Syrian Muslim intellectual and critic Muhammad Shahrur (Shahrour) (1938-2019)

The Syrian intellectual Muhammad Shahrur (Shahrour) has passed away at the age of eighty in Abu Dhabi. Although he made name as a thinker and writer about Islam, and the interpretation of the Qur'an in particular, Shahrur was neither a traditionally trained 'alim, nor a conventional scholar of religion. Educated as a civil engineer in the Soviet Union and Ireland, he made a living as a foundations expert in the construction industry and only published his first book on Islam in 1990.

His The Book and the Qur'an: A Contemporary Reading was both admired and derided. Not shying away from courting controversy, Shahrur's writings are characterized by a tone that is both anti-clerical and anti-traditional. While reaching hundreds of thousands throughout the Muslim world, the book was criticized and dismissed by both the Islamic religious establishment and other Muslim academic scholars of Islam, including figures such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, who considered Shahrur's approach methodologically naive.

Shahrur's interpretation of scripture was part of a broader epistemological concern with reconciling revelation with advances made in the modern sciences. His idiosyncratic approach shows even greater confidence in the modernity project than the nineteenth-century reformer Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) or the Pakistani-American Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988). While his vocabulary is reminiscent of that of the controversial exegesis by fellow engineer Mahmud Muhammad Taha (1909-1985), Shahrur's 'scientific hermeneutics' drew on the neo-Kantian idealism and logical positivism of Western mathematician-philosophers, such as Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.

To learn more about Shahrur/Shahrour's work, click on the book cover images below for one of the few translations of his writings in English, Andreas Christmann's edited volume, or the section of the chapter on Scripture  in my Contemporary Thought in the Muslim World (pp. 69-72).

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010)

The Egyptian Islamicist Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd has died in a Cairo hospital on 5 July 2010. He had only recently returned to Egypt after being diagnosed with a rare viral disease.

Since 1995 Abu Zayd had lived in exile in the Netherlands after his innovative approaches to Quranic studies -- promoting a human-centered hermeneutics and applying methods derived from semiotics, literary theory & criticism to the study of the Islamic scripture -- caused controversy in both academic, religious and political circles. This not only led to him being denied tenure at the University of Cairo, but also resulted in court proceedings initiated by lawyers associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Following a conviction on grounds of apostasy, those prosecuting Abu Zayd went a step further by insisting that the courts also impose a divorce from his wife on grounds that an non-Muslim cannot be married to a Muslim woman.

Because of these developments, Abu Zayd and his wife Ibtihal Younes ( a professor of French literature) considered it prudent to leave Egypt for the more welcoming academic environment in Europe. Traveling via Spain Abu Zayd found refuge in the Netherlands, where he held a number of academic posts at the Leiden University and lastly as the incumbent of the Ibn Rushd Chair at the University for Humanistics in Utrecht. He was also associated with the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin in Germany. In 2005 he was awarded the Ibn Rushd Prize by the Ibn Rushd Fund for the Freedom of Thought

After an absence of almost fifteen year, Abu Zayd started to revisit his home country again. However, his position is still controversial; in December 2009 Kuwait refused him entry in spite of having initially issued a valid visit visa. It was during a recent visit to Indonesia that the scholar fell ill and was admitted to the Shaykh Zayed Hospital in Cairo where he slipped into a coma.

Publishing primarily in Arabic, very little of Abu Zayd's work has been translated into English. The German-Iranian scholar and author Navid Kermani assisted Abu Zayd a number of years ago with the publication of an autobiography in German, which was later also translated into Dutch.

For more on Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd on this blog, click here.