Anyone that explores in depth the historical development of Muslim society sooner or later realises that in this case, the dialectic development-model of the Hegelian trinity of thesis-antithesis-synthesis -- the denial of denial -- does not work. there is most often no qualitative difference between thesis and synthesis, and any attempt at an antithesis appear as external or alien influences, effectively neutralised by Islamic orthodoxy. An instructive category of this anti-dialectic process is the concept of bidca,1 which originally meant a practical or theoretical renewal that had no antecedent in the Prophet's time. The concept changed in accordance with the openness2 or exclusiveness of Islam: at times of tolerance towards "otherness" the word meant "innovation", however, at times of crisis, when "renewal" was seen as the source of trouble, it meant "heresy". We can understand the history of Classical Muslim empirehood and the regional formations derived from it – the spectacular successes and, after the eleventh century, the ever more frequent and deeply damaging disasters – from the peculiar sui generis character of Mohamedan Islam and the two centuries that followed it. Islam created its own society in unique contrast with other religions, and in consequence religion (dīn) and the world (dunyā) formed a close union. Islam determined everything from religious law to the system of institutions, from lifestyle to the scale of values. This had great advantages and later insuperable drawbacks. That is to say, it became possible for this distinctive social formation to last for a thousand and four hundred years, and yet for imperial unity to disintegrate in the ninth and tenth centuries – showing that the "preponderant moment" of society, that which designates the place of the rest, is not an economic, neither a political, nor an ethnic moment, but is the principle of social integration proposed by Islam. Which, it hardly need be emphasised, is not strictly speaking a religion but a distinctive network which includes a system of law, culture and institutions (both formal and informal), and determines behaviour towards that which is "other". As is known, Islam did not acquire all these roles straight away. The question of hegemony in society (namely, which ruling principle was to gain the necessary, indeed indispensable, legitimacy in the multiracial and multilingual empire with its many cultures and traditions?) arose urgently in the cAbbāsid period, not the Umayyad; what was to exercise hegemony in the future, without which the ruling elements of the empire would after a while be unable to set beside them a determining part of their society and become easily defeated.3 The decisive struggle for social hegemony between the two alternatives in the cAbbāsid caliphate lasted for a hundred and fifty years from the mid-eighth century;4 the one (which the cAbbāsids at first supported) was the so-called "ancient Oriental model", a relic of the Persian god-king tradition and the cesaropapist Byzantine regime, which found influential supporters in the important class of Persianised Aramaic scribes; the other was the principle of the theocratic community based on the Koran and the prophetic traditions, upheld by the experts on religion, the culamā, and on religious law, the fuqahā; as the intelligentsia of the Muslim community. These latter were ultimately victorious and established the impressive structure of Muslim orthodoxy, which in later years set firm limitations on the liberties of the authorities in question. As time went by, Islam (or rather the consensus of the theocratic community) laid down the boundaries of social practice in accordance with its own eminently comprehensible principle: this, however, became the principle of retraditionalisation or repristination.5 This meant that everything new and everything that deviated from the "beginnings" had to be made to conform to the sanctified model of ancestral tradition.6 In addition to the Koran the theocratic community's second point of reference was sunna, the prophetic tradition, the development and character of which show more certainly than anything the inevitability of repristinatio. Naturally, the Koran could not regulate the ubiquitous "metabolism" of society (the expeditions of conquest had begun after it had been completed, and Muslim empirehood, with its own multifarious practices to be regulated, had only formed in the decades after the prophet's death). Hence sunna, an appendage to the Koran, ensured the meshing together of statics and dynamics, the squaring of the circle, as it were, and had to regulate the problems of constantly varying social practice. However, in such a way that, so to speak, the prophet had to give ex post approval, that is, the permanent present had to appear clothed in the past. Through the sacral impossibility of overwriting the beginnings, real or imaginary, we can understand the nature and lawfulness of Islamic fundamentalism as a recurrent process. Fundamentalism, in essence, is a manifestation of crisis, which appears at a time of societal crisis brought on by external, and even more so internal causes, when new phenomena – felt to be alien and 'other' – proliferate in the essential elements of social life and threaten the structural identity of Islam. At such times, in defence of Islam, various forces come into play, which, by the unfeigned purity of the "sources" and citing the way of life and doctrines of the prophet and his companions, radically confront bidca, which was regarded as heretical, and try to establish the idealised condition of the beginnings. There is therefore in the nature of this a clear repristinatio-mechanism, in which only the contours of the past are sketched (it is always interpreted and constructed), while the utopian future that is to take shape is the radical rejection of the present. Thus in fact the attitude towards present and future has been determined by a construct of a past which obviously never existed, and in fact its multifaceted sketch has been transmitted to the Islamists of our day7 by the reductionist imaginings of latter-day fundamentalist forerunners, the followers of Ibn Hanbal (780–855), one Ibn Tamiyya (1263–1328) and his disciple Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292–1350).