Meaning within Arkoun’s Project
For Arkoun, the imaginary names the work of images, symbols, memory, and collective representations when they give religious meaning a form that can be lived within the community. In this sense, the concept goes beyond individual imagination and symbolic ornament; it describes the way people receive the text, reorganize it, and connect it to their images of the sacred, authority, the past, and the future.
From this position, the imaginary enters Arkoun’s understanding of Islam as a living historical experience. Religious meaning takes shape in collective consciousness, as it does in language, interpretation, and ritual, and myth meets history here, symbol meets legitimacy, and memory meets writing. The imaginary is therefore directly linked to the topic of memory and the imaginary, and to what it makes possible: a reading that follows religion in its social and cultural movement, alongside its textual and conceptual presence.
How does the concept work?
For Arkoun, the imaginary functions as an interpretive tool that reveals what literal reading leaves outside its field of vision. It explains how certain images become certainty, how symbols move from the level of representation to the level of legitimacy, and how some meanings remain alive because they find support in collective memory alongside proof. Reception thus appears in his work as a historical process in which inherited images, forms of education, authority, and language all participate.
The concept also reveals the relation between the imaginary and interpretation. When the sacred is reproduced within jurisprudence, education, or political discourse, explicit rules operate together with an older symbolic reservoir that is reordered and redirected. From this perspective, the imaginary offers a broader understanding of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, because both rely on collective images that exceed the limits of the direct text and shape the way it is understood and used.
Where does it appear in the books?
The imaginary appears clearly in The Human Formation of Islam, where it is part of a description of Islam as an experience formed within history, language, authority, and collective representations. Here the imaginary is present within the relations that produce the meaning of religion in society and connect it to memory, mythologization, and symbol.
It appears in a different and clearer way in When Islam Awakens, where it is linked to the field in which censorship, legitimacy, and interpretation intersect with historical memory. In this book, Arkoun turns to the way images and perceptions continue to shape modern religious consciousness, so the imaginary here appears as an active force in the present rather than as a general interpretive background.
In Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Rooted Origination, the imaginary appears from a different angle: as a symbolic reservoir whose elements are mobilized in the discourse of origin and grounding. At this point, the concept illuminates how old images are redirected within a struggle over meaning and authority, and how the return to origins becomes a new symbolic construction rather than a neutral recovery of the past.
It also emerges in Islamic Thought: Critique and Ijtihad, though in a less direct and more expansive way. There, the imaginary is part of the project of reopening Islamic reason itself, because critique and ijtihad confront not only texts but also what has become entrenched in consciousness as images and assumptions that render some questions invisible from the outset.
It likewise appears in Battles for Humanism in Islamic Contexts, where the imaginary stands alongside the questions of education, language, logic, and lexicon. In this context, the concept is used to explain religion, and to show how the very capacity for understanding is formed within a culture that needs to rebuild its cognitive and symbolic tools.
Related concepts
- Memory and the imaginary: shows how collective remembrance and symbolic image support one another in producing meaning.
- Historicity: places the imaginary within time and prevents it from being separated from the conditions of its formation.
- Tradition: reveals what the past bequeaths in the form of images and modes of reception, not texts alone.
- Orthodoxy: shows how inherited images become a standard that regulates understanding.
- Power and knowledge: clarifies how images and symbols are managed within religious legitimacy.
- Discourse analysis: helps trace the presence of the imaginary in religious speech and its formulations.
Limits of the reading
The imaginary explains many ways in which meaning takes shape, but questions of truth, legitimacy, and historical conflict still require other tools. It reveals the symbolic work that makes religion receivable and durable, and this revelation in turn needs to be examined in light of texts, institutions, power, and social transformations that reshape and direct this work.
See also: The imaginary (brief definition)