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muhammad shahrur’s life and workxxxviiincidentally, the most often voiced killer-argument against all ‘contemporary’readings of the Qur"an). What has been overlooked, however,is that in Shahrur’s philosophical scheme of things this ‘whateverhumans find suitable’ is not necessarily what is incompatible with‘what God finds suitable’. This is because God ‘guarantees’ compatibilityin a twofold way: by the absoluteness of His being He vouchsafesfor the absolute and infinite validity of the text’s form (fresco)and its content/meaning. And by having created human beings andendowed them with reason with which they make sense of the textin each historical period, He also created the inherent warranty thathuman beings, provided they find a joint consensus or similar understanding,will always correctly concur with what has been said in thetext. Since there can be no inherent contradiction between the divinetext and its (contemporary) human understanding—if performed onthe highest possible rational/scientific level and in full accord withempirical reality—the accusation of an overly subjective, all-toohumaninterpretation of the Qur"an is—at least seen from Shahrur’spoint of view—beside the point.As for the second act of interpretation, al-ijtih§d, or the disclosureof a congruence between the divine law of the sharÊ#a, applied insociety, and what is intrinsically and universally human in all societieson this earth, this does not involve, as many modern ijtih§d theorieshave argued, adapting the eternally valid aÈk§m rules of theQur"an to the temporal needs of contemporary societies. On thecontrary, it is the attempt to get the always temporally valid aÈk§mattuned to the eternally valid laws of al-qur"§n, that is, with what eachhistorical period has relatively understood of it (through al-ta"wÊl). Inother words, a rigid dress code (such as the total veiling of the femalebody), for example, which jars with human instinct and deviates fromthe current social consensus about good etiquette and moral decency,cannot be—by definition—divine law. Inheritance law which discriminatesagainst female heirs and deviates from legal practice anywherein the world is incompatible with God’s law. Legal injunctionson apostasy, theft, polygyny, jih§d, killing and such like, which arerejected by the majority of people and interpreted as inhuman andin violation of universally accepted human rights, undermine theethical God-humankind bond and must be reformulated in the lightof al-isl§m. Shahrur holds that the rules of umm al-kit§b are in permanentneed of active preservation (Èifí), supervision (riq§ba), and confirmation(taßdÊq), while the al-qur"§n is its ȧfií, raqÊb, and mußaddiq.