Abdolkarim Soroush

Abdolkarim Soroush (عبدالكريم سروش ), born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh (born 16 December 1945; ), is an Iranian Islamic thinker, reformer, Rumi scholar, public intellectual, and a former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran and Imam Khomeini International University.

He is among the most influential figures in the religious intellectual movement of Iran.

Soroush is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.

He was also affiliated with other institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the Leiden-based International Institute as a visiting professor for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.

Abdolkarim Soroush was born in Tehran in 1945.

Upon finishing high school, Soroush began studying pharmacy after passing the national entrance exams of Iran.

After completing his degree, he soon left Iran for London in order to continue his studies and become familiar with the Western world.

In 1983, owing to certain differences which emerged between him and the management of the Teacher Training College, he secured a transfer to the Institute for Cultural Research and Studies where he has been serving as a research member of staff until today.

He submitted his resignation from membership in the Cultural Revolution Council to Imam Khomeini and has since held no official position within the ruling system of Iran, except occasionally as an advisor to certain government bodies.

His principal position has been that of a researcher at the Institute for Cultural Research and Studies.

It was after receiving a master's degree in analytical chemistry from University of London that he went to Chelsea College, (a constituent college of the University of London which was merged with two other constituent colleges: Queen Elizabeth College and Kings College in 1985) for studying history and philosophy of science.

After the revolution, Soroush returned to Iran, where he published the book Knowledge and Value (Danesh va Arzesh), the writing of which he had completed in England.

He then went to Tehran's Teacher Training College where he was appointed the director of the newly established Islamic Culture Group.

While in Tehran, Soroush established studies in both history and the philosophy of science.

A year later, all universities were shut down, and a new body was formed by the name of the Cultural Revolution Committee comprising seven members, including Abdulkarim Soroush, all of whom were appointed directly by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Soroush's joining the Cultural Revolution Committee has been criticized on two sides.

He has been accused by orthodox critics of preventing the Islamization of human sciences and by the opposition of the Islamic Republic regime of Iran to involvement in the dismissal of teachers.

Soroush rejected the opposition's accusation.

There is no independent historical research on Soroush's role in events that led to the Cultural Revolution and also his membership and his role in the Cultural Revolution Committee.

He has welcomed such study in his interview with Professor Forough Jahanbakhsh - inquiring into modern Iranian intellectual history.

During the 1990s, Soroush gradually became more critical of the political role played by the Iranian clergy.

The monthly magazine that he cofounded, Kiyan, soon became the most visible forum in post-revolution Iran for religious intellectualism.

In this magazine, he published his most controversial articles on religious pluralism, hermeneutics, tolerance, clericalism, etc. The magazine was clamped down in 1998 among many other magazines and newspapers by the direct order of the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic.

About a thousand audio tapes of speeches by Soroush on various social, political, religious and literary subjects delivered all over the world are widely in circulation in Iran and elsewhere.

Soon, he not only became subject to harassment and state censorship but also lost his job and security.

His public lectures at universities in Iran are often disrupted by hardline Ansar-e Hezbollah vigilante groups who see his intellectual endeavors as being mainly motivated by anti-regime politics rather than theology per se.

Since 2000, Abdulkarim Soroush has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, teaching Rumi poetry and philosophy, Islam and Democracy, Quranic studies and philosophy of Islamic law.

Also a scholar in residence at Yale University, he taught Islamic political philosophy at Princeton University in the 2002–2003 academic year.

From 2003 to 2004 he served as a visiting scholar at the Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin.

He was named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2005, and by Prospect magazine as one of the most influential intellectuals in the world in 2008.

Soroush's ideas, founded on relativism, prompted both supporters and critics to compare his role in reforming Islam to that of Martin Luther in reforming Christianity.

He spent the fall semester of 2007 at Columbia University and the spring semester of 2008 at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs as a visiting scholar.

In the winter of 2012, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago teaching the intellectual and religious history of modern Iran.

Soroush is primarily interested in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, the philosophical system of Molana Jalaleddin Balkhi (Rumi) and comparative philosophy.

He is a world expert on Rumi and Persian Sufi poetry.

The philosophy of Abdolkarim Soroush can be summarized as follows:

Soroush's main contribution to Islamic philosophy is his interpretation of the Kantian distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge.

His theory is called "the theoretical contraction and expansion of religious knowledge" and is primarily based on Kantian philosophy.

Soroush maintains that one should distinguish between religion as divinely revealed and the interpretation of religion or religious knowledge which is based on socio-historical factors.

The essence of religion is conceived by Soroush as independent from experience while religious knowledge is understood as a finite, limited, and fallible form of human knowledge, thus depending on empirical evidence.