Formulation of the Claim
Arkoun acknowledges the existence of a distance between the Qur’an’s legislative intent and what jurists and judges later arrived at in the crystallization of legal rulings.
Explanation
The text places the Qur’an at the level of the original legislative intent, then distinguishes between this intent and the juridical formulations that accumulated after it. The point here is not to deny the connection between the two, but to note that legal development was not simply a direct uncovering of what was already in the Qur’anic text; rather, it was a later crystallization with its own logic and limits.
The importance of this distinction appears in matters of inheritance, where Arkoun points out that what became established among jurists does not simply match the Qur’anic intent as the text presents it. The distance between the text and later systematization thus becomes a way into understanding how rulings took shape within Islamic history.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom belongs to the book’s broader effort to read the Qur’an as a foundational text with its own horizon, then to trace the way juridical readings reconfigured that horizon within later legislative systems. It is close to theses that distinguish between revelation and its historical apprehensions, and between the construction of jurisprudence as a relatively autonomous field in Islamic culture.
Limits of the Claim
This atom should not be read as a sweeping judgment on all Islamic jurisprudence, nor as a denial of the value of ijtihad or its relation to the Qur’an. The aim is to identify a historical and epistemic difference between the Qur’anic intent and later juridical crystallization, not to issue a final verdict on the tradition as a whole.
Brief Evidence
The text concludes that there is a clear distance between the Qur’an’s legislative intent and what jurists and judges later produced, and this difference appears especially in matters of inheritance.