Formulating the claim
Direct expression prevails in this sura over the living metaphor.
Explanation
This claim means that the Qur’anic discourse here tends toward direct formulation more than it relies on living metaphorical images, making the expression less displaced and closer to straightforward reporting.
Within Arkoun’s framework, this observation belongs to a broader attentiveness to the diversity of modes of discourse in the Qur’an, and to the refusal to reduce them to a single rhetorical system; thus, the sura is read here in terms of the prevalence of directness in it, not in terms of denying metaphor in the Qur’an as a whole.
Its place in the book’s argument
The atom falls among the observations accumulated by the book to highlight the variation of styles within the Qur’anic text itself, and how multiple forms coexist in it between the direct and the metaphorical. In this way, it serves Arkoun’s thesis in questioning simplistic conceptions that treat the Qur’an as a homogeneous discourse at the level of language and style.
Limits of the claim
This statement does not imply that the sura is devoid of metaphor, nor that directness in it is absolute in all passages. Nor is it appropriate to turn this stylistic observation into a general judgment about the Qur’an as a whole.