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unfortunately owing to the political instability and the infiltration of alien ideologies the Qur’anic worldview could not remain intact for long. How it all happened needs serious investigation. The civil strife that had engulfed the entire world of Islam after the murder of the third Caliph was a congenial atmosphere for all those who wanted to dilute the divine message. From this period onward, we see the sudden emergence of a host of public entertaining intellectuals, the qassas and pseudoscholars of prophetic traditions who wanted to change Islam from within. Such an attack was more dangerous than the armed rebellions of the Bedouin tribes. Omer II was aware of the sensitivity of Hadith literature and hence he made a concerted effort to compile the authentic traditions to distinguish them from the fabricated ones. But the short span of Omer’s rule did not allow him to accomplish this great intellectual project. The ideological infiltration through the backdoors of history continued and it was entirely on the individual scholars of the time to address this issue. Much has been written about how to distinguish the true traditions from the false ones, however, almost none of our great scholars has realised that the very development of sharei sciences owes much to the social milieu and are not product of a planned activity. This abrupt and unplanned development of knowledge in Islam later had a devastating impact on the Muslim mind. The division of knowledge into sharei and nonsharei sciences, or into Islamic and secular, not only created a social role for the clergy it also blocked the emergence of scientific and rational thinking among Muslims. It was a major paradigm shift, changing the direction of the Ummah forever. A religion for all time and every place as Islam claims to be, nevertheless, it had to make its beginning in a tribal setup. The early generations of Muslims were aware of the limitations of a tribal polity as they tirelessly worked to transform their political set up to suit the demands of the divine message. In their efforts to