Formulation of the claim
The Qur’anic stories are presented as a representational structure, not as a purely historical narrative.
Explanation
Arkoun links the Qur’anic stories to a mythic or representational structure. Thus, these stories are not understood only as accounts of events, but as a semantic form that organizes meaning and presents it in representational form.
This means that, in Arkoun’s reading, the value of the Qur’anic stories is not limited to reporting, but extends to building a symbolic horizon that guides understanding and gives meaning its form within the text. For him, they are a way of speaking, not merely a record of what happened.
Its place in the book’s argument
This idea appears within Arkoun’s effort to read the Qur’an in a way that goes beyond historical literalism and understands Qur’anic modes of expression in their relation to the text’s broader semantic structure. It is also connected to his attempt to show that Qur’anic discourse operates through representational forms and modes of meaning, not through direct narrative alone.
Limits of the claim
This does not mean that the Qur’anic stories are reduced to a single function, nor that their representational dimension cancels their relation to their religious horizon or to their effect on the recipient.
Brief evidence
Page 274
W. M. Watt: Islamic Revelation in the Modern World, Edinburgh University Press, 1969, P. 83. In reality, it imagines a pattern upon themselves, to the extent that they stop, and its function for linguistic metaphor is that status by which knowledge ought The opposite, as well, in the sense of the unreal and the corresponding or parallel concept related to it, which governs it, meaning that the book that controls it See how the figurative expression imposes a determinate pattern and preserves the concept. Modern scholars who establish the contrast between the Meccan suras of “poetic expression” and the civil suras, “prosaic expression” devoid of the beauty of poetry, or those who describe it as expository, are full of nonsense
Related links
Readings in the Qur’an Qur’anic story representation