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xxintroductionengineering. There he experienced another phase of political andideological confusion. While witnessing the dismantling of Stalinismduring Nikita Khrushchev’s reign as Soviet Prime Minister (1958–64),his religious beliefs were challenged by a confrontation with Marxistphilosophy and institutionalised Soviet-style atheism. Sharing withmany contemporary foreign intellectuals the disillusionment with theone-party rule and totalitarian tendencies of the Communist Partyof the Soviet Union, he still battled with atheism and was—accordingto his memories—so involved in defending his theistic beliefs that allother questions of religion seemed irrelevant to him. 10 When hegraduated in 1964 with a diploma from the Moscow Institute ofEngineering, fluent in Russian and married to a Russian wife whobore him a son, he returned to Syria. A couple of years before hisreturn, the political union between Syria and Egypt (1958–61) hadbeen buried along with any hope for a pan-Arab union. Trying toexplain the underlying reasons for such political failure, Shahrurbelieved that pan-Arab thought had failed to produce the necessaryideology for a political union as it was too immersed in romanticistnostalgia entrenched in sentimental poetry. His encounter withMarxist philosophy had taught him that any viable ideology neededa fundamental concept of knowledge, that is, a theory about thehuman perception of things that exist in objective reality. He wasdetermined to put this right with his own philosophical ideas.Yet at this point in Shahrur’s development, the prospect of a goodcareer as a civil engineer and all that this required, in particular themastering of mathematics and analytical geometry, proved moreattractive to him than his philosophical interests. Thus, in 1968, heleft Syria again to study abroad, this time at the University Collegein Dublin where he earned his master’s degree in 1969 and his doctoraldegree in soil mechanics and foundation engineering in 1972.Eventually, he went back to Damascus University, where he lecturedas a mudarris, then as an assistant professor before being made a fullprofessor at the Faculty of Engineering. He taught at DamascusUniversity for twenty-six years, from 1972 to 1998, and becamerenowned as the author of several Syrian standard reference workson soil mechanics and foundation engineering. Beside his teachingobligations he worked as a consultant engineer supplying inspectionservices for over two thousand building projects in Syria (most10Ibid, 504–505, and 508.