religions. He therefore exposed what he saw to be the main matters obscuring Islam's reality, causing superstition and false beliefs to become confused with it, and he showed that applying the disciplines of logic, rational demonstration and argumentation, rhetoric, and the linguistic sciences, truth, in other words, the reality of Islam, might be revealed. In any event the purpose of all these disciplines, as well as of all the Islamic sciences, is the ascertainment of truth and reality. It is the purpose too of modern science, as Bediuzzaman was at pains to show, for which reason, just as the Qur'an and the universe are mutually interpretative, so the Qur'an and Islam are "completely compatible" with the physical sciences, let alone conflicting or being contradictory. Hence the title of the First Article, The Element of Reality.

In his endeavours to reveal the reality of Islam Bediuzzaman employed the disciplines mentioned above. This was not an innovation, however, for they were all taught in the medreses. He states his position and method with the first proposition of the First Premise of the First Article: if reason and scripture conflict, reason is taken as basic and scripture is interpreted. As he says, this is "an established principle," for it was an exegetical principle favoured by scholars of the Ash'arī School. It had been called "the rule of interpretation" by al-Ghazali, "the universal rule" by al-Razi, and had been expounded by al-Taftazani and al-Sayyid al-Sharif al-Jurjani, whose kalām manuals were basic texts taught in the medreses. Mention is made of all these eminent scholars in various con- texts in this book.

Recalling the importance of logical reasoning and the other disciplines he has elucidated in outlining his proposed principles for Qur'anic exegesis, Bediuzzaman invites his readers to combine the Element of Reality, the First Article, with the Element of Rhetoric and Eloquence, the Second Article, as though the former were the major premise and the latter the minor premise, so as to produce the result or conclusion of the Element of Doctrine, the Third Article.

In the Third Article, Bediuzzaman intended to offer proofs for the four main aims of the Qur'an; that is, proof of the Single Maker, prophethood, bodily resurrection, and justice, the chief tenets of