ABSTRACT
The conclusion presents some closing thoughts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The Islamic tradition provides an explanatory context required to explicate the foundations and substance of the thought of Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali. The chapter explores how the classical Islamic tradition is fundamentally a dynamic entity with the ideas, norms, values and events of the past transmitted and interpreted in the present. It discusses Muhammad al-Tahir ibn Ashur's attempt to expand the scope of al-Shatibi's objectives of the Shari'ah, in the first part of the twentieth century, into a separate discipline from the foundations of jurisprudence. The chapter demonstrates the importance of situating Muslim authors, particularly reformers, in the contests taking place within the Islamic tradition. Precedents to the interpretation of the past and present of Islam in this study getting away from the Eurocentric notion of history undoubtedly do exist.
