Formulation of the Claim
Intermediaries between revelation and people multiplied throughout history, from the founders of schools of law to commentators and Sufi lodges.
Explanation
Arkoun describes a historical process in which layers of mediation accumulated between God’s word and believers, so that the relation to the text was no longer direct, as it is imagined in the first moment of reception. This multiplication renders religious understanding subject to a chain of interpretations and mediations that impose themselves as part of the inherited tradition.
For him, this is tied to a shift from early creativity to scholastic repetition, that is, to the reproduction of meanings within apparatuses of commentary and indoctrination. The issue is not the existence of a single intermediary, but the multiplication of intermediaries themselves until they became a fixed structure in the history of reading and reception.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom comes within Arkoun’s critique of the structures that produced historical religious knowledge, where the text is not understood apart from the ways it was surrounded by interpretation, regulation, and representation. It intersects with his related theses on the formation of tradition and the monopolization of meaning, as well as with his critique of the transformation of the religious sphere into a domain dominated by sectarian and interpretive mediations.
Limits of the Claim
This atom should not be understood as a denial of the value of interpretation or as reducing the history of religious thought to a mere obstacle. Rather, it describes a specific historical accumulation in the way meaning is transmitted, not a sweeping judgment on all forms of mediation in themselves.