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xxxviintroductionbetween al-isl§m and al-Êm§n. In this vision the Qur"an ceases to be‘Scripture’ whose sacred meanings are firmly locked inside each individualword and which need to be unlocked by the hermeneuticallyand spiritually most astute reader (normally the trained #§lim-mufassir).Instead, the Qur"an functions as text whose words are simply vehiclesof meanings that point to a nontextual structure to be discoveredeither in cosmos, nature, and history of all humankind (the universallaws of al-qur"§n) or in the manifestation of humanity in concrete,historical human societies (the contingent laws of umm al-kit§b). Theprocess of discovering the former is called al-ta"wÊl, while the deductionof laws for the latter’s procedures of human legislation is calledal-ijtih§d.As for al-ta"wÊl (that is, the act of interpreting al-qur"§n or better,the disclosing of its objectivity), this is based on Shahrur’s evolutionaryphilosophy that envisages humans’ increasing participation inGod’s absolute knowledge. According to his ‘dialectics between theuniversal and human episteme’ in a postprophetic era, the only wayto link the total, comprehensive knowledge which is in Allah (thatis, objective existence), and the relative, partial knowledge whichhumans possess (because of their subjective understanding of objectivereality), is through the existence of a text whose miraculousnature allows a correspondence between its objective nature and thesubjective understanding of each historical age. Shahrur calls thiscorrespondence al-tash§buh or ‘assimilatability’, God’s assurance of apermanent harmony (though, not sameness) between the temporaland eternal, relative and total, partial and absolute. Explaining thispoint, he establishes an analogy between al-ta"wÊl’s dialectical relationshipbetween human readers and their texts (scripture or otherwise)and our perception of ancient wall paintings: “Think of a frescoat the Vatican. The fresco is fixed, objective. But as the viewerchanges position, he sees the fresco in a different way. Each time wemove, we see the fresco in a different way. The mullahs want us tostand still and see the fresco as it was in the seventh century. Wewant to move around and see the fresco in a dialectic between textand context. Our interpretation of the fresco as we move around issubjective”. 44His critics understood this as a free license to the human mindto read into the Qur"an whatever it finds suitable (which is,44Interview, 512–513.