Meaning of the Concept in This Book
For Mohammed Arkoun, Qur’anic discourse is not a static text, but a transcendent oral discourse that retained a living memory and a strong connection to a tangible historical and existential context. In this book, it appears as the first face of the Qur’an before it was later understood in a closed, codex-based manner.
This concept is also connected to revelation as an audible discourse, not merely a written form. It therefore remains open to the plurality of meaning and to the living memory that accompanied the Qur’anic experience.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
Qur’anic discourse enters the book’s argument insofar as it explains how the Qur’anic experience became a new historical symbolism, and then how it later became possible for Qur’anic discourse to be historically transformed into an instrument of legitimation within the process by which religion, society, and power took shape.
In this sense, Qur’anic discourse is read here not only as a theological object, but as a fundamental element in understanding how Islam reshaped Arab society through revelation, rituals, and the state, and how this was also connected to the historical formation of religion, society, and power through legitimation and conflict.
How It Works within the Atlas
Within the structure of the atlas, this concept functions as a link between three levels: the first experience of revelation, the formulation of the Qur’an, and then the later trajectories of reading that closed meaning within orthodox readings. It is therefore associated with concepts such as plurality of meaning, living memory, and multiple levels.
Through it, the atlas also shows that historical reading does not separate the text from the conditions of its formation, but places it within a complex relationship with obedience and freedom, and with the transformations that accompanied the transition of revelation as an audible discourse into a more rigid religious and political system, culminating in the restriction of official Islam within the imperial state and the repression of religious and political oppositions.