Muhammad Shahrour (, 11 April 1938 – 21 December 2019) was a Syrian philosopher and author. He was an Emeritus Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Damascus who wrote extensively about Islam. Shahrour was trained as an engineer in Syria, the former Soviet Union and Ireland. He referred to the book of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as "The Book", not the Quran; which casts him in direct contradiction with other Islamic thinkers and traditional scholars. Yet similar to Quraniyoon Muslims, he did not consider Hadith as a divine source; however, he did not belong to the same school as Ahmed Subhy Mansour. Early life Born in Damascus, Shahrour had his high school diploma in 1958, then he studied Civil engineering at the Moscow State University, Soviet Union until 1964. Afterwards, he went back to Syria to work as a research assistant for the Damascus University. Later on, he had Master's and PhD degrees, in 1968 and 1972 respectively, from the University of Dublin. Positions Shahrour decided to write his first book, which took him more than twenty years to complete, after the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six Day War that was a collective shock for the Arab world. This led Shahrour to search for a way out of the region's crisis, which he interpreted above all as a moral and intellectual crisis. Shahrour said that traditional scholarship on the Qur'an is unscientific. His interpretation of the Quran supports liberal political positions such as pluralism. He also said that the Quran must be read and understood in relation to ever changing social realities. Shahrour said that "jurisprudence in the name of God is a farce benefiting only those wanting to maintain political power", thus opposing diametrically the views of both Islamists and of the Ulama, the traditional legal Islamic scholars. According to Shahrour, Islam makes no laws, but sets limits (Hudud) within which man enjoys "the greatest possible degree of freedom". The traditional interpretation of Hudud in Islamic law or Sharia is a class of punishments that are fixed for certain crimes. However, according to Shahrur, the chopping off of a hand is not the punishment for theft, the punishment is cutting the thief from the community. A judge could sentence the guilty party to jail, or for example, volunteer work instead. Shahrur possibly took this idea about the upper and lower limits of punishment from the Lebanese