The Idea
For Arkoun, universality is not a ready-made truth proclaimed all at once, but an open process that takes shape gradually. He therefore rejects the idea of it as something complete from the beginning or directly present in every age. The point here is that universality requires historical and intellectual work in order to expand so as to include everyone, not merely a theoretical declaration that would be sufficient on its own.
Concise Formulation
Universality: an open and gradual project
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This claim appears within the book’s construction of the idea that religion cannot be understood outside its history or outside the becoming of its meanings. So rather than presenting universality as a fixed and final attribute, the text places it within a process of formation. In this way, debate over certain symbols or issues becomes a sign that religious meaning is still being rearranged, not that it has settled definitively into a single form.
Why It Matters
Its importance lies in preventing the reader from imagining Arkoun as someone who equates universality with an easy absolutism. He links inclusiveness to cultural and historical action, not to slogans. This helps explain his critique of any discourse on religious universality that ignores gradual development, difference, and interpretation. Universality here is more a project for the future than a description of the present.
Brief Evidence
The debate over the veil is considered a symbolic indication of the return of the primacy of Qur’anic knowledge in its form He rejects the conception of religious universality as a completed and immediate universality
Reading Questions
- Why does the text reject understanding universality as complete and immediate?
- What makes universality, for Arkoun, a historical project rather than a final judgment?
Degree of Documentation
High: the claim appears in a clear location in the book’s material.