This Religion Is a Science 169changes in the Revelation, the early Quranic interpreters were able to
create a helpful chronology of its verses. Yet what this chronology
most clearly indicates is that God was rearing the Ummah like a lov-
ing parent, instructing it in stages and making alterations when neces-
sary, from the first Revelation in 610 to the last in 632.
Of course, with Muhammad’s death, the Revelation ceased. But
that does not mean that the Ummah stopped evolving. On the con-
trary, the contemporary Muslim community—nearly a billion and a
half strong—bears almost no resemblance to the small community of
faith that Muhammad left behind in seventh-century Arabia. While
the Revelation may have ended, the Quran is still a living text and
must be treated as such. The notion that historical context should play
no role in the interpretation of the Quran—that what applied to
Muhammad’s community applies to all Muslim communities for all
time—is simply an untenable position in every sense.
Nevertheless, the heirs of Traditionalism have managed to silence
most critics of reform, even when that criticism has come from their
own ranks. When in the 1990s Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a Muslim pro-
fessor at Cairo University, argued that the Quran, while divinely
revealed, was a cultural product of seventh-century Arabia, he was
branded a heretic by the conservative-dominated Ulama of Egypt’s
famed al-Azhar University and forced to divorce his Muslim wife
(the couple fled Egypt together). When Mahmoud Mohamed Taha
(1909–85), the renowned Sudanese legal reformer, claimed that the
Meccan and Medinan texts of the Quran differed so greatly from one
another because they were addressed to very specific historical audi-
ences and should be interpreted as such, he was executed.
As will become apparent, the debate over the nature and function of
the Quran and the Shariah has in no way ended. Indeed, contempo-
rary Muslim scholars such as Abdolkarim Soroush and Khaled Abou
El Fadl have been vigorously pushing the Muslim community toward
reformation by reopening the gates of ijtihad and insisting on return-
ing to a rational exegesis of the Quran. However, the dominance of
the Traditionalist position continues to have devastating conse-
quences for the development and progress of law and society in the
modern Middle East.