A Civilization That Forgot Its Reasons
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre opens his book After Virtue with a thought experiment. Imagine a society that suffers a catastrophic break with science and technology—laboratories destroyed, scientists killed, textbooks burned, and the accumulated knowledge behind an advanced civilization largely wiped away. Generations later, people begin stumbling across fragments of what was lost: surviving instruments, machines, technical vocabulary, and scattered instructions for how certain things were once done. They discover that some of this technology still works and that, by following the surviving procedures, they can put it to practical use.
But they no longer understand how the technology was developed or the underlying physics that makes it work. They know that certain actions produce certain results, but not why. Over time, explanation gives way to imitation. Procedures become rituals. Accidentally successful practices become rules. Superstitions grow around the machines, while misunderstandings accumulate about their purpose, their origins, and the limits of what they can actually do. People may become quite skilled at repeating inherited techniques while remaining almost completely ignorant of the principles that once made those techniques intelligible.
What survives, then, is not simply a collection of broken artifacts but the practical shell of a lost body of knowledge: technology that can still be used, at least partially, by people who have forgotten the science that produced it. And because the underlying reasoning has disappeared, they can no longer reliably distinguish what is essential from what is accidental, what is genuine knowledge from later superstition, or what the technology is truly capable of from the limitations imposed by their inherited practices.
MacIntyre built this scenario to describe the state of moral language after the Enlightenment. But the analogy fits religion even more strongly than it fits ethics, and it is key to understanding the religion the Quran calls mankind to.
Ḥanīf, Dīn, and Fiṭrah
Ask most religious people—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—what their religion consists of, and they will recite a creed, a prayer, or a list of practices: what to eat, how to pray, which day to observe, which rites to perform, and in what order. Ask why those particular practices matter, and the answer eventually reduces to some version of because this is what God commanded. The performance survives; the reasoning that gives the performance meaning often does not. This is MacIntyre’s fragment-society transplanted from science to religion: the rituals remain while their foundation recedes from view.
The Quran’s answer to this condition is captured in a word: ḥanīf. The word derives from the Arabic root ḥ-n-f and carries the basic sense of inclination or turning—deviating from one course toward another. The direction of that turning has to be supplied by context. In the Quran, ḥanīf consistently describes the person who turns away from false worship and toward God.
Its semantic core, then, is not a body of doctrine but an orientation. A ḥanīf is not defined first by possessing a particular set of propositions, rituals, or inherited customs, but by the direction in which he has turned. Quran 30:30 expresses this idea with unusual precision:
[30:30] Therefore, you shall devote yourself to the religion (dīn) of strict monotheism (ḥanīf). Such is the natural instinct (fiṭrah) placed into the people by GOD. Such creation of GOD will never change. This is the perfect religion, but most people do not know.
فَأَقِمْ وَجْهَكَ لِلدِّينِ حَنِيفًا فِطْرَتَ ٱللَّهِ ٱلَّتِى فَطَرَ ٱلنَّاسَ عَلَيْهَا لَا تَبْدِيلَ لِخَلْقِ ٱللَّهِ ذَٰلِكَ ٱلدِّينُ ٱلْقَيِّمُ وَلَٰكِنَّ أَكْثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ
The religion (dīn) of humanity from its very beginning is an orientation toward God—a ḥanīf orientation. If God is the one fixed point by which everything else is understood and made relative, then that is monotheism in its most fundamental sense. And the Quran presents this orientation not as something artificially imposed from outside, but as the natural disposition (fiṭrah) placed within the human being from the beginning.
The literal Arabic is even more revealing than the translation. The verse begins:
فَأَقِمْ وَجْهَكَ لِلدِّينِ حَنِيفًا
fa-aqim wajhaka lil-dīni ḥanīfan
So set your face toward the religion, ḥanīf.
The verb aqim is an imperative: set, establish, make stand. Wajhaka literally means “your face,” but can also be understood as “your aim” or “focus.” And lil-dīn means to the religion. The image is therefore one of orientation: set your face toward the dīn. The following word, ḥanīfan, is grammatically a circumstantial expression describing the person whose face is being directed—doing so as one who turns or inclines. The verse is not merely naming a religious category. It is describing a posture: face one direction, toward God, while turning away from competing objects of devotion.
The verse then immediately identifies this orientation with:
فِطْرَتَ ٱللَّهِ ٱلَّتِى فَطَرَ ٱلنَّاسَ عَلَيْهَا
fiṭrata llāhi allatī faṭara l-nāsa ʿalayhā
the fiṭrah of God upon which He originated mankind.
The repetition is important: fiṭrah and faṭara come from the same root, f-ṭ-r. The language does not merely say that God later taught human beings this disposition. It says that God originated humanity upon it. Humanity is created already standing upon a certain primordial disposition. Fiṭrah is therefore not something acquired from a later institution, scripture, priesthood, or inherited tradition; it belongs to the conditions under which the human being was made.
Read as a whole, the imagery is remarkably coherent: humanity is created upon a fiṭrah and then commanded to set its face toward the religion (dīn) as a ḥanīf. Therefore, religion in its truest sense is being described in terms of orientation before it is described in terms of ritual.
This is the primordial religion. God is the fixed point; the human being is oriented toward Him; everything else takes its proper place relative to that orientation. In that sense, monotheism is not merely the proposition that “there is one God.” It is the condition in which God alone occupies the position by which everything else is measured. To become ḥanīf is to turn away from every rival center and restore that original orientation to God alone.
This is the distinction that later religious thinking easily flattens. Dīn is not reducible to a set of practices, recited formulas, or memorized creeds. It is the orientation of one’s whole being toward God. The foundation is the ḥanīf posture itself: the human being turned toward God in accordance with the disposition upon which humanity was created. Practices and prayers may express that orientation, but they are not themselves the dīn. Once the practices are mistaken for the foundation, MacIntyre’s fragment-society reappears: the motions remain while the reasons that once made them intelligible disappear. Ritual survives, but orientation is forgotten.
And this is why grounding religion in fiṭrah matters so much. The foundation cannot belong exclusively to prophets, scholars, or people fortunate enough to inherit a particular scripture, because 30:30 says that God faṭara l-nāsa ʿalayhā—He originated humanity upon it. The religious starting point is therefore not an externally transmitted rulebook. It is something already present in the human creature, which revelation can awaken, clarify, correct, and call back into alignment.
Abraham: The Practitioner
Abraham is, in the fullest sense, the Quran’s first philosopher of monotheism—the paradigmatic ḥanīf.
[3:67] Abraham was neither Jewish, nor Christian; he was a monotheist submitter. He never was an idol worshiper.
مَا كَانَ إِبْرَٰهِيمُ يَهُودِيًّا وَلَا نَصْرَانِيًّا وَلَٰكِن كَانَ حَنِيفًا مُّسْلِمًا وَمَا كَانَ مِنَ ٱلْمُشْرِكِينَ
The point is more than chronological. The Quran does not merely observe that Abraham lived before Judaism and Christianity took their later historical forms. It identifies him instead by something more fundamental: he was a ḥanīf, a submitter, and not one of those who associated partners with God. His religious identity is therefore located prior to the institutions that would later claim him.
What Abraham represents is ḥanīfiyyah: not religion first as inherited law, ritual, communal label, or historical affiliation, but as an orientation toward God that precedes all of these. Judaism and Christianity come later. The ḥanīf posture comes first. And the Quran does not leave that posture abstract. It shows us what it looks like in practice.
Abraham does not begin by inheriting a creed and then defending it. He questions what he has inherited. He looks at the world around him, applies criteria, tests claims, rejects what fails, and follows the reasoning where it leads. Only afterward do distinct rites and practices enter the story. The order is significant: orientation first, reasoning first, ritual afterward.
Quran 6:74–79 presents this method directly. Abraham begins by confronting the idol worship of his father, Azar, and then turns to the visible heavens as though conducting an argument in real time. He rhetorically considers a shining plant as a possible lord, then rejects it when it disappears. He repeats the test with the moon and then the sun. Each candidate is more impressive than the last, yet each fails for the same reason: it rises, sets, changes, and passes from view. What is contingent cannot be ultimate.
The episode culminates not in Abraham receiving a creed from someone else, but in a conclusion:
[6:79] “I have devoted myself absolutely to the One who initiated the heavens and the earth; a monotheist (hanif) I will never be an idol worshiper.”
إِنِّى وَجَّهْتُ وَجْهِىَ لِلَّذِى فَطَرَ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضَ حَنِيفًا وَمَآ أَنَا۠ مِنَ ٱلْمُشْرِكِينَ
This is the ḥanīf posture made visible. Abraham turns his face toward the One who originated the heavens and the earth precisely by turning away from everything within those heavens and earth that might compete for the place of God.
Nothing in the passage involves a scripture Abraham consults or a code he inherits. He observes, applies a criterion, and infers. The criterion itself—that the divine cannot be contingent, transient, or subject to disappearance—is not handed to him from outside the narrative; it is available to a mind willing to observe and reason. And the passage closes by explicitly opposing ḥanīf to shirk: the one orientation directs the whole self toward God, while the other divides that orientation among God and competing objects of devotion.
Quran 21:51–67 shows the same method turned outward, against the inherited beliefs of his society. Abraham asks his people why they worship objects that can neither help nor harm them, then stages a confrontation: he smashes the idols except the largest, and invites his people to ask that idol what happened—forcing them to admit, out loud, that it cannot even speak. When they fall back on inherited custom—this is what we found our fathers doing—Abraham’s answer is direct: both they and their fathers have been in plain error. Custom is not an argument. It is the absence of one.
[21:51] Before that, we granted Abraham his guidance and understanding, for we were fully aware of him. [21:52] He said to his father and his people, “What are these statues to which you are devoting yourselves?” [21:53] They said, “We found our parents worshiping them.” [21:54] He said, “Indeed, you and your parents have gone totally astray.” [21:55] They said, “Are you telling us the truth, or are you playing?” [21:56] He said, “Your only Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth, who created them. This is the testimony to which I bear witness. [21:57] “I swear by GOD, I have a plan to deal with your statues, as soon as you leave.”
[21:58] He broke them into pieces, except for a big one, that they may refer to it. [21:59] They said, “Whoever did this to our gods is really a transgressor.” [21:60] They said, “We heard a youth threaten them; he is called Abraham.” [21:61] They said, “Bring him before the eyes of all the people, that they may bear witness.” [21:62] They said, “Did you do this to our gods, O Abraham?”
[21:63] He said, “It is that big one who did it. Go ask them, if they can speak.” [21:64] They were taken aback, and said to themselves, “Indeed, you are the ones who have been transgressing.” [21:65] Yet, they reverted to their old ideas: “You know full well that these cannot speak.” [21:66] He said, “Do you then worship besides GOD what possesses no power to benefit you or harm you? [21:67] “You have incurred shame by worshiping idols beside GOD. Do you not understand?”
Notice what does not appear anywhere in these episodes: Abraham consulting a divine writ for his arguments. He gets there through logic, evidence, and a refusal to accept “this is our custom” as a substitute for a reason. His designated practices and rites come only later, and only after this reasoning has already done its work. Only after do we see that Abraham was inspired how to perform the Contact Prayer (Salat) and give the Obligatory Charity (Zakat).
[21:73] We made them imams who guided in accordance with our commandments, and we taught them how to work righteousness, and how to observe the Contact Prayers (Salat) and the obligatory charity (Zakat). To us, they were devoted worshipers.
وَجَعَلْنَٰهُمْ أَئِمَّةً يَهْدُونَ بِأَمْرِنَا وَأَوْحَيْنَآ إِلَيْهِمْ فِعْلَ ٱلْخَيْرَٰتِ وَإِقَامَ ٱلصَّلَوٰةِ وَإِيتَآءَ ٱلزَّكَوٰةِ وَكَانُوا۟ لَنَا عَٰبِدِينَ
Additionally, 14:37 and 14:40 show Abraham praying that his descendants keep up the Contact Prayer (Salat) and the Obligatory Charity (Zakat).
[14:35] Recall that Abraham said, “My Lord, make this a peaceful land, and protect me and my children from worshiping idols. [14:36] “My Lord, they have misled so many people. As for those who follow me, they belong with me. As for those who disobey me, You are Forgiver, Most Merciful. [14:37] “Our Lord, I have settled part of my family in this plantless valley, at Your Sacred House. Our Lord, they are to observe the Contact Prayers (Salat), so let throngs of people converge upon them, and provide for them all kinds of fruits, that they may be appreciative. [14:38] “Our Lord, You know whatever we conceal and whatever we declare— nothing is hidden from GOD on earth, nor in the heavens. [14:39] “Praise be to GOD for granting me, despite my old age, Ismail and Isaac. My Lord answers the prayers. [14:40] “My Lord, make me one who consistently observes the Contact Prayers (Salat), and also my children. Our Lord, please answer my prayers.
These practices are real, and they are commanded. But they arrive downstream of the discovery, as its consequence, not its cause. Prayer and charity are how a person who has already found God gives Him His due and gives other people theirs—the outward discipline that expresses an inward orientation already secured through reason and conscience. They are not the orientation itself.
This is the distinction from 30:30 made visible in narrative form: the orientation first, the practice downstream. Reverse the order, and you are back in MacIntyre’s fragment-society.
The Limits of Reason
None of this should romanticize reason or claim human beings reliably use it well. The same Quran that presents Abraham’s inference as sound spends enormous energy on how judgment fails: desire, pride, the comfort of custom, and self-interest all suppress the very faculties fiṭrah provides. Abraham’s people are not shown lacking the capacity to reason—they are shown having it and refusing to use it, because custom is comfortable and confronting a silent idol is not. Abraham represents the faculty working as intended; his people, and much of later tradition after them, represent the same faculty present and unused. It is one endowment, exercised or abandoned.
None of this makes revelation redundant—and the limits just described are exactly why. Revelation provides guidance, correction, clarification, and confirmation—it settles disputes reason alone leaves open, corrects a community’s specific distortions, and confirms conclusions conscience was already reaching toward, however unevenly. But Abraham’s story is the Quran’s own demonstration that human beings are not intellectually or morally helpless before revelation arrives: he reaches real theological and moral conclusions with no text to consult, using only the faculties he was given. Revelation functions less like a light switched on in a dark room and more like a correction to capacities that were already partly working. It awakens what fiṭrah already inclines toward; it does not manufacture that inclination from nothing.
The Command Muhammad Himself Was Given
The Quran does not leave this as an implication to be drawn from Abraham’s story alone. It states it as a direct instruction to Muhammad, repeated across at least five separate passages. Quran 16:123 puts it in the plainest terms available:
[16:123] Then we inspired you (Muhammad) to follow the religion of Abraham, the monotheist; he never was an idol worshiper.
ثُمَّ أَوْحَيْنَآ إِلَيْكَ أَنِ ٱتَّبِعْ مِلَّةَ إِبْرَٰهِيمَ حَنِيفًا وَمَا كَانَ مِنَ ٱلْمُشْرِكِينَ
The same command recurs at 3:95, 4:125, 6:161, and again at 22:78, which names the community itself as inheritors of millata abīkum Ibrāhīm—the milla of your father Abraham.
Milla is a path handed down, a way of life set out for a community to walk—distinct from dīn, the inward orientation itself, and from sharīʿah, the specific rulings later attached to it. But notice what qualifies the milla Muhammad is told to follow: not Abraham’s biography or historical customs, but Abraham ḥanīfan—Abraham precisely as one who reasoned his way to God and refused idolatry. The word is grammatically a description of manner, not a title. Muhammad is not told only to imitate Abraham’s rites (manasak); more importantly, he is told to follow Abraham’s path in the same way Abraham himself held it: reasoned, non-idolatrous, oriented toward God rather than toward inherited custom.
This closes the loop on the whole argument. Muhammad’s own mission is defined, in the Quran’s own words, as a restoration of Abraham’s reasoned orientation—not the founding of a new religion organized instead around tradition, custom, and transmitted reports. If the standing order given to Muhammad himself was to recover a path defined by reason, then any system built afterward in his name that displaces reason with something else has not extended his mission. It has quietly reversed it.
How the Point Got Lost
The reversal is not theoretical. It is built into the operating logic of mainstream Sunni religious authority.
Abraham is presented as a man who questions inherited religion, tests claims, rejects what cannot survive scrutiny, and turns toward God through logic and reason. Sunni tradition, by contrast, trains the believer to ask a fundamentally different question: What is Muhammad reported to have done?
That question reaches into nearly every corner of life.
Which hand should you eat with? How should you trim your beard? Which foot should enter the bathroom first? In what position should you sleep? How should you drink water? What should you say before entering a toilet, after sneezing, before sleeping, after waking, before intercourse, after intercourse, while dressing, while traveling, while entering a house, or while leaving one?
The answer is repeatedly the same: because Muhammad is reported to have done it that way.
The believer is not primarily being taught to recover the reasoning behind an act. He is being trained to reproduce an act because a report attributes it to the Prophet. Gesture becomes evidence. Repetition becomes piety. Biography becomes law.
A common Quranic defense of this approach appeals to 33:21:
[33:21] In the messenger of GOD you have a good example for those among you who seek GOD and the Last Day, and constantly think about GOD.
لَّقَدْ كَانَ لَكُمْ فِى رَسُولِ ٱللَّهِ أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنَةٌ لِّمَن كَانَ يَرْجُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ وَٱلْيَوْمَ ٱلْءَاخِرَ وَذَكَرَ ٱللَّهَ كَثِيرًا
The phrase uswatun ḥasanah means “a good example” or “an excellent model.” But the Quran uses the same expression for Abraham:
[60:4] You have a good example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, “We disown you and the idols that you worship besides GOD. We denounce you, and you will see nothing from us except animosity and hatred until you believe in GOD ALONE…”
قَدْ كَانَتْ لَكُمْ أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنَةٌ فِىٓ إِبْرَٰهِيمَ وَٱلَّذِينَ مَعَهُۥ …
That parallel matters. No one reads “Abraham is a good example” and concludes that believers must discover what Abraham ate for breakfast, how many fingers he used while eating, which foot he entered a room with, how he clipped his toenails, what style of clothing he wore, or what position he slept in. The Quran itself tells us what is exemplary about Abraham: his refusal of idolatry, his willingness to break with inherited falsehood, his judgment, and his uncompromising orientation toward God alone.
The same expression in 33:21 should therefore not be treated as a blank check for turning every reported detail of Muhammad’s private habits into religion. To call someone an example is not to declare every incidental feature of his biography normative.
The Quranic model is moral and religious before it is mimetic.
Abraham is exemplary because of how he confronts falsehood and turns toward God, not because later believers are expected to reproduce the incidental details of seventh-century—or, in Abraham’s case, ancient—daily life. Muhammad can likewise be an example in faithfulness, perseverance, courage, obedience to God, justice, and trust without every alleged habit attributed to him becoming a divine rule.
This distinction becomes even harder to ignore when the Quran itself repeatedly commands Muhammad to follow Abraham’s milla. If “following an example” meant reproducing a prophet’s personal habits, then Muhammad himself would have needed a transmitted catalogue of Abraham’s diet, grooming, dress, sleeping position, and bathroom etiquette. The Quran gives him nothing of the sort. What it gives him is Abraham’s orientation: ḥanīfan—turned toward God and away from every rival.
That is what an example looks like in the Quran.
This is precisely the inversion of Abraham.
Abraham does not ask, What did my father do? He asks whether what his father is doing makes sense. He does not defend inherited worship by tracing a chain of authorities back through respectable ancestors. He looks at the object of worship and asks whether it can speak, benefit, harm, endure, or even remain present. When the answer is no, he rejects it.
The Quran repeatedly presents inherited practice as something to be interrogated, not something that becomes true merely because it was transmitted.
[2:170] When they are told, “Follow what GOD has revealed herein,” they say, “We follow only what we found our parents doing.” What if their parents did not understand, and were not guided? [2:171] The example of such disbelievers is that of parrots who repeat what they hear of sounds and calls, without understanding. Deaf, dumb, and blind; they cannot understand.
وَإِذَا قِيلَ لَهُمُ ٱتَّبِعُوا۟ مَآ أَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ قَالُوا۟ بَلْ نَتَّبِعُ مَآ أَلْفَيْنَا عَلَيْهِ ءَابَآءَنَآ أَوَلَوْ كَانَ ءَابَآؤُهُمْ لَا يَعْقِلُونَ شَيْـًٔا وَلَا يَهْتَدُونَ
وَمَثَلُ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ كَمَثَلِ ٱلَّذِى يَنْعِقُ بِمَا لَا يَسْمَعُ إِلَّا دُعَآءً وَنِدَآءً صُمٌّۢ بُكْمٌ عُمْىٌ فَهُمْ لَا يَعْقِلُونَ
The Quran’s objection is not merely that these people inherited the wrong practices. It is that inheritance itself had become their argument. Their answer to “Why?” was effectively: because this is what was handed down to us.
The same scene appears again in 43:21–25:
[43:21] Have we given them a book before this, and they are upholding it? [43:22] The fact is: they said, “We found our parents carrying on certain practices, and we are following in their footsteps/traditions (athar).” [43:23] Invariably, when we sent a warner to any community, the leaders of that community would say, “We found our parents following certain practices, and we will continue in their footsteps/traditions (athar).” [43:24] (The messenger) would say, “What if I brought to you better guidance than what you inherited from your parents?” They would say, “We are disbelievers in the message you brought.” [43:25] Consequently, we requited them. Note the consequences for the rejectors.
أَمْ آتَيْنَاهُمْ كِتَابًا مِّن قَبْلِهِ فَهُم بِهِ مُسْتَمْسِكُونَ
بَلْ قَالُوا إِنَّا وَجَدْنَا آبَاءَنَا عَلَىٰ أُمَّةٍ وَإِنَّا عَلَىٰ آثَارِهِم مُّهْتَدُونَ
وَكَذَٰلِكَ مَا أَرْسَلْنَا مِن قَبْلِكَ فِي قَرْيَةٍ مِّن نَّذِيرٍ إِلَّا قَالَ مُتْرَفُوهَا إِنَّا وَجَدْنَا آبَاءَنَا عَلَىٰ أُمَّةٍ وَإِنَّا عَلَىٰ آثَارِهِم مُّقْتَدُونَ
قَالَ أَوَلَوْ جِئْتُكُم بِأَهْدَىٰ مِمَّا وَجَدتُّمْ عَلَيْهِ آبَاءَكُمْ ۖ قَالُوا إِنَّا بِمَا أُرْسِلْتُم بِهِ كَافِرُونَ
فَانتَقَمْنَا مِنْهُمْ ۖ فَانظُرْ كَيْفَ كَانَ عَاقِبَةُ الْمُكَذِّبِينَ
The word āthār here means the traces, footsteps, or remains left behind by those who came before, and, ironically, is also a common term used in reference to the Hadith corpus. The parallel is difficult to miss: religious authority is being defended by appeal to inherited practices rather than by the truth of the thing itself.
That is exactly where the Sunni model fails. Swap “our fathers” for “the chain of narrators” and the scene has not changed at all. A community that replaces “why” with “it is reported” has not found a more pious relationship to Abraham’s God. It has recreated, gesture for gesture, the exact posture Abraham was sent to confront—only with hadith standing where the idols once stood, and isnād standing where “our fathers” once stood.
Sunnis have spent centuries building an entire second corpus of law out of reports about the Prophet, then demanded unreasoning submission to that corpus as the price of piety. It has done to Muhammad exactly what the idolaters did to their fathers, and what later Jews and Christians did to their prophets: rejection of logic and reason and blind adherence to laws and practices that were never authorized by God.
[6:19] Say, “Whose testimony is the greatest?” Say, “GOD’s. He is the witness between me and you that this Quran has been inspired to me, to preach it to you and whomever it reaches. Indeed, you bear witness that there are other gods beside GOD.” Say, “I do not testify as you do; there is only one god, and I disown your idolatry.”
قُلْ أَىُّ شَىْءٍ أَكْبَرُ شَهَٰدَةً قُلِ ٱللَّهُ شَهِيدٌۢ بَيْنِى وَبَيْنَكُمْ وَأُوحِىَ إِلَىَّ هَٰذَا ٱلْقُرْءَانُ لِأُنذِرَكُم بِهِۦ وَمَنۢ بَلَغَ أَئِنَّكُمْ لَتَشْهَدُونَ أَنَّ مَعَ ٱللَّهِ ءَالِهَةً أُخْرَىٰ قُل لَّآ أَشْهَدُ قُلْ إِنَّمَا هُوَ إِلَٰهٌ وَٰحِدٌ وَإِنَّنِى بَرِىٓءٌ مِّمَّا تُشْرِكُونَ
Conclusion
Start again from MacIntyre. A society loses the reasoning behind its instruments and continues performing the motions anyway, eventually mistaking the motions for the substance. That is what happens when religion is reduced to inherited forms after the reasons that once made those forms intelligible have been forgotten. Abraham is the Quran’s demonstration that religion did not begin that way.
The first principle was never the fasting, the prayer schedule, the dietary law, or the communal label. The first principle was the ḥanīf orientation itself: the human being turning away from falsehood and toward the Creator through reason, observation, conscience, and the disposition already placed within humanity as fiṭrah. Prayer, charity, and other practices come afterward as expressions of that orientation. They are practices of the dīn; they are not the foundation of the dīn itself.
That distinction matters because outward religious performance, by itself, proves very little. The Quran depicts hypocrites praying, disbelievers invoking God in moments of danger, idolaters acknowledging God as Creator, and people loudly claiming faith while their actual loyalties point elsewhere. A creed can be recited. A ritual can be performed. A religious identity can be claimed. None of those things, taken alone, tells us what ultimately governs a person.
What distinguishes the believer is therefore not simply the possession of religious forms, but the orientation of the whole person. Where does the person ultimately turn towards? What occupies the highest place? What is everything else made relative to? That is the force of the ḥanīf posture. The believer is not merely someone who performs the correct motions, but someone whose entire direction has been turned toward God without rival. The outward practices matter precisely because they express that orientation; severed from it, they can remain as empty motions in the hands of believer, hypocrite, or idolater alike.
This is why the Quran surrounds religion with a vocabulary of reflection, reasoning, and observation—tafakkur, taʿaqqul, and naẓar—and directs those commands not merely to prophets or scholars, but to all of humanity. It repeatedly condemns the opposite posture: accepting inherited custom simply because it was inherited, especially when that custom violates morality, compromises monotheism, or is falsely attributed to God.
Reason, observation, moral intuition, conscience, the sense of justice, the willingness to question what one has inherited, and the ability to distinguish the Creator from created things are therefore not specialist tools. They do not belong exclusively to people who possess a scripture or stand within a particular religious institution. In principle, they are available to human beings everywhere. That is precisely what fiṭrah means: humanity was not created religiously empty, waiting for an external system to manufacture an orientation toward God. It was created upon a disposition already capable of recognizing and responding to Him.
This also helps clarify the function of revelation and of the messenger who brings it. Abraham himself, after establishing the House, prays that God raise a messenger among his descendants:
[2:129] “Our Lord, and raise among them a messenger from among them who will recite to them Your revelations, teach them the scripture and wisdom, and purify them. You are the Almighty, Most Wise.”
The sequence matters. Abraham does not pray for a messenger to replace the human capacity to reason, nor to become the new center of religious devotion. He prays for one who will recite God’s revelations, teach, and purify. The messenger’s role is therefore corrective and clarifying: to call people back to God, to sharpen what has become confused, and to restore an orientation that human beings are already capable of having but are also capable of distorting. Therefore, the messenger points beyond himself. God remains the object of the orientation.
And if that orientation is rooted in fiṭrah rather than produced solely by membership in a particular religious community, then accountability before God cannot be confined to those who happen to inherit one particular scripture, prophet, or communal identity. People may encounter different revelations, traditions, and historical circumstances, while still possessing the same underlying human capacity to recognize God, act justly, and respond to truth.
That is why the Quran can speak across religious boundaries in terms of belief, accountability, and righteous conduct rather than reducing salvation to membership in a single historical community:
[2:62] Surely, those who believe, those who are Jewish, the Christians, and the converts; anyone who (1) believes in GOD, and (2) believes in the Last Day, and (3) leads a righteous life, will receive their recompense from their Lord. They have nothing to fear, nor will they grieve.
إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَٱلَّذِينَ هَادُوا۟ وَٱلنَّصَٰرَىٰ وَٱلصَّٰبِـِٔينَ مَنْ ءَامَنَ بِٱللَّهِ وَٱلْيَوْمِ ٱلْءَاخِرِ وَعَمِلَ صَٰلِحًا فَلَهُمْ أَجْرُهُمْ عِندَ رَبِّهِمْ وَلَا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ
The religious starting point, then, was never restricted to those who happened to inherit a particular book. Revelation can deepen, correct, and clarify that starting point, but the capacity to turn toward God precedes the historical boundaries that later communities draw around themselves.
Even the milla Muhammad is commanded to follow is described through Abraham: a path held ḥanīfan, turned toward God and away from rival objects of devotion. There is no point in this story where reason is supposed to be discarded in exchange for a new collection of unexamined customs. To call Abraham neither Jew nor Christian is therefore not merely to place him earlier on a historical timeline. It is to place him beneath the later layers—to show the foundation before the structures were built over it.
He is not an early representative of someone else’s religious institution. He is the Quran’s image of the primordial religious posture itself: a human being confronted by the world, refusing inherited falsehood, reasoning from creation to Creator, and turning his whole being toward God.
Revelation does not replace that foundation. It corrects it when human beings distort it, confirms it when they recover it, and calls them back when they lose it. But the foundation was never the accumulated fragments.
The fragments are the rites, formulas, laws, customs, and communal identities that can be preserved even by people whose actual orientation points somewhere else.
The foundation is what cannot be faked by performance alone: the direction of the whole self toward God.
That is ḥanīf.
