Formulation of the claim
For Arkoun, the Hajj is understood as a rite that combines a vertical dogmatic dimension with a horizontal psychological, social, and historical one.
Explanation
The text distinguishes between the reading that confines Hajj to a vertical dogmatic dimension and another horizon that is tied to human experience, community, and the history of practice. This distinction shows that religious meaning is not reduced to the normative formula alone, but is also bound up with the functions and significations that the rite carries within society.
The text also states that the traditional Islamic reading has obscured this horizontal dimension; that is, it has privileged a single mode of understanding and neglected what relates to the psychological, social, and historical context. The rite is therefore not presented here as a purely devotional practice, but as a subject that reveals how religious meaning itself is formed.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom appears within Arkoun’s effort to reread rites and Qur’anic themes outside the confines of dogmatic understanding. It is connected to what the book says about critiques of modes of reception that obscure the historical and human dimensions of the text and practice, and it falls within a broader framework that calls for recovering the multiple layers of meaning rather than settling for only one of them.
Limits of the claim
The atom does not mean that the Hajj loses its devotional dimension or that one of the two dimensions cancels out the other; rather, it points to a flaw in the mode of understanding that neglected the horizontal dimension. Nor does it offer a comprehensive historical judgment on all readings; instead, it describes a tension in reading as presented in the text.
Brief evidence
Understanding the Hajj combines a vertical dogmatic dimension with a horizontal psychological-social and historical one, but the traditional Islamic reading obscured this horizontal dimension.