Asad meant to devote two years to completing the translation and the commentary but ended up spending seventeen. In the opening, he dedicates his effort to ""People Who Think"." The author returns to the theme of Ijtihad - The use of one's own faculties to understand the Divine text, again and again. The spirit of the translation is resolutely modernist, and the author expressed his profound debt to the reformist commentator Muhammad Abduh. In the foreword to the book, he writes "...although it is impossible to 'reproduce' the Quran as such in any other language, it is none the less possible to render its message comprehensible to people who, like most Westerners, do not know Arabic...well enough to find their way through it unaided." He also states that a translator must take into account the ijaz of the Qur'an, which is the ellipticism which often "deliberately omits intermediate thought-clauses in order to express the final stage of an idea as pithily and concisely as is possible within the limitations of a human language" and that "the thought-links which are missing - that is, deliberately omitted - in the original must be supplied by the translator...".