Formulation of the claim
Qur’anic discourse establishes a new sacred space.
Explanation
Qur’anic discourse transforms matter, place, and time into religious signs endowed with spiritual meaning, so that the meaning of space itself is altered within religious experience.
In this transformation, space no longer remains merely an external frame for meaning; it becomes part of the organization of the relationship between human beings and symbols, linking the sensory and the spiritual in a single construction.
Its place in the book’s argument
This idea falls within Arkoun’s approach to explaining how Qur’anic discourse reorganizes place, time, and symbols, not as separate elements, but as components in the formation of religious meaning within the text.
The atom gains its importance from the fact that it reveals one aspect of this semantic transformation, which links the discursive structure to the redefinition of space itself in the Qur’an.
Limits of the claim
This formulation does not mean that it explains all dimensions of Qur’anic discourse or exhausts every instance of its operation on place and time; rather, it is limited to highlighting its effect in creating a new sacred meaning.
Brief evidence
A material basis for the spiritual leaps of the pilgrim while in the state of ihram, as well as sites of manifestation and embodiment, with meanings specific to each religious experience. For this reason, we are right to describe all of this as a kind of distinctive semiotic semantic expansion of the hajj. The sacred space of the miqat, the site of the sanctuary, namely the Kaaba, the cloth that covers it, the pilgrim’s routes or circumambulation, Zamzam water, the stones for the stoning ritual, the body of the sacrificial animals and their blood, the pilgrim’s very special clothing, and so on… all this system of material signs refers to a system of religious beliefs, or, better said, it refers to symbols in the original sense of the word, that is, the contact between two separate parts of the same thing.
Related links
Qur’anic discourse, symbols, place and time