Formulation of the claim
Old exegesis turns interpretive discourse into a continuous narrative that brings together the Qur’an and memory.
Explanation
This claim means that exegesis, in its older form, does not stop at explaining the immediate meaning of the text, but builds around it a narrative system that links the verses to what has accumulated in religious memory from reports and transmitted accounts. In this way, the text becomes part of a broader story in which reading, memorization, circulation, and interpretation are connected.
From Arkoun’s perspective, the importance of this shift lies in the fact that it reveals how meaning operates within the exegetical tradition as a continuous construction rather than a mere partial explanation. The interpretive narrative here is not an external ornament added to the text, but a way of integrating it into a historical and mental horizon that ensures its persistence within religious consciousness.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s critique of the mechanisms by which meaning is formed in the Islamic tradition, where he attends to the way old exegesis shaped the relationship between the Qur’an, oral circulation, and collective memory. It comes close to the book’s theses that distinguish between the text as it is read within a closed traditional structure and the text as it can be studied within the history of the formation of religious discourse.
Limits of the claim
This atom does not mean that all old exegesis is identical in its methods or results, nor does it deny the existence of differences among exegetes and schools. It does not reduce exegesis as a whole to a single narrative, but points to a general tendency that Arkoun observed in the shaping of meaning within a continuous narrative framework.