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the sunna of the prophet 109of miraculous power that they possessed independently from the messagesthey carried to the people. MuÈammad’s (ß) mission as aprophet and messenger, in contrast, was solely authorised by Allah’sorder to deliver the text of the divine revelations exactly as he heardit.It is because of this mission that Allah asks the Muslim-Believersto be obedient to MuÈammad (ß) as messenger (rasål), not as prophet(nabÊ) or human being ( al-bashr al-ins§n). Why? Because obediencerequires the impeccability of the one whom we obey, and MuÈammad(ß) was not in any way impeccable either as human being or asprophet—only as messenger (within the boundaries that the Bookstipulates). Numerous passages in the Book could be quoted to illustratethis truth.As for the thorny problem of how to correctly follow MuÈammad’ssunna we conclude that we should emulate not his rules as such butthe manner in which he harmonised with the Book the ‘becoming’and ‘progressing’ of his society on the Arabian Peninsula in theseventh century. In other words, we should follow his model and alsoapply the divine rules but this time within the politic al-historicalcontext of our own time. He presents to us the first and most authenticmodel of how to transform the ‘being’ of-and-in-itself of the Bookinto concrete realities of society, state, family, and such, a modelijtih§d which we have to emulate for our own times, the twenty-firstcentury.This insight allows us to conclude that MuÈammad (ß) was a pragmaticleader who received the ‘absolute’ and applied it to the ‘particular’of his time. As we have seen, he was certainly a wise man,but, as we have also seen, the wisdom of his sunna was not derivedfrom a divine source. This implies that our philosophical and theologicalknowledge, which should be anchored in divine knowledge,can only be derived from the Book alone. It cannot come from thewords and statements of MuÈammad (ß) even if he was God’s mostperfect Messenger. Only Allah alone, not His Messenger, should bethe ultimate source of knowledge. Nor shall the words of his companionsand contemporaries be the inspiration for contemporarythought.Finally, let us assure the reader that we are committed to followingthe sunna of the Prophet but only to the extent and degree we definedin this chapter. We are indeed willing to emulate the example ofMuÈammad (ß) but only within the parameters of a new Islamic