the search for a legal identity in twentieth-century Islam and the crises that are associated with reformulating both a legal theory and a general concept of law represent the latest historical stage in which humanistic and positivist tendencies have collided with the imperatives of revelation. True, this collision is unprecedented in the profound impact and the havoc it wreaked upon the intellectual and structural make-up of the traditional Islamic legal systems. But the tension between reason and revelation – that is, between human considerations of man's own welfare in this life, on the one hand, and divine intervention and decree, on the other – has been consistently present since Muhammad migrated to Medina. The very fact that the Quran untiringly called upon the Arabs to obey God and His Prophet, and to abandon their old ways in favor of a new “path” prescribed by the Deity, constitutes the practical equivalent of a higher will dictating to man modes of thinking and living that are often at variance with his normative ways. This divine interference, with its own internal dynamic, was on the increase with the passage of time. Obviously, the Quran could not provide on its own the basis for this intervention in mundane affairs. A second agency was required, and this was the Prophetic Sunna which emerged some decades after the Prophet's death.