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1. Introduction
Islam is not only a religion, a system of the religious beliefs but also a way of life, which prescribes, exhorts, admonishes, and instructs its adherents how to live their individual and social lives. Thus, it is at once a religion, a system of law, a social order relevant to ethics, politics, economics and the whole of human life. In other words, it is everything that every Muslim needs to live his or her life in this world. Because this guidance is from Allah, the Muslim believes it is universal and eternal and valid and, therefore, right and proper, binding in the life of Muslim man, woman, and child, and in the collective life of the community. Hence, Muslims have tried to determine the situation in which certain passages of the scripture were revealed and how the context of the Qur'an was reconstructed. Throughout Islamic history, the Qur'an has always been taken out of its own first society and transferred into new societies. Every society and every individual assesses their own world and creates their own identity. This is inevitable, because every developmental stage presents problems, questions, and dilemmas of its own, which demand timely, suitable, and practical answers.
As history would have it, Islam did spread beyond the boundaries of Arabia and today it is a global religion with hugely different faces and practices in the various parts of the world. The question, therefore, is: how can the Islamic scripture, the Qur'an, be read and interpreted and its meaning understood, constructed, and applied by Muslims living under hugely different ways of life yet still in accordance with the fundamental teachings of the Qur'an? Islam was a practicable religion for Arabs at the time of the Prophet and even brought uplifting and beneficial change in Arab society. Islam is also an equally practicable religion for a variety of people in various parts of the world today.
However, Western scholars sometimes read Islam as a static, monolithic and unchangeable religion, neglecting to distinguish between the ideas of Islam and the reality of social changes which provide constant accretions through the different perspectives, customs and cultural practices in different contexts. Identification of Islam with a static political, social or religious framework misguides the reader of...