"Few ideas are more foreign to modernity

and the Enlightenment than the idea of divine revelation. Subjectivity and individual freedom are usually celebrated as cornerstones of modernity. Claims that God created man and woman in His image, that He spoke authoritatively to mankind, and that human life and death have a transcendental purpose seem irreversibly outdated. The acid of criticism -- that essential ingredient of mankind -- has not only eaten away metaphysical certainty. It has also succeeded in abolishing metaphysical questions. Instead, modernity reflects its own continuously changing crisis in a form of self-criticism that tautologically installs this very permanently changing criticism as the essence of a never completely achievable modernity."

-Stefan Wild, "Why self-referentiality?" Self-referentiality in the Qur'an, (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2006), 1.