Formulation of the Claim
A large part of the original data is lost with the death of the first generation of Companions.
Explanation
The text links the death of the first generation of Companions to the loss of some elements of the original, not as a total loss, but as a deficiency affecting the first material that was later transmitted. In Arkoun’s view, the relation to the original thus becomes indirect, because what reaches later generations passes through a human and temporal break.
This means that knowledge of the original does not remain complete in its first form; rather, it is recovered through partial traces and relatively late historical transmission. The claim therefore does not speak of the invalidity of the original, but of the erosion of some of its data through absence, death, and circulation.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom appears within Arkoun’s argument, which emphasizes that religious texts and traditions reached us through a complex historical process, not through a direct and complete presence of the original. It also aligns with his broader theses on the limits of access to the founding moment and the need for a historical reading that takes into account rupture and transformation in the transmission of meaning.
Limits of the Claim
This atom should not be taken to mean a denial of the original as a whole or an equation between the original and what came later. What is meant here is the deficiency in some of the data, not a comprehensive judgment on the heritage or on the reliability of transmission.
Brief Evidence Passage
“ I hope the reader has now understood the theoretical aims of what I call ‘readings of the Qur’an’ in the plural, for I want to study the theoretical conditions whose fulfillment makes it possible to arrive at a new reading of the Qur’an, by which I mean the reading that reaches its original, primary meanings when it was still an oral text before becoming a written text. These theoretical conditions we can know and define, but we cannot realize them because of the irreversible loss of the first situations of discourse, as mentioned earlier. I mean that it is impossible for us to reach those exceptional moments that show us the Prophet when he first uttered the Qur’an before the Quraysh or the Meccans and how their reactions were, if I may say, ‘on the spot.’ The sh”
Related Links
- The Humanist Formation of Islam
- Islamic thought: criticism and ijtihad
- When Islam Awakens