Formulation of the claim
The Qur’an establishes a new thinkable, and excludes what was before it outside this horizon.
Explanation
Arkoun understands this claim as an effect of founding a new epistemic field; revelation does not merely add religious content, but rearranges what the mind can address and formulate. In this sense, the Qur’an becomes a moment of transition in the limits of thought itself, not merely an object of thought.
This means that what was considered unthinkable or closed within a prior horizon is brought back into a broader and more tightly organized horizon. Here the atom is linked to the idea of a shift in the conditions of mental possibility within Qur’anic discourse.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom comes within a line of argument that reads the Qur’an as establishing a new field of understanding and knowledge, not merely as a text from which a doctrinal content is extracted. It is close to the book’s theses that highlight the Qur’an’s effect in reshaping the relationship between religious discourse and the limits of thought, and in moving the receiver from a prior horizon to a different one.
Limits of the claim
This atom should not be loaded with a detailed historical claim about all forms of thinking in the Arabian Peninsula or beyond, nor equated with a sweeping judgment on everything that preceded the Qur’an. What is meant is the Qur’an’s place in redrawing the mental possible within its own horizon.