What I hope to bring forth in this book is Islam’s contributions to an area at once profoundly theoretical but also eminently practical, namely the science of interpreting scripture, reconciling its claims of truth and justice with what is true and just outside its text. I hope to offer glimpses into the world of the ulama and their books, a world that I at first wanted to observe as an object of study but soon found to be an interlocutor that all too often showed me the limitations of the worldview I had grown up in and revealed my own intellectual arrogance.
