Born in Tehran in 1945 and educated in London, Abdolkarim Soroush returned to Iran with the Khomeini revolution. Soroush is the Muslim intellectual who has, more than any other, represented the hope that it would be possible to create a liberal democracy in a religious Muslim context. These hopes culminated during the presidency of Khatami, to whom Soroush was very close, but were followed by disappointment after the failure of attempts to create a new democratic beginning from the 1979 revolution. Soroush, who, as a young man, shared in the experience of change that led to the birth of the Islamic Republic, is today one of the most tenacious and radical opponents of Khamenei and the Council of Guardians.
His problems with the regime began early on, but after Ahmadinejad’s 2004 electoral success, the situation in his country became dangerous for him as for many others, and he was forbidden to speak in public. Very soon, to ensure his safety, he was obliged to leave Iran, where now even Khatami is effectively under house arrest. His academic career, which has taken him to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin and produced a book titled Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000), has become permanent exile.
Due to the importance of his reformist religious perspective, many journalists have described him as “Islam’s Luther,” perhaps explained by the fact that in the Shiite tradition, unlike the Sunnis, there is the presence of the clergy and its earthly power. Soroush is a theoretician of freedom and individual rights, and he is a critic of the theological tradition that has justified power through transcendence, thereby sanctifying centuries of tyranny.
Soroush’s concept of freedom has religious characteristics. He distinguishes between internal and external freedom, for example. Internal freedom concerns the spiritual, intimate sphere and consists of emancipating oneself from passions and rage; external freedom concerns the political sphere and consists of freeing oneself from the yoke of potentates, despots, and charlatans. His concept of democracy is pluralistic, based on freedom that allows reflection and assessment of various options, with norms and regulations that guarantee the right to take part in public life.
Fred Dallmayr, who dedicated the essay Dialogue between Cultures (I Libri di Reset, 2002, Foreword by Giuliano Amato) to Soroush, emphasized how Soroush’s idea of freedom and his search for the truth are linked to an idea of reason as analytic reflection, as critical capability used to address holistic concepts and traditional metaphysics. Soroush significantly states that hatred for reason increases under dictatorships, and that fascists “found a friend in juvenile passions and an enemy in the rationality of maturity.”
“Drawing from both Western and Islamic sources, Soroush has laid foundations for Islamic pluralism by challenging Khomeini’s claim that Iran’s mullahs have a God-given right to govern,” wrote Time magazine in 2005, including Soroush in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Soroush opposes the power of the clergy, because human beings inevitably interpret religion, and religion therefore becomes open to totally diverging interpretations. After 9/11 his work was fundamental in the global debate on the compatibility between Islam and democracy.
Soroush does not, however, renounce his own version of “religious democracy,” which would exist only within the pluralistic boundaries of full freedom to criticize and in a framework with “secular” with “post-modern” features. It would maintain the distinction between civil society and government power, as well as address the problem that democracy “cannot prosper without entrusting itself to cohesive moral factors, such as respect for the wishes of the majority and the rights of others, justice, compassion, and reciprocal trust.” In this, Soroush’s position appears to echo Christian arguments (like Böckenförde’s) that point out the insufficiency of a perfectly neutral liberal state that is indifferent at a moral level about different concepts of good.
Translated by Francesca Simmons