Muslims must become aware that they no longer stand in the same place as the Prophet Muhammad stood in the 7th century regarding the Quran and Hadith as canonical sources. The Islam of the first community of the Prophet (610-661) has developed through the historical contribution of Muslims in the subsequent centuries. Therefore, the Quran is subject to a provisional Muslim interpretation that must always accommodate the respective realities. It can always be differently interpreted, which helps free it from the lifelessness of a written book. This also implies that the Quran has no value without the involvement of people in their current present. Such an interpretation can deprive particular groups that pursue ideological and political objectives of their sovereignty of interpretation. Therefore, it should be emphasized that only a humanistic reading of the Quranic text can make a constructive contribution to the establishment of a modern Islam in the Western context, in that it appeals to the reflective and critical understanding and stresses the freedom of interpretation.

Of course, the task of the Muslim of today is to interpret the canonical sources of Islam anew and in accordance with the times within the framework of a theoreticalpractical reflective understanding and explanation in the always changing historical situation. However, adopting the neutral position of an observer, for example, in the context of a descriptive and historical approach to understanding, is not enough. This was and still is the self-imposed task of Islamic studies in the West, although it has become clear that its supposed objectivity is undermined by the preconceptions of its scholars. Certainly, the preconception of their own culture is anchored deeply in the way Islamic scholars think, and this is what makes a hermeneutical interpretation possible in the first place. The efforts of Muslims, naturally, gain an objective and nuanced access if critical analysis plays a central role in the present time. Otherwise, the whole undertaking simply leads to a reproduction of the Muslim tradition and the history since the origin of Islam.

The autonomy of the text proclaims through exegesis the death of the author. This concerns the liberation of the written from its writer since the written loses its father or master in the act of being written down. No author can control what interpretation makes of the text. The author becomes a passive observer of his or her own text. For there is an almost unlimited range of possibility for understanding or misunderstanding.