Formulation of the Claim
Arkoun distinguishes between Qur’anic religious consciousness and later Islamic theological consciousness.
Explanation
This distinction assumes that some religious concepts did not take shape at the level of the Qur’anic text itself, but were crystallized later within the theological edifice. For Arkoun, it is therefore not valid to read the Qur’anic signification directly as if it were identical with what became established in the doctrinal and theological tradition.
This difference reveals two distinct layers in the formation of meaning: an initial Qur’anic layer linked to the time of revelation, and a later layer that reorganized understanding within interpretive and doctrinal systems. From here, conflating the two becomes a cause of projecting what is later onto what is Qur’anic.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom belongs to Arkoun’s effort to dismantle the distance between the founding text and the readings that surrounded it across history. It is directly connected to his project of criticizing closed interpretation and drawing attention to the fact that the history of Islamic understanding is not the text itself, but one of its later formations.
Limits of the Claim
This atom does not mean denying the religious value of the theological tradition, nor reducing the Qur’an to a single fixed meaning. Nor does it establish a final historical judgment on all forms of interpretation; rather, it sets a methodological boundary between the early Qur’anic consciousness and the theological construction that followed it.