Islam and Modernism (IV)
Kambiz Iranpour
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Friday, January 27, 1995
COLUMN ONE
"Islamist's Theory of Relativity"
Iranian scholar says faith is open to interpretation, challenging the
dogma of hard-line mullahs. His ideas on religion, democracy could lead
to a Muslim Reformation.
BACKGROUND
Islam accepts the prophets and tenets of Judaism and Christianity as part
of a single tradition that was the precursor to Islam. The Koran is the
holy scripture revealed by God to the prophet Mohammed in the 7th Century.
The five pillars are belief in the supremacy of God, five daily prayers,
charity, fasting during Ramadan and pilgrimage to Mecca. It is the only
monotheistic religion that offers a set of rules not only for establishing
spiritual beliefs but also for governing society.
By ROBIN WRIGHT
Times Staff Writer
Copyright 1995, Los Angeles Times
TEHRAN-Abdol Karim Soroush is an unassuming figure. Small-framed
bespectacled and tenderly soft-spoken he looks almost fragile as he sits
at the big, round oak table in his office at the Research Institute for
Human Sciences here.
But this gentle man is shaking the foundations of a faith that claims a
billion followers-nearly one out of every five people on Earth. Both
supporters and critics now call him the Martin Luther of Islam-a man whose
ideas on religion and democracy could bridge the chasm between Muslim
societies and the outside world.
"Soroush is challenging 13 centuries of thinking," said Nasser Hadian, a
political scientist at Tehran University. "He is proclaiming that
understanding of religion is all relative. Put another way, no one
interpretation is absolute. It is not fixed for all time and place. Who
can say what God meant? This opens the door to all kinds of new ideas,
political as well as religious."
Put still another way, Soroush and an emerging group of Islamic writers
and thinkers are making it possible to be Islamic without being
fundamentalist, according to John Voll, an expert on Islam at the
University of New Hampshire.
"They are creating a comprehensive, late 20th-Century world view that is,
at the same time, authentically Islamic and authentically modern," he
said.
Soroush and contemporaries!such as Tunisia's Rashid Ghannouchi, Egypt's
Hassan Hanafi and Algeria's Mohammed Arkoun-are shaping what may turn out
to be Islam's equivalent of the Christian Reformation: a period of
questioning traditional practices and beliefs and, ultimately, of
upheaval.
Already, Soroush's impact extends far beyond the realm of religion. His
writings are framing a new debate about political change-not just for Iran
but for the Middle East.
"Soroush is profoundly important to an issue facing the entire Muslim
world," Hadian said, "because he says Islam can be interpreted in a way
that is compatible with democracy. And he shows how."
In the region of the globe that has most resisted change, few ideas are
more pivotal to the future than the relationship between Islam and
democracy. Although the Iranian government has not formally reacted to
Soroush's writings and teachings, many senior mullahs and officials are
widely believed to feel threatened by his words. But for all the
acclaim-his work is already the subject of dissertations in places as far
away as Georgetown University in Washington-Soroush does not seek, nor even
welcome, media attention.
A bimonthly magazine called Kiyan, which means source or soul, was founded
in 1991 primarily to air his columns and the debate they have sparked. It
now has subscribers in Asia, Europe and the Americas, including the United
States.
Soroush, otherwise, is almost reclusive-probably wisely so. Friends say
even his dustbin has been picked and probed to keep track of his ideas.
Getting an interview can take years of appeals and pulling strings with
intermediaries.
Against the hustle and honking din of downtown Tehran, the quiet chambers
of the institute where Soroush is dean of faculty seem like a sanctuary.
In his office, soft music plays in the background.
"Islam and democracy are not only compatible," he began. "Their
association is inevitable. In Muslim society, one without the other is
not perfect."
Soroush, who is in his late 40s speaks deliberately and in English. Among
a long list of academic credentials, Soroush did graduate work in
philosophy at the University of London.
"I have given two bases," he said. "The first pillar is this: To be a
true believer, one must be free. To become a believer under pressure or
coercion will not be true belief. And this freedom is the basis of
democracy.
"The second pillar in Islamic democracy is that interpretation of
religious texts is always in flux," he added. "Those interpretations are
also influenced by the age you live in. So you can never give a fixed
interpretation."
Everyone is entitled to an interpretation. Although some may be more
scholarly than others, no one version-by a cleric or layman is
automatically more authoritative than another.
For the Islamic Republic of Iran as well as other Muslim societies, the
practical implications of Soroush's words are profound-although he refuses
to spell them all out. "I will be better served if I do not get entangled
in such political affairs," he said, chuckling knowingly. "Let other
people draw the implications and consequences."
The most basic are equality and empowerment of ordinary believers. As did
the Reformation, Soroush's argument establishes the rights of
individuals-in their relationship both with government and with God. And
like democracy anywhere, the beliefs and will of the majority at the
bottom define the ideal Islamic state. It can't be imposed from the top
or by an elite, such as the clergy.
"No one group of people has exclusive right to interpret or reinterpret
religion. That is something to be abolished," he explained, sitting at
the table, almost buried behind piles of books.
Islam also should not be used as a modern ideology, for it is too likely
to become totalitarian, he said. And the ideal Islamic republic is ruled
not by mullahs or sheiks but by secular leaders.
With haunting similarity to thinking during the Reformation, in which
Protestants split from the Roman Catholic Church, Soroush's arguments in
effect divide the roles and powers of church and state. That would be a
stunning shift for the only major monotheistic religion that provides a
set of rules by which to govern society as well as a set of spiritual
beliefs.
But the change would not be total. Like Luther, the 16th-Century German
theologian who inaugurated the Reformation, Soroush is not abandoning the
values of the faith. He instead argues against rigid thinking and
elitism.
Islam, he says, is a religion that can still grow. He believes in Sharia,
or Islamic law, as a basis for modern legislation. But he views Sharia
less rigidly than does the traditional clergy.
"Sharia is something expandable," he said. "You can't imagine the extent
of its flexibility. And in an Islamic democracy, you can actualize all
its potential flexibilities."
But does not the freedom inherent in democracy ultimately contradict
Islam, which literally translates as submission?
"Just the reverse," he responded, a smile spreading across his face. With
the precision of a logician, he built a philosophical argument as if it
were a mathematical equation.
"If you freely surrender or submit, this does not mean that you have
sacrificed your freedom," he said. "You should be free as well to leave
your faith. It is a contradiction to be free in order to believe-and then
afterward to abolish that freedom."
For a growing group of followers-ranging from young mullahs to regime
opponents, from intellectuals to government technocrats-Soroush represents
the hope of reconciliation, both within Islam and between Islam and the
outside world.
"He is finding ways to reconcile Islam and modernism for educated Muslims
who have had problems with traditional Islam," said Mohammed Reza Bouzari,
a businessman and Soroush follower for almost a decade. "He shows how
understanding changes day by day, year by year. This is the only way to
save Islam in the modern world."
Soroush's Kiyan columns are now the center of a feisty intellectual
debate. His Thursday evening lectures at a local mosque are packed. At
Tehran University's School of Theology, where he teaches the history and
philosophy of science, students wait in the halls just to see him.
At the last national book fair, an anonymous donor contributed enough to
make all copies of Soroush's books available at half price. His most
popular book just ran its fourth printing. Even critics concede that his
writing in Persian is so poetic it draws readers on literary merit alone.
"This is a seed in the ground, and it is going to grow," Bouzari said.
"It's an intellectual revolution," added Reza Tehrani, Kiyan's editor.
But the movement symbolized by Soroush may be on a collision course with
Iran's powerful clergy.
"The debate is between those who accept the idea of a multifaceted,
multidimensional religion that changes across time and space and those who
say Islam has only one essence, and it can't be touched, and therefore
democracy is alien," said Hadi Semati, an analyst at Tehran's Center for
Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies.
In Iran, the latter are now in power.
"The government does not like us, but so far it tolerates us,' Tehrani said.
Many, however, fear for Soroush's future.
"Soroush is a man of some courage, especially given the context in which
he says these things and the direct criticism of the form of government in
Iran today that comes out of his writings and teaching," said Shaul
Bakhash, an Iran expert at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and
author of an upcoming book on the Islamic debate.
Soroush was originally one of the revolution's own. He returned from
London shortly after the 1979 upheaval that brought the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini to power.
In the early 1980s, he was part of the cultural revolution, serving on the
seven-man committee that determined Islamically correct university
curricula.
He hosted one of the new regime's early television shows on Persian
poetry. Yet he can also quote vast passages from a cross-section of
Western philosophers.
"We've never had anyone like Soroush," Hadian said. "Very few people
really know both the West and Islam, and can talk about and to both
worlds. Some intellectuals here are familiar with the West but not with
the religious nuances. And some clerics know religion but not the West.
Even in Iran, we can't communicate with each other. But Soroush can bring
together ideas from both worlds because he understands and has lived in
both."
The debate within Iran is echoing throughout the Muslim world. Various
thinkers are looking at how to modernize and democratize political and
economic systems in an Islamic context.
The extensive writings of Egypt's Hanafi, for example, center on "bringing
the faith up to date in a revolutionary way," New Hampshire Islamic expert
Voll said. "He thinks of developing the equivalent in Islam of what
liberation theology was to Catholicism."
Tunisia's Ghannouchi, another philosopher, is working on a book titled
"Public Freedom in the Islamic State."
"Islam did not come with a specific program about our life," he said in an
interview. "It brought general principles. It's our duty to make this
program through interaction between Islamic principles and modernity."
Ghannouchi advocates majority rule, protection of minorities, full women's
rights and equality of all secular and religious parties.
"Freedom," he pronounced, "is superior to Islam."
Yet his views are seen as such a challenge to the state that he was
repeatedly imprisoned in Tunisia before being forced into exile in Europe.
The Reformation did not fully shake out for about 200 years with the
establishment of a welter of Protestant denominations. By that yardstick,
an Islamic Reformation-if that is what it turns out to be-is only in its
incipient stage, and the current debate underscores that the turmoil in
the Muslim world is due at least as much to internal tensions as to
friction with the outside world.
Soroush prefers to avoid comparisons with Luther.
"I'm just a writer and a thinker," he said. "I'm not thinking of doing
things like Luther did.
"Although," he paused, "perhaps Luther did not know what he was doing at
that time."
He laughed easily. "But I am well aware that these ideas, if taken
seriously, might be of some use or help some radical change in the way we
look at religion."