"Thus, in the first place,

we must use all the intellectual resources God has given us to attempt to understand the true meaning of the Qur'an. [...] God gave Muslims, individually and collectively, sight, hearing, and intellect to put at the service of studying the linguistic and historical context of the Qur'an. It is impossible for any one individual to master all these aspects of Qur'anic learning, even in a lifetime of study. A serious effort to understand the Qur'an, therefore, necessarily includes a deep engagement with the extensive scholarly tradition of Islam.

This is something that many modern activists and commentators on the Qur'an have lacked. Indeed, many of the most influential Muslims (for better or worse) who made claims about the Qur'an in the twentieth century were not trained as religious scholars. Sayyid Qutb was a writer who captured the attention of Arabic readers with his articulation of widely felt frustration with arrogant and repressive Middle Eastern rulers in his extensive commentary In the Shade of the Qur'an. Abul Ala Mawdudi (d. 1979), founded of Jamaat-e-Islami in pre-partition India and prolific commentator on the Qur'an, was a journalist. With the success of the argument that the doors of ijtihad should open and that consensus should be expanded to include the voices of non-specialists, writers like Qutb and Mawdudi did not feel restrained by their lack of scholarly credentials to make claims about  the meaning of the Qur'an.

In his characteristically blunt fashion, Fazlur Rahman, an influential twentieth-century scholar of the Qur'an, decried the inability of many activist-oriented Muslims to develop a relevant, coherent, and systematic approach to the interpretation and application of the Qur'an:

The traditionalist ulema, if their education has suffered from a disorientation toward the purposes of the Qur'an, have nevertheless built up an imposing edifice of learning that invests their personalities with a certain depth; the neorevivalist is, by contrast, a shallow and superficial person - really rooted neither in the Qur'an nor in traditional intellectual culture, of which he knows practically nothing. Because he has no serious intellectual depth or breath, his consolation and pride both are to chant ceaselessly the song that Islam is "very simple" and "straightforward," without knowing what these words mean. In a sense, of course, the Qur'an is a simple and uncomplicated, as is all genuine religion - in contradistinction to theology - but in another and more meaningful sense a book like the Qur'an, which gradually appeared over almost twenty-three years, is highly complicated - as complicated as life itself. [13]   

While activists and revivalists are limited by their superficial understanding of classical Islamic learning, staunch traditionalists must be aware of the severe limitations of the inherited tradition. Our search for the true meaning of the Qur'an and its application to our lives cannot be a narrow, partisan following of a particular school of thought, for it certainly possible that groups, like individuals, can engage in self-interested exegesis. In a previous study of slavery and social status in Islamic law, I argued that such a tendency is evident in the deliberations of early Muslim scholars. [14] Only a truly open-minded, critical engagement with the diverse schools of thought and approaches to the Qur'an will be sufficient to claim the exercise of due diligence. 

-from The Story of the Qur'an: Its History and Place in Muslim Life by Dr. Ingrid Mattson, pg. 230