'Muslims in the United States are plagued by the problem of authority.

By this I do not mean political or social authority - although that is a problem as well - but rather, textual authority. The problem is not so much the lack of an institutional framework to channel the authority of the text. Rather, the problem is developing the conceptual framework from which the text is approached, constructed, and presented. Muslims in the United States have not developed legitimate ways of understanding and interpreting Islamic texts. More importantly, they have not developed ways of evaluating the legitimacy or authoritativeness of the various ways according to which an Islamic text can be read and interpreted. The connections between the classical epistemological and hermeneutic heritage and Muslims living in the United States have been thoroughly severed. Muslims in the West are a disinherited bunch, and they are compelled to reinvent themselves without the collective wisdom of past Muslim generations. When it comes to making sense of Islamic texts, there is a remarkable vacuum - a vacuum that is often fulled by authoritarian agents who are able to appropriate the Divine Will in order to proclaim the death of discourse. This fatality is proclaimed in the humble service of a despotic puritanism in order to impose a suffocating silence.

-And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses, pg. 37-8