This thorough grounding in the entire system of ideas which has traditionally gone under the name of religion in Muslim society, formed the basis of Mr. Parwez' critical study, in the all-pervading light of the Holy Qur'ān, of not only the history of Islam and of Muslims, of the beliefs and practices of pre-Islamic religions of humanity, but of the total area of human thought and socio-ideological movements throughout the ages. The result of this critical study is a tremendous re-evaluation of values forefigured in the philosophical work of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), and especially in his penetrating insight regarding the nature of Islam as "a protest against all religions in the old sense of the term." Allama Iqbal was not vouchsafed the time to develop this exhilarating and revolutionary thesis in the work which he proposed to write as an "Introduction to the study of Islam," but he had definitely upheld the necessity, in an atmosphere of bitter sectarian conflicts which raged in the world of Islam during his lifetime, of tearing off "the hard crust" of centuries old impress of pre-Islamic superstitions of Muslim nations "which had immobilised an essentially dynamic outlook on life … to rediscover the original verities of freedom, equality and solidarity with a view to rebuild our moral, social and political ideals out of their original simplicity and universality."

	G. A. Parwez

Mr. Parwez' immense philosophical work is a realisation of Allama Iqbal's desire to study Islam not as a religion but as a Dīn – a word which has no parallel in Western languages, and an exposition of whose meaning forms the core of the present work as well as his numerous books, treatises, lectures and discourses, of his fascinating exposition of the Qur'ān (in thirty parts) and his modern Qur'ānic Lexicon (in four volumes). His revolutionary writings and discourses have inspired a widespread critical movement in Pakistan among the intelligentsia as well as the common people and are influencing similar thinking in other countries. The central organ of this movement – the monthly Tolū-e-Islam (the Islamic Dawn) – is avidly studied at home and abroad. The voluminous encyclopaedic work of Mr. Parwez has gone on for the last thirty years, side by side with his official duties as a civil servant. Since his retirement from service, he has engaged himself entirely in the service of the movement. It was in this capacity that he worked as a member of the Islamic Laws Commission, appointed under the 1956 Constitution of Pakistan.

The present work, the first of this author to be written in English, as its name suggests, is a study of the basic character of Islam, not as a religion, as it has been hitherto designated, but as a challenge to and a protest against all religion, which is another name for the historical entity called priestcraft, and which finds no sanction anywhere in the Qur'ān. Islam is rather an enemy of priestcraft. The irony is that the tendency towards priestcraft has slowly matured within Muslim society until it has taken hold of the entire area of Islamic belief and practice. Mr. Parwez' movement is one of the most vital forces in Muslim society which has taken the revolutionary stand of replacing once again, as in the beginning of Islam, the concept of religion by the concept which, in the terminology of the Qur'ān, is called Dīn. According to Mr. Parwez, Islam is not the name of individual subjective experience of a relationship with the Deity; it is essentially a "Code of Life" in accordance with which the existence of the individual as well as the collective can have a positive meaning and an uninterrupted evolution here-now and in the here-after. It is only on the basis of permanent values of Islam that humanity can hope to develop and emerge out of the welter of purely pragmatic and amoral philosophies of action working in a limited temporal scale, without the sheet anchor of a divinely inspired message, to provide them a total existential sanction.