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4introduction by muhammad shahrurto have fully understood the text because this would imply that interms of the acquired and transmitted knowledge of the text readerand author have become absolutely identical. As for the Book, whichembodies the ultimate level (of knowledge), its author is Allah whoalone possesses absolute knowledge about it. While the text of theBook is of divine origins, all its readers/listeners are humans like youand me whose knowledge is not absolute. Human knowledge of thedivine text is partial, limited, and relative. Therefore, people understandthe text in different ways according to their historically conditioned,context-based perceptions of the text’s meaning. Until thecoming of the Last Hour this will be the unchanging hermeneuticalcondition in reading the divine text, because the human reader willalways be influenced by the time and historical context in which heor she lives.Because no revelation has occurred after the last one to MuÈammad(ß), who hence completed all previous chains of prophethoods, everyprophecy has its fixed time and cannot be infinitely extended. Wealso argue that since Allah alone has absolute knowledge of the textwe human beings only possess relative knowledge that aspires toreach towards the unattainable absoluteness of Allah’s knowledge. Ifit is true that the era of revelations has come to an end withMuÈammad (ß) and that only Allah enjoys absolute knowledge, thenthe divine text must possess the quality of ‘assimilatability’ (al-tash§buh).This means that even if the form of the text in its literal substanceis fixed, its content (that is, its meaning) moves. This movementmeans that the rules and injunctions of the text have the flexibilityto be applied according to the changing circumstances of humansocieties, a flexibility that is the core element of ÈanÊfiyya, which wedefine as the curved movement of human legislation within thestraight lines that God has set up. We do not mean by flexibility moraland legal relativism but rather a greater amount of responsivenessto the needs of human societies. This can be achieved by applyingdivine norms within the boundaries of upper and lower limits thatthe text provides. It implies that Allah has left it to us to make sense,by way of our relative and context-related knowledge, of the manyinjunctions in the text, and to fill the gaps that the text has left—allof this strictly within the constraints of the divine boundaries (orlimits).In our linguistic analysis of the divine text we start with the premisethat words cannot be meaningless. This is a departure from tra-