Formulation of the claim
The First Fitna embodies the struggle of Qur’anic legitimacy with tribal and political maneuvers.
Explanation
Arkoun understands the First Fitna as a moment when the tension between the emerging Qur’anic reference and the forces that sought to direct the political and tribal field was laid bare. What is meant here is not an isolated event, but a shift of the conflict to the level of legitimacy itself: who has the right to represent, who controls meaning, and who settles the decision in the name of the community.
In this perspective, the First Fitna reveals that the establishment of power was not separate from the question of the source from which it derived its legitimacy. Qur’anicness therefore appears here not as a merely abstract religious framework, but as a reference that entered into confrontation with human arrangements that sought to contain it or instrumentalize it.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom appears within Arkoun’s theses that read early Islamic history as a field in which religious and political meaning took shape together, rather than as a completed narrative innocent of conflict. It also aligns with his interest in showing how texts, authority, and collective memory intertwine in the production of legitimacy, and how this gives rise to an early conflict whose effects continue into later Islamic thought.
Limits of the claim
This atom should not be burdened with a final judgment on all parties to the Fitna, nor reduced to a single cause. Nor does it mean that Qur’anic legitimacy was entirely detached from historical reality; rather, it is presented here as a focal point of conflict within that reality.