Abdolkarim Soroush

Works

• 1990The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of the Shariʿa

  Essays first published 1988–90: religion is not identical with human understanding of it, and that understanding changes with philosophy, science and the questions of each age.

• 1999The Expansion of Prophetic Experience

  The revelation is understood as a prophetic experience that grew with the Prophet’s life and community, so that its historical form can be distinguished from its core.

Position

Soroush distinguishes between religion itself and human knowledge of religion. Religion, as revelation, does not change; but our understanding of it is a human, fallible and historical form of knowledge that stands in exchange with all other knowledge – philosophy, science, the questions of each age – and therefore contracts and expands with it. From this it follows that no interpretation can claim final authority and that the clergy has no monopoly on understanding Islam. In “Sturdier than Ideology” (1994) he criticised the turning of religion into a political ideology, as in the work of Ali Shariati: an ideology is a rigid weapon for struggle, while religion is richer and must remain open. He argued for a “religious democratic government” in which faith is freely held and human rights and justice are understood as having a basis outside religion. In “The Expansion of Prophetic Experience” (1999) and in later interviews he described revelation as the prophetic experience of Muhammad, shaped by his person and his historical world, a view that led to sharp responses from leading clerics. His thought is marked by Popper’s fallibilism and by the mystical poetry of Rumi, whose Masnavi he edited.

Life & context

Abdolkarim Soroush, born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh on 16 December 1945 in Tehran, studied pharmacy at the University of Tehran. In 1973 he went to London, where he studied analytical chemistry and then the history and philosophy of science at Chelsea College, and was active among Muslim Iranian students. He returned to Iran after the revolution of 1979 and taught at the Teacher Training University in Tehran. In 1980 Ayatollah Khomeini appointed him to the Cultural Revolution Headquarters, which closed the universities and reorganised them along Islamic lines; the extent of his responsibility for the purges of that period is disputed. From 1988 to 1990 his essays on the “contraction and expansion” of religious knowledge appeared in the journal Keyhan-e Farhangi and made him the leading figure of Iranian religious reform thought. In the 1990s his lectures were disrupted by vigilante groups and he lost his academic positions. Since 2000 he has lived and taught mostly abroad, among other places at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Further main works

• The Restless Nature of the World (Nahād-e nā-ārām-e jahān, 1978)
• Sturdier than Ideology (Farbeh-tar az ideolozhi, 1994)
• Straight Paths (Serāthā-ye mostaqim, 1998)
• Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam (2000)