By Bj Lewis Islam is ripe for reform, a renowned Islamic scholar said Tuesday at Texas Woman’s University, but the impetus must be theological, not legal, and that poses many problems in the politically divided world in which potential reformers must operate. Islamic scholar Abdulkarim Soroush spoke on “Reforming Islamic Societies: Problems and Prospects” to […]
The writer is a director at the South Asia Free Media Association, Lahore khaled.ahmed@tribune.com.pk The clergy and the state in Pakistan have had problems with Allama Iqbal’s view of the state in his Sixth Lecture. Iran too has had to deviate from the thought of Imam Khomeini on what is “permanent” and what is “changeable” […]
The following is by an Iran expert who wishes to remain anonymous. Grave, soft-spoken, the exiled Iranian religious scholar Abdolkarim Soroush is a living record of the Iranian revolution. As a fanatical young supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini, he helped purge Iran’s universities of leftists and secularists in the early 1980s. Later, as a founder and […]
Abbas Milani What we are witnessing right now in the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political battle for the future of the Iranian state. But closely linked to this political fight is also an old theological dispute about the nature of Shiism–a dispute that has been roiling Iran for more than a […]
by: Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabar For more than two decades, Abdulkarim Soroush has been Iran’s leading public intellectual. Deeply versed in Islamic theology and mysticism, he was chosen by Ayatollah Khomeini to “Islamicize” Iran’s universities, only to eventually turn against the theocratic state. He paid a price for his dissidence. Vigilantes and other government-supported elements disrupted […]
by: Sarah Flanagan Abdolkarim Soroush spoke to a packed Hindle auditorium about his philosophy on democracy’s place in the Islamic world on Monday April 7. Wheaton joins institutions such as Harvard and Princeton and Georgetown in inviting Soroush to share his intellectual insight on the compatibility between democracy and Islamic society. “I haven’t seen […]
Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush.(Essay) John von Heyking “You know, I’ve had enough of big ideas.” (2) Whether due to Western-style schemes of “development,” Marxism, nationalism, secularism, or Islamism, the Islamic world has suffered its share of ideological activism. What these ideologies share is a “big idea,” or ideology, that purports to transform the Islamic […]
By Azam Puya In 1992, Mehdi Bazargan, an Iranian lay Muslim intellectual, expressed a new theological opinion on one of the most important issues that has been the concern of Muslim thinkers and interpreters of the Quran: the purpose of the mission of the prophets. He said that the only purpose of the prophetic mission […]
