Abdolkarim Soroush Research Articles

Islam, State and Modernity: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab World

Islam, State and Modernity: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab World

Islam, State and Modernity: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab World

Islam, State and Modernity: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab World

Conventional Secularism and the Humanization of Islam: Theory and practice of religious politics in Iran

ABSTRACTThis article is a critical examination of a post-revolutionary Iranian discourse on secularism. This discourse seeks to offer a new understanding of Islam and reformulate its relationship with politics. Intellectuals who were important figures within the post-revolutionary establishment articulated this discourse. ‘Abdolkarim Soroush has been the leading voice of this discourse. Soroush’s project is an attempt to penetrate the individual Muslim’s self-perception through reinterpretation of the nature and role of religion. This article argues that Soroush’s modernist project is a defense of conventional secularism and does not address the challenge of continuity.

Islam–science relation from the perspective of post-revolutionary Iranian religious intellectuals

Throughout Islamic history, various arguments have been raised by Muslim scholars concerning how the Quran and scientific knowledge are related to one another. This paper seeks to examine how contemporary Iranian religious intellectuals (rowshanfekrān-e-dīnī) have dealt with the question of the compatibility or incompatibility between Islam and science. In particular, the paper focuses on the writings of two of the most significant reformers of the post-revolutionary era, namely Abdolkarim Soroush and Muhammad Mujtahed Shabestari, concerning the relation between science and religion. The paper also examines the extent to which the ideas of these two thinkers about the relation between Islam and science reflect those of pre-modern and modern Muslim scholars. To do so, I first examine various pre-modern and modern discourses within the Islamic tradition about Islam–science relation as well as the scientific exegesis of the Quran, and then investigate the extent to which Soroush’s and Shabestari’s perspectives are related to such discourses. The central argument of the paper is that the theories proposed by Soroush and Shabestari significantly differ from the views of those modern and pre-modern Muslim scholars who attempt to argue in favour of the dichotomous view that Islam is either compatible or incompatible with scientific knowledge.

Discourse analysis matters: bridging frameworks

ABSTRACTA great deal of discourse analysis is deeply imbued with Western perspectives on language, communication, politics, and society. One solution to this problem is to expose these perspectives and develop, across different cultures, culturally distinct forms of discourse analysis. In this paper I want to claim that it is also possible to think of discourse analysis in a way that crosses cultures and, in a sense, stays ‘neutral’ politically. The approach I sketch out is tentative and exploratory. It is based on an old thesis in philosophy called the Quine–Duhem thesis, a thesis that states a distinctive view of how science works. I will argue that the thesis can illuminate the nature of critical debates not only in science, but in society more generally. I will add to the Quine–Duhem thesis insights from Karl Popper and the Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush. On this basis I develop a proposal about an approach to discourse analysis that I call Framework Discourse Analysis (FDA). This approach is not meant to replace other approaches, but to speak to the task of how in a world awash with conflict and polarization, conflicting viewpoints can come productively into contact with each other.

Abdolkarim Soroush: The Neo-Muʿtazilite that Buries Classical Islamic Political Theology in Defence of Religious Democracy and Pluralism

Abdolkarim Soroush: The Neo-Muʿtazilite that Buries Classical Islamic Political Theology in Defence of Religious Democracy and Pluralism

The Post-Islamist Turn and the Contesting Visions of Democratic Public Religion

This article examines the relationship between religion and sociopolitical development in the context of the re-emergence of popular social movements in Muslim societies in the Middle East and North Africa. It makes a case that despite the decline of Islamism as a mode of social mobilization, religion maintains an active presence within the public sphere. Focusing on the religious-political discourses of Abdolkarim Soroush and neo-Shariatis, as the representatives of two distinct post-Islamist currents in post-revolutionary Iran, the article identifies some of the capacities and limitations of their particular conceptions of democratic public religiosity for contributing to the ongoing processes of change in Iran and other contemporary Muslim societies.

Human Rights and the Challenge of Foundations

Human Rights and the Challenge of Foundations Anthony Chase (bio) Abdulaziz Sachedina , Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2009) 248 pages, ISBN No. 978 0 1953 8842 8 Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im , Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a (Harvard University Press 2008), 324 pages, ISBN No. 978 0 6740 2776 3 Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (Mahmoud Sadri & Ahmad Sadri eds. & trans., Oxford University Press 2002), 256 pages, ISBN No. 0195158202 Grace Y. Kao , Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World (Georgetown University Press 2011), 239 pages, ISBN No. 978 1 5890 1733 7 Samuel Moyn , The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010), 337 pages, ISBN No. 978 0 6740 4872 0 Jean H. Quataert , Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press 2009), 355 pages, ISBN No. 978 0 8122 4163 1 Kate Nash , The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK (Cambridge University Press 2009), 224 pages, ISBN No. 0521853524. Are commonly given foundations for human rights convincing (or even needed)? And can the religiously minded accept such foundations if they do not flow out of a religion (presumably their religion)? These questions are a recurring undercurrent in critical thought on human rights that finds vague underpinnings such as "the conscience of mankind" unsatisfying, and finds equally unsatisfying utilitarian notions of human rights as the simple expression of the legal consent of states without need for further elaboration. The demand that human rights require a more explicit foundation may be misleading in a troubling manner. Is the spread of human rights really dependent on a specific foundation, religious or otherwise? It may well be, instead, that such a focus moves attention away from the pluralistic impulses and immediate claims that are actually behind human rights global spread, as a review of literature from a variety of disciplines dealing with human rights can help us understand. An apt starting point in this regard is Abdulaziz Sachedina's Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights, which poses the questions noted above quite directly. As human rights have become more central to political discourse around the globe, work on human rights foundations has been a focus of literature in an expanding range of academic disciplines. It follows that, as disciplines such as religious studies (Sachedina's home), law, history, sociology, and international relations increasingly focus on human rights, each brings their own particular framings to these questions. Human rights and human rights-informed events [End Page 498] are clearly ripe for being explored from multiple disciplinary perspectives. It is less clear, however, if these disciplines are sufficiently exploring each other: we may have explorations of human rights from the perspectives of multiple disciplines, but is there a need for more explicitly interdisciplinary work? Questions of human rights foundations and the role of religion, in particular, would seem to lend themselves to interdisciplinary possibilities. This is, however, the first notable lack in Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights. Its disciplinary focus on religion as a possible foundation for human rights leads to a disconnect from exciting academic work being done on human rights in other fields. This work could give greater dimension to discussions of what allows human rights to make impacts. Sachedina argues that common justifications for human rights are, simply put, not persuasive: human rights need to be placed on a firmer foundation if they are to continue spreading. Sachedina goes further to claim that this is because human rights have moved away from the sort of religious justifications that gave them what he says were their original impulse. Sachedina's solution, therefore, is that there must be a return to these sorts of foundations, particularly if human rights are to gain legitimacy in parts of the world where they are most contested. Most specifically, therefore, his book attempts to articulate how it is that Islam can serve as precisely the sort of religious foundation he maintains human rights needs. In other words, Sachedina's book is seemingly mistitled. Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights has less to do with the...

Two Iranian Intellectuals: Ayatollah Morteza Motahari and Dr. Abdol-Karim Soroush and Islamic Democracy Debate

The ideological and social changes of the past hundred years and the introduction of a secular religion combating the traditions started a big portion of modernistic endeavours in Iran. It was not only seen in the field of ideas and ideologies, but also in the policies of the governments which prioritized the modernization process in Iran. The result has been so far the creation of numerous modernist ideologies in Iran. With regard to their distance from established traditions, we can categorize these ideologies into several distinctive groups. One such group is the, religiously driven, Islamic thinkers who are further divided into traditionalists, reformists and modernists. In this essay, the aim is to consider two Islamic thinkers; Ayatollah Mutahhari representing the reformists and Dr Soroush affiliated with the modernists on their views about democracy. We will try to answer the critical question of compatibility of Islam with democracy and find the relationship between Islam and democratic practice. Key word: Islamic Democracy, Muslim Intellectuals, Modernists, Traditionalists, Reformists

Deconstruction, Secularism, and Islam

Since early 1990s, Jacques Derrida's growing attention to politics and religion has been abundantly noted. What has received far less attention is Derrida's explicit secular commitments in his discussions of religion and politics. Such commitments might be seen as arising from a structural threat that religion, or at least religious dogmatism, poses to political discourse. Insofar as religion, for Derrida, is bound to appeals to sacred, understood as unscathed, pure, and thus unconditioned and absolute, it threatens he described in Violence and Metaphysics as the worst violence, i.e., denial and closure of discourse. ' Given such a threat, an appeal to secular principles to protect a democratic public space of free and critical discourse might seem to follow. In this essay I seek to unsettle such a possible perception of relation between deconstruction and secularism, as well as Derrida's own commitments to secularism for democracy, by critically contrasting Derrida's discussion of secularism and religion with work of two recent Muslim reformers. In work of Abdullahi An-Na'im and Abdolkarim Soroush we find an implicit, but far-reaching, commitment to a certain logic of autoimmunity that Derrida analyzes at length in Faith and Knowledge and gives voice to in Above All, No Journalists: for sacred or divine to reach light ... to phenomenalize itself, to utter itself, to manifest itself, [it] must cede to . . . 'autoimmunity.'2 That is, for sacred or divine to manifest itself, it must appear in human space of profane. Both of these Muslim reformers draw strong democratic consequences from necessarily profane status of religious interpretation and knowledge. Thus, contrary to prevailing secular conception of proper relation between democracy and religion, as well as predominant western view of Muslim religious and political thought, they defend democratic reforms from an avowedly religious basis. Because Derrida's commitment to secularism follows from and mirrors his commitment to democracy, I will begin by reviewing general nature of political commitment for Derrida and specific basis of his commitment to democracy. I will then examine Derrida's strategic advocacy of secularism for democracy despite double-bind and autoimmunity inherent to both democracy and religion. In second half of essay, I move to examining how An-Na'im and Soroush present critical alternatives to Derrida's account of secularism and religion, ones that upset presumed necessary link between secularism and democracy. Deconstruction and Democracy Derrida argues repeatedly and at great length that ethical, political, and religious commitments are all characterized by a leap beyond can be known or generated by rational deliberation. That is, there is always an unbridgeable gap between reason and deliberation on one hand and decision to believe or act on other.3 No rules or norms or even direct commands interpret themselves in any given situation (e.g., God to Abraham: Kill Isaac! - is it meant ironically? Is that exactly I should not Is this a test? I must decide, always in a deficit of certainty). Thus very question, what should I do? generates an infinite responsibility for whatever I do, even if I do nothing at all, because I can never fully justify whatever decision I make.4 Derrida complements arguments for infinite responsibility with arguments that every action I take is always open to double bind of chance and threat.5 That is, unknowability and essential incalculability of future means that any decision I make and action I take, regardless of how long I deliberate on it beforehand and how much knowledge I assemble on its behalf could end in regret. The point again is not to generate fear or inaction. On contrary, double bind of chance and threat and necessary irresponsibility characterizing every decision imply, for Derrida, urgency of deciding and doing something, as well as grappling with our responsibility for effects we can never completely control. …

Parallels between Contemporary Western and Islamic Thought on the Discourse of Power and Knowledge

This paper examines parallels between contemporary Western and Islamic thought. It will propose that there is congruence between Western and Muslim political thought processes on issues of soft-foundationalism, negative theology, provisional truth claims and religious democracy, in order to offset hegemonic tendencies. This will be illustrated by a concise juxtaposition of the ideas of Davutoglu, Winkel, Sardar, Tariq Ali, Derrida, Foucault, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammed Arkoun and others. In the social sciences, namely political science, the neutralization of ideology is also supported in relation to the concern of ideological encroachments into the discipline by William E. Connolly, that echoes Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. This paper concludes that similar concerns on the relationship between power and knowledge in contemporary Western and Islamic political thought processes are beneficial to the study of Islam and its transformation as a social and political phenomenon.

Religion and Politics in the Middle East

In the final decades of the twentieth century, a new strand of Islamic intellectualismbegan inserting itself into contemporary Muslim discourses onpolitics, law, and human rights. Not fitting into existing neat categoriessuch as traditionalist, revivalist, and modernist-liberal Islam, its promotersoperate on the interstices of established traditions and practices within theMuslim world, as well as the liminal spaces between cultures and civilizations.With the advent of the new millennium, the impact of their alternative, cosmopolitan or culturally hybrid ways of engaging with the Islamicheritage, or turath, is receiving increasing recognition.In his latest book, Religion and Politics in the Middle East, which examineswhether religion has primacy over politics or the other way around,Robert D. Lee’s focus has shifted from individuals (Muhammad Iqbal,Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, and Mohammed Arkoun) to a quartet of countries(Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and Iran). At the same time, he continues toacknowledge the significance of maverick thinkers such as the EgyptianNasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Turkey’s Said Nursi and Fethullah Gülen, and theIranian Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohsen Kadivar in questioning, challenging,and transforming the intellectual and political scenes in their respectivecountries and beyond—although often forced to do so from abroad asexilic intellectuals ...

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Islam and dissent in postrevolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush, religious politics and democratic reform

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Islam and dissent in postrevolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush, religious politics and democratic reform

Review of The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics

Many scholars, Muslim and Western, struggle to understand the concept of human rights in Islam and its status in contemporary Islamic societies. There is much debate because often the discussion of “universal” human rights does not address the subject of religion at all. Furthermore, the language of “universal” human rights, as presented in Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), is not explicit in Islam’s primary and secondary sources, including the Qur’an and Hadith. The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics attempts to address this sensitive and largely unexplored relationship between Islam and human rights, by further focusing on, what the author calls, “comparative religious ethics,” which “seeks to understand ethical values across religions and cultures.” To demonstrate diversity of opinions on this issue, Irene Oh studies and compares the religious ethics of Abul A’la Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, and ‘Abdolkarim Soroush. This text opens the door for further research to investigate into the issue, and uncovers that “universal” ideas of human rights have found their way into Islamic thought.

Book Discussion Section: COMPARATIVE ETHICS, ISLAM, AND HUMAN RIGHTS: Internal Pluralism and the Possible Development of Tradition

ABSTRACTDialogue with three major Muslim authors shows that Islam can take a positive stance toward human rights while also presenting differing interpretations of the meaning and scope of rights. Because of their subordination of norms reached through reason to those drawn from faith, as well as negative experiences of the impact of Western colonization of parts of the Muslim world, Abul A‘la Maududi and Sayyid Qutb place significant restrictions on rights of conscience. 'Abdolkarim Soroush's positive support for the role of reason in Islamic faith and his less‐negative assessment of the West lead him to more vigorous support for the human rights agenda. This study raises the question of whether the humility needed in comparative ethics and the respect for others at the root of human rights are necessarily linked.

Islam and dissent in postrevolutionary Iran: Abdolkarim Soroush, religious politics and democratic reform

The Iranian revolution of 1979 overhauled not only the foundations of Iranian society, religion and politics, but also our understanding of the role of religion in modern government. Here Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi takes us on an enlightening journey, showing that the revolution unintentionally opened up the public sphere to competing interpretations of Islam. Far from being the exclusive preserve of high-ranking seminarians as before, in contemporary Iran lay theologians, intellectuals, lawyers and social activists are active and influential interlocutors in debates on the meaning of Islam.A key figure is philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, a leading force behind Iran's pro-democracy movement and vocal critic of the state. Through a close reading of Soroush's writings, and by tracing the links between Muslim intellectual critique and the realpolitik of postrevolutionary power struggles, Ghamari-Tabrizi offers nothing less than a pathbreaking reassessment of the Iranian revolution. With powerful insights, 'Islam and Dissent' is essential for an understanding of the Muslim world today, as of the new relationships between religion, politics and democracy visible across the globe.Islam and politics a very important topic, especially re. Iran. Soroush is a key figure in Iran, and in Middle East generally. This title is recommended by star academics in the field of Islam and politics.

The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights and Comparative Ethics: By IRENE OH

The discussion about Islam and human rights has been going on for some time now, and it started long before the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). So what is a new book going to add to this long running debate? Irene Oh argues that her work aims to bring some cross-cultural dialogue into the picture. The author argues (correctly) that most of the contributions to the debate hitherto have come from Western scholars or liberal Muslims who are at home in the West. To balance this, she selects the works of three scholars: Abū l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī (Pakistan), Sayyid Quṭb (Egypt) and Abdolkarim Soroush (Iran). The choice is dictated first by the fact that these thinkers write about human rights from an Islamic perspective, and have proved influential in their communities. Their work covers a broad spectrum geographically, historically, doctrinally and ideologically. The writings chosen start from the 1940s (Quṭb), then cover the 1970s (Mawdūdī) and finally the 1990s (Soroush). The latter also belongs to the Shiʿi minority school of Islamic thought, which gives added significance. The spectrum they cover also ranges from the ultra-conservative to the extremely liberal.

The Novelty of Jihadist Terror.

It is notoriously difficult to grasp the distinctiveness of one’s own epoch. We lack distance from events, and hence a sober perspective on them. Intellectual laziness and wishful thinking may induce us to fall back on entrenched habits of mind. Another salient obstacle to creative thought is the inertia of our language. Terms well suited to past situations are often applied to radically different times; hence the reflex of modern commentators to label the jihadist radicalism of al Qaeda as “fascist,” “totalitarian,” or “Islamo-fascist.” The first thing to note about such analogies is that, ironically, they provide a measure of conceptual solace by implying that we are in familiar territory. After all, we know what National Socialism and Bolshevism were. A second, less obvious point, is that the language of totalitarianism in the Islamic context inverts, rather than escapes, earlier simplifications. During the 1990s a host of self-styled American Middle East experts minimized the accelerating wave of Arab and Islamic radicalism by imposing on it a variety of consolations. We were told that the Middle East was undergoing a “Reformation” (the Tehran university professor Abdolkarim Soroush was briefly assigned the role of Martin Luther); that Fatah was a “democratic” or “progressive” organization of the Palestinians; and that the West Bank and Gaza were hotbeds of “civil society.” (Such wishful thinking is punctured in Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers in the Sand, available as a free download at http://sandbox.blog-city. com/ivory_towers_on_sand_download.htm) Those depictions look rather silly now but even they might have become serviceable if their exponents had been willing to recognize that democracy can be repressive and that civil society is capable of assuming vicious forms. Most Muslims are not radicals, and militant Islamism is itself a large and heterogeneous set of movements, so it is useful to distinguish among

Cultural Essentials versus Universal Values?

AbstractThis paper adopts a comparative approach to analyze the crucial issue of the dynamics between universally shared values and the essentials of different cultures. It presents the ways in which universal values are conceptualized in Western, Indian and Muslim philosophy, presenting not only a historical overview but referring to modern authors such as Daya Krishna, D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Richard Rorty, Muhammad Iqbal, S.H. Nasr and Abdolkarim Soroush to show how these authors implicitly use, or do not use, cultural essential and universal values in their own work. It is eventually claims that comparative philosophy is of crucial importance for the future of philosophical thought in a global world.

Mysticism in Contemporary Islamic Thought: Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush

Mysticism in Contemporary Islamic Thought: Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush