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conclusion 493society, the Messenger MuÈammad (ß) used his independentjudgement to issue prohibitions or permissions which he hadto qualify in accordance with the shifting historical context andchanging circumstances. This is (also for us) the only way toapply the dictum of the #ulam§" that ‘the legal injunctions changewith the changes of time’ ( al-aÈk§m tataghayyar bi-taghayyural-azm§n). It is the only chance to turn the current geographicallyand temporally very narrow-minded Êm§nic discourse—caged into the space of the Arabian Peninsula at the time ofthe seventh century—into a universal isl§mic discourse thatintegrates all people on this globe and covers all periods of timeuntil the coming of the Last Hour.19. The sunna of MuÈammad (ß) has been defined as the first ijtih§dever, a deliberate application of the rules of the Book to a concretehistorical situation. We have shown that the sunna embodiesMuÈammad’s (ß) interpretations of how to transform thedivine and absolute rules into practiced norms of everyday lifeon the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century. It was not theonly and certainly not the last application of the Book. WhatMuÈammad (ß) did was to consider the cultural, political, andeconomic situation of seventh-century Arabia and to positionits ‘becoming’ and ‘progressing’ vis-à-vis the divine and transhistorical‘being’ of the divine text. In applying universalinjunctions to his concrete historical milieu, he built the foundationof a centralized state on the Arabian Peninsula whichwas, at that time and in terms of ancient Arabia, an enormousqualitative leap. In this role, MuÈammad (ß) was a truly pragmaticleader and an immensely convincing bearer of a new,revolutionary message. As the first mujtahid and greatest messenger(ß), who received a divine, absolute message from God,he transformed the eternal into the temporal, the abstract intothe concrete, the universal into the particular. Because of thisintrinsic link between MuÈammad’s (ß) ijtih§d and the concrete,contingent circumstances of seventh-century Arabia, we statedthat we do not draw analogies from the decisions we face inour contemporary world to his decisions of the seventh century.We must apply our own ijtih§d and use our own intellect tobring the rules of the Book in line with objective reality as weface it today and in accordance with the epistemological paradigmswe possess now. Therefore, we did not apply the method