This is where we see the motives which drive Western...

This is where we see the motives which drive Western religious historians like Gibb to come up with unilateral interpretations of complex concepts and doctrines.

They explain and analyze them in terms that prevent the possibility of truly understanding what a sect or religion, such as Islām, really represents.[^4] It can never be sufficiently stressed that the general application of Western terms like “orthodoxy,” “heterodoxy,” “church” and “sect” to Islām are grossly misapplied, especially as Islām does not have a Church to define orthodoxy or the powers to excommunicate.[^5] The use of such terms ends up simplifying complex issues, associating them with Western religious phenomena which do not have equivalents in the language of Islām.

There is no place for such terms as “orthodoxy, “heterodoxy,” “church,” “sect,” and “heresy” in an Islāmic tradition rooted in the concept of divine unity.[^6] While there is diversity within Islām, there is not, simply by a slight difference in approach, a contradiction of its central doctrine of divine unity nor the gregarious separation in its fundamentals of faith or its community [ ummah ].

Rather, they are diverse tendencies that make up Islām and so long as they do not stray from the fundamentals of faith, they can all claim with some justification to represent its most authentic expression.[^7] With this understanding, one can appreciate that in Islām there does not exist a clear line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

As a result, the various Islāmic currents are neither radically misguided groups which have broken from official orthodoxy nor are they separated from one another as are the Christian sects of today. Unlike the Western world, the Islāmic world defines orthodoxy by means of the profession of faith or shahādah : Lā ilāha illā Allāh / Muhammadun rasūl Allāh [There is no god but Allāh and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allāh].

The shahādah is the most universal proclamation of divine unity and is not a strictly defined theological formula. There exists, of course, an orthodoxy in Islām, without which no doctrine or tradition is possible. However, contrary to Gibb's affirmation, Islāmic orthodoxy has not been defined by ijmā' [scholarly consensus] in any restricted or limited sense.