It is not uncommon for people to ask what the Qur'ān (or any other scripture for that matter) actually says on a particular issue. Thus it might be useful to preface this chapter with a few comments on the way that question is framed, and what it presumes. That word 'actually' suggests the questioner believes a text has a single, objectively verifiable meaning. Yet when texts speak - and that is a particularly appropriate verb in the Qur'ān's case - they speak to particular people in particular circumstances. The Qur'ān's meaning, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith has pointed out, is the history of its meanings. That is true in both an internal and an external sense. First, the Qur'ān reflects the history of its own development over the more than twenty years of its address to a varied audience. Second, since the time of its canonisation it has been read by a very diverse community of faith in widely different historical contexts.

So what the Qur'ān 'actually' says, is what it says to actual readers, especially believing readers. No community of faith reads its scripture with a detachment that strives for some elusive objectivity: believers read scriptures, often at the same time reading things into them. Nor are scriptures necessarily read as a whole, with the community feeling it has to reconcile and explain every detail of the text. There are in most traditions what have been called 'canons within the canon'. A 'scriptural' approach to any subject does not emerge simply from the sacred text, but rather brings that text into conversation with other elements both from within and from outside the tradition.