Formulation of the claim
God appears in the Qur’an as the dominant grammatical and semantic agent.
Explanation
Arkoun places God at the center of the Qur’an’s linguistic structure, so that actions and meanings turn toward Him and a network of meaning gathers around Him. The point is not merely the presence of the name of God, but rather His role as the axis around which the Qur’anic statement is internally organized.
This characterization comes within a reading that holds that religious consciousness changes historically, and that the way God is represented and discourse about Him is formulated is not fixed in the same way across all periods. Thus, “dominant agency” here is a description of a textual and semantic function within the Qur’an.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom belongs within Arkoun’s analysis of the structure of Qur’anic discourse and the place of the foundational concepts within it. It approaches what he presents: that understanding the Qur’an is not limited to doctrinal content, but also includes the organization of language and the distribution of semantic roles within the text. It is therefore directly connected to questions of the semantic formation of religious discourse and the status of the central concept within it.
Limits of the claim
This atom should not be loaded with a final judgment on all representations of God in Islamic history, nor turned into a generalization that extends beyond the Qur’an itself. Nor does it mean reducing the entire Qur’anic text to a single element, but rather describing a specific centrality within the structure of discourse.