In examining each society it is a fundamental (and generally very difficult) task to identify its "preponderant moment" (what Hegel and Lukács call the übergreifendes Moment) which designates the place of the rest. The various theories of history pay little attention to this problem when they speak of ancient, medieval, and modern societies. In its time Marxism attached great importance to it, although class relations linked to ownerships, change of which depended on the development of productive forces and conditions, cut too short the far more complex multiplicity of historical movement, and the"straitjacket " of modes of production closed rather than opened the way to adequate interpretation of societies. Naturally, it was impossible to interpret the historical development of Islam on that basis, and in order to do that it was necessary to go back to Ibn Khaldūn as a usable theoretical antecedent.1 We may naturally regard Islam as the directing principle of this historical movement and interpret it as a system of societal integration which arranged its own new type of community, the umma, in accordance with a normative theocratic principle; this, because of the particular circumstances of its genesis (in consequence of the preponderance of the politically, economically and culturally open nomadic and trader elements – the two principal factors in the origins of Islam), was able permanently and organically to integrate the growing and constantly changing elements of empirehood on the basis of the principle of repristinatio or retraditionalisatio. This integration meant not a return to a primitive state but a creative reversion to the constantly recreated idealised model of the beginnings. What do this retraditionalisatio and the tradition that drove it look like?2