Cover story
Photo by Nader Davoodi
Travelers on one ship
An in depth interview with Abdolkarim Soroush
Interview by Mahmoud Sadri
May 3, 1999
The Iranian
I had been working on a translation of eleven of Abdolkarim Soroush's
essays along with a critical introduction for more than a year when I learned
he was visiting Houston -- one of his stops on a lecture tour of the United
States. I then proposed to go there and interview him for an "intellectual
biography."
Thanks to many hours of joint work and debate on the fine points of
his notoriously complex writings, I had acquired the requisite familiarity
with his thought and persona to sketch the course of the interview in my
mind.
We started the day-long interview, in an overcast day, March 11, 1997,
in his hotel room in downtown Houston. We broke for lunch and spent a couple
of hours dining and visiting the exquisite "Rothko Chapel."
The hours of afternoon slid by in conversation and by the first rays
of sunset we had wrapped up the interview. I then transcribed and translated
the tape of the interview and sent it to him for further comments, which
were minimal.
This interview will be published, along with the rest of the collection,
this summer, in the book entitled Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in
Islam: The Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, translated, annotated,
and with a critical introduction by myself and Ahmad Sadri. (New York,
Oxford University Press, 1999.)
Mahmoud Sadri
The Interview:
- Part
one
- Part
two
- Part
three
- Part
four
- Part
five
- Part
six
Interviewer
Mahmoud Sadri is an associate professor
of sociology at Texas Women's University. He has a doctorate in sociology
from New York's New School for Social Research. For more information see
his page at the Texas
Women's University. He is the coauthor, with Aruthur Stinchcombe, of an
article in "Durkheim's Division of Labor: 1893-1993" Presses
Universitaires de France, 1993. To top
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