ABSTRACT
Modern Islamic authorizing discourses include three competing camps: traditionalists, who locate religious authority in the Qur'ān and the ḥadīth (Sunna); Qur'ānists, who limit religious authority to the revealed text; and, straddling these two trends, a host of modern reformers, who neither reject Sunna nor accept it in its entirety. A common limitation to all these trends is their tawḥīdic ambivalence towards of the Qur'ānic concept of transcendence and its relevance to the meaning of authority.
Modern Islamic authorizing discourses include three competing camps: traditionalists, who locate religious authority in the Qur'ān and the ḥadīth (Sunna); Qur'ānists, who limit religious authority to the revealed text; and, straddling these two, a host of modern reformers, who neither reject Sunna nor accept it in its entirety. A common limitation to all these trends is their tawḥīdic ambivalence towards the Qur'ānic concept of transcendence and its relevance to the meaning of authority.
