I have attempted in this book to acquaint the English-speaking reader with some of the sciences of the Qur’aan. The more one understands of the Qur’aan and applies in one’s life, the closer one comes to Allaah. I hope that Muslims will steer the middle course between two unpleasant extremes. The first is to throw up one’s hands, claiming that Islaamic knowledge is not the business of the layperson, and that it should be left to specialists in the field. This attitude has left the Muslim masses in deep ignorance of their religion. Whoever is not busy learning about Islaam is likely to be busy in a wide variety of activities that will be a cause for regret on the Day of Judgment. This attitude also leads to a result that was severely criticized in Soorah at-Tawbah. The Jews and Christians took their priests and rabbis as lords in place of God by blindly following them when they prohibited what God had made lawful for them and made lawful that which God had prohibited.135

The second extreme is to consider oneself learned after having read a couple of books on Islaam. Such persons feel duty-bound to correct the “mistakes” of those around them when they see them doing something they are unfamiliar with, or when they have heard somebody somewhere say that a certain practice is wrong, but they themselves have not studied the different positions of scholars on the issue along with their evidences. I hope that this book will impress upon such people the complexity of the Islaamic sciences, especially since that which has been presented here is the tiniest tip of an iceberg compared to what has been written on the subject in Arabic.

I would hope that if the reader gets nothing else out of the book, that he or she will leave with a standard by which to measure the statements of those who are offering interpretations of the Qur’aan. We live in a time when non-Muslims are very eager for the Muslims to reinterpret the sources of our deen. Fundamental to such efforts is reinterpretation of the Qur’aan. Muslims are fairly wary of nonMuslim reinterpretations, but there is a whole reinterpretation movement being advocated by Muslims. This movement, which is especially strong among Muslims living or trained in the West, takes many assumptions of western industrial civilization as self-evident truths which must be accommodated in the Muslims’ understanding and practice of Islaam.