But one thing is certain: the past, and the idealized, perfected, and totally imaginary view of it wrought by those puritans and fundamentalists who strive to re-create it, is over. The next chapter in the story of Islam will be written solely by those willing to look forward, to confront whatever lies ahead, confident in the knowledge that the revolution launched by the Prophet Muhammad fourteen centuries ago to replace the archaic, rigid, and inequitable strictures of tribal society with a radically new vision of divine morality and social egalitarianism still continues to this day.
