by Robin Wright
Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens…are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.
Another is Jefferson’s language from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men.
Each of the four invoked God as the guarantor of freedom.
I laid the pictures out on Soroush’s oak desk.
“Yes,” Soroush replied, “Exactly.”
Soroush provided the intellectual bridge that allowed Iranians to be, at the same time, authentically Muslim and authentically democratic.
He quickly built up a strong following in Iran. A magazine was founded largely to promote his ideas—and the debate about them. Students and young clerics flocked to his lectures. A burgeoning reform movement grew up around his discourse—to the fury of Iran’s theocrats.
“Way back before September 11, Iran started the war on ideas—among Muslims themselves,” said Hadi Semati, the jovial Tehran University political scientist who has long been one of my guides to reform and politics in Iran.
“For almost a century, intellectuals had not produced anything of note. Mostly, they brought ideas from the West. But Soroush initiated new ideas on Islam. He changed the redlines of Islamic discourse. And he did it in our own political space. This made it genuine.”
Soroush’s emergence reflected the wider context of political change in the Middle East.
In the West, the timeline of democratic change was slow and sequential. The Reformation within Christianity gave birth to the Age of Enlightenment, which in turn paved the way for new political ideas about individual rights and democracy. The process unfolded over four centuries—and is still far from complete even in the world’s most durable democracies.
The Middle East is confronted with the extraordinary challenge of reforming Islam and overhauling political systems at the same time.
Adapting Islam is a process known as ijtihad, or “interpretation.” It is applying the essence of the faith—based on the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet Mohammed, known as the hadith—to new problems or a changing world. The word ijtihad derives from jihad.
Jihad is today easily the most misunderstood word in the world. It literally means “trying” or “struggle.” For practicing Muslims, it means engaging in the daily struggle—with oneself—to be a good Muslim. Jihad only becomes a legitimate military struggle with outsiders when Islam is believed to be endangered, in defense of the faith.
In the twenty-first century, ijtihad is the key to Islam’s own version of a reformation. It is also the key to political change. But no issue is more sensitive in the Islamic world today than ijtihad. Deciding just how to interpret and who has the right to interpret are hotly disputed. Outsiders beware.
The ijtihad camps fall into three categories. Think of them like three doors.
The first are the purists, such as Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda or the ultraconservative Salafi ideologues. They believe Islam was perfect and absolute in its original form. They see the early generations of Muslims, particularly the first three in the seventh century, as the model for all Islamic life in any age. They are literalists. Most are Sunnis.
For them, the door to ijtihad is sealed—forever. Opening it would compromise or corrupt the faith. Evil and heresy are on the other side.
The second category includes the majority of clerics and Islamic jurists, who do tolerate ijtihad. They straddle a wide middle ground. Most view interpretation through the prism of Islamic law, producing sometimes obtuse legal interpretations. Some like to draw on the Middle Ages, the golden age of Islamic scholarship, when the Middle East was the center of science, medicine, literature, and the arts—and Europe lived in intellectual darkness. Their perspective is narrowly confined and not conducive to independent thought or sweeping new ideas. Using modern reason is not encouraged. Most in this camp are Sunni, although the group includes many Shiite clerics, too.
For most, any movement on ijtihad is confined inside the room. Most do not notice the door, much less consider opening it.
Reformers or modernists are another minority. Some are clerics, but many are also academics, scientists, and philosophers. They believe in exploring the sacred text in search of new interpretations and applications for modern life. They argue that the understanding of Islam, like other religions, was not fixed for all time and all places when it was founded. They believe strongly in applying reason and science to enrich the faith and revitalize Islamic civilization.4 They want to reform Islam to take it forward. They include Sunnis, mostly nonclerics. But because of their own struggle to survive and adapt over the centuries, Shiites tend to conduct the more enterprising or adventurous exercises in ijtihad for the twenty-first century.
For them, the door to ijtihad is open—although how far is still a matter of fierce debate.
Soroush is one of those reformers.
“The essence of religion will always be sacred, but its interpretation by fallible human beings is not sacred—and therefore it can be criticized, modified, refined, and redefined,” he told me.
Human knowledge and experience evolve with time, he said. So, too, should interpretations of the religious texts.
“What single person can say what God meant?” he continued. “Any fixed version would effectively smother religion. It would block the rich exploration of the sacred texts. Interpretations are also influenced by the age you live in, by the conditions and mores of the era, and by other branches of knowledge. So there’s no single, inflexible, infallible, or absolute interpretation of Islam for all time.”
Soroush even finds freedom in submission.
“Since you’re free to be a believer, you should be free to leave your previous faith or to change your religion or to convert to another religion,” he explained. “So submission is still there. But if you want to surrender or submit to another faith, you should be free to do that, too.
“It’s a contradiction to be free in order to believe—and then afterwards to abolish that freedom.”
Soroush also challenges the core idea—on which Iran’s Islamic government was based—that there is a single right path for the faithful to follow. Tehran’s clerics believe they are the only ones who can define it.
Soroush argues, however, that there is no single right path in Islam—and no single right religion.
“Every day, Muslims recite a prayer ten times entreating God to guide us to the right path,” he explained to me. “Some say the only right path is Islam, and the rest stray or are on a deviant path. But I argue that there are many right paths. I try to justify a pluralistic view of religions—the internal sects of Sunni, Shia, and others, and also the great religions, like Christianity, Judaism, and the rest.
“We think they go to hell, and they think we go to hell,” he said, a smile crossing his face, as if the idea were amusing in its smallness.
“But I’m trying to say that Christians and members of other religions are well guided and good servants of God. All are equally rightful in what they believe. To some, this sounds like heresy,” he said, the smile widening. “But this, too, has found listening ears in our society.”
Not within the regime, however. From the mid-1990s, the ruling clerics increasingly cracked down on Soroush. After he was slowly squeezed out of his teaching posts at three universities, he established the Serat Institute. Serat means “path,” as in “in the path of God.”
The emergence of an Islamic reform movement in Iran is not surprising. Settled by an Aryan people, an Indo-European race from which Iran gets its modern name, the country of both snow-capped mountains and steamy deserts has historically been a crossroads for culture and ideas, commerce and religion. Iran bridges the Arab world to
the west and Asia to the east, the former Soviet republics to the north and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms to the south, Turkey in Europe in the northwest across to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the Asian subcontinent on the southeast. The great caravan routes of the old Silk Road cut through several Persian cities. The discovery of oil by British geologists in 1908 brought in many more outsiders from the West. Over the millennia, Iran has been a repository for souvenirs of disparate cultures.
Faith has also been a central part of Persian culture, long before Islam.
The Zoroastrians of ancient Persia founded one of the world’s first monotheistic faiths and heavily influenced subsequent Judeo-Christian thought. Their core ideas—about the devil, hell, a future savior, the worldly struggle between good and evil ending with a day of judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and an afterlife—had an impact on all other monotheistic faiths, and even Buddhism. The use of hands in prayer is widely traced to Zoroastrians praying by pointing both forefingers to the light above; they worship light as the symbol of a good and omnipotent God.
Iran’s constitution embraces Islam. But it also acknowledges some of Iran’s other faiths with their own seats in parliament, proportionate to their numbers. Christians, Armenians, Zoroastrians, and Jews have their own seats.5 Each is sworn in on their own holy book.
Jews have been in Iran from the early days of Persian civilization. The Bible recounts Cyrus the Great’s conquest of neighboring Babylon, today’s Iraq, in the sixth century B.C. He decreed that Jewish slaves be freed and then mandated reconstruction of their destroyed first temple. Many Jews opted to live in Persia rather than move to Israel after their liberation. So many settled in what is today Isfahan that it was once known as Yahudiyeh or Dar al Yahud, Farsi and Arabic titles both roughly meaning “haven of Jews.” The majority have fled sporadic persecution since the revolution, although Isfahan remains the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel.
But Islam, today, defines the national identity. It serves as the most common denominator among otherwise widely diverse ethnicities. The Persian descendants of the Indo-European settlers make up about one half of the seventy million people spread across a country larger than Alaska and more than three times the size of France. The rest are a mix of Turkish-speaking Azeris in the north, Baluchis (or “wanderers”) along the border with Pakistan, nomadic herding tribes in the south, Arabs along the Persian Gulf, plus Turkoman farmers and horse traders, mountain-dwelling Lors (an Arab-Persian mix), Armenians, Mongols, Afghans, Indians, and a smattering of several others.
Islam is the glue: Eighty-nine percent are Shiite; another nine percent are Sunni. Only two percent belong to other faiths.
Iran has also always been awash with ideas and science, of which reason played an important and early part.
In science, Avicenna—called Ibn Sina in the Muslim world—was an eleventh-century physician, scientist, and philosopher whose medical texts were taught in Europe until the seventeenth century. One of the moon’s craters is named after him. Nasir al-Din Tusi, who lived in the thirteenth century, is widely considered the most eminent astronomer in the 1,400 years between Ptolemy and Copernicus; he charted a science of evolution six centuries before Charles Darwin. The moon’s Nasireddin crater is named after him. Abu Bakr al Razi was one of the greatest physicians and philosophers of the Islamic world; his work had enormous influence on subsequent European science. He is credited with the discovery of sulfuric acid and alcohol in the tenth century. He was also an early rationalist. Iran still commemorates Razi Day (August 27), and both a university and institute are named after him. The list goes on and on.
Politically, the quest for empowerment also did not explode out of the blue with Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1960s. Twice before in the twentieth century, Iranians had tried to end dynastic rule—long before democracy was a word uttered in any neighboring state.
The Constitutional Rebellion of 1905–1911 forced the weak Qajar dynasty to agree to Iran’s first constitution and parliament. Foreshadowing the 1979 revolution, the revolt was launched by the same powerful troika—the clergy, bazaar merchants, and the intelligentsia—that would come together again later in the century. Their goal was to curtail the monarchy’s powers.
The rebellion was a reaction to the shah’s huge economic and political concessions to Europeans, particularly Britain and Russia. The dynasty was, in the end, permanently weakened. The last Qajar king fled to France in 1923.
A self-educated army colonel named Reza Khan wrested power from an interim government in 1926. He added the name Pahlavi, meaning “heroic,” and crowned himself king—launching the Pahlavi dynasty.6 He also changed the country’s name in the mid-1930s from Persia to Iran, reflecting its people’s Aryan roots. He ruled for almost sixteen years, until he was forced to abdicate for his pro-Nazi sentiments during World War II. In a virtual replay of the Constitutional Rebellion, his son soon faced similar demands to limit the monarchy’s power.
In 1953, a new coalition called the National Front, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, moved to curtail massive concessions—particularly in the oil industry—given by the shah to foreign powers. Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi tried to dismiss Mossadeq, but it backfired—and the shah ended up fleeing to Rome instead. The young king returned to the Peacock Throne after American and British intelligence orchestrated riots that forced the prime minister to resign. The foreign plot infuriates Iranians to this day. Many still want a formal apology from the United States and Britain. Mossadeq has since come to represent, in a single name, frustrated democratic aspirations—and how close Iran came to peaceful evolutionary change.
After the shah’s return, the Pahlavi monarchy ruled for another quarter century. Iranians turned to revolution only after evolution twice failed.
Abdolkarim Soroush embodies Iranian passions and politics. He is pious and immersed in its religious traditions. But he also loves the sciences. He earned a degree in pharmacology. After compulsory duty in the shah’s army and work at a Tehran laboratory, he went to London for graduate work in analytical chemistry and the philosophy of science. His first book on Islamic philosophy was The Restless Nature of the World.
During our conversations, he often mused about reconciling religion and modern reason.
“The ancient world was based on a single source of information: religion. The modern world has more than one source: reason, experience, science, logic,” he told me in the late 1990s.
“Modernism was a successful attempt to free mankind from the dictatorship of religion. Postmodernism is a revolt against modernism—and against the dictatorship of reason. In the age of postmodernism, reason is humbler, and religion has become more acceptable.
“The reconciliation between the two,” he said, “is now more viable.”
Over the years, I watched Soroush’s ideas grow in substance and influence. He became daringly outspoken, despite clerical criticism of his work. He also increasingly became the target of young vigilantes when he stepped into lecture halls. Several times he was injured.
Soroush is actually a pen name. Abdolkarim means “servant of God.” Soroush means “angels of revelation.” His real name is Hosein Dabbagh. Dabbagh means “tanner,” the profession of his grandfather. Most Iranians only took last names—many arbitrarily based on where they lived or a father’s profession—under orders from the first king in the 1920s. Khomeini came from the town of Khomein, but his brother ended up with a different last name, not all that uncommon from the time.
Soroush originally combined the names of his now-grown children as a pen name when he started writing poetry. He later began using it permanently to protect his family.
By 1999, Soroush crossed a political threshold. “This is totalitarian rule,” he told me when I returned to Tehran. “And they are totalitarian rulers. That is a harsh thing to say, but it’s the truth. The regime can’t survive the way it is.”
An Islamic state simply can not be imposed, he told me. It has to b
e embraced, accepted, and voted on by the majority of people. The use of religion in politics without full freedom is not only wrong, he added, it is dangerous. It will inevitably lead to totalitarianism.
“Governments can make people pay taxes, but they will never be able to breathe faith in God and the Prophet into people’s hearts,” he said. “Faith is made of the same fabric as love, and love cannot be created by force.”
He paused, reflecting for a moment. “You know, our revolution was a haphazard, chaotic, and theoryless revolution, in the sense that it really wasn’t well thought out—not by the leader, not by the people.
“For the Imam [Khomeini], Islam was everything. He wanted everyone to topple the shah in order to apply Islam. But he didn’t elaborate on any of these points,” Soroush continued.
“So now it’s the intellectuals’ job to provide a theory for the revolution, to rethink it, and to offer a new logic for it. And the outcome will be not another revolution, but reform. Because—two revolutions in one generation? Well, really! It’s too much!” And he chuckled.
As his public following grew, a follower began to organize free Thursday evening lectures for the public. They were held at private homes and at mosques on the eve of the Muslim weekend. I went to several of them and sat on the floor or outdoors with the overflow crowds, listening to him speak in that soft voice, often for hours.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, Akbar Ganji was in the crowd too.
Ganji was a former Revolutionary Guard, a member of the elite unit created to protect the fragile new Islamic republic. In the early years, he provided ideological training for its officer corps. Among those he invited as a guest lecturer was Soroush. He was captivated by the philosopher. Students often describe Soroush’s lectures in Persian as poetry. He can, in fact, recite from memory many of the long works of Iran’s great poets, Rumi and Hafez.
Ganji, who was born in 1959 and also grew up in the shabby suburbs of south Tehran, became a friend and a kind of disciple of Soroush. After the Revolutionary Guards, he moved to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, where he helped to churn out revolutionary propaganda. But the bonds with Soroush strengthened as he, too, grew disillusioned with the revolution.
