The Idea
This claim assumes that official codification is not a neutral transmission of what happened, but a process of selection, preference, and exclusion. In other words, what has come down to us as a fixed text or a complete narrative has passed through human and historical sorting. This perspective therefore urges caution against treating the final corpus as a direct mirror of the origin, and calls attention to what was preserved and what was bypassed.
Concise Formulation
Official codification: includes selection, deletion, and retention
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This claim is important to the argument because it opens the way to questioning the religious sources of knowledge themselves. If codification has rearranged the material, deleted some of it, and retained other parts, then texts are not read as final truths but as historical products. In this sense, the book prepares the reader to understand that epistemic authority is formed through selection, not through transmission alone.
Why It Matters
The importance of this idea is that it breaks the simplistic view that equates what appears in the corpus with the whole truth. This is necessary for understanding Arkoun’s project, because it is based on uncovering the history that entered into the formation of the text. This claim also brings back to the foreground the question of who chooses what is narrated and what is marginalized.
Brief Evidence
It included selection, deletion, official codification, and the shift from oral to written transmission. This means that official codification is not a neutral transmission of what happened, but a process of human and historical sorting. Therefore, the final corpus should not be treated as a direct mirror of the origin; rather, one must attend to what it retained and what it excluded.
Reading Questions
- What effect does acknowledging selection and deletion have on understanding inherited texts?
- How does this view change our relationship to what we consider an official narrative?
Degree of Documentation
High: the claim appears in a clear place in the book’s material.