The book’s argument is organized around the idea that understanding Islam requires beginning with the Qur’an through a sequential recitational method that establishes the distinctness of terms is the necessary entry point for rebuilding religious concepts away from inherited accumulations. From this entry point, it presents Islam as a human values framework broader than particular confessional belonging and Islam as historically and conceptually prior to the specificity of the Muhammadan message as a vision that makes Islam a general human horizon broader than a specific ritual affiliation. This vision is also translated in practice in freedom and human values as the criterion of Islam and the basis for resisting tyranny and the civil state regulating the public sphere by law rather than by religious prohibition, and is then deepened ethically and conceptually through the distinction between dhamb, sayyi’a, and khati’a, which distributes responsibility between forgiveness, reform, and insistence and the concepts of loyalty, unbelief, and associating partners with God being reread on a value-based, not identity-based, foundation.