In the last two chapters we have considered two perspectives that characterize modern forms of Islam. In studying worship we learned that some Muslims have engaged in a social and moral critique of the ways in which others carried out their ritual obligations. Their objections developed as part of a broad movement for Islamic reform in the late nineteenth century. “Modernist” scholars emphasized the importance of returning to the scriptural texts to rediscover the proper approaches to worship, and of rejecting those practices that did not have a clear scriptural base. They also emphasized holding proper intentions and attitudes when at worship, an emphasis that has led some to hinge Islamic revival on the subjectivity and bodily attitudes of Muslims.

This moral critique of traditional practices sometimes joins with an epistemological shift that casts Islam as a system of propositions rather than as an accumulated body of ideas and practices. This perspective on Islam can support a modernist position but it need not do so. One may render Islamic “systematic” in ways that support older ways of thinking about Islam as a set of accumulated norms and practices. Nonetheless, there are what we may think of as meta-textual “elective affinities” between the two ideas, to the extent that both – the modernist moral critique and the Islam-as-system epistemological shift – privilege the immediate relation of the Muslim to sources of scriptural proof.