AbdolKarim Soroush :: عبدالكريم سروش

Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush’s essay titled ‘Treatise on Tolerance’ is published in the 2004 Praemium Erasmianum Foundation publication. This essay is Translated from the Persian by Nilou Mobasser.

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First and foremost, I would like to pay tribute to the soul of Erasmus, who was the
master of tolerance and pluralism. Next, I would like to thank the board of the
Erasmus Prize Foundation which selected me as one of the three winners of the
Foundation’s 2004 award. I commend their record of cultural and humanitarian
service and wish them ever greater success in this endeavor.
I have no first hand information about the criteria that were used to select this year’s
winners, but I suspect that, in the selection of an Iranian Shi’i Muslim such as myself,
the book Tolerance and Governance and, perhaps, the tale of its publication, were
significant in the eyes of the boardmembers of the Erasmus Prize Foundation. As its
title suggests, the book tries to present democracy as a way of governance that is
based on tolerance, and to persuade the post-revolution Muslim community of Iran
that it is possible for them both to safeguard their Muslim values and norms and to
live in a democratic system; that they need not acquire one at the cost of the other.
Not only tolerance, but also criticizing officials and holding them to account are
religious values, and both these notions are firm pillars of democracy. The points that
need greater emphasis at this juncture are giving precedence to rights over duties and
substituting interpretive pluralism for an interpretive monopoly or the official
interpretation of religion by rulers.
At any rate, the book was being put forward for publication at a time (1995) when
Iran was experiencing its most severe period of political asphyxiation since the
revolution. The book’s author had been forced to leave the country, having been
subjected to savage, physical assaults at universities and public venues, as well as
fierce attacks by newspapers. He had lost his job and security and – far away from his
family – spent his time fleeing from country to country (Germany, Britain, Canada).
The Culture Ministry had fallen into the hands of a minister who harked from the
ranks of extremist conservatives; a minister who would not allow the publication of
the slightest shred of ‘un-Islamic’ material. The newspaper and book market was
undergoing an unparalleled slump, and no-one was being given the chance to defend
himself against the insults and calumnies directed at him. My students had also been
banned from writing or explaining anything. In these oppressive conditions, one of
my audacious students and friends (who is now serving a six years prison term
because of his courage in revealing the secrets behind the killing of a number of
writers) had the courage to push through the publication of my book, Tolerance and
Governance. However, the book did not contain only pieces written by me. It was a
collection of my writings and scholarly critiques of them that had appeared in various
publications. This approach was in itself almost unprecedented in the history of Iran’s
book industry, but a subsequent development was to make it truly unprecedented. The
amazing development was that the Culture Ministry was preventing the publication of
the book as it stood and that it high-handedly added to the book a long critical piece
written by one of the agents behind the regime’s policy of cultural repression who
happened to be a leading member of the Ansar-e Hezbollah vigilante group. The book
now bears within it that unwanted article like an illegitimate child. And the bittersweet
irony of it all is that this illegitimate element has become the cause of the
book’s legitimacy!
You can see that the book is not only entitled Tolerance and Governance, it is the
living embodiment of it.
But setting aside these introductory remarks, tolerance, which we are in great need
of in Iran today, is not by any means alien to our Iranian culture and Islamic creed. I
propose to show this in the works of two great poet/thinkers of Iran. Hafez, the
renowned Iranian poet of the eighth/fourteenth century exalted tolerance to the point
of saying: In these two expressions lies peace in this world and the next / With
friends, magnanimity; with enemies, tolerance.
Hafez penned these words at a time when a century had passed since the Mongol
invasion of Iran and, with the horror and distress of that invasion still etched on their
minds, Iranians were struck by the Timurid thunderbolt. The flames of insecurity,
injustice and destruction seared the land, and not only were local rulers and politicians
incapable of tolerating one another, but religious and sectarian leaders too were
engaged in unending feuds, each one of them considering the others to have been
duped by Satan and destined for hell. In Hafez’s words, ‘the orb was in a grim
temper’ and society in need of ‘a sage proposition’. The sage proposition, which
could provide felicity and peace both in this world and the next, was, to Hafez’s mind,
nothing other than the two noble and lofty notions of magnanimity and tolerance; the
first, towards friends and, the second, toward enemies. Of course,
if I were in Hafez’s place, I would add a concluding phrase to his verse as follows:
with friends, magnanimity; with enemies, tolerance, but not with the enemies of
tolerance!
Hafez knew well that, in a religious society, inviting people to exercise tolerance
would fail to have any impact or captivate hearts unless it was accompanied by an
insightful theory of human nature and religion. This is why he astutely tried
throughout his works to use the language of poetry and allusion to elucidate a theory
of this kind and to persuade his audience that his recommendation was not just a case
of well-intentioned sermonizing but that magnanimity and tolerance were sound
philosophical notions that rested on solid foundations.
Human fallibility, both in the realm of theory and in the realm of practice, was
something that was never far from Hafez’s mind and he tried to utilize religious
mythology to highlight it and lay it bare. According to Islamic accounts,
the presence of human beings on earth was the result of two original sins; one,
committed by Satan and, the other, committed by Adam. God commanded all the
angels to bow down before Adam. Only Satan disobeyed and his punishment was that
he was banished by God. Then, he had the opportunity until the end of time to deceive
and lead astray Adam’s offspring and to try to lure them away from God. (This myth
does not appear in the same form in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.)
The second sin was that, tempted by Satan, Adam ate the forbidden fruit. No sooner
had he tasted the fruit than he became aware of his own nakedness and sexuality. The
pun-ishment for this sin was that Adam and Eve were banished from heaven and
descended to earth, where they married and became the founders of humankind and
human history.
On Hafez’s reading, then, individual human beings, who are the products of sin and
are never immune from Satan’s temptations, can neither stake a claim to infallibility
themselves nor treat harshly others who err and expect them to behave like angels.
None of these things are compatible with human nature and the genesis of human
existence. Hafez expresses this idea in the most gracious terms: Who are we to
profess innocence? / When saintly Adam was stung by sin.
As far as Hafez is concerned, sin is a defining, ineluctable feature of human nature
and conduct. And intelligent people must take it into account in their conception of
the world and human life. They must not disregard its vital role for the sake of its
moral reprehensibility. Perhaps when Mandeville, the Dutch-born English physician,
wrote his The Fable of the Bees and equated individual vice with collective virtue, he
had something along these same lines in mind.
Be that as it may, Hafez goes even further than this and, in one of his works,
qualifies human beings with the two adjectives
‘somnolent’ and ‘wine-tainted’. The former attribute regards theoretical
fallibility and, the latter, practical transgressions. (Bear in mind that, in Islamic law,
drinking wine is considered a sin.) It is as if to say, we human beings see truths with
half-open eyes or in a dream-like state; hence, we do not have a totally clear
conception of them. No one possesses the truth, because everyone is somnolent. And
no one has absolute vision; hence, no one can call others blind and treat them with
violence. We are all half-blind, half-aware creatures and we have to lend one another
a hand. The practical outcome that emerges from this image is not discourteousness
and intolerance, but tolerance and patience; and not just with friends but also with
enemies, because we are all human beings; we are all somnolent and wine-tainted.
Even more explicit and precise conclusions can be drawn from this mythology-based
reading: Truth and religiosity must never be used as weapons. For they are of the
nature of language, not claws. Rather than encouraging arrogance and imperiousness,
they should foster humility and forbearance. Someone who is closer to the truth is
more humble and more tolerant towards others than someone who is self-righteous in
the delusion of possessing the truth and imagines that everyone else is deprived and
out of luck. This is a kind of mild and moderate Erasmian form of doubt, which
underpins modern thinking and logically bears within it a call to tolerance.
Here, I would like to cite Karl Popper’s exact words about Erasmus and Socrates
and their epistemological moderateness and its link to tolerance and magnanimity, in
order to demonstrate the affinity between the ideas of eastern and western
philosophers in this respect.
Erasmus of Rotterdam attempted to revive this Socratic doctrine –
the important though unobtrusive doctrine ‘Know thyself and thus admit to thyself
how little thou knowest!’ Yet this doctrine was swept away by the belief that truth is
manifest and by the new self-assurance exemplified and taught in different ways by
Luther and Calvin, by Bacon and Descartes.
It is important to realize, in this connection, the difference between Cartesian doubt
and the doubt of Socrates or Erasmus or Montaigne. While Socrates doubts human
knowledge or wisdom and remains firm in his rejection of any pretension to
knowledge or wisdom, Descartes doubts everything – but only to end up with the
possession of absolutely certain knowledge; for he finds that his universal doubt
would lead him to doubt the truthfulness of God, which is absurd. Having proved that
universal doubt is absurd, he concludes that we can know securely, that we can be
wise – by distinguishing, in the natural light of reason, between clear and distinct
ideas whose source is God and all other ideas whose source is our own impure
imagination. Cartesian doubt, we see, is merely a maieutic instrument for establishing
a criterion of truth and, with it, a way to secure knowledge and wisdom. Yet for the
Socrates of the Apology, wisdom consisted in the awareness of our limitations; in
knowing how little we know, every one of us.
It was this doctrine of an essential human fallibility which Nicolas of Cusa and
Erasmus of Rotterdam (who refers to Socrates) revived; and it was this ‘humanist’
doctrine (in contradistinction to the optimistic doctrine on which Milton relied, the
doctrine that truth will prevail) which Nicolas and Erasmus, Montaigne and Locke
and Voltaire, followed by John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, made the basis of the
doctrine of tolerance. ‘What is tolerance?’ asks Voltaire in his Philosophical
Dictionary; and he answers: ‘It is a necessary consequence of our humanity. We are
all fallible and prone to error; let us then pardon each other’s folly. This is the first
principle of natural right.’(1)
Hafez even drew on the troubling notion of determinism (predestination, fatalism) to
reinforce his tolerance-inclined thinking. He says, we are all prisoners of destiny; a
Muslim person is Muslim by virtue of geography and history, just as a Christian is a
Christian on the same grounds. If Iranians were born in the Netherlands and the Dutch
in Iran, then the latter would be Muslims and the former, Christians. How, then, can
we prisoners of history and geography put on airs and graces and claim to be superior
to others, or, even worse, resort to weapons and wage war on one another and shed
other people’s blood? Prisons always make people humble and prisoners are kinder to
one another in the light of their shared fate. We are the prisoners of our history,
geography, learning and beliefs and, once the veils have fallen away, we will see with
what fallacies and superstitions we were afflicted.
In the correspondence between Luther and Erasmus, as well as in Erasmus’ book
Discourse on Free Will, we repeatedly encounter the tale of human will versus God’s
will. This is a conundrum that all scholars and thinkers, especially religious ones,
grappled with in the past. They sought to explain what role is left to human beings if
God’s will determines all affairs; or, if human beings do have some independence,
where the boundaries of God’s will lie. And, as we know, it was this same delineation
and definition of the extent of God’s will that ultimately opened the way for
philosophical secularism, one of the legitimate offspring of which was political
secularism.
Erasmus’ final verdict was that people who had been baptized were more likely to
benefit from God’s grace than people who had not been baptized, and that Gabriel,
too, was more likely to receive people who had been chosen by God beforehand. In
other words, for Erasmus, too, people who had happened to be born Christians and
had happened to have been baptized were more favoured by and closer to God.
Hafez, too, who lived in a religious society filled with Sufi sentiments, whilst being
a serious critic of this society, concurred with a determinist position of this kind and
wrote unequivocally: Rob me not of hope in eternal grace / How can you know who is
truly favoured and who disgraced ? / Not only I happened to lose piety / My Father
also opted for losing the eternal heaven. In other words, at one and the same time, he
accepted his fallibility as a descendent of Adam and did not accept that transgression
and sin removed the possibility of benefiting from God’s mercy and grace. He was of
the view that good people and bad people had it inscribed in a book from time
immemorial that they would lead a life of felicity or villainy.
And even more delicately and profoundly, he wrote: Are the chaste and the unchaste
not both from the same tribe? / Which one do I choose to fall for? What choice? In
other words, when the saint and the sinner are in the same position in terms of their
divinely-decreed destinies, which one do we freely choose?
Is it meaningful to speak of choice and will?
We can see what dubious underpinnings Hafez is prepared to call upon to bolster his
correct belief in tolerance. And, to borrow an analogy from Mowlana Jalal-al-Din
Rumi, we can see how he turns dust into gold with the magic of his words in order to
empower and enrich society with the resulting treasures.
From this panoply of views, epistemological doubt or a belief in half-open eyes is
the most important and the most acceptable. Let us turn to the great Rumi, who lived a
century before Hafez. He came from Balkh (in modern-day Afghanistan) and his
travels took him to Iran, Iraq and Hijaz. Finally, he came to reside in Konya (in
modern-day Turkey) and was buried there. But his teachings captivated the entire
Islamic world – and, in our times, also enraptured the West – and were an inspiration
to all ardent hearts and all lovers of God. In order to demonstrate the extent to which
human knowledge is incomplete and relative, he recounts an Indian fable to us in
verse. The Indians had put an elephant on display. The elephant was in a dark
chamber and, in order to see it, the people had to file past it through the darkness. But,
since they could not see in the dark, they would try to feel the elephant with their
hands. On leaving the chamber, they would tell others about their experience. The
ones whose hands had touched the elephant’s feet would say, I saw a ‘column’. The
ones whose hands had touched the elephant’s back would say, I saw a ‘plank’. The
ones whose hands had touched its trunk would say, I saw a ‘pipe’, and so on.
Rumi tells us that, if these people had had candles in their hands, their differences
would have disappeared. But, alas, in the dark chamber of nature, our knowledge of
the truth (which is symbolized by the elephant) is fragmented. We each hold a portion
of the truth in our hands and no one has all of it (apart from, he believed, mystics,
who possess special, kohl-lined eyes). This admission of the deficiency of knowledge
is enough to make us more humble, and patience and tolerance are nothing other than
one of the fruits of the tree of humility.
Rumi said even more exquisite things and I have no doubt that, if Erasmus had known
about them, he would have drawn on them and made excellent use of them in his
writings. Rumi held that prophets played two major roles: teacher and healer. And he
even attached more importance to their role as healers than as teachers. Prophets and
religions have come to human beings mainly to cultivate their spirits and to heal their
souls; not to fill their minds with learning, but to fill their hearts with the love of God
and love for one another, and to cleanse them of sickness and hatred. The mind, too,
when liberated from vice, can find its way more nimbly into the hidden chamber of
the world’s secrets; a mind that is in chains is heavy-footed and a prisoner of nature.
Rumi counselled theologians that God had given them reason purely so that they
could use it to recognize the truth and He had sent religion purely so that they could
worship the Creator; woe betide them if they used it to other ends and for other
purposes! The mind is like a cane in the hands of the blind, not a weapon in the hands
of antagonists with which they can beat each other: When the cane becomes an
instrument for clamour and war / smash it into a thousand pieces, O blind one! There
can be no better argument than this for exercising tolerance. When something is
misapplied and used for the opposite purpose from the one for which it was intended,
it must be discarded, even if it is the cane of reason and religion. If religions and
ideologies turn into instruments of animosity and if, instead of filling hearts with love
and magnanimity and inclining them towards the Creator, sow hatred, vindictiveness
and arrogance, they must be abandoned.
Were prophets not physicians and healers? Are religions not servants of morality
and the virtues? What sort of religiosity is it that increases sickness and sets people
against each other and, in a Godly manner, distributes heaven and hell between
people? It is here that the words of Muhyi al-Din Ibn-Arabi, the great Islamic mystic
and Rumi’s contemporary, are so stirring when he says: I’m a disciple of the religion
of love / wherever the convoy of love goes, my religion and faith follow.
Mystically, Rumi takes things even further: Religion is neither a sword nor a cane, it
is a rope; a rope that the individual must grasp autonomously, with a longing to
ascend, in order to climb out of the well of ignorance and conceit and glimpse the
light of knowledge, magnanimity and kindness. Many are the people who have been
deceived by the Koran and the Bible (and by religion, in general) because it is not
enough for a book to be a book of guidance; the reader, too, must want to be guided;
otherwise, a totally humane creed can produce totally inhumane results in corrupt and
sullied hands. Rumi used the very evocative and expressive term ‘an upward yen’:
Beseech God continually that you may not stumble over these deep sayings and that
you may arrive at the journey’s end.
For many have been led astray by the Quran: by clinging to that rope a multitude have
fallen into the well.
There is no fault in the rope, in as much as you had no desire for reaching the top.(2)
The rope is in your hands but you do not wish to climb out
of the well. You take it and descend into the well. You do not have ‘an upward
passion’. This is why rectifying the direction and the objective takes priority over the
means and the instruments. There are people who turn religions into the instruments
of animosity and there are people who turn them into the instruments of kindness and
coexistence. It depends on their ‘passion’, which comes before religion and sits
outside of it.
When we speak of the intolerance of believers towards one another, we must not
forget non-believers. Just as we can have religious Fundamentalism, so, too, can we
have secular Fundamentalism. Intolerance is a kind of plague that both the believer
and the unbeliever can be afflicted with and if attention
is not paid to the biological origin, mental structure and the inherent deficiency of
human knowledge and if there is no ‘upward yen’, we can all sink into pride and
narrow, rigid prejudices, which produce no fruit other than hatred, violence,
elimination, folly and decline. Before anything else, we must rectify our passion.
Anyone who thinks that he has special qualities or especially seeing eyes and that he
can view humanity and history from a greater height and has discovered the hidden
and ultimate secret of humanity’s existence and history’s destination, or imagines that
politics and statesmanship are the realization of a divine or historical (religious or
secular) promise, or believes that he has a superior and different standing from
everyone else, or treats others in a way that he would not want to be treated himself,
can easily succumb to destructive violence and intolerance and consider this violence
sacrosanct. The intolerance of people of this kind is the worst kind of intolerance,
because, if others see violence as their right, these people see it as their divine or
historical ‘duty’. Is it not interesting to note that mystics and prophets were of the
opinion that, despite possessing special forces and qualities, they had a mission to
behave towards the masses as if they were one of them and that they even believed
that the unkindness of the masses towards them was an intrinsic hardship of the
spiritual path which they had to endure.
Islamic Sufism, despite its shortcomings, was the bearer and teacher of values that
we are in great need of today if we are to bolster the element of tolerance. In
denigrating power and wealth, Sufis used to teach people to view these two things
with the utmost suspicion and to be extremely wary of the afflictions they could give
rise to, and to know what mortifications their emergence, growth and unchecked
existence could bring. We can even use the denigration of power and wealth to
strenghten – from a moral perspective – the fair distribution of power and wealth
which is among the pillars of liberal democracy or social democracy.
By teaching humility and rejecting avarice and even an excessive avarice for
knowledge (!), and by restraining ‘the pleasure principle’ and bolstering the ‘quest for
virtue’, they guided people in a direction that reduced tension and conflict amongst
them, thereby encouraging coexistence and moderation. They always asked God to
grant them the ability to do two things: ‘battling against the self and being benevolent
towards others’, and they believed that the latter was a product of the former. They
maintained that a person has to be hard on himself in order to be magnanimous
towards others; a person has to refuse to forgive himself in order to be forgiving
towards others.
It is sad to say that, in our world, the internal moral elements of seeking virtue and
trying to perfect oneself have become so weak that external measures cannot easily
instil patience, magnanimity and humility in people. One of the reasons why humility
has been considered the greatest virtue and arrogance the greatest vice, is that
arrogance breeds violence and humility tolerance. Our Sufis held love in high esteem
precisely because love makes the lover humble! They, therefore, considered conceit to
be the slayer of love. The people who turn religiosity into a factor that feeds
selfishness and a sense of superiority – and are arrogant and self-righteous because
they claim to be pious and obedient to religious law – truly commit the greatest
injustice against celestial creeds. Erasmus was a committed Christian and, at the same
time, a humble and tolerant humanist. His ‘desire for the top’ prevented him from
falling into the trap of ostentatious, degenerate piety. In the words of Sa’di, the
illustrious Iranian poet of the seventh/ thirteenth century: The fruit-laden branch
bends to the ground; in other words, the more fecund a person is, the more humble he
is. It is people who are vacuous and inwardly impoverished who fail to be humble and
tolerant towards others.
In my country, Iran, a religious state, tolerance has reached its nadir today; I can go
so far as to say that tolerance is seen as a vice rather than a virtue. Before, we used to
live under a secular, undemocratic and intolerant state. Today, we have to endure an
intolerant religious state. (Hence, religiosity is not a necessary condition of
intolerance, nor is secularity a sufficient condition for tolerance.) Today, not just
unbelievers but even believers are not tolerated by the state in Iran. And there is no
other reason for this other than that the rulers see themselves as the measure of what is
true and what is moral. And they are bent on taking people to heaven even if they
have to drag them there in chains. The concept of duty has left so little room for rights
that, even when the people want to criticize their rulers, they have to ask them for
permission.
Newspapers tremble and are easily banned by the dozen with the mere stroke of a
pen because their variety and plurality is itself a call to pluralism and tolerance.
Conversely, semi-armed groups of hooligans can operate with impunity and
insolence, and appear by the dozen at public gatherings to break them up and beat up
opponents. They are left free to behave in this way because they are the living
embodiment of the absence of magnanimity and tolerance. The country’s officials
view these incidents with total indifference because this is what their brand of
religiosity, or better put, their ‘downward yen’ decrees.
Our statesmen have taken the rope of religion and are taking the people deep down
into the well of obscurantism. And there are only two reasons for this: first, a
downward passion and second: vacuity. If they were rich in learning and spirituality
and if they had an upward passion, the fate of religion and religiosity would
undoubtedly have turned out better than this, and they would have adopted
‘magnanimity towards friends and tolerance towards enemies’ as their slogan.
The conclusion I wish to draw and emphasize is that tolerance is an extra-religious
(and certainly not an anti-religious) virtue; exactly like love, which, in the words of
the great Rumi, ‘lies beyond all religions’. Religions have asked human beings to
obey God and to refrain from sin. But love (and love of God, at that) is not a religious
duty; it is an extra-religous, moral virtue, which, of course, also enriches and lends
meaning to religion. Tolerance, too, must be viewed in this same light. It is a virtue
that we are all in great need of, whether we are believers or unbelievers. And it is only
by teaching tolerance that we can, in Hafez’s words, ensure peace in this world and
the next. The enemies of tolerance – in whatever guise, religious or secular –
are enemies of both humanity and religion. We must guide them.
Translated from the Persian by Nilou Mobasser

Notes
1) Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p.16 rkp 19
2) Rumi, Mathnawi, Book iii, 4207-4209

Copyright
Abdulkarim Soroush
Praemium Erasmianum Foundation
isbn 90-803956-9-2
Series Praemium Erasmianum Essay
1999
Michael Ignatieff, Whose Universal Values? The Crisis in Human Rights
isbn 90-803956-6-8
2001
Claudio Magris, The Fair of Tolerance
isbn 90-803956-5-x
Adam Michnik, Confessions of a converted dissident
isbn 90-803956-4-1
2002
Max van Rooy, The silent theatre.
The documentary photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher
isbn 90-803956-3-3
2003
Alan Davidson, Food history comes of age
isbn 90-803956-2-5
2004
Sadik Al-Azm, Islam, Terrorism and the West Today
isbn 90-803956-08-4