In ‘Abduh's thought there was always a tension between two facts, neither of which could be wholly explained in terms of the other, but each of them bringing with it certain inescapable demands. On the one side stood Islam, with its claim to express God's will about how men should live in society; on the other, the irreversible movement of modern civilization, beginning in Europe but now becoming world-wide, and by the very nature of its institutions compelling men to live in a certain way. It was ‘Abduh's purpose to prove, by an exposition of the true Islam, that the two demands were not incompatible with each other, and to prove it not only in principle but in detail, by a precise consideration of the teaching of Islam in regard to social morality. He never maintained that there was an unconditional harmony between the two: that Islam permitted all that the modern world approved. When there was a real conflict, he was always clear which of the two claims had precedence. There remained for him something fixed and irreducible in Islam, certain moral and doctrinal imperatives about which there could be no compromise; Islam could never be just a rubber-stamp authorizing whatever the world did, it must always be in some measure a controlling and limiting factor.