ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the Qur’an’s own instinct which is to leave to men of alert intelligence the detailed applications, relying throughout in the author's remarks upon the Book, the authoritative tradition or Sunnah and the guidance of the true guides. Islam is the religion of Muhammad’s mission, as readily understood by his companions and their contemporaries who heeded it. Of prophets as well as others, Islam lays down that they cannot of themselves control good and harm. People were not roused to action, nor minds to vigour and speculation until a large number of them came to know their right to exercise choice and to seek out facts with their own minds. Such assurance only came to them in the sixteenth century ad—a fact which the same writer traces to the influence of Islamic culture and the scholarship of Muslim peoples in that century.
