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muhammad shahrur’s life and workxvii‘READ THE QUR"AN AS IF IT WAS REVEALED LASTNIGHT’: AN INTRODUCTION TO MUHAMMADSHAHRUR’S LIFE AND WORKThis edition assembles the essential writings of Muhammad Shahrur,one of the most interesting and innovative thinkers in the contemporaryArab-Muslim world. The success of his first book on Islam,The Book and the Qur"§n: A contemporary reading (1990), 1 made him ahousehold name among intellectuals, students, and scholars of theentire Middle East during the 1990s. Many readers were stunned bythe bold, creative, and unfamiliar way of thinking that characterisedShahrur’s writings. People who were neither experts nor full-timestudents of Islam and the Qur"an were fascinated by the logic of hisarguments and gained easy access to rather complex philosophicaland theological debates. My own first encounter with his work cameduring my fieldwork for my PhD thesis in the mid-1990s in Damascus,when I witnessed what Peter Clark, back in 1996, had called ‘theShahrur phenomenon’: the publication of an extraordinary book that“challenges a millennium of Islamic tradition”. 2 The unusual compositionof the book, its peculiar Arabic style, and its original wayof presenting logical arguments were so unique that in 1997 WaelHallaq emphatically stated that the book “is impressive in that itoffers both depth and range, virtually unparalleled in modern writingson the subject”. 3 The enormous number of copies sold, the speedby which reprints were issued and pirate versions reproduced, andthe extent to which the book’s ideas were circulated in the pre-Internet 1990s throughout the Middle East inspired Dale F. Eickelmanin 1999 to argue that the Shahrur phenomenon reflected the factthat in most Muslim countries a reconfiguration of the ‘public sphere’can be witnessed, not only in terms of different communication1MuÈammad ShaÈrår, Al-Kit§b wa’l-qur"§n—Qir§"a mu#§ßira (The Book and theQur"an: A Contemporary Reading), (Damascus: D§r al-Ah§lÊ li’l-Nashr wa’l-TawzÊ#,1990).2Peter Clarke, “The ShaÈrår Phenomenon: A Liberal Islamic Voice fromSyria,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 7, no. 3 (1996): 337–41 (337).3Wael Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to SunnÊ ußål al-fiqh(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246.