AbdolKarim Soroush :: عبدالكريم سروش

Frontline – Volume 20 – Issue 08, April 12 – 25, 2003 (India’s National Magazine) By: A.G. NOORANI The proceedings of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit in Kuala Lumpur provided a glimpse of the hurt and dismay in the Muslim psyche at Western perception of Muslims as terrorists. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed said on […]

Andriansyah, “Ahmad Wahib’s Renewal Islamic Thinking in Indonesia in Perspective of Abdolkarim Soroush”  International Institute of Islamic Thought Indonesia, Vol. 2, No.5, May 2003 Generally, there are three groups of Islamic thinking in Indonesia. The First, they who render Islam should be as doctrine applied universally; meta-historic; definitive; and self-sufficient. Hence, they do not need […]

February 3, 2003. Dear Foreign Secretary, We are writing in advance of your meeting on February 5 with Kamal Kharrazi, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to urge you to use this opportunity to send a clear message to the government of Iran about human rights conditions in the country. With […]

The Iranian reform and its permutations: How fundamentalism gave birth to its opposite By Ahmad Sadri   (December 14, 2002)   The Iranian Understanding the reform movement in Iran is predicated upon understanding the particular brand of Islamic fundamentalism which it aims to modify. There is a lot that is unique about Iranian fundamentalism but it […]

President’s Essay — From the 2001 Annual Report   By Vartan Gregorian Although more than a year has passed since the attacks of September 11, 2001, most Americans still have such a sketchy knowledge of Islam that we probably need to keep ourselves focused on President George W. Bush’s repeated reminders that terrorists, not Muslims or […]

Excerpted from draft of Noah Feldman, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (forthcoming Farrar, Straus & Giroux Spring ’03).  Not for quotation.       How, exactly, might Islam and democracy coexist?  The sine qua non of democracy is collective self-government through popular elections.  If one looks at the medieval classics of […]

Briefly… Democracy building remains an uphill struggle in most Muslim countries. The explanation of why so many Muslim countries are not democratic has more to do with historical, political, cultural, and economic factors than with religious ones. Nevertheless, many Muslim activists, using broad and sometimes crude notions of secularism and sovereignty, consider democracy to be […]