Funny, challenging, controversial, passionate and unforgiving, this is an unprecedented personal account of a Muslim's life in the modern world. As an Islamic scholar, outspoken social activist and well-known commentator, Farid Esack is in a unique position to tackle the quandaries and challenges facing Muslims today. Whether it be cultivating a meaningful relationship with Allah or striving for gender equality and religious freedom, Esack combines personal insight with incisive analysis. Providing a devout yet practical guide for those seeking to re-engage with their faith in the modern world, this groundbreaking work will help believers and non-believers alike to appreciate the eternal relevance of the Qur'an and its teachings.

The Qur'an has spoken to Muslims for over one thousand years; it is seen as law-maker, moral code, and the word of God. Drawing on both contemporary and ancient sources, Esack outlines the key themes and explains the historical and cultural context of this unique work whilst examining its content, language and style, and the variety of approaches, including fundamentalist, feminist, and modernist, that have been used to interpret it. Other areas covered include: the Qu'ran as evocative oral experience; understanding and interpreting the Qu'ran; the major themes of the Qu'ran, including such issues as truth, justice and gender relations.

The demise of apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s followed an unprecedented unity in struggle against oppression from members of different faith traditions. Determined as South African Muslims were to participate with the rest of the oppressed in solidarity against apartheid, this brought them into conflict with interpretations of the Qur'an that denied virtue outside Islam, and left them searching for a theology that would allow them to both co-operate against injustice and be true to their faith. In this challenging account, Farid Esack reflects on key qur'anic passages used in the context of oppression to rethink the role of Islam in a plural society. He exposes how traditional interpretations of the Qur'an were used to legitimize an unjust order, and demonstrates that those very texts used to support religious intolerance, if interpreted within a contemporary socio-historical context, support active solidarity with the religious Other for change.