Formulation of the Claim
The arbitrary fundamentalist interpretation of the text leads to turning the Qur’an into a tool harnessed for political and violent projects.
Explanation
Arkoun links misreading the text to its shift from the realm of guidance and understanding to the realm of conflictual use. The problem is not in the text itself, but in the way it is handled when it is torn from its context and made to bear what it cannot bear.
In this perspective, political violence does not arise from the text as text, but from the reading that makes it a ready-made support for prior objectives. Thus fundamentalist interpretation becomes here a mechanism for converting the text into a pretext for domination or confrontation.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom belongs within Arkoun’s critique of closed fundamentalist interpretation, which suspends the historical and epistemological conditions for understanding texts. It is connected to the theses in which he insists on the need to subject reading to critical methods that prevent the monopolization of meaning and prevent the text from being turned into a discourse of political mobilization.
Limits of the Claim
This atom does not imply that every reading of the text leads to violence, nor that it judges religion itself by this outcome. What is meant is a specific interpretive mode that makes the text susceptible to being harnessed in political violence.