“Islam and Dissent: Abdolkarim Soroush, Religious Politics and Democratic Reform” by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Ian Chesley
May 27th, 2009
Islam and Dissent is a truly excellent critical assessment of the role of Abdolkarim Soroush, the leading Iranian philosopher and religious thinker, in the history of the Islamic Republic. It traces his intellectual beginnings as a lecturer for the Muslim Youth Association in London, where he was studying for a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science, to his official position as cultural overseer during the Islamic Revolution, to his current role as the most influential dissident Iranian intellectual.
The introduction to the volume makes clear what is at stake intellectually for its author. A leftist student at the time of the revolution, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi spent time in an Iranian jail in the early 1980s for his political views. The period in history the book covers coincides with the bitter struggle between leftist and religious political actors over the future of the Iranian revolution. While Ghamari-Tabrizi goes to some length in the introduction establishing his post-Marxist, post-structuralist credentials, he still retains some of the contentiousness of the revolution in its early stages. This emerges most clearly in his touchy defense of Marx and Engels—as opposed to the “vulgar” variety of Marxism that Soroush abused in his early lectures.
In addition to being an intellectual biography of Soroush, Islam and Dissent presents a micro-history of the Iranian revolution that highlights all of its fissures and inconsistencies. Especially in the West, we tend to think of the Iranian revolution as a neatly packaged set of ideologies and naturally occurring chain of events. Far from being inevitable, Ghamari-Tabrizi shows how some of the central tenets of Shia revolutionary dogma were very much under debate in the years after the revolution. Khomeini himself comes across as flexible and pragmatic about the application of his concept of velayat-e faqih (“guardianship of the jurist”). Fearing that society was not prepared to accept what essentially amounted to a clerical dictatorship, Khomeini deferred and delayed expressing his own position on the constitution, preferring to have the title bestowed upon him rather than claiming it himself.
During these early years of the revolution, Abdolkarim Soroush returned to Iran from England, where he was a doctoral candidate in the history of science, and quickly came to the attention of the revolutionary leadership. Khomeini had read and appreciated Soroush’s work on Mulla Sadra (an influential 17th-century philosopher-mystic), explaining why, in a short time, Soroush was appointed to the Cultural Revolution Council, despite having little background in political activism. The CRC gained notoriety for the role it played in purging the university community of insufficiently Islamic academics, which Ghamari-Tabrizi details in his book. The few years that Soroush participated in the CRC’s activities caused some in the dissident movement to question Soroush’s later criticisms of the Islamic Republic; Soroush himself provides few answers to his critics and, in what comments he has made on his work for the CRC, claims he had specific tasks that had little to do with the campus violence for which the CRC was responsible. Ghamari-Tabrizi is particularly relentless in his quotation of Soroush’s writing after the period of terror in the early eighties, in which he comes off as an apologist for the political repression of his intellectual rivals.
On the other hand, Soroush’s position as a voice of moderation on the CRC made him suspect in the eyes of the religious conservatives, who were the eventual victors in the post-revolutionary political struggle. And, in fact, by the early 1990s Soroush had gone from being at the vanguard of the Islamic revolution to a major critic of the ideology that had come to be official policy of the young government. He began writing about religious ideology, and especially the concept of ideology as espoused by Ali Shariati, an intellectual forebear of the revolution. Soroush criticized Shariati and sought to separate religious ideology, which was a tool of the state, from religion as such. Religion as such could not be claimed for any one political faction, since it belonged and remained in the realm of divinity. In the words of Ghamari-Tabrizi and Soroush:
“By abandoning Islam as ideology, Soroush sought to reclaim the enigma of religion. Rather than being a manifesto for action, the shari’ah is silent, it is given voice by its exponents. It is like history, which is given voice by the historian, or nature, the laws of which are constructed by the scientist. The shari’ah does not put forward immutable answers to predicaments of all historical moments. That is not to suggest that “the silence of the shari’ah empties it of all meaning. Rather, its silence impedes any particular group from claiming access to its essence whereby they would prohibit and condemn competing understandings of religion.’ […] Soroush considered the religious text to be hungry for rather than impregnated with meaning. He believes that meaning is given to religion, not extracted from it.”
This “hermeneutic” approach to questions of religion, informed by western philosophy, directly confronts the ideology of the Islamic Republic. Soroush’s idea of the “silence of the shari’ah” is really an attempt to silence those who would politicize the ineffable aspects of religious experience; in other words, the governmental clerics. That is precisely the irony that Ghamari-Tabrizi discovers in the aftermath of the post-revolutionary political struggle in Iran. The activist clerics who put Islam at the head of politics made Islam itself subject to political debate, and subject to critiques like that of Soroush. And Soroush’s position (as he has strikingly articulated it recently) seems to imply that religion and politics cannot mix, an upsetting proposition to moderate critics of the Islamic Republic, who strive to show that introducing democratic principles in Iran does not necessarily mean overturning the religious basis of the country.
The organization of the book takes something away from the multiple stories that it tells. The story of Soroush takes up several chapters, but those chapters are spaced out between chapters on the history of Islamic modernism, the development of the Iranian revolutionary constitution, and fate of political parties in the 1980s. The first few chapters do not hang together in a way that moves from one theme to another in a natural progression. This structure may be due to the imperatives of ‘academic’ publishing, but unfortunately it diminishes Ghamari-Tabrizi’s very cogent treatment of Soroush’s complex ideas.
That criticism should not discourage anyone from reading Islam and Dissent. All of the material, however it is organized, is presented clearly and accurately, with many citations translated from Persian-language sources valuable to the English-only reader. For western onlookers who would write the hagiography of the dissident Soroush rather than examine the full range of his positions, the book provides a critical and realistic reading of history.