Formulating the Claim
Contemporary fundamentalist movements see the Prophetic City as an imagined utopian model on which their vision is built.
Explanation
This claim appears in the context of Arkoun’s critique of fundamentalists’ representations of early Islamic history, insofar as the city is not evoked as a specific historical experience, but as a complete image transformed into a ready-made reference for the present. In this sense, the past shifts from being a field of historical understanding to being an example invoked to confer legitimacy on present-day conceptions.
This model reveals a tendency to strip the Prophetic period of its historical complexity and then to use it in a discourse of restoration or foundation. For Arkoun, this cannot be separated from his broader critique of the way religious memory is constructed when it is reduced to an idealized example closed off from critical time.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s argument in his critique of foundationalism, where he shows that some contemporary discourses do not return to the Prophetic City as a historical event open to reading, but rather as a complete model fit for reproduction. It is therefore close to his thesis on the impossibility of turning the early Islamic past into a ready-made standard for producing the present without historical interrogation.
Limits of the Claim
This claim does not mean denying the symbolic value of the Prophetic City for Muslims, nor reducing every reading of it to imagination or political instrumentalization.