Abdolkarim Soroush

Abdolkarim Soroush, born Hossein Haj Farajollah Dabbagh in Tehran in 1945, is a philosopher, scholar of religion, specialist in Rumi, and one of the most important figures in contemporary Iranian religious intellectualism. He initially studied pharmacy at the University of Tehran and later pursued analytical chemistry and the philosophy of science in London. After the Iranian Revolution, he returned to Iran and, through his lectures, essays, and books, became one of the country’s most influential religious thinkers.

Soroush has taught or conducted research at various Iranian institutions and at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Amsterdam, and Georgetown. In addition to the philosophy of religion and modern Islamic theology, he is an important scholar of Rumi and has delivered numerous lecture courses on the Masnavi, the Divan of Shams, and mystical experience.

Soroush’s best-known contribution is the theory of the theoretical contraction and expansion of religious knowledge. In this theory, he distinguishes between “religion” and “religious knowledge”: religion is divine, whereas human understandings of religion are historical, changeable, and fallible. This distinction became one of the foundations of religious intellectualism in contemporary Iran.

Other major themes in his thought include religious pluralism, the distinction between the essential and accidental aspects of religion, the expansion of prophetic experience, the prophetic dreams theory of revelation, the relationship between religion and democracy, the freedom of faith, and criticism of the ideological use of religion and clerical power. His later work has increasingly emphasized the experiential, poetic, and historical dimensions of revelation and religious faith.