An Abrahamic Semitic Approach
The study of the past has always been a contested terrain, whether that be in regard to people across traditions or those within a tradition. But when engaging with history, particularly the past as narrated by God in His final Proclamation (al-Qur'ān), we're at liberty to ask: Which perspective are we meant to employ?
In contemporary times, the past as related in the Proclamation is interpreted through the filters of modern cultural assumptions, political ideologies, or sectarian frameworks. We propose a different route: one rooted in the Abrahamic-Semitic tradition itself, as intended by God.
The Problem with Modern Perspectives on the Ishmaelite tradition
Contemporary understandings of the "Islamic" past are frequently clouded by the assumptions of modernity: colonial inheritance, nation-state logic, and cultural constructs that are more Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal than Abrahamic. These perspectives are often reactive: seeking legitimacy against the West, validation in terms of modern science or sociology, or political empowerment through sloganeering and tropes. The result is a reading of the final Proclamation and the history it covers that is heavily refracted through the anxieties and ideologies of the present.
Of course, there is also the persistent homogenisation of history in modern Muslim discourse. Instead of reckoning with the fact that early Semitic monotheism predates the crystallisation of what is now referred to as "Islamic civilisation," there is a tendency to read prophetic history backwards from the vantage point of Abbasid kalām or post-colonial discourse. This imposes categories that came later onto an earlier worldview and erases the distinctiveness of the covenantal Abrahamic tradition that the final message was sent to revive.
Why the Abrahamic-Semitic Lens?
The final message directly continues on from the earlier Prophets: Noah, Abraham, Moses, and others. There is no identification with a new religion, despite the modern idea of taking the word "submission" which alludes to the submissive nature of Abraham in the final revelation and turning it into a distinct religion simply about the Prophet Muhammad, but as a clarification of the primordial message (Qur’an 42:13; 2:136) and transfer of covenantal stewardship to the Ishmaelites. Thus, to understand God’s account of the past properly, one must adopt the historical, legal, and ethical worldview of those Semitic traditions.
This means recovering the covenantal logic that shaped the Abrahamic household which was a logic based on God's sovereignty, covenantal law, loyalty, justice, and responsibility. It means paying attention to the legal forms and social practices of earlier prophetic communities as living paradigms, not as stories to be moralised and set aside. It also means recognising the Proclamation's own emphasis on history as a site of divine signs (āyāt) and covenantal accountability, not merely as nostalgic reference or inspirational anecdote.
The Perspective
We study the past as a revealed historical consciousness that connects the ancient Semitic Prophets through a coherent divine program. We do not approach it as myth, moral allegory, or cultural folklore, but as covenantal reality: the real dealings of God with communities through messengers and material consequences. This involves triangulating the final decree from God with the Torah, Nev'im and Ketuvim and relevant extra-Qur'anic sources such as the hadith corpus, while stripping away the theological accretions and prejudices that often colour exegesis and historical interpretation.
For example, when the God mentions Moses or the Children of Israel, it is not just critiquing the Jews of Madinah (Yathrib). It is invoking a historical archetype of custodianship, human failure, and the possibility of covenantal renewal that has bearing on the faithful today. The point is covenantal inheritance and continuity. Similarly, the centrality of Abraham in the final Proclamation of God is not a folkloric father figure or a neutral patriarch. He is a key patriarch of moral and intellectual independence, with a devout and submissive heart that acts as an example to his steward descendants, and a rebellion against corrupt systems that usurp the ultimate sovereignty of God.
Why This Approach Is the Right One
- It aligns with the Proclamation's own claim: The final Proclamation does not present itself as a cultural product of 7th Century Arabia. It anchors itself in a far older covenantal tradition. To understand it otherwise is to violate its own epistemology and skew the message.
- It avoids anachronism: The modern religious lens often projects contemporary preoccupations such as identity politics, geopolitical grievances, and sectarian categories onto the past. The Abrahamic lens resists that distortion by contextualising each Prophet within their own mission and mandate.
- It restores universality: Modernity treats "the religion of Islam" as a culturally Arabised or Persianised phenomenon. But the Abrahamic-Semitic lens reveals a universal prophetic tradition that spans geography and ethnicity, united by loyalty and obedience to the Creator, the ultimate sovereign and lawgiver.
- It is historically grounded: This approach does not rely on later theological developments or post-Prophetic empire dynamics. It re-centres the final message as a primary source of historical consciousness and contextually rooted in earlier Semitic records.
- It reclaims purpose: The Qur’anic past is not trivia or heritage. It is a living mirror. Through this lens, the rise and fall of communities, the consequences of injustice, and the rewards of loyalty to the divine King are not abstract lessons. They are real-world warnings and invitations.
The past is not made up of abstract ideas or histories to be theoretically checked like a tick-box exercise. It is to be understood as a living genealogy of faithful continuity. Our approach, rooted in an Abrahamic-Semitic lens, seeks to restore the final Proclamation's historical narrative on its own terms. It is an approach that prioritises divine intent over cultural inheritance, covenant over culture, and revelation over reaction. In doing so, it reorients both the believer and the historian toward a richer, more faithful understanding of what the final message is truly saying, and fundamentally, what God wants.
The Inversion of Understanding the Quran
When you hear the statement: “the sunnah explains the Quran” you're meant to be hearing a precise hermeneutical claim within a carefully ordered system. The Proclamation issues a directive such as upholding the covenantal prayer or paying the duty, and the Prophetic instructions fill in the details. The directive, its authority, its purpose, and its moral weight all derive from the Proclamation. The twenty three years of prophetic guidance is the operational elaboration of what the Proclamation has already established as binding. It’s the equivalent of a constitution setting out a right, and case law or executive practice specifying how that right is administered. No one mistakes the case law for the constitution. The case law only has force because the constitution establishes the right in the first place.
The relationship is therefore not symmetrical. The Proclamation is the root, the origin, the criterion. Branches derive their life from the root. You can’t nourish the root by watering the branches. That’s not to mention that the historical sources (hadith) exist on a spectrum of authenticity, transmission reliability, and contextual embeddedness. Verified sources still require contextual interpretation such as: when was this said, to whom, under what circumstances, in response to what question? The Proclamation also requires some of this apparatus but it is far more self-presenting, directly addressed to the Israelites and Ishmaelites, and internally coherent across its length. When there is genuine tension between a historical source and a clear revelatory principle, jurists have always understood the source as either inauthentic, misunderstood, or contextually limited. They didn’t reinterpret the Proclamation simply to accommodate the hadith.
Modern popular religious discourse has quietly but catastrophically reversed this order. The mechanism works like this:
A preacher encounters one or two hadith that are often circulating in a decontextualised form, and often already filtered through a particular sect’s reading, and constructs around them a theological, legal or moral narrative. This narrative then becomes the lens through which the Proclamation’s verses are read. The verses are no longer interpreted, instead they’re being conscripted. They are cited cynically to decorate one that has already been made from hadith. Obviously, the logical problems with this are substantial and compounding.
First, it mistakes the elaboration for the foundation. If a directive only exists in the Proclamation, and a hadith elaborates on it, then removing the Proclamation removes the ground on which the hadith stands. But if the hadith comes first in the preacher’s mind, the Proclamation becomes redundant and a mere rhetorical garnish. This isn’t a minor methodological quirk. It means the “religion” being practiced is, structurally speaking, a “hadith-religion” that quotes the Quran for atmosphere.
Second, it creates a selection bias with no correction mechanism. The Proclamation is a single, bounded text. You can’t cherry-pick it without the rest of it remaining visible and capable of challenging your selection. The hadith corpus is vast, internally varied, and filtered through centuries of transmission with genuine disagreements about reliability. A preacher who starts from hadith can almost always find something that supports the narrative they have already arrived at. There is no equivalent of the rest of the Proclamation to push back, because the Proclamation has been demoted to supporting role. The interpretive system becomes self-sealing.
Third, it inverts the burden of proof. A hadith that appears to contradict a Quranic principle faces a very high bar. The Proclamation doesn’t need to justify itself against the hadith. In the inverted modern system, this burden is effectively reversed: a verse that seems to challenge the preacher’s hadith-derived narrative is quietly recontextualised, spiritualised, or ignored. The text that should function as the criterion is instead being made to pass the test set by its own elaborations!
Fourth, it produces irresolvable contradictions between sects, with no common ground. Two preachers each with their own preferred hadith cluster, each having retroactively imposed their narrative on the Proclamation’s verses, have no shared court of appeal. The Proclamation could be that court if it were functioning as the criterion, but once it has been subordinated to hadith, appeals to the Quran simply mean appeals to your own hadith-filtered reading of the Proclamation. The disagreement becomes intractable because the arbiter has been removed.
I think that part of why this inversion has gone on for so long is because it mimics a form of scholarship. Citations are produced. Chains of transmission are invoked. Arabic terminology is used. The structure looks like rigorous engagement with sources to the layman. But the order of operations is wrong, and that wrongness is invisible unless you are specifically looking for it.
There is also a psychological dimension. A hadith is, very often, a story: a scene, a person, a moment, a ruling given in context. Stories are cognitively compelling. They feel more concrete than the way preachers present the Quran as a flat declarative, direct address. A preacher who builds from hadith stories is building from material that is naturally persuasive to an audience conditioned by narratives. The Quran’s presented mode: address, command, argument, warning, reminder all require a different kind of attentiveness that popular religious culture has largely stopped cultivating.
What is lost is the Proclamation function as the criterion (furqān), the thing that distinguishes, or the instrument of discernment. The Proclamation repeatedly describes itself in this way (and also describes the Torah in this way). It is not simply a book of guidance among other books of guidance. It is the measure against which other sources are evaluated. A tradition that has inverted the hierarchy has, in effect, decommissioned its own criterion. It retains the name of the Proclamation while stripping it of the authority of God’s speech. That isn’t a small irony. It is the central irony of a great deal of what passes in the public realm.