AbdolKarim Soroush :: عبدالكريم سروش

 Overview Reinventing Khomeini offers a fresh interpretation of the ideological battles that paved the way for Mohammad Khatami and the struggle for political reform in Iran. These battles did not result from a sudden shift in the ideological climate, nor did the reform movement completely defy the ideology of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Rather, this movement […]

Some Aspects of the Problematic   During the past ten years we have noticed several Muslim ideologists and movements that explicitly, although in different ways and with different content, have formulated demands for democracy, legitimation of political power by popular mandate, Human Rights and liberties in the sense expressed in the UN¹s Declaration of 1948 […]

The Martin Marty Center  University of Chicago Divinity School Sightings October 19, 2000 By:  Scott Appleby Graphic and deeply disturbing images of violence, motivated in part by religious animosities, emanated from the Middle East last week. Such images, whether beamed from Israel, Palestine, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Northern Ireland, or the United States, overshadow a […]

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 […]

Hamid Dabashi AT the writing of this essay, Iranians were poised to cast their fateful vote in the sixth round of parliamentary elections after the success of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The election of the Sixth Majles was a momentous occasion for a nation much maligned in its modern history by a debilitating combination […]

By: Forough Jahanbaksh Abdolkarim Soroush (b.1945) is an Iranian philosopher-thinker whose innovative ideas on religious reform are sure to win him a place among the most prominent Muslim reformers of this century. A graduate of Tehran University in pharmacology, Soroush undertook postgraduate studies in history and the philosophy of science at the University of London […]

Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on February 15, 2000 Robin Wright Los Angeles Times Correspondent and Author, The Last Great Revolution  “Turmoil and Transformation in Iran” Thank you very much. There’s a special irony in that here I am, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and I’ve been to the city four […]