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144chapter threethe Gospel, He returned again and brought down the qur"§n. Butafter that He will never return again, nor will any other prophet ormessenger ever appear again to renew Allah’s message.This has serious consequences for the way we understand the Book.With the Torah and the Gospel, Allah attuned His revelations to theactual historical circumstances that formed the intellectual horizonof the Jews and Christians who were the recipients of His message.In other words, God’s revelations showed all the signs of the Zeitgeistthat these periods had. It would be seriously anachronistic to go backto the Torah and the Gospel in order to understand the text thatwas revealed later, the Book. It would be more appropriate, as wasdone during the European Enlightenment, to regard these texts,which inadequately discuss the laws of nature and the complexitiesof the cosmos, as historically obsolete. Neither the Torah nor theGospel possess the universal quality of tash§buh since they are purelyhistorical texts, written for a specific group of people in a narrowlydefined historical period. It is no wonder that the Torah and theGospel have no relevance any more in modern sciences and are onlyused for liturgical purposes. May God prevent our #ulam§" frominflicting the same destiny upon the qur"anic text!Allah no longer communicates directly with human beings. Hereturns to them solely through the text of the Book, revealed fourteenhundred years ago. And yet, even today we still absorb immenseknowledge about objective reality from His text. This can only implythat even if the form of His text is fixed, its content still moves.A miracle! This elasticity of the text allows its readers to relate whatis read directly to what is experienced in reality. Generations offuture readers will do the same without having violated either theform or the content of the text. No one, of course, will ever be ableto fully understand or exhaustively interpret the text; this can onlybe done by God. Even those ‘who are deeply rooted in knowledge’( al-r§sikhån fi’l-#ilm) [3:7] will always be restricted in their interpretationsdue to their limited understanding of the truth. As forMuÈammad (ß), he never actually ventured to interpret a single lineof the qur"§n; instead, he interpreted other parts of the Book, for example,the umm al-kit§b, but not the qur"§n, which he was asked to deliver,uninterpreted, to the people.