Looking for rules in the Revelation is like looking for a needle in a haystack while your horse is starving. To compare, the Quran devotes 10 times more attention to astronomical events than law or ritualistic minutia, yet that ratio is inversely proportional on nearly every Muslim bookshelf, layman or scholar. I know nearly zero Muslims who can identify Jupiter or the Pleiades and maybe hundreds who know where to put their hands during Salah according to each legal school – a fact never once mentioned in the Revelation.

Most of the Quran‘s discourse is devoted to encouraging the reader to pay attention to various observable phenomena in the world around him, and to understand what they are signifying as ayāt or signs pointing to their Lord. Not in a mystical or speculative way, but a rational and inductive approach.

Rather than making the Quran fit to my world, I should immerse myself in the world of the Quran. There I will discover how frivolous and tainted are my desires for “correctness”, no matter how much my nafs dresses them up as “religious” or “islamic” pursuits. Such is the entirety of the fiqh tradition