Formulating the claim
Arkoun maintains that traditional interpretation shifts the Qur’anic text from a horizon of implication and metaphor to the level of realism and detail.
Explanation
Within this conception, the text is not read as an open-ended discourse, but is reduced to direct and determinate meanings that make its presence closer to detailed description than to symbolic suggestion. In this way, the scope of interpretation narrows in favor of the literal meaning, or the meaning closest to fixity.
In Arkoun’s critical framework, this shift means that traditional interpretation fixes the text within a limited discursive horizon and prevents it from retaining its semantic density. The issue is not merely explaining the verse, but the way its relation to meaning and to reality is reconfigured.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s critique of interpretive methods that reduce the Qur’anic text to the level of directness and realism, instead of leaving it within the space of implication and symbolism. It is tied to his broader argument about the need for a reading that reveals layers of meaning and dismantles the mechanisms of closure imposed by traditional readings.
Limits of the claim
This atom should not be taken as a definitive judgment on all forms of traditional interpretation, nor as a description of every inherited reading alike. Nor does it mean that Arkoun rejects interpretation in principle; rather, he criticizes a specific mode of turning signification into detailed realism.