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xxxiiintroductionThe absence of a personal God in Shahrur’s philosophy explainswhy no prophet, saint, or mystic—not to mention the religiousscholar—has a particular ‘nearness to Him’, which would give hima special status because of his religious enquiries. The prophets’ specialstatus is only derived from their own rational enquiries (ijtih§d) intothe objective truth and their applaudable application of the universalethical code ( al-isl§m) to the moral conduct of concrete individualsand the legal functioning of particular societies ( al-Êm§n). And thesaints, mystics, and the #ulam§" have distanced themselves from Godby preferring rituals over ethics and doctrine over critical reasoning.Here, more than anywhere else, the teleological and evolutionarycharacter of Shahrur’s prophetology becomes evident because eachprophetic vision turns into historical perspective with the passing oftime. Each prophet taught the universal message vis-à-vis the particularconcerns of their people, but as the prophetic era has ended,their particular teachings must eventually be superseded by the universalconcerns of all humankind. National legislation must becomeworld legislation, and particular ethics must turn into universal ethicsshared by all human beings. Given Shahrur’s endeavour to bringhistorical Islamic religion ( al-Êm§n) back to what is shared universallyas human, ethical conduct ( al-isl§m), one understands his impatiencewith SalafÊ Islamists who, like medieval scholars before them, regardthe particulars of MuÈammad’s time as the universal ideal for allhumankind and who, thus, sacrifice the truly universal ethical teachingsof the Qur"an in favour of the particularistic interpretations ofMuÈammad, his companions, and subsequent generations of Islamicscholarship.Here lies the root of Shahrur’s bitter anticlericalism and antitraditionalism.He feels that the #ulam§" and fuqah§" of Islam havebetrayed the progressive, universal message of al-isl§m in the followingways: by their obsession with the particular details of seventhcenturyArabia; by their imposition of the ÈadÊths onto the qur"anictext (holding its meanings firmly locked up in the distant past); bytheir fixation on the details of rituals; by their distrust of the humanrational faculty; by their suppression of freethinking; and by theirneglect of the common good and what Islam shares with other religionsin favour of particularistic, sectarian interests that advocate asense of spiritual superiority. Even more radically, in idolizing theearly generations of Islam, in declaring MuÈammad’s sunna as sacrosanct,and in sacralizing the opinions of famous medieval scholars,