The Idea
The Qur’anic experience is understood here as a phase extending over roughly twenty years, not as a fleeting event or an announcement detached from its surroundings. This temporal span makes it a field in which meaning gradually takes shape, within a continuous relation between religious discourse and the transformations lived by the early community. It is therefore read not simply as a text, but as a historical process in which revelation took form within lived experience.
Concise Formulation
The Qur’anic experience: lasted about twenty years
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This claim lies at the heart of the book’s way of looking at the Qur’an: it does not isolate the text from its time, but links it to the duration of its formation and to the conditions that accompanied its appearance. In this sense, duration becomes an important interpretive element, because it supports the idea that understanding must begin from living history rather than from abstract reading alone. It is a principle that helps build a broader reading of meaning and experience.
Why It Matters
The importance of this claim lies in the fact that it softens the view of the Qur’an as a closed block outside time, and opens it to historical understanding. It also helps show that Arkoun focuses on the formation of religious discourse within reality, not on separating it from reality. Time thus becomes part of the meaning of the experience, not merely its backdrop.
Brief Evidence
The text argues that the Qur’anic experience lasted about twenty years, and so it cannot be understood as a fleeting event or as an announcement detached from its surroundings. This temporal extension allows meaning to form gradually within the relationship between religious discourse and the transformations lived by the early community. The Qur’anic experience is therefore read not as a fixed text alone, but as a gradual historical process.
Reading Questions
- How does estimating the duration of the Qur’anic experience change the way we understand revelation?
- Why does the book insist on linking the Qur’an to the time of its historical formation?
Degree of Documentation
High: the claim appears in a clear location in the book’s material.