The Historical Fallacy in Interpretation

Formulation of the claim

The historical fallacy is the projection of present-day concepts onto the past in interpretation.

Explanation

By this claim, Arkoun intends to draw attention to a methodological deviation in reading history, when past events are understood through concepts that did not belong to them. The problem, then, is not an isolated mistake, but a mode of reading that transfers the questions and judgments of the present onto the past.

This warning also indicates that such projection may be committed by the specialist historian just as it may be committed by anyone who interprets texts or events from an ideological motive. Awareness of historical difference therefore becomes a condition for a more precise understanding of the points where meaning takes shape.

Its place in the book’s argument

This atom appears within Arkoun’s critique of forms of reading that subject the past to ready-made categories, instead of listening to its own specific historical conditions. It converges with closely related theses, such as the distinction between the time of the text and the time of interpretation, and thus the rejection of turning modern concepts into coercive keys for understanding the past.

Limits of the claim

This atom does not mean abolishing the possibility of historical understanding or preventing comparison across times; rather, it alerts us to the danger of confusing different contexts. Nor can it be reduced to a technical observation, because for Arkoun it is linked to the nature of a method that frees reading from projection.

Brief evidence

I am at least now going to present the reading that does not escape these conditions and limitations,
which is aware of its own limits in reading the Qur’an personally
and of its possibilities, but which remains conditioned by modern circumstances even now,
from within the history of Islam. The result, despite all the glaring illuminations that dominate the text, is not absolute.
Our reading therefore aims to propose reasonable ways of mounting a new and inventive confrontation
between the new and the inventive. I said that it is new and inventive because it will start
from the historical earthliness and from the celestial transcendence,
the old philosophical literary

Related links

• Readings in the Qur’an