What is meant
It means that within everything there is a struggle between its opposites, and that struggle is what drives it toward continuous change. This struggle explains how a thing grows or transforms, and how it can collapse or perish when the contradiction within it reaches its limit.
The Atom’s Structure in the Atlas
- Type of argument: methodological
- Argument movement: it makes internal conflict the basis of development and decay.
- Central terms: internal conflict, opposites, development, decay.
- Degree of centrality: foundational.
It offers a dynamic explanation of change based on internal tension, thus explaining growth and collapse from within the thing itself, not only from outside it.
Links that help with reading
- Muhammad Shahrur the Book and the Qur’an
- History, Development, and Sunan
- decay
- Dialectic and duality are two laws for explaining change
Basis
- Supporting text: “The law of internal conflict of opposites that explains development and decay.”
Location of the basis in the book
- Book: the Book and the Qur’an.
- Location: in the first section of the book
- Type of basis: close witness.
- Mark that helps verification: the internal conflict of opposites
- Reading note: the phrase explains development as the result of an internal conflict of opposites, which closely matches the atom’s content.
Degree of documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom rests on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of reading: the wording above is an analytical summary, and is not treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted word for word.
Its function in the book
Its function here is definitional; it fixes a meaning or conceptual distinction on which Shahrur relies in building the idea.
Related to
Editorial note
A foundational atom in his view of transformation and sunan.