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Revelation as Human Linguistic Discourse

3 min read

Formulation of the claim

Revelation is presented as divine discourse, yet it cannot be separated from being human linguistic discourse.

Explanation

In Arkoun’s thought, revelation cannot be understood outside its linguistic and historical medium; it does not reach the recipient as an abstract meaning, but takes shape in a language circulated within a human community and subject to the conditions of understanding and interpretation. The question of revelation is therefore tied to the way it is represented and formulated, not merely to acknowledging its transcendent source.

This makes revelation a field for thinking about the relationship between the transcendent and the human, and between the message and its expressive form. What matters here is not denying the religious dimension of revelation, but drawing attention to the fact that its presence in the world takes place through discourse, and that discourse can only be understood within the horizon of language and history.

Its place in the book’s argument

This atom comes within Arkoun’s effort to dismantle conceptions that isolate revelation from the conditions of its formation in collective consciousness, and place it outside the human realm that can be studied. It converges with his broader theses that link religion to history, and insist that foundational texts can only be read through analytical tools that reveal their linguistic structure and the trajectory of their reception.

At this point, the atom contributes to the book’s central argument about the need to move the question from abstract assent to critical understanding, and from treating revelation as a self-sufficient given to considering it as a linguistic event that lived within society and through it.

Limits of the claim

This atom does not mean reducing revelation to a purely human construction or denying any faith dimension within it. Nor should it be taken as a final judgment on the truth of revelation; rather, it should be understood within Arkoun’s analysis of the way it appears and is represented in language and history.

Brief evidence passage

When we closely examine the basic structure of the linguistic mode of expression used in the Qur’an, we discover that the validity of the sacred book rests primarily on a linguistic basis. There is no doubt that the traditional believer imagines this divine validity as though it were a transmission that actually occurred through extraordinary means, that is, through heavenly or divine modes of conveyance by means of the angel Gabriel… etc. (the modern anthropologist tells us that these extraordinary means are nothing but metaphorical, imaginary, or mythical). In any case, one fixed fact remains: the sensible and tangible manifestation of revelation or of the transmitted message took place in a human language, Arabic here, and in it we observe that the speaker of the discourse asserts itself through the use of a form

Mohammed Arkoun Atlas