Formulation of the Claim
The binary of believer and disbeliever was originally a political and social description.
Explanation
Arkoun sees this binary as not having been, in its beginnings, a purely doctrinal boundary, but rather a way of determining belonging and alignment within the community. It thus carries a political and social trace before settling, in later usage, as a definitive religious judgment.
This means that the meaning of believer and disbeliever is not understood here from theology alone, but from the history of the community’s formation and its struggle over definition, authority, and distinction. The binary therefore becomes a marker of a socio-political transformation as much as a religious expression.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s critique of the way religious concepts became tools of sorting and control within Islamic history. It comes close to his broader thesis about the need to reread foundational concepts in light of their historical formation, rather than as fixed meanings outside time.
Limits of the Claim
This atom should not be taken to deny the religious dimension in the later use of the binary, nor to mean that all of its connotations were political only. What is meant is its origin and first function as understood in Arkoun’s context.