ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the first part of this book. The first part of the book deals with particular phenomena in the Islamic tradition other than the Quran. It discusses "Traditionalism in Islam", began as a paper for a 1991 cross-disciplinary conference organized under the auspices of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History by Robert Rotberg. It also deals with the often mentioned but seldom scrutinized traditionalist bent that appears again and again in Muslim scholarly thought and religious custom and practice. It explores the general concepts of revelation that emerge in the earliest sources for our reconstruction of Islamic beginnings; it argues that the later dogmatic distinctions between verbatim divine word and inspired prophetic word were much less important and therefore less pronounced than they came to be in later centuries.
