Abdolkarim Soroush (عبدالكريم سروش (
listen (help·info)) Persian pronunciation: [æbdolkæriːm soruːʃ]; born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh (born 1945; Persian: حسين حاج فرج دباغ), is an Iranian Islamic thinker, reformer, Rumi scholar, public intellectual, and a former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran and Imam Khomeini International University. He is arguably the most influential figure in the religious intellectual movement of Iran. Soroush is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He was also affiliated with other institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the Leiden-based International Institute as a visiting professor for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2005, and by Prospect magazine as one of the most influential intellectuals in the world in 2008. Soroush’s ideas, founded on relativism, prompted both supporters and critics to compare his role in reforming Islam to that of Martin Luther in reforming Christianity.
Abdolkarim Soroush (عبدالكريم سروش (listen (help·info)) Persian pronunciation: [æbdolkæriːm soruːʃ]; born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh (born 1945; Persian: حسين حاج فرج دباغ), is an Iranian Islamic thinker, reformer, Rumi scholar, public intellectual, and a former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran and Imam Khomeini International University. He is arguably the most influential figure in the religious intellectual movement of Iran. Soroush is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He was moreover affiliated with extra institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the Leiden-based International Institute as a visiting professor for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2005, and by Prospect magazine as one of the most influential intellectuals in the world in 2008. Soroush’s ideas, founded on relativism, prompted both supporters and critics to compare his role in reforming Islam to that of Martin Luther in reforming Christianity.
Abdolkarim Soroush was born in Tehran in 1945. Upon finishing tall school, Soroush began studying pharmacy after passing the national log on exams of Iran. After completing his degree, he soon left Iran for London in order to continue his studies and to become aware with the Western world.
It was after receiving a master’s degree in questioning chemistry from University of London that he went to Chelsea College, (a constituent researcher of the University of London which was merged in imitation of two supplementary constituent colleges: Queen Elizabeth College and Kings College in 1985) for studying archives and philosophy of science.
After the revolution, Soroush returned to Iran and there he published his book Knowledge and Value (Danesh va Arzesh), the writing of which he had completed in England. He next went to Tehran’s Teacher Training College where he was appointed the director of the newly customary Islamic Culture Group. While in Tehran, Soroush customary studies in both chronicles and the philosophy of science.
A year later, all universities were shut down, and a new body was formed by the proclaim of the Cultural Revolution Committee comprising seven members, including Abdulkarim Soroush, all of whom were appointed directly by Ayatollah Khomeini. Soroush’s joining of the Cultural Revolution Committee has been criticized on two sides. He has been accused by orthodox critics of preventing the Islamization of human sciences and by the enemy of the Islamic Republic regime of Iran to involvement in the dismissal of teachers.
Soroush rejected the challenger accusation. There is not an independent historical research upon Soroush’s role in actions which led to the Cultural Revolution and as well as his attachment and his role in the Cultural Revolution Committee. He has welcomed of such study in his interview as soon as Professor Forough Jahanbakhsh – inquiring into liberal Iranian smart history.
In 1983, owing to certain differences which emerged in the middle of him and the supervision of the Teacher Training College, he secured a transfer to the Institute for Cultural Research and Studies where he has been serving as a research zealot of staff until today. He submitted his handing over from membership in the Cultural Revolution Council to Imam Khomeini and has in the past held no certified position within the ruling system of Iran, except occasionally as an advisor to certain government bodies. His principal position has been that of a learned in the Institute for Cultural Research and Studies.
During the 1990s, Soroush gradually became more necessary of the embassy role played by the Iranian clergy. The monthly magazine that he cofounded, Kiyan, soon became the most visible forum in post-revolution Iran for religious intellectualism. In this magazine he published his most controversial articles on religious pluralism, hermeneutics, tolerance, clericalism, etc. The magazine was clamped next to in 1998 among subsequent to many additional magazines and newspapers by the dispatch order of the final leader of the Islamic Republic. About a thousand audio tapes of speeches by Soroush upon various social, political, religious and studious subjects delivered whatever over the world are widely in circulation in Iran and elsewhere. Soon, he not abandoned became subject to harassment and disclose censorship, but also lost his job and security. His public lectures at universities in Iran are often disrupted by hardline Ansar-e Hezbollah vigilante groups who see his intellectual endeavours as instinctive mainly annoyed by anti-regime politics rather than theology per se.
From the year 2000 Abdulkarim Soroush has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University teaching Rumi poetry and philosophy, Islam and Democracy, Quranic studies and philosophy of Islamic law. Also a scholar in residence in Yale University, he taught Islamic embassy philosophy at Princeton University in the 2002-2003 academic year. From 2003 to 2004 he served as a visiting scholar at the Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin. He spent the fall semester of 2007 at Columbia University and the spring semester of 2008 at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs as a visiting scholar. In the winter of 2012, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago teaching intellectual and religious records of open-minded Iran.