MIDDLE EAST
From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2000
By L. Carl Brown
Reason, Freedom,
and Democracy in Islam.
Abdolkarim Soroush, translated and edited by Mahmoud
Aadri and Ahmad Sadri. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 236
pp. $29.95.
In 1979, Soroush became the youngest member appointed to Iran's
post-revolution committee to purge and "Islamicize"
Iran's universities. By the late 1980s, however, he was challenging the
hard-line clerical rule in his writings and lectures, championing
democracy, and calling for a synthesis of reason (or science) and Islam.
For his efforts he was roughed up by thugs and forced into exile -- only
to return to Iran soon after the 1997 election of the reformist President
Muhammad Khatami. This selection of his writings reveals a genuinely
liberal intellect rooted in Soroush's Iranian and Islamic culture but at
home with Western thought, toward which he is neither aggressive nor
apologetically defensive. Soroush, who has gained a following among
Iranian students and even a few of the mullahs, cites the likes of Jalal
al-Din Rumi, Muhammad Iqbal,
Jörgen Habermas, and Alexis de Tocqueville as
often as the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. That might seem a recipe for
a rambling, rootless philosophy, but his statements are penetrating and
coherent. Although some observers have dubbed him the Luther of Islam, he
is perhaps better seen as Islam's Erasmus, since he is carefully working
within the system.
Copyright 2003 by the
Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
|