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muhammad shahrur’s life and workxxifamously for the al-Yalbågha Commercial Complex in Damascusand the capital’s four big football stadiums), as well as the Gulf countries(e.g., the Commercial Centre in Medina, Saudi Arabia).Despite his full-time career as a university professor and consultantengineer, Shahrur never lost interest in developing his views on logic,epistemology, and theistic theology as a response to the crisis of pan-Arabism and the military debacle of the lost Six Day War in 1967.In this, he was similar to many other Syrian Arab intellectuals duringthe 1970s and 1980s, who also taught at Damascus University (suchas ‘§diq Jal§l al-#Aím, •ayyib •ÊzÊnÊ, Adonis, Y§ssin al-\§fií, Eli§sMurqus, SalÊm Barak§t, Burh§n Ghalyån, et al.), and who had alsobeen influenced by Marxist theories. This is not to say that Shahrurwas particularly visible or audible in matters of philosophy or Islam.In fact, his intellectual positions appear to have been developed moreor less in private, as evidenced by the fact that before his suddenbreakthrough with The Book and the Qur"§n in 1990, Shahrur had notpublished anything on the subject and was then, at the age of fiftytwo,an unknown author—often tentatively referred to as al-k§tibal-muhandis, the ‘writer-engineer’. And yet, what distinguished himfrom his more famous and better trained philosopher-colleagues wasthe ‘unorthodox angle’ from which he looked at the place of religionand Islam in contemporary Arab intellectual thought.Although he shared with other Syrian thinkers (in particular•ayyib •ÊzÊnÊ) the belief that Islam possesses a universal epistemologythat encourages rationalism, human liberty, and the appropriationof knowledge, Shahrur did not find his inspiration in the classicalphilosophical heritage nor in the exegetical tradition of medievalIslam, but rather in his work as a natural scientist and engineer.What mattered to him most was not a consistent argument derivedfrom the scholarly discourses of the past, but absolute consistencybetween the Qur"anic worldview and his own modern and rationalexperiences of reality. Much of this outlook had already been developedduring his Dublin years, where he is said to have devoured thewritings of Alfred North Whitehead and his pupil, Bertrand Russell,both mathematician-philosophers themselves, in particularWhitehead’s 1925 Lowell Lectures on “Science in the ModernWorld”. 11 Through Whitehead’s work, Shahrur also absorbed much11Alfred N. Whitehead, Science in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1926). Whitehead’s dictum that “the progress of science must result in