The Book Beyond Religion
Among all disciplines engaged by Shehrezad Faruk Czar—economics, physics, medicine, identity systems, sound, and civilization design—there exists one text that stands apart, not as a belief system, but as an intellectual constant. It is the only book he has read in its entirety more than one hundred times. Not out of ritual. Not out of obligation. But out of necessity.
That book is the Qur’an.
His engagement with the Qur’an is not confined to faith, nor limited by theology. It is an engagement that treats the text as a multi-disciplinary construct—one that operates simultaneously as linguistic architecture, mathematical system, legal framework, psychological manual, ethical constitution, historical commentary, and metaphysical map. Religion, in this reading, is not the container of the Qur’an; it is one of its outputs.
The Qur’an, approached honestly, refuses to remain within a single domain.
From the outset, his reading of the text has been total. He has examined it as a Muslim and as a non-Muslim. As a believer and as a neutral analyst. As a human reader and—most controversially— as an attempt to read from the authorial perspective itself. Not metaphorically, but structurally.
If the Qur’an asserts divine authorship, then it must be examined as a text written from outside human limitation, not merely spoken to humans.
Most readings of the Qur’an assume the human vantage point and then interpret upward. His approach does the inverse: it assumes divine authorship as a hypothesis and then asks whether the internal structure of the text sustains that claim under mathematical, linguistic, and systemic scrutiny. This is not theology. It is intellectual audit.
What emerges from this approach is a book that behaves unlike any other in human history. The Qur’an is not linear. It loops, refracts, repeats, interrupts, and self-references. Verses echo each other across chapters without chronological order. Concepts appear, disappear, and reappear transformed.
To the casual reader, this can appear chaotic. To a disciplined mind, it reveals non-linear intelligence.
From a mathematical standpoint, the Qur’an exhibits symmetry, proportion, recurrence, and balance that cannot be dismissed as coincidence. Repetition is never redundant; it functions as reinforcement across contexts. Silence—what is not said—is as deliberate as what is stated.
As an endocrine biochemist, he observed how the Qur’an addresses human behavior with uncanny precision. Emotional states, cognitive biases, impulse control, fear, greed, gratitude, patience, and arrogance are dissected with clinical clarity.
As an economist, he recognized that the Qur’an contains an implicit economic philosophy—one that rejects hoarding, condemns asymmetrical power, regulates trade ethics, enforces accountability, and frames wealth as trust rather than possession.
As a physicist of systems and vibration, he encountered a text saturated with references to balance, measure, proportion, rhythm, and order. The Qur’an repeatedly invokes the idea of mīzān—balance—not merely as justice, but as a universal principle governing creation.
And as a scholar of language, he encountered a linguistic phenomenon that resists translation without loss. Arabic in the Qur’an is not merely expressive; it is structural.
It is in this context that his distinction as a Marmaduke Pickthall Scholar in Qur’anic Studies must be understood—not as honor, but as intellectual lineage.
The Qur’an, in this framework, becomes a civilizational document. It speaks to law, science, ethics, and the future as much as it speaks to the past.
This is the mark of true mastery: when a text no longer needs to be cited because it has been internalized.
To describe him as a Qur’anic scholar is therefore not to place him within a religious category. It is to acknowledge a level of engagement that treats the Qur’an as one of humanity’s most sophisticated intellectual systems.
In a world increasingly polarized by shallow readings and weaponized belief, this approach restores the Qur’an to its rightful place: not as a slogan, not as a boundary, but as a text of immense civilizational intelligence.