Liberalism in Disguise

A Critique of Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush’s Economic and Political Thought

When we speak of “religious intellectualism,” we must first clarify what we mean by the term: “religious” intellectualism—or, more precisely, “religious intellectualism”—is a movement among the modern educated classes that seeks to reform Islam from “outside” the official religious institution, namely the seminaries (the institutional home of the clergy), while remaining “within” Islam, attempting to improve and strengthen it in its encounter with the modern world and the age of modernity. This relationship of being outside and inside religion is crucial, because before the emergence of religious intellectualism, a movement arose in Iran that moved from “religious” reform to reforming “religion” itself, drew on the concept of the “Occultation,” and, by claiming an “Advent,” created a new faith outside the sphere of Islam. Interestingly, Sayyid Jamal al-Din Asadabadi, the father of religious intellectualism worldwide, was—and to some extent still is—accused of being a Babi and of Babism because of comparisons with this lineage, and the case has yet to be closed. Religious intellectualism, too, remains vulnerable to accusations of sect-building, and two interpretations of it continue to compete: one sees it as a research program for ijtihad within religion, while the other regards it as an ideological project for constructing a new religion. Under the first interpretation, religious intellectualism is a continuation of the element of “ijtihad”; under the second, it is an instance of “innovation” in religion.

After Sayyid Jamal al-Din Asadabadi, who emerged “from” the seminary but did not remain “within” it, we encounter three generations of religious intellectualism in Iran:

The first generation consisted of intellectuals such as Mehdi Bazargan and Yadollah Sahabi, who approached religion from the perspective of science, by which they meant modern empirical knowledge in the natural sciences and engineering, whose criterion of scientific validity was experience—that is, experimentation. This current was unfamiliar with the humanities and social sciences because it was estranged from philosophy as the mother of these disciplines, and this became its Achilles’ heel. With the emergence of Marxism as Iran’s first encounter with the modern social sciences, religious intellectualism entered a crisis. The translation of Marx’s Capital and works such as Principles of Economics (translated by Tudeh intellectuals such as Abdolhossein Noushin) turned religion’s absence from this field of knowledge into a problem, and the children of religious intellectuals—including those in the People’s Mojahedin Organization—copied Marxist and Tudeh teachings into pamphlets such as Economics in Simple Language, reproducing the leftist account of society.

The second generation of religious intellectuals had been educated in the social sciences; figures such as Ali Shariati and Abolhassan Banisadr had studied sociology and economics. At the time, sociology had only recently begun to be taught at the University of Tehran through the efforts of people such as Gholamhossein Sedighi and Ehsan Naraghi, but young students such as Shariati and Banisadr went to France in an attempt to fill Iran’s social-science gap at its source. We do not have precise information about the level of these individuals’ studies, and despite their reputation as holders of doctorates—that is, as having attained a form of scholarly ijtihad in modern knowledge—serious doubts surround their academic credentials.

Nevertheless, the second generation of religious intellectuals were practitioners of oratory and essay writing, and they poured the socialist concepts they had brought back from France into theories such as “monotheistic economics,” giving Islam a Marxist-socialist veneer. The rejection of private property, the priority of society over the individual, the renewed sanctification of the state, and the struggle against capital were among the legacies of this current. Figures such as Habibollah Peyman later joined them and became even more Marxist than the Marxists themselves when, after the Revolution, in the journal Ommat, they extended the theory of a “monotheistic classless society” and theorized confiscations and the nationalization of the economy and industry.

The third generation of religious intellectuals, however, emerged after the Islamic Revolution. The leading figure of this generation was Abdolkarim Soroush; after him, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, by leaving the seminary, and then Mostafa Malekian, by abandoning the clerical institution, also moved into religious intellectualism, though they did not remain there. They were versed in philosophy, theology, and mysticism, and lacked both the philosophical poverty of the first generation and the Marxist-socialist orientation of the second; they were familiar with the humanities (rather than the social sciences). Here, the distinction between the humanities and the social sciences means the distinction between philosophy and theology on the one hand and political science, economics, and sociology on the other. Politically, the third generation criticized the anti-philosophical and anti-jurisprudential tendencies of the first generation, which, under the influence of their hidden teachers, including Shariat Sangalaji, had anti-Sadrian inclinations and regarded philosophy as fruitless in comparison with modern science. The revival of Sadrian Transcendent Theosophy, based on the convergence—indeed, the eclectic combination—of philosophy, mysticism, and jurisprudence (wisdom, knowledge, and Sharia), formed the theoretical foundation of the third generation of religious intellectualism and brought it closer to the Sadrian tendency among the clergy (Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, and Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi). This philosophical school furnished a critique of Marxism that protected it from the affliction of the second generation of religious intellectualism, but another problem lay within this current: philosophers such as Abdolkarim Soroush, although trained in the philosophy of science, were closer within Islamic philosophy to theology, whose task was to employ reason in proving religion rather than to exercise reason independently of religion. As modern intellectuals, they ultimately sought to establish a new theology; and as Sadrian thinkers, they regarded the elevation of wisdom and philosophy as lying in their connection with knowledge or mysticism, and even with Sufism and the Sufi tradition.

In his lectures and essays, Abdolkarim Soroush repeatedly spoke of his love for Rumi and displayed an affinity for al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali was the author of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, written against philosophy, while Rumi stands at the head of the Sufi religious tradition.

At this point, we need to reflect briefly on the relationship between intellectualism and modernity: in its European origins, intellectualism was a child of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment in Europe was a return to philosophical reason, whose foundations had been laid in ancient Greece and which had been marginalized in the Middle Ages under the dominance of the Catholic Church. Following the Reformation and the emergence of Protestantism under Martin Luther and John Calvin, a return to philosophy occurred—not from within Protestantism itself but among reformed Catholics—that went beyond Protestantism and led to the Renaissance in art, literature, and philosophy. From within it emerged modern political science (Niccolò Machiavelli), modern sociology (Montesquieu), and modern economics. In this sense, a great transition took place from religious revolution to literary and artistic revolution, from cultural revolution to industrial revolution, and ultimately to political revolution—a process called modernity, development, and progress. Accordingly, democracy cannot be analyzed without development, development without modernity, or modernity without a transformation in the relationship between religion and worldly life. What caused the third generation of religious intellectualism to deviate—that is, to change course on the road to modernity—was a lack of historical understanding. Despite their philosophical understanding of science and their command of Sadrian philosophy, they neglected the logic and philosophy of modern history, according to which technology is the foundation of modernity and modernity cannot be achieved without industry.

It is necessary here to point to one example of religious intellectualism’s misunderstanding of the modern age, because it bears directly on our own time and on a current debate: in 1985 CE and 1365 SH (that is, 40 years ago), the Ministry of Islamic Guidance of the Islamic Republic of Iran sent a delegation to Japan to visit an industrial exhibition. At that time, just as today, when Iran is searching for a “model” and sometimes looks to Russia and, even more so, to “China” as such a model, Iran believed that Japan, wounded by America, had managed to achieve progress by returning to tradition. Our understanding of Japanese tradition, of course, ultimately came down to the kimono (traditional dress), which itself was the direct and indirect product of broadcasts of Japanese television series such as Years Far from Home (Oshin) or Life Story (Haniko). Despite the heavy censorship of their stories, the clothing of Japanese women meant that the censor’s task was not difficult. No one cared about the hardships of Japan’s occupation and surrender or the prostitution of women; the censors portrayed them as honorable, hardworking women who were obedient and pious and could turn a dervish of a man into a king!

Continuing in this same spirit of “Oshinism,” Soroush too traveled to Japan to answer the question, “What does our revolutionary society intend to do with industry?” (Watching Industry, p. 2). He set out with the preconception that industry was like an “unruly giant,” whose consequences were “the pollution of nature, the dispelling of heedlessness, the erosion of tradition, the destruction of contentment, the creation of greed, and the multiplication of needs”; Soroush went to Japan intending to restrain technology and to “dissolve and assimilate” it, in order to prove that “the finest technology is that which does not exist” (ibid., p. 3). The result of Soroush’s journey was the essay “Industry and Contentment,” published in the volume Watching Industry (Soroush Publications, affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, 1366 SH).

Dr. Soroush begins his essay by referring to “the judgment of the respected officials of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance” and to setting out “with the intention of learning lessons from the industry, planning, and devices of the masters of science and technology” (p. 274), language in which a judgment is already evident. The philosopher of science who had descended into the role of government ideologue did, of course, understand that “Japan wanted to show that it was moving from imitation to innovation” (p. 275)—that is, it did not wish to remain an imitator—but even this Japanese innovation was, in his view, mistaken, because “to move beyond imitating nature and become the creator of another nature means becoming like God... human desires have reached astonishing limits, to the point of aspiring to divinity” (p. 276). In effect, Soroush accuses progressive humanity, on account of modernity and technology, of polytheism—indeed, of aspiring to godhood!

What Soroush reported amounted to little more than a cursory account of an industrial exhibition; he failed to notice any of Japan’s new technologies even to the degree an economic journalist might have done, and regarding the Iranian pavilion he contented himself with saying that it “had a spiritual atmosphere.” But what did this spirituality in industry consist of? “The coffeehouse, which was the destination and final point of the wayfarers’ path and relieved their fatigue, was both the journey’s end and the very subject of the exhibition” (p. 280).

Astonishingly, the philosopher of the regime delights in the fact that Iran’s pavilion at Japan’s industrial exhibition had been built as a coffeehouse in which “streams of water, like those in the Fin Garden, flowed into the coffeehouse from four directions, springing from the foot-washing channel of a pool, and were immensely delightful.” He duly honors the favor bestowed by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, which had brought a country with the innovative industry of the 1340s to such a disgrace in the 1360s that it substituted a coffeehouse for a factory! Alas that Soroush did not write another report on that exhibition! He thanks God for “the repentance that Iranian history made from the vile monarchical system, the ablution it performed in the waters of the Revolution, and the blessing bestowed upon it under the shadow of the Islamic Republic of Iran” (p. 280), and we do not know what exactly he means. Was the nationalization of industries, the loss-making factories, and technological decay following the great confiscations of 1358 the water of repentance poured over Iranian industry?

After this brief report, full of praise for contentment and condemnation of industry, the second part of Soroush’s essay turns to doubting industry through the lens of Sufism.

“Where, finally, should we stop? At what point in the industrial race should we withdraw from the game? What relationship do greed and contentment, two very great moral values, have with industry? Is technical growth not merely a mild name for human avarice and greed? What is it that human beings should be content with and not covet? Has industry not stripped the world of God? Has it not planted the illusion of omnipotence in the human heart, rendering the confession of helplessness before Almighty God pointless and meaningless? Have mysticism and the ideas of our Sufis, who ‘teach people to renounce the world,’ who disparage engineering and ‘knowledge for the sake of the feeding trough,’ who call scholars of worldly sciences ‘the bewildered,’ and who elevate knowledge of the path of truth and of the heart above them, played no role in the failures of our world?” (pp. 281–282).

Soroush borrowed all these expressions from Saadi and Rumi, one of whom privileged dervishhood and the other Sufism over attachment to worldly life. Perhaps raising these doubts in the form of questions encourages the charitable assumption that Soroush is asking questions not like the Taliban but like a philosopher, so that he can answer the objections and defend industry!

The third part of the essay reinforces this charitable assumption, as Soroush turns to the roots of the emergence of science, technology, and the Renaissance, explains humanity’s transformation from quality to quantity, and attacks Sartrean and Heideggerian existentialism as well as domestic Marxism (which had preceded Soroush in criticizing technology), reproaching them for rejecting logic and spirituality.

Yet when he turns to “seeking a remedy” in the final section of his essay, he begins, like the fundamentalists, with a hadith from Abu Umama al-Bahili, quoting the Prophet of Islam as saying that “if agricultural tools and implements find their way into someone’s house, humiliation will enter there as well” (p. 292). Then, after listing several virtues of technology—“creating greater welfare, unlocking nature’s secrets, controlling humanity’s natural enemies (floods, earthquakes, disease), facilitating communications, disseminating knowledge, producing more food, and...” (p. 297)—he identifies the “intrinsic defects of technology,” which cannot be eliminated, as follows: “the pursuit of speed, intensifying competition, destroying contentment, desacralization, inducing heedlessness, environmental pollution, acquisitiveness, awakening the desire for divinity, inflaming the fire of greed, alienating human beings from themselves, stirring dormant lusts, creating artificial appetites, placing terrifying destructive powers in the hands of the unworthy, making human beings serve it, sucking nature dry and reducing it to waste” (p. 297).

Soroush’s indictment of technology—and in fact of development—is a charge sheet containing all the accusations of Marx, Heidegger, and Rumi together, and, like a kind of Transcendent Theosophy (?!), blends philosophy, mysticism, and jurisprudence. These are the rulings issued by a Muslim intellectual against modernity and development:

1- Competition destroys tranquility and serenity, waters the sapling of enmity, pours oil into the lamp of aggression, fattens the child of heedlessness, and fans the fire of rivalry; in place of a peaceful paradise of bliss, free of rancor and envy, it installs a hell full of conflict and flames (p. 301).

The rejection of competition as the foundation of the modern world is not confined to industry but extends to politics (where competition is the basis of democracy), and Soroush claims that “whatever becomes the object of competition and hostility is blameworthy, even if it is knowledge” (p. 302).

2- Human perfection lies neither in greater consumption nor in greater production, nor in more competition, accumulation, and ostentation. These are the perfections of the machine, not of the human being... Dignity lies in seclusion, not in putting one’s personality up for auction; rather, it lies in contentment and freedom (p. 306) ... We should be a model of contentment for the world, not a model of industry... Why should we want books printed on finer paper and in more luxurious editions? Can we not read and learn from simpler books? Why more colorful and sweeter medicines in more beautiful boxes? Why increasingly elegant and comfortable cars every day? Why the metro? Why digital watches? Why refined white sugar and sugar cubes? (p. 310).

3- In industry and technology, we should take the principle of eating carrion in necessity as our rule and take no more from them than necessity and need require. We should not imagine that the best technology is the most modern. Good technology is technology that does not exist (p. 312) ... We should not solve Tehran’s traffic problem by building a metro. The metro is used by those who are not committed to contentment and who, on the one hand, seek through colorful advertising to encourage everyone to buy diverse and constantly renewed models of cars, while on the other hand they do not want congestion on the streets. We should think the opposite way. We should ask whether bicycles can replace automobiles; whether by reducing private cars we can make travel easier and the city’s air cleaner; whether by increasing public transportation and making it cheaper we can get people to their destinations; whether by saving time we can increase people’s real productivity; and, most importantly and radically, whether we can put an end to the corrosive and inauspicious ostentation of a handful of gluttonous worldlings, consign their alluring cars to some grave or corner, redirect workers’ labor and factory raw materials toward producing more necessary goods, make people healthier through more exercise (cycling), and leave hospitals and pharmacies calmer and less burdened? (p. 322).

Soroush, of course, was not merely a Sufi mufti; he was a revolutionary ideologue who admonished the Islamic Republic: “The Islamic Republic must make clear to itself what it is pursuing. Power at any price? Winning the admiration of others? A wholly material life under a cover of spiritual slogans? Reducing Islam to jurisprudence and consigning knowledge and ethics to oblivion? Shutting down forbidden trades while leaving every other kind of relationship unrestricted, and mercilessly sucking nature dry until it is reduced to waste?” (p. 325).

Soroush’s questions to the Islamic Republic were not intended to present it with a genuine choice, because given his description of the defects of technology, it was obvious that the Islamic Republic should not choose this path. His aim was something else when he spoke of jurisprudence being insufficient to provide morality, because jurisprudence gave weight to private property, private enterprise, growth, and capital, limiting itself to prohibiting forbidden trades; but Soroush did not consider this restriction sufficient: “What is the ideal of the Islamic Republic? A society in which the divine limits are enforced? ... Is our ideal society one in which everyone is Muslim and a believer?” Soroush considered Islam and faith necessary but not sufficient. What he spoke of was an asceticism that took ideological form, whose criterion was fear of and abstention from technology: “After all, becoming technological must have a limit” (p. 325).

In the middle of the 1360s, Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush spoke against technology under circumstances in which he knew that technology was the essence of development. Development moved from transformation in religion to transformation in industry so that it could ultimately transform politics as well. A religious revolution without an industrial revolution was incomplete. Yet Soroush, as an ideologue of the Islamic Revolution who had traveled to Japan at the expense of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance to observe it as an object lesson, drew from the journey a conclusion that he could equally have drawn from a trip to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Socialist Republic of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, or even, years later, from a journey to the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

At the same time, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri in Qom was criticizing the construction of Tehran’s metro, asking why the city’s attraction relative to the countryside should be increased, while Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, during Friday prayers in Tehran, invoked his pre-Revolution travels to Europe and America in an effort to support building the Tehran metro; yet our Muslim intellectual was theorizing against the metro! Fortunately, the Islamic Republic had not yet become so ascetic as to listen to the city’s Sufi. With Hashemi Rafsanjani’s presidency, technocrats came to power, and modernizing economists such as Mohammad Tabibian, Masoud Roghani Zanjani, and Masoud Nili drew up Iran’s development plans on the basis of economic science. Although Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s fatal mistakes in failing to understand the priority of liberalization over privatization led to economic corruption, despite all its shortcomings Iran in the 1370s returned to the standards of the 1340s—a trajectory that, had it continued, might have led Japan, China, and Korea to take Iran as a model.

Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush himself also underwent transformation and development in his understanding of religion and formulated the theory of the contraction and expansion of religious knowledge, but he never revisited his theory of industry and contentment critically. Although in the 1370s, with his theory of “More Substantial than Ideology,” he became the first critic of Ali Shariati and moved beyond him with the most laudatory yet hollow definitions of Shariati—even at a ceremony honoring the “martyred teacher (?!) of the Revolution”—he was accused of liberalism. It was a liberalism that remained at the level of the philosophy of science and did not even extend to political philosophy. Abdolkarim Soroush not only knew nothing of history, political philosophy, constitutional law, and political economy; he thought that with the philosophy of science, new theology, mysticism, and ethics he could explain the modern world. Thus, he naively interpreted civil society—which can emerge only from the private sector—as an ethical society, and in political theory spoke of religious democratic government, which, though a step forward compared with religious despotism, rested on the fallacy that because “a society is religious, its government must necessarily be religious as well.” This failed to understand the complex relationship between religion and government in religious societies whose own believers did not want, or were unable, to establish a religious government.

In later years, Soroush himself distanced himself from this political theory and, in an interview with Gozaresh-e Film magazine, claimed to be a liberal democrat without embracing the political philosophy of liberalism—a philosophy for which Karl Popper’s The Open Society was insufficient and which, beyond Soroush’s narrow definition of liberalism as rights-centeredness, rested on fundamental concepts such as natural rights, individual property, the rule of law, tolerance, the theory of the nation-state, and the independence of the institution of religion from the institution of the state.

In his new theology, Soroush went so far that religious intellectualism, in the words of his prominent student Arash Naraghi, was turning into a new sect: when he spoke of “straight paths” and set religious pluralism against religions’ exclusive claims to salvation; or when he sought the “expansion of prophetic experience” and, in practice, by transforming prophethood into mission and reducing Sharia to spirituality, began to breach the doctrine of the finality of prophethood, and in the wake of this theory reduced and interpreted the word of God in the Quran as the word of God’s Prophet. Soroush even raised doubts about the meaning of the Occultation and changed so fundamentally that he moved from religious reform to reforming religion itself. Yet in the world of politics and sociology he traveled in the opposite direction: after repeated declarations of unbelief against him by orthodox jurists forced him to travel, emigrate, and become a political exile, he for a time attributed these religious excommunications to religious government and rebelled against its leaders. An appointee of Imam Khomeini to the Cultural Revolution Headquarters tasked with purging the universities after the Revolution—who in the 1360s had mounted the pulpit on radio and television and maintained a regular page in government publications—he was forced, after the left wing was removed from government, to make do with Kiyan magazine, Tehran’s Aghdasieh Mosque, and the Philosophy Association. Yet even after the left returned to government under the name of Reformism, Soroush’s situation did not improve, as he had personally become more radical, and in his self-imposed exile he criticized the government. This continued until Reformism lost its momentum and monarchism became hegemonic within the Iranian opposition. Seeing the monarchists’ abusive rhetoric, lack of patriotism, and propensity for violence—especially after their warmongering and Israel and America’s launching of war against Iran—Soroush saw no alternative but to revert to his factory settings! In all this, Soroush’s political and personal motives are irrelevant, and even the consequences of his stance against enemy aggression and monarchist reaction, whatever their purpose or motivation, are respectable and indeed worthy of praise and appreciation.

What is astonishing—and worthy of criticism—is Soroush’s retreat from all the transformations he underwent from the 1370s through the 1390s. During those two decades, Soroush wore the garb of liberalism and confronted the left as a liberal thinker. Yet for some years now, after living in the very heartland of liberalism, he has rebelled against it so strongly that he seems to have forgotten liberalism’s most basic principles. In recent years, the United States has been infected by a virus called Trumpism, which resembles fascism far more than the liberalism articulated by America’s Founding Fathers in The Federalist Papers and embodied in politicians such as Barack Obama. Of course, every country can have its own experience of freedom, and freedom in Iran need not depend on imitating America, Britain, France, and so on. One should therefore even hesitate before translating liberalism simply as “freedom-seeking.” But criticizing American imperialism—which is incumbent upon all advocates of freedom, including independent national and global liberals—does not mean denying modernity, development, progress, and democracy. Values such as human rights, the rule of law, the open society, sustainable development, and a free economy remain defensible, and indeed it is precisely from this standpoint that American imperialism and fascism should be criticized. We should not surrender to the neo-Marxist wave that reduces liberalism to neoliberalism and ignores liberal values of freedom. We must stand firm and, from a liberal standpoint, criticize Marxism, fascism, and, more importantly than either of them in our time, imperialism.

The concrete example of this capitulation to the neo-Marxist wave against neoliberalism is Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush, to such an extent that one begins to wonder whether he was ever truly a liberal, even though he still claims liberalism for himself and says in an extensive autobiographical interview with Andisheh Pouya magazine (No. 101, Tir 1405): “If we separate the different dimensions of liberalism from one another, I am completely liberal when it comes to cultural freedoms” (p. 59). And this is precisely the problem: can cultural, political, and social freedoms be defended without defending economic freedoms? Can a government be expected to respect political rights and freedoms without an independent private sector and a competitive free market? Liberalism is not a restaurant menu from which one can order only salad or soup; it has a history, a philosophy, and a logic, and ignoring them produces a lion without mane, tail, or belly—a lion God has never created! Dr. Soroush has said: “Liberalism has different dimensions: it has an economic face, a political face, and a cultural face. Its economic face is what we call the free market. Hayek believed that justice is not something imposed on the market from above, and that what occurs in the market is itself justice; just as the spontaneous growth of language must be recognized and rules cannot be imposed on language from outside, the spontaneous order of the market must also be recognized” (p. 59). Soroush’s account of the theory of spontaneous order does not appear critical, or at most is interrogative, but he immediately adds that “as you know, Popper, unlike Hayek, believed in government intervention in the market.” This aside means that Soroush considers himself a Popperian and trusts the judgment of this philosopher of science more than that of economic philosophers. This is, of course, Soroush’s right and choice, but Karl Popper is not only far from being the benchmark philosopher in political and economic philosophy; he himself was influenced by Hayek, and both as Austrian thinkers were influenced by the Austrian School. Although even Hayek differed from Ludwig von Mises, all of them believed in the free market, the rule of law, and the open society, and it is difficult to imagine reaching an open society without a free market. Even Popper himself pointed to this when Soroush quotes him as saying: “I love socialism, but I love freedom more than socialism” (p. 59). Yet Soroush’s wish goes further: “I wish social democracy were possible, but alas, it is not” (p. 63).

The problem is that the social sciences have nothing to do with wishful thinking or selling dreams. Social democracy is in fact possible and has been realized under liberal democracy—not only in leftist movements or communist governments, but in liberal governments from Sweden to France, as well as Britain, and even in a version in the United States known, in contrast to the conservative tradition, as American liberalism and embodied in the Democratic Party. What Soroush wants, however, goes beyond social democracy, and this can be seen in his interpretation of liberalism: “If I have a criticism, it is of capitalist liberalism, and I believe capitalism has imposed its own profit-seeking, consumerism, and greed on liberalism” (p. 60).

In fact, Soroush speaks the language of the left and describes the competitive free-market system with the label of capitalism, which places the question of capital or the theory of surplus value in industrial production as a modern phenomenon under an ideology. This is what Karl Marx did, trying to turn the dispute over surplus value produced in industrial commodities into class struggle by creating the binary of “worker-employer.” Here one must take one’s hat off to Marx for discovering the issue, but Marx’s solution not only failed in socialist and communist regimes; with the emergence of a new wave of industrial revolution and the rise of “entrepreneurs” as the third side of the triangle of industrial production, the very terms of the problem have changed considerably, and the details of that discussion must be left to another essay. But Soroush’s solution is not only not socialism; it lies even further back: “Perhaps the welfare state is a solution and a temporary palliative. [But] this is where I turn to contentment and simple living, and contentment takes its place within my overall thought. I tell myself and those who listen to me: do not drown in capitalist and consumerist life; live a life of contentment. The capitalist system wants me to be a consumer, and every time I go to the market, the market decides what I should and should not buy. A credit card means you buy whatever you want and remain in debt forever. That is why I do not have a credit card. I have borrowed this from al-Ghazali, Rumi, and religious thought: that the good life is precisely contentment” (p. 60). And this means that Abdolkarim Soroush has not changed at all from 1365 to 1405, over a period of 40 years, even though he modestly (?!) says, “I do not present contentment as an economic system, and I have no particular economic system, nor do I know one, and I am not an economic theorist.” Yet as a pole, a spiritual master, a sheikh, he not only advises his disciples to practice contentment in industry, but also asks the government to follow the elder of the Soroushian order and teach contentment in universities: “Why should we not promote simple living in universities? ... We can teach the principles of simple living and contentment at universities, just as we say what is good and what is bad” (p. 61). Soroush, of course, is the same member appointed by Imam Khomeini to the Cultural Revolution Headquarters who, after 45 years, still believes that “universities should be imbued from head to toe with the fragrance and spirit of Islamic thought,” merely changing the word “must” to “it is good” (p. 52), and for that very reason he still defends the dismissal of university professors during the Cultural Revolution: “Some of the dismissals were justified ... In general, I agreed that a purge had to take place, but with trials and investigation of people’s records. I accepted that, in any case, not everyone could be retained. Not everyone was compatible with the revolutionary system that had emerged, and some had no place in a revolutionary university because they were not in harmony with the Revolution” (p. 51).

Soroush’s words are grave: purge? Revolutionary university? Who determines the standard of purity and impurity? Who said the university must be revolutionary? Was the seminary revolutionary? Were there not many jurists who did not believe in the Revolution or in religious government? Did a Cultural Revolution take place in the seminary? Were seminary professors dismissed for being out of step with the Revolution? Was the university more revolutionary than the seminary? Opposite the concept of purity necessarily stands the word impure; were professors such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who were never revolutionary and even sought, in an alchemical fashion, an Islamic monarchy, impure? Soroush places the blame for Nasr’s dismissal from the university on Dr. Mohammad Maleki, the radical president of the University of Tehran (a national-religious figure), but who determined the criteria and standards other than the Cultural Revolution Headquarters, whose very name was contradictory, because culture cannot be revolutionized—except in the manner of the Chinese communists, who themselves later regretted what they had done. And in Iran we still have, outside the Constitution, the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, legislating alongside Parliament, with Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi seated there bearing Abdolkarim Soroush’s visage and Ali Shariati’s tone. But what difference does it make?! If Soroush were to return to Iran today (as he wants to) and reclaim his former seat from Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi, he would do exactly what he has said:

“At the time I agreed with this idea (the purge of professors). Even now, if the university is to become a real university, I think some people should be tried and dismissed. Not because they were not revolutionary, but because they are not good professors and have weakened the university. Even today, if this university were handed to me, I would send some people to court because of the injustice they have done to the university and its students. They took dozens of positions and still went to class and taught students nothing, while receiving university salaries—in more explicit terms, they were consuming illicit earnings.”

Thus Soroush always wants the university in the dock, whether on charges of being insufficiently revolutionary or on charges of consuming illicit earnings. In this interview, after 45 years, the philosopher of the regime is still angry with Reza Davari and takes positions against Dr. Vahid Dastjerdi, Dr. Mohsen Kadivar, and Dr. Arash Naraghi, and in the most insulting terms calls on an Islamic scholar such as Mohsen Kadivar to repent, saying that “the path of repentance is open to him, if grace becomes his companion” (p. 57). He builds a case against Arash Naraghi, who was once his disciple and student: “A student comes along and falsely accuses me of sect-building, while he himself defends and promotes such-and-such sexual minority and speaks at gatherings of such-and-such deviant sect. I have never spoken ill of him; I am only astonished by this behavior of his: what business have you with infidels if you do not worship idols?” (p. 57). The question for Soroush now is this: suppose the university were handed to him today—where would these four established professors of the humanities (Davari, Vahid, Kadivar, Naraghi), despite all their differences, belong: in court or at the university?

Soroush recounts memories of Seyyed Javad Tabatabai that it is doubtful he could have attributed to Tabatabai while he was alive. To understand why Tabatabai said that mujtahids such as Akhund Khorasani and Mirza Na’ini understood constitutionalism better than intellectuals such as Shariati and Soroush, there is no need to call Tabatabai on the phone and have him say, “The journalists exaggerated this, whereas I expected him to give a detailed explanation and stand by his own opinion” (p. 58).

It is enough to read Seyyed Javad Tabatabai’s books, especially The Theory of the Rule of Law and The Tabriz School, to become familiar with Tabatabai’s interpretation of Akhund Khorasani’s school. That very “national clergy” understood the theory of constitutionalism 120 years ago from within its own traditional and usuli standpoint and realized that one cannot make a revolution in culture!

A revolution in culture is precisely the impossible desire Abdolkarim Soroush still harbors after 45 years, and by his own account he has arrived at a progressive reaction. A professor of the philosophy of science sits in the United States in the twenty-first century and prescribes contentment for Iranians who have been struggling for development, progress, and modernity for 120 years and have passed through several revolutions, movements, coups, and wars!

The pinnacle of Soroush’s struggle in America is this: “If I came late to today’s interview, it was because I was hanging out the clothes I had washed to dry in the sun. As long as I can hang clothes in the sun, I do not put them in the dryer. That is my temperament. The whole point of industry and contentment is that if clothes can be dried in the sun, electricity should not be used for them” (p. 61).

Dr. Soroush does, of course, own a vacuum cleaner! “But most of the time I sweep with a non-electric broom” (ibid.), because he believes that “as far as possible, one should not use industrial products.” He follows Peter Singer’s ruling that “luxurious living is forbidden,” and of course, if he wants to be a good follower of this secular marja, he should not eat meat either! For the moment, however, the pole of Iran’s Sufi intellectualism believes that “luxury goods should not be produced. Now, if someone produces them, let them. And if someone wants to buy them, there is no problem. I recommend to people: do not buy them” (p. 61).

After 45 years, Soroush reveals that when he went to Japan in 1365, with the approval and at the expense of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, to produce a philosophical report on its industrial exhibition, his imagination was occupied by another beloved: “When I was writing Industry and Contentment, I had India very much in mind, because it was far removed from luxurious living and its people lived simply, and there was also a good democracy there. China is the same” (p. 61). We know nothing of Chinese democracy (?!), but Indian democracy is accompanied by extreme inequality, the gap between rich and poor is enormous, and nothing remains today of Nehru’s secular social democracy except the rule of anti-Muslim Hindu extremists. Thus it becomes clear that Soroush, whom we imagined to be the Martin Luther of Islam, seems all these years to have secretly yearned to be Gandhi. Gandhi, of course, was half-naked and an ascetic who lived a primitive life. Soroush likewise believes that because “we are fundamentally importers, if we ourselves can possess industries that allow us to manage our affairs in complete simplicity without difficulty, that would be very good.” The ultimate aim of this industry is contentment, not growth, development, and exports. Abdolkarim Soroush’s ideal city is not the open society but a rural life: “In my personal, individual life, and in a village where I might happen to live, I would like to establish such a mode of subsistence and live within it” (p. 61). This village is not imaginary for Soroush. He has found it: “Here in America there is a group called the Amish who live near Pennsylvania and have a very traditional way of life. I spent two nights among them. They ride horse-drawn carriages, have no telephones in their homes, and at night they have no electricity in the house, lighting oil lamps and candles instead. They have large farms and produce and consume their own agricultural products. Their women are also relatively veiled. They are old Catholics and their roots and ancestry go back to Germany. Even in medical matters they are strict and have not embraced modern medicine as much as they should. They are happy and live their lives... To tell the truth, in those two days I was somewhat charmed by them” (p. 67). This is the utopia of Iranian religious intellectualism! There was, of course, no need for him to endure half a century of struggle and the suffering of exile; at the very least, instead of America, he could have gone to the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, if the Khmer Rouge no longer exist in Cambodia! Of course, Professor Soroush cannot choose this way of life: “Personally, I cannot live that way... they define simplicity as an escape from modernity” (ibid.). In the United States, the most he can do in protest against Donald Trump is say: “Because I pay taxes to the government here, I was and remain distressed. I tell you that I have reduced my income to the minimum so that I pay the minimum tax” (p. 68). The Gandhi of our time has adopted tax avoidance as his form of civil resistance and civil disobedience: “Once, someone at one of my public lectures asked what he could do because he did not want the taxes he paid to support these wars and American foreign policy. I said explicitly: I cannot tell you to evade taxes or cheat, but I can tell you that if you can, practice contentment. Reduce your income so that you pay less tax” (ibid.).

We are, of course, worried that this interview may be translated and reach Trump’s ears, and that the professor may be expelled from America, because we do not want him to become stateless for a second time. Dr. Soroush himself says he has two homelands: “It is reported from Imam Ali that khayr al-bilad ma hamalaka, meaning the best land is the one that bears you and carries your burden. Iran threw me off its back, could not bear me, and made me dismount. Here (in America) I am mounted and travel lightly.”

Dr. Soroush is satisfied with America: “I am respected here and have been respected. I taught at the best universities here and they paid me generously and appreciatively.” Of course, he was always a visiting professor, but now he has become a homeowner as well. The suffering he feels is probably the torment of conscience over the war imposed on the very Iran that, according to him, could not tolerate him: “Iran is also my country. I was born there, went to university there, and all my ties are there. Truly, in this war I felt like a body split down the middle and torn into two parts.”

That is why, despite all his contentment regarding industry, he recommends that Iran build nuclear weapons: “I endorse the Iranian government if it pursues a reciprocal nuclear initiative, because it is surrounded by those who possess atomic bombs, who seek its life and want to eliminate it from existence. America has no right to tell us we must not have an atomic bomb. If it and Israel have that right, then we have that right too, because we live among wolves” (p. 62).

Dr. Soroush believes that showing mercy to the sharp-fanged Trump would be an injustice to us Iranians. Yet he himself is not among us. He has not been for years, and during these years he has lived in comfort and abundance in the United States, on the grounds that we in Iran were not worthy of tolerating him. We, however, did not cast the professor off our backs. Through the 1360s, the government placed radio and television, the intelligence apparatus, Kayhan, Kayhan Farhangi, the Cultural Revolution Headquarters, University Jihad, and so on at his service. In the 1370s, when he fell out of favor with the government, the pulpit, Tehran’s Aghdasieh Mosque, Kiyan magazine, the Institute of Philosophy, the Academy of Sciences, and so forth were still not devoid of him. Although he paid a heavy price for religious revisionism concerning the finality of prophethood, Mahdism, prophethood, and the authorship of God’s word, the Iranian people did not drive him away. Soroush shifted as the left and right wings of government shifted, but he was never expelled.

Now he has returned. In the guise of the sheikh of religious intellectualism and the elder of the Soroushian order, he has forgotten that the first person to take an axe to this ideological body was Soroush himself when he moved beyond Ali Shariati. Yet now he not only defends Ali Shariati and says, “To this day I no longer have those suspicions about Shariati... Shariati did something great in our country: he brought religion out of isolation and pushed Marxism, which had become the religion of the youth, into isolation, and he helped bring about the Revolution, which was an auspicious event in the history of our country,” but he also lashes out at Shariati’s critics who criticize precisely his role in mixing Islam and Marxism, insulting a decent economist—who had found no better word to describe Shariati’s scholarly fraud—with language worse than that word itself. Unaware of the freedom-oriented intellectual movement built in these years of Soroush’s and other religious intellectuals’ absence from home by national intellectuals and freedom-minded economists such as Mousa Ghaninejad, Mohammad Tabibian, Seyyed Javad Tabatabai, Masoud Nili, and others, despite all their differences, he once again opens the door to humiliation and insult. To criticize Soroush, there is no need to recall Dr. Mohammad Tabibian’s memory of traveling to Japan, nor is it necessary to delve into the details of Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush’s personal life in exile. It is enough, at a time when the Iranian people suffer from sanctions, inflation, aggression, excommunication, and humiliation and are searching for a path toward development, dignity, peace, and welfare, to reread—not even his 1365 essay “Industry and Contentment,” but his interview with Andisheh Pouya magazine, in which he claims: “I was never the regime’s ideologue.” Religious intellectualism, with all its services and mistakes, has reached the end of the road. The late Engineer Mehdi Bazargan, the father of this current in Iran, moved beyond the aspiration of religious intellectualism in his lecture “God and the Hereafter: The Sole Aim of the Prophets’ Mission,” which Soroush himself rescued from the marginalization of the national-religious current and interpreted.

Ali Shariati, who according to Soroush “brought the sacred down to earth” (p. 48), also, in Soroush’s own account, “wanted to make religion worldly by ideologizing it and in fact secularizing it, so that it could serve worldly life” (p. 56), and this both did and did not happen. Religion became worldly, but the world did not become religious. Even Mostafa Malekian, who came after Abdolkarim Soroush to transform religious intellectualism into spiritual intellectualism, ultimately abandoned both spirituality and rationality and turned to psychotherapy.

All the hopes of religious intellectuals rested on Abdolkarim Soroush, who had delivered the funeral oration for religious intellectualism at Mehdi Bazargan’s memorial and, as he himself says, had composed: “Religion is not a means but an end in itself/ An end worthy of humanity” (p. 48).

But now, with profound regret, we must declare that religious intellectualism has not only reached the end of its road; it has also turned its back on its own legacy, both in thought and in ethics. Having transformed from an intellectual current into a circle and a sect, it defends its own faction and tribe by dividing people into insiders and outsiders and even personalizing intellectual debates, even when it scarcely believes in that faction at all. Soroush still considers himself indebted to Shariati (p. 48), even though there is no longer any intellectual affinity between the two, except that Shariati—whose companions are offended when he is called a fraud—also called philosophers the bastards of history. Except, too, that Abdolkarim Soroush—who is rightly offended by accusations that Shariati was not a Muslim—himself willingly quotes others about Seyyed Ahmad Fardid (who was both Ali Shariati’s teacher and Ehsan Shariati’s teacher in anti-Westernism), saying “this man is a wicked demon,” and goes even further into his private life, criticizing “how suddenly after the Revolution they washed the hands and face that had been soiled by every sort of vice and intoxicant and seated him on the throne of sanctity.” Seyyed Ahmad Fardid, of course, was like Ali Shariati in that each was turned into an ideologue by one faction of the revolutionaries. But if it is forbidden in the media to call Shariati a fraud or a non-Muslim, why should Fardid’s record of vice and intoxicants be opened at all?!

Abdolkarim Soroush could have turned religious reform into a sustained project by continuing that project and giving serious weight to political philosophy, political economy, constitutional law, and, above all, history. But his Sufi disposition prevented him from fully recognizing the importance of the social sciences as worldly sciences, from refraining from prescribing dervish-like remedies for politics, economics, and human rights, and from speaking of contentment while he himself lives amid abundance. By abundance I do not mean wealth, but freedom from deprivation of the most basic civic rights: the right to work, the right to growth, the right to welfare, and the right to dignity. Until the right to property is recognized—Hayek regarded it, after the right to life, as the second and final natural right of human beings, from which all other rights derive—neither a free individual nor an open society will emerge.

Wealth, of course, is a necessity of development, and a society whose members do not possess accumulated capital will not develop; a society that does not develop will not attain freedom, nor will justice be realized within it.

A decade ago, in my journalistic accounts of the history of political thought, I had concluded that the path of religious reform ultimately emerges from the detour of religious despotism, and that from reformism we arrive at fundamentalism. I published those studies in a five-volume collection titled A Critique of Political Theology, which was a critique of political Islam, and in the very first volume I wrote of the tragedy of Islamic Protestantism—of how they moved from Martin Luther to John Calvin. At the time I thought Abdolkarim Soroush was the Martin Luther of Islam, and so in the fourth volume of that collection I wrote about the tribulations of Islamic liberalism. Now, however, I understand that he himself is John Calvin: a man who moved from religious reform to religious despotism. In Abdolkarim Soroush, unlike Ali Shariati and then Mehdi Bazargan, we saw religious liberalism, and although as the path continued we encountered the contradiction between liberalism and Islamism, we did not ignore his role in liberal epistemology. But poverty in economic and political thought ultimately caused the curtain to fall and the mask to be removed, revealing beneath this masked liberalism a hidden totalitarianism...

Source: Tejarat-e Farda Weekly, No. 642, The Cost of Isolation, Saturday, 17 Mordad 1405