Formulating the claim
The Qur’an fashions a mythic world of its own.
Explanation
Arkoun means that the Qur’an does not merely retrieve familiar figures, stories, and symbols; rather, it rearranges them within a new system that gives them their own significance. For him, the issue concerns the mode of formation and the construction of meaning, not simply the presence of the symbolic elements themselves.
This world appears as part of the Qur’anic text’s work in shaping an alternative vision of the world, where inherited elements coexist with their re-employment within a new discourse. For that reason, myth is not read here as narrative ornament, but as one of the ways the text works upon meaning.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom belongs to Arkoun’s efforts to show that the Qur’an is a foundational text for its own symbolic world, and that understanding it requires attention to both its imaginative and semantic structure. It is connected to what he advances in the book regarding a reconsideration of the relationship between the Qur’an and the earlier tradition, and of how meaning takes shape within Qur’anic discourse.
Limits of the claim
This claim does not mean that Arkoun reduces the Qur’an to myth, nor that he denies its religious or historical dimensions. Nor should he be made to pass a final judgment on all elements of Qur’anic narration or to equate this world with what is circulated in mythological literature in its direct sense.