Dr. Israr Ahmad was born in 1932 in Hisar, in what is now the Indian state of Haryana, and migrated with his family to Pakistan at the time of Partition. He trained initially in medicine, earning a degree that gave him a lasting appreciation for empirical and analytical modes of reasoning even as his deepest commitments remained theological. From an early age he was drawn to the study of the Qur'an, and much of his subsequent public life was organized around the conviction, articulated forcefully in this monograph, that the revival of Muslim societies depends first and finally on the revitalization of inward faith rather than on political or legal reform alone.

In the 1950s and 1960s Ahmad was associated with Jama'at-e-Islami, the influential revivalist organization founded by Maulana Abul Ala Mawdudi, but he grew increasingly critical of what he came to regard as its premature entry into electoral politics at the expense of the deeper, slower work of intellectual and spiritual formation. This monograph, first published in 1967 in the pages of the monthly journal Meesaq and issued the following year as a booklet by Darul-Ishaat-e-Islamia in Lahore, marks the point at which Ahmad set out his own diagnosis of the shortcomings of twentieth-century Islamic revivalism and his alternative programme of action.

That programme centered on the establishment of Markazi Anjuman Khuddam-ul-Qur'an, which Ahmad founded in Lahore to pursue the two-part plan outlined in the monograph's concluding chapter: an organization for the mass revitalization of faith, and a dedicated Qur'an Academy for the training of a new generation of religiously and intellectually equipped scholars. Ahmad went on to deliver extensive recorded lecture series on Qur'anic exegesis that reached audiences well beyond Pakistan, and in 1975 he founded Tanzeem-e-Islami, a further institutional expression of the reform programme first sketched in this text.

Throughout his career, Ahmad maintained a distinctive position within the landscape of Islamic revivalist thought: sympathetic to the aims of movements such as Jama'at-e-Islami and Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimoon, yet insistent that their emphasis on Islam as a socio-political "system of life" had, in practice, come at the expense of the inward faith that alone could sustain such a system. He died in 2010, having built, through Markazi Anjuman Khuddam-ul-Qur'an and Tanzeem-e-Islami, an institutional legacy that continues to carry forward the academic and revivalist project this monograph first proposed.