Thread by @hxhassan

Today is the death anniversary of Dr Mohammed Shahrour, a Syrian intellectual known for his controversial views on Islam (radical but on the opposite spectrum of jihadism). He came up with a novel way of approaching the Quran, widely rejected by clerics but fascinating at times.

To me, the most fascinating is that he came up with a method that's almost identical to Islamic radicals but in a way that pushes a liberal view of Islam, different from traditional & extremist views. A "literalist" view with modern applications.

While progressives usually focus on avoiding what they see as odd statements in Islamic texts by going for maqasid (the higher objectives of sharia, specified in hadiths) or majaz (metaphorical explanations), he embraced literalism and found a method to explain things.

His method has been widely rejected, simply by saying he could not have come up with something that Islamic jurists missed over 14 centuries. But he said his method is an extension of an old school defeated by an Abbasid-era school.

The old school he meant was one that rejected synonyms in the Quran مدرسة الترادف (the dominant one says different references in the Quran still meant the same). He says no each word meant something different, and he stuck to a *coherent* way of approaching the text accordingly.

On synonyms, this is the main thing.

He distinguishes between various references that traditionalists take to mean almost the same thing. “The book”, “the Quran”, “al-sab’ al-mathani”, “al-hadith”, “tafseel al-kitab”. By distinguishing between each of those, he discovers a lot.

To him, the Quran is different from Mushaf and different from Kitab and different from al-thikr and different from furqan, and these distinctions matter a lot.