the framework within which the relationship between religious foundation and the beginnings of political formation is understood.