The project of religious reform undertaken by nineteenth-century Islamic Modernists pivoted on the Prophet Mohammad. For Modernists, the retrieval of the Prophet Mohammad from the detritus and distortions of tradition was the prerequisite to redeploying the Prophet as the eternal exemplar – the model of emulation for all Muslims. Islamic Modernists recast the Prophet Mohammad as the ideal expression of Modern Islam – of a rationalized, internalized and spiritualized expression of God’s intent. As such, Mohammad could again serve as precedent, but precedent defined by his intentions and pious sensibilities, not by his specific actions in his historical context. Historicizing the prophet enabled his resuscitation as an enduring model of emulation – the ideal modern Muslim. The historicisation of the Prophet was also central to the Islamic Modernist articulation of a new, modern, methodological path forward – a new hermeneutics of the Quran and the Hadith. Historicizing the Prophet was the necessary prerequisite for religious reform as the de-contextualization of Islamic essence and its re-contextualization in the modern present – the reclamation of eternal truth from the distortions of Tradition. The quest for the historical prophet was therefore also a quest for the essence of Islam in its greatest, most perfect historical expression. Historicizing the Prophet was necessary in order to humanize him and fundamentally reconstruct the concept of precedent. For Islamic Modernists, the Prophet was first and foremost the mediator of God’s intent. Mohammad was not simply the bearer of God’s directives for mankind, but enjoyed a Divinely bestowed consciousness which provided him with knowledge of God’s intent. Aided by God, Mohammad translated God’s intent into practice. Islamic Modernists suggested that it was this act of translation – the art of negotiating the relationship of author (as God) with audience (seventh-century Arabian society) – that constituted the true precedent of the Prophet. It was this mediating role between the eternal and the historically contingent that Modernists defined as prophetic precedent – replacing Hadith as content and Sunna as replication, with the concept of translation.