‘It must be asserted firmly,’...‘no matter what the Ulema say, that he who sincerely affirms that he is a Muslim, is a Muslim; no one has the right t… - Asaf Ali Asghar Fyzee

At the end of the 19th century, one-half of the cultivable land in Algiers was dedicated. Similarly, in Tunis one-third and in Egypt one-eighth, of the cultivated soil was ‘in the ownership of God’. But it was already realised by the beginning of the 20th century, first by France and later in Turkey and Egypt, that the institution of waqf was in some respects a challenge to the natural growth and development of the national economy.

It must be realized,... that religious practices have become soulless ritual; that large number of decent Muslims have ceased to find solace or consolation in the traditional forms of prayer and fasting; that good books on religion are not being written for modern times; that women are treated badly, economically and morally, and that political rights are denied to them even in fairly advanced countries by the fatwas of reactionary Ulema; that Muslims, even where they constitute the majority in a country, are often economically poor, educationally backward, spiritually bankrupt and insist on "safeguards"; that the beneficial laws of early Islam have in many instances fallen behind the times; and that the futile attempt to plant an Islamic theocracy in any modern state or fashion life after the pattern of early Islam is doomed to failure. ... the time for heart-searching has come. Islam must be reinterpreted, or else its traditional form may be lost beyond retrieve.

Such gradual modifications, even of the rules of Shariah do not destroy the essential truth of the faith of Islam. On a truer and deeper examination of the matter, it will be found that certain portions of the Shariah constitute only an outer crust which enclose a kernel—the central core of Islam—which can be preserved intact only by re-interpretation and restatement in every age and in every epoch of civilization. The responsibility to determine afresh what are the durable and what the changeable elements in Islam rests on us at the present time. The conventional theology of the Ulema does not satisfy the minds and the outlook of the present century. A re-examination, re-interpretation, reformulation and restatement of the essential principles of Islam is a vital necessity of our age.