Islām and “Islam”: How the Qur’an Was Turned into a Religion

The greatest deception surrounding the Qur’an is not that it has been attacked, mocked, or censored, but that it has been absorbed, institutionalised, and transformed into something it never claimed to be. The modern world speaks of “Islam” as if it were a religion in the conventional sense, complete with clergy, rituals, uniforms, sects, jurisprudence, and political authority, yet when the Qur’an itself is read without inherited assumptions, it becomes immediately clear that it never presents itself as a religion at all. It speaks instead as a direct address to humanity, a call to conscience, a mirror held up to power, corruption, and self-deception, and a reminder of principles that predate all labels, tribes, and institutions.

The Qur’an does not belong to Muslims, nor does it grant them any exclusivity over truth; it is addressed to those who think, who reflect, who are willing to stand upright in a world built on distortion.

This alone explains why the Qur’an had to be neutralised, because a text that speaks directly to the human being without intermediaries cannot be allowed to remain free. A Qur’an read plainly dismantles hierarchy, exposes false authority, and removes the legitimacy of inherited power. It leaves no room for priesthood, no justification for sectarianism, and no shelter for those who claim moral authority while exempting themselves from accountability. It does not create a new belief system, but restores an ancient and universal orientation towards the One, an orientation that transcends ethnicity, culture, and time. This is why the Qur’an insists repeatedly that it brings nothing novel, that it confirms what was already known, and that its purpose is correction rather than innovation. It is not a founder of religion but a destroyer of religious illusion.

The Qur’an itself makes clear that it will be abandoned, not by being rejected outright, but by being sidelined, recited without being followed, revered without being obeyed, and replaced by other authorities that claim to explain it while quietly supplanting it.

This abandonment is not theoretical; it is visible everywhere today. The Book is memorised but not read, chanted but not contemplated, displayed but not allowed to challenge the structures that govern daily life. It is invoked ceremonially while decisions are made elsewhere, and its moral clarity is dulled through endless commentary, interpretation, and deferral to scholarly opinion. The tragedy is not that Muslims fail to defend the Qur’an, but that they believe they are defending it while living at a distance from it.

Central to this distance is the weaponisation of the word “Islam” itself. In the Qur’an, Islām simply means submission to God, an inner and outward alignment with truth and justice that is inseparable from ethical conduct and personal responsibility. It is not an identity to be worn, a label to be inherited, or a banner under which power can be exercised. Over time, however, this word was hollowed out and repurposed, transformed into a religious brand that could be regulated, policed, and controlled. Once submission (islām) to God was replaced with belonging to Islam, obedience quietly shifted away from conscience and towards institutions, scholars, traditions, and rulers. What emerged was not a community of aligned individuals, but a managed population whose loyalty could be measured through rituals rather than righteousness.

This transformation did not occur by accident, nor was it imposed solely by external enemies. It was facilitated internally by those who discovered that a Qur’an-centric humanity is fundamentally ungovernable. A people who answer directly to God cannot be ruled through fear, nationalism, debt, or clerical intimidation, and they cannot be easily mobilised to serve systems built on injustice. The solution, therefore, was not to destroy the Qur’an, but to bury it beneath layers of secondary authority, until the Book itself became one voice among many rather than the sole criterion of truth.

The introduction of hadith as a parallel source of guidance represents the most effective move in this process. What began as anecdotal reports and historical recollections was elevated into a vast body of law and doctrine that now functions, in practice, as a second revelation. This corpus, compiled long after the Prophet’s death, riddled with contradictions, and frequently at odds with the Qur’an’s own ethical framework, is nevertheless treated as sacred, unquestionable, and indispensable. The result is a belief system in which God’s direct speech is filtered, restricted, and sometimes overridden by hearsay attributed to men. This is not preservation of guidance; it is the very form of textual idolatry the Qur’an warns against when it condemns those who take scholars and religious authorities as lords besides God.

What is often missed is that this pattern is not unique to Islam as a religion. It mirrors precisely what happened to earlier revelations, where scripture was gradually displaced by tradition, commentary, and institutional authority. Christianity replaced the message of Jesus with councils and creeds, while Judaism buried divine law under rabbinical layers that placed interpretation above revelation. In this sense, traditional Islam is not an exception but a continuation of the same corruption, one that the Qur’an explicitly came to warn against. The irony is that Muslims frequently criticise Christians and Jews for abandoning scripture, while failing to recognise the same abandonment in themselves.

The modern Muslim condition reflects this disconnect with painful clarity. Vast numbers of people perform rituals with mechanical precision while remaining disengaged from the ethical demands of justice, honesty, and resistance to oppression. Time is spent policing outward conformity while corruption, tyranny, and exploitation are tolerated or even sanctified.

Tawḥīd, the absolute oneness of God, is reduced to theological slogans, while practical obedience is redirected towards clerics, sects, and legal schools. The Qur’an’s insistence that righteousness is defined by moral action rather than ritual performance is acknowledged verbally but ignored in practice, because ritual is safer, easier, and less disruptive than truth.

Yet the Qur’an does not recognise religious labels as indicators of nearness to God. It consistently measures people by integrity, accountability, and their willingness to stand against injustice, regardless of the names they adopt. Those who align with God are not defined by affiliation but by conduct, and they appear in every nation, every culture, and every era. They are not a majority, nor are they celebrated, but they endure as a remnant that refuses to surrender conscience for comfort. These are the people the Qur’an addresses, not the self-satisfied inheritors of religious identity.

The answer, therefore, is not to become a Muslim in the conventional sense, nor to exchange one religious system for another. It is not found in joining an “ism,” reviving a caliphate, or refining ritual practice. The answer lies in alignment with God alone, stripped of intermediaries, branding, and inherited assumptions. The Qur’an does not call humanity forward into novelty, but backward into remembrance, away from artificial complexity and towards fundamental truths that have always been known. It is a challenge not only to individuals, but to every power structure that depends on human forgetfulness.

In the end, the Qur’an will stand, regardless of how thoroughly it is sidelined, and the religious constructs built around it will eventually fall away. God will not ask what label a person carried, what sect they defended, or what rituals they performed with precision.

The question will be far simpler and far more difficult to evade: whether they stood for truth when it was costly, whether they aligned with justice when it was inconvenient, and whether they submitted to God rather than to the systems that claimed to speak in His name.