Formulation of the claim
Modernity transferred legislation from the authority of the jurists to the authority of parliament.
Explanation
Arkoun sees the modern transformation as having created a rupture with the medieval conception of the sharia as a system upheld by jurists alone. The old meaning of religious legislation no longer fit the modern political structure, which rests on representation and institutions.
Within this framework, understanding religious law in the present becomes more complex, because the sphere that used to grant jurists their traditional position has changed. Legislation is therefore no longer tied solely to juristic authority, but enters into a new political order.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s critique of the structure of legislation in the medieval Islamic conception, where the authority of religious knowledge intersects with the authority of rule. It stands close to his theses about the rupture imposed by modernity on older forms of organization, and about the transfer of legislative decision-making to modern institutions that no longer derive their legitimacy from jurisprudence alone.
Limits of the claim
This atom does not mean that modernity eliminated religion from the public sphere, nor that it ended every presence of juristic interpretation. What is meant is a change in the center of legislation and its mechanisms, not the disappearance of all religious referents.