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xforeword by dale f. eickelmannavigate, but its focus is on the text. This unadorned means of persuasion,however, appeals to a growing educated middle class.Shahrur’s use of the term ‘Copernican revolution’ to emphasizecontemporary innovations in interpreting God’s word contains anelement of hyperbole. The cliché of the Renaissance, itself a nineteenthcentury term, is that people like Copernicus discarded thedusty parchments of earlier eras to learn ‘directly from nature.’ Inpractice, the revolution wrought by Copernicus and others combinedfirst-hand observations and the careful analysis of received opinionsof the past, made possible through the dissemination of multiple textsthrough printing. The present ‘revolution’ in thinking about Islamis not a complete break with the past. However, the rise in educationallevels and the multiple channels of communication have createdan unprecedented opportunity for people to talk back toauthorities, both religious and political, and to invest conventionalforms with new meanings and contexts. The field of discourse hasshifted, so that even those who advocate a more exclusively Islamicintellectual development do so in a language and style that assumesbackground knowledge of ideas and institutions which are not distinctivelyMuslim. The current situation is far different from earliereras, when men of religious learning all read essentially the same‘core’ texts.The Qur"an, Morality, and Critical Reason presents for the first time inEnglish a comprehensive account of Shahrur’s original approach tohow to think about Islam. In preparing the Arabic original of thisbook, Shahrur has naturally drawn on his nearly two decades ofwriting about Islam. In so doing, however, he has gone beyond andcreated a text that is often both new and consistently accessible.In an interview that I conducted with Muhammad Shahrur inDamascus in 1996, published for the first time in this volume, weexplored his original sense of audience. Over the years, Shahrur haslearned to communicate to new and wider audiences. His earlierwritings dealt only obliquely with the rough topics of the world inwhich we live—tyranny and terrorism. His more recent writings inArabic, and this book in English, confront these hard issues headon.The Qur"an, Morality, and Critical Reason is in part a long-term dialoguewith Shahrur’s audience in the Arab world, Europe, NorthAmerica, and even Indonesia—where his work in translation hasreceived a wide and appreciative audience. Andreas Christmann,