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1 From critique of Marxism to critique of Islamism
Soroush’s biography and intellectual context
This chapter will discuss Soroush’s intellectual life and context. For this, his education history will first be presented at three different phases: pre-university education in a private religious school, studying pharmacy at Tehran University, and finally, studying philosophy of science in London. Then Soroush’s intellectual life will be analysed in four phases from the late 1970s to the present, from Soroush as a young Muslim critic of Marxism into Soroush as a critic of Islamic Republic. Finally, some features of Soroush’s intellectual context, including the tradition–modernity dilemma of Iranian-Islamic society as well as local Islamism and global secularism, will be discussed.
Education: From ‘Alavi Madrasa to London University
I. Student of ‘Alavi Madrasa
Abdolkarim Soroush was born Haj Hossein Faraj Dabbag1 in 1945 to a religious family in Tehran. As a young boy, he attended the ‘Alavi School,2 which was one of the Islamic private schools in Tehran. These schools were established by religious middle-class families aiming to combine religion and science in their curriculum in an effort to counter the influence of state secular schools on their children.3 ‘Alavi School’s curriculum embraced both modern sciences and religious teachings.4 The building block of Soroush’s thought, which is the combination of religion and modernity, was already the philosophy of his school.5 In an interview, Soroush states that the director of ‘Alavi School, Mr. Rouzbeh, who believed in the compatibility of Islam and science, taught the students scientific interpretations of the Koran. He says that Mr. Rouzbeh’s exclusive devotion to the reconciliation of religion and science was one of his most noticeable attributes, and “[h]e made an all-out effort to derive scientific principles from religious texts.”6 Then Soroush adds that he had great difficulty accepting this argument.
II. Student of pharmacy in Tehran University
While Soroush was a student of pharmacy in Tehran University, he also studied Islamic philosophy and mysticism under the instruction of a private tutor. Learning about Islamic philosophy contributed to his religious concerns about the relationship between religion and philosophy. In recalling his tutor’s methodology, Soroush said, “My tutor would initially present philosophical arguments in a thoroughly logical and cogent fashion and then proceed to demonstrate that religious principles and traditions already contained those rational premises.”7 If in the ‘Alavi School, he was taught that scientific principles could be derived from the Koran, and his philosophy tutor taught him that philosophical principles could also be found in Islamic tradition, he could conclude that the Koran provides the knowledge and the answers to all questions of humanity.
In addition, while still a student in Iran, Soroush also became engaged with political Islam. The activities of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a revolutionary Islamist-Marxist group, and the lectures of Shariati in Hoseyniyye-ye Ershad led Soroush to reflect on the relationship between religion generally and Islam specifically and politics.8 These different groups saw in Islam a perfect political system, again espousing the idea that Islam is all encompassing and owns solutions for all aspects of life.
These ideas, among others, possibly contributed to leading a segment of Iranian society to consider Islam “an alternative and complete and independent system” to the capitalist-liberal West and the socialist-Marxist East,9 a self-concept that has led to the Islamic Revolution. One of the most frequent and popular slogans in the Islamic Revolution was “na sharqi, na gharbi, jomhuri-ye Islami” (neither East nor West, [only] the Islamic Republic).10 Soroush’s cooperation with the Islamic revolutionary groups in its first years and the role he played as one of its ideologues could be understood in light of these early experiences.
During Soroush’s time at university in Iran, he was similarly influenced by other intellectual streams, namely classical Sufi literature like the works of Rumi, Hafiz, al-Ghazali, and Feyz Kashani. These readings familiarized him with the Sufi and mystical interpretations of Islam, characterized by some researchers as being the inner and/or spiritual side of Islam. Soroush was impressed by the Sufis’ insistence on the spiritual and ethical aspects of Islam as well as with their respect for pluralism and tolerance. This is indeed the part of tradition that still accompanies Soroush in his encounter with modernity.
III. Student of chemistry and philosophy of science in London
After receiving his doctorate degree in pharmacy from Tehran University, spending some years completing his obligatory military service, and working in the chemistry field, Soroush left Iran for London in 1973 in pursuit of his studies in analytical chemistry. But soon he changed his discipline to history and philosophy of science. Indeed, from the contents of Soroush’s “luggage,” it was obvious that the young chemist would put aside chemistry for something else. In his trip to London, he took four books with him: Mulla Sadra’s al-’Asfar al-’Arba‘a; Feyz Kashani’s al-Mahajjat al-Bayza’; Hafez’s Divan; and Rumi’s Mathnavi.11 This particular selection clearly demonstrates Soroush’s main fields of interest. Al-‘Asfar al-‘Arba’a is the main book of the Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra (1571–1636), who tried to combine reason and revelation. Al-Mahajjat al-Bayza’ by Feyz Kashani is the Shi‘a version of ’Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din, the main work of Imam al-Ghazali, which is an encyclopaedia of Islamic knowledge from a Sufi revivalism perspective. The two other books are poetry collections by two great Sufi poets, Hafez (b. 1310) and Rumi (1207–73).
After having spent one year studying chemistry, Soroush found himself facing many questions regarding the nature of the natural sciences and was advised to study philosophy of science. He took up a Ph.D. program in History and Philosophy of Science at Chelsea College, working on a thesis about the history of monomolecular reactions, but never finished it.12 Soroush was intensively engaging himself with the Western philosophy and had difficulties reconciling the new philosophy with his knowledge of Islamic philosophy and tradition. He says in an interview that he experienced a critical period when Rumi lost most of his freshness for him, and he started to question Rumi’s approach: “It had become difficult for me to feel any harmony and congeniality with him. […] I often would find his arguments strange, unpalatable, or incredible.”13 It seems clear that this period was a turning point in Soroush’s intellectual journey. The difficulty of the situation becomes clearer when we consider the different intellectual worlds with which Soroush was engaged. On the one hand, he was reading Rumi’s pantheist world view, and on the other, he was reading Popper’s disenchanted world. Soroush’s concept of Islam as the most comprehensive tradition of mankind, including all of science, philosophy, and politics, was obviously being challenged. Later on, Soroush came to reconcile these two contradicting worlds.
Intellectual life: From “Islamic Republic’s ideologue” to “apostasy”
Soroush has had an intellectual life with many ups and downs. During the early years of the Islamic Republic, Soroush was an intellectual member of the revolutionary family, assigned by Ruhollah Khomeini as a member of the Advisory Council on Cultural Revolution. Soroush’s dialectical debates with leaders of the Marxist parties and his lectures on Islam were broadcast on Iranian TV and radio so often that his role was known by some as a “premiere ideologue” of the Islamic Revolution.14 However, Soroush gradually separated himself from the Islamic Revolution and political Islam in general. By the late 1980s, he had turned into a dissident of the Islamic Republic and was even accused of apostasy by some of his critics.15 In the 1990s, he was described by some as the Martin Luther of Islam.16 Soroush, however, rejected being called the Martin Luther of Islam. When Soroush received the Erasmus Prize in 2004, he said that if he had to be compared to any Christian reformist figure, it should be Erasmus rather than Martin Luther. “The humanism, tolerance and more importantly the anti-sectarian tendency of Erasmus attracts me more towards him than Martin Luther, who was, no doubt, also a great man of European history.”17 He does not like to be known or called the founder of a new sect; instead, he perceives himself as a reformist who just elaborates on tradition and tries to make it understandable in modern context. Due to some political and security difficulties in Iran, since 2000 Soroush has spent most of his time lecturing at Western universities.
Soroush’s intellectual life could be categorized into four main periods. The first phase can be regarded from 1978 till 1980, when Soroush’s main intellectual contribution was critique on Marxism. From 1980 till 1988, Soroush was mostly engaged with defending modern humanities against the more radical members of the revolution family, some anti-Western and anti-modern intellectuals who were critical and reproachful of modern (Western) humanities. The third phase started in 1988, when Soroush published The Contraction and Expansion of Religious Knowledge and argued for the historicity and contextuality of religious knowledge. From 1998, after the publication of The Expansion of Prophetic Experience, till now, the fourth phase has continued, that is, when Soroush argues for the historicity and contextuality of the religion itself.
I. A young philosopher of the Islamic Revolution (1978–80)
The beginning of Soroush’s career as a professional intellectual can be situated within the last years of his stay in London, when he published his first books. During this time, he wrote several books that were directly or indirectly critiques on Marxism. The four main works written during this period are as follows: Nahad-e Na-aram-e Jahan (The Dynamic Nature of the Universe),18 which was a “modern” reading of Mulla Sadra’s philosophy and his theory of al-Harakat al-Javhariyya (Substantial Motion); Danesh va ’Arzesh (Knowledge and Value);19 Tazadd-e Dialektiki (Dialectic Antagonism);20 and ‘Elm Chist? Falsafe Chist? (What is Science? What is Philosophy?).21 When Soroush returned to Iran some months after the Islamic Revolution, he genuinely continued his struggle against Marxism. He took part in several televised discussions between Muslim thinkers and Marxists. He and Ayatollah Mesbah (currently one of his main ideological opponents), sat together on the Islamic side of the debating table. During the first years of the Islamic Republic, Soroush became engaged with some administrative activities, mainly as a member of the Advisory Council on Cultural Revolution. The council’s task was the “cleansing” the universities of non-revolutionary elements and the subsequent reopening of universities.22 Though Soroush soon resigned from this position, the issue of destroying oppositional academics and intellectuals within the early years of the Islamic Republic and Soroush’s “cooperation” with this “cleansing” are still controversial.23
During this phase, Soroush used Mulla Sadra’s transcendental philosophy as well as Karl Popper’s post-positivist philosophy of science and his liberal political philosophy to criticize Marxism. Sadra’s Substantial Motion (“al-Harakat al-Javhariyya”) and Popper’s open society, critical realism, and falsification theory were Soroush’s main conceptual tools in his fight against Marxism. Gradually, Soroush found himself abandoning his close relationship with Mulla Sadra. He once made a reflective remark about his last dialogue with Mulla Sadra, stating: “This was my last dialogue with Mulla Sadra. I have not terminated this meditation, but I have not revisited his work in recent years either.”24 However, he stayed faithful to his Popperian legacy. We will see that later in his life, Soroush continues to use the same concepts and theories in criticizing political Islam. As for the early post-revolution years, Soroush became famous as the representative of Popperian philosophy in Iran.
II. Professor of philosophy at Tehran University and advocate of modern human sciences in post-revolutionary universities (1980–88)
During his engagement in the Advisory Council on Cultural Revolution, Soroush faced a group of revolutionaries who were calling for the Islamization of the human sciences and even, in some extreme cases, banning some of these fields at the universities. They a...
