Formulation of the Claim
The community of believers is constructed as a collective subject in opposition to the “other.”
Explanation
This claim means that, in Arkoun, religious identity is not presented as an isolated individual given, but as a collective representation that takes shape within discourse and is reinforced through the distinction between the community and whoever stands outside it. Believers do not appear merely as adjacent individuals, but as a single symbolic entity to which unity of meaning and stance is attributed.
This construction reveals a dialectical dimension in the making of identity; the collective subject is defined through its relation to what it excludes or confronts. The presence of the “other” therefore becomes part of the mechanism through which the community is formed, not merely a secondary external element.
Its Place in the Book’s Argument
This atom belongs to a sequence of ideas that explain how religious communities are formed within systems of representation and knowledge, rather than as fixed natural facts. It falls within the broader argument that follows the forms taken by the construction of the religious sphere, the limits of consciousness of it, and how relations between belonging and difference are articulated in works that address critique of Islamic thought and the history of the formation of collective representations.
Limits of the Claim
This formulation does not mean that all believers are in fact dissolved into a single homogeneous mass, nor does it deny internal differences among them. Nor should it be taken as an ethical judgment on the community, but rather understood within the limits of describing the mechanism of identity construction in discourse.