Intended meaning
It means that European thought had cognitively gone beyond inherited symbols after having benefited from them in an earlier stage. This places it in contrast with the path of the Arab-Islamic mind, which, in the author’s view, remained captive to those symbols instead of turning them into knowledge.
The atom’s structure in the atlas
- Type of argument: historical
- Argument movement: it portrays the European experience as a cognitive transcendence of inherited symbols after benefiting from them.
- Key terms: Europe, inherited symbols, knowledge, transcendence.
- Degree of centrality: secondary.
This atom uses a historical comparison to highlight the difference between transforming symbols into knowledge and remaining captive to them, as a prelude to criticizing cognitive stagnation in the Arab-Islamic context.
Links that help with reading
- Muhammad Shahrur: Religion and Power
- Critique of heritage, jurisprudence, and exegesis
- The conflation of religion and authority produced oppression
Basis
- Supporting text: “European thought surpassed them cognitively after having benefited from them in an earlier stage.”
Place of support in the book
- Book: Religion and Power.
- Location: in the middle section of the book, in the discussion of the development of science and the mind.
- Type of support: close evidence.
- Marker that helps verification: the faculty of rational judgment was lost
- Reading note: this location works as support because it links European progress to moving beyond a state of utter ignorance and recovering rational judgment.
Degree of documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom relies on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of reading: the wording above is an analytical summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted word for word.
Its function in the book
Its function here is declarative; it establishes a result on which what follows in the argument depends.
Related to
Editorial note
The support is brief, and the comparative reading is evident in the wording.