Cover story
Photo by Nader Davoodi
Soroush interview:
Travelers on one ship
Part Four
(Soroush:) ... The [Cultural Revolution] Council eventually succeeded
in reopening the universities after a year and a half. And I went back
to teaching. When I returned to Iran, my first lecture series -- "In
What Kind of a World Do We Live" -- was broadcast on the radio. It
later appeared as a book.
This period coincided with the postrevolutionary turbulence that verged
on political and ideological chaos. These conditions continued for a couple
of years until the government gradually reasserted its control.
In this period of unlimited political and ideological freedom people
like me were constantly bombarded with inquiries and requests to engage
in ideological duels. I accepted some of these challenges in order to clarify
my positions to myself and others. For this reason, I consider my entire
eighteen years of post-revolutionary thought as a period of unabated intellectual
struggle.
Throughout this period I attempted to clarify both my own relationship
to religion and religiosity, and the relationship of religion to social
institutions. In this period, I started to teach philosophy of natural
and social sciences. I included philosophies of Winch, Habermas, and Hayek
as well as those of Motahhari, Ibn Khaldoun, and others. I also taught
Hegel, Herder, and Marx in the context of the philosophy of history. I
have not had a chance to edit and publish my notes on this subject matter
yet.
Another important subject that I explored was modern theology (kalam
jadid.) that dealt with the relationship of humanity and science to
religion. I initiated this lecture series at the divinity school of the
University of Tehran. The need for a new understanding of religion drew
many students to these lectures. Modern theology forced me to expand my
horizons. Through these studies and reflections, I gradually ordered my
thoughts.
One of the works that I regularly recommended to my students was Arthur
Koestler's Sleep Walkers. This book had already been translated,
but few actually appreciated it. Koestler, a brilliant journalist, had
a secret love of religion. The book brims with wistful longing for religiosity,
something he was incapable of feeling because of his Marxist upbringing.
It includes excerpts from the correspondences between Galileo, Copernicus,
Keppler, and others with the ecclesiastic authorities.
Through studying and teaching these materials, I gradually prepared
myself to tackle the problem of the conflict between religion and science
in particular and the nature of religious understanding in general. I gradually
gravitated toward the notions of game and competition. It is conceivable
that I had taken this from both Wittgenstein and Kuhn, but in those days
I was unaware of this possibility.
The main idea was that the world of ideas and opinions constitutes a
game, and it is the very nature of the this game, rather than its outcome,
that is valuable. Competition, cooperation, dialogues, and bickering among
scientists advance the procession, the process of science. Therefore, although
scientists seek to develop their own theories and advance their own careers,
they carry science on their collective shoulders, like an independent entity.
I later found that Popper, too, had come close to this approach in his
three-worlds theory. This insight led me to distinguish science as a system
of ideas from science as a collective and objective activity. Observing
scientific debates convinced me that the world of ideas is a world of dialogue.
A scientist is engaged in a dialogue even in the solitude of his contemplation.
In the first years of the revolution, social sciences and humanities
were under attack for being "impure" and "Western"
or else insignificant and worthless. I published a series of sixteen articles
in their defense. These disciplines stood accused of being responsible
for the corruption of the youth and secularization of the new generation.
Social sciences and humanities were considered products of corrupting Western
thought and as such in need of deep cleansing or else complete purging
from the universities.
But I thought that the future of the country depended on people who
were trained in these disciplines. These persecuted sciences needed a gallant
defense. My main effort was to establish that social sciences and humanities
are as important and valuable as the natural sciences. These sciences had
been considered the repository of what has been dubbed as "the cultural
invasion of the West."
In those discussions I alluded to the competitive nature of science
and knowledge. My next step was to generalize this concept to religiosity.
Thus I entered the domain of the philosophy of religion, armed with an
understanding of the philosophy of science.
In addition to modern theology, philosophy of ethics, philosophy of
history, and philosophy of experimental sciences, I started a lecture series
on Rumi's Mathnavi at the divinity school of the University of Tehran.
This was at once a favorite subject of mine and a popular course with the
students. I had the good fortune, thank God, to discuss two books of Mathnavi,
that is, about eight thousand lines of poetry in eight consecutive semesters.
I supplemented that with three more semesters at another university.
These lectures were some of the most enjoyable parts of my work. I would
teach these topics in a state of rapture. I felt this in my other lessons
as well. I never chose a topic to teach unless I was most interested in
it myself. During the teaching of these topics, I learned more than the
students, because I worked harder than they did.
Let me recount the preliminary conditions for my interest in the philosophy
of religion: the first one was my self-taught knowledge of the exegeses
of the Koran. As I mentioned before, these studies motivated me to explore
the question of why various scholars arrive at different interpretations
of the sacred text. Why is it, for example, that the same verse yields
different interpretations at the hands of Mo'tazeli and Ash'ari exegetes,
without ever leading to a lucid and plausible solution or synthesis.
The second element was my familiarity with the works of mystics and
politicians. The former argued that the world is an impermanent domain
to be abandoned in favor of an inner journey. Religion was understood as
the methodology of such a journey. In other words, they considered the
affairs of the world and those of religion as mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, I witnessed the activities of politically motivated
thinkers and activists who favored deriving their political doctrines from
religion. Not only groups such as People's Mojahedin but also individuals
such as Mehdi Bazargan and Ali Shariati belonged to this category. Both
the world-flight ideology of the Sufis and world-domination ideology of
the politicians were extracted from the Koran.
Bazargan and Shariati were particularly struck by what they saw as the
Muslim abandonment of the worldly aspects of religion and the abdication
of the political and social struggle. Thus they proposed a new understanding
of religiosity that embraced these aspects.
I was more interested in their theoretical positions than in their practical
and political proposals. I was trying to understand and analyze the new
concepts they were using. I wondered why a certain class of interpretations
of religious texts rise in a particular time and not in others. My early
encounter with the so called scientific interpretations of religion also
contributed to my interest in the philosophy of religion.
Finally, my understanding of the nature of science as a competitive
and collective process and my subsequent application of this view of scientific
knowledge to religious knowledge contributed to my interest in the philosophy
of religion. Around this time, I was meeting, on a daily and later a weekly
basis, with about ten colleagues who were mostly university professors.
It was in one of those sessions that I first formulated twenty theses
on the nature of religion and shared them with my friends. Some of these
were still in embryonic form but they gradually evolved into a philosophy
of religion that emerged as my contraction and expansion thesis.
Sadri: Do you have a copy of it somewhere? I think it would be
of utmost importance in retracing the evolution of your thought. By they
way, do you remember any of it, off hand?
Soroush: I still have a copy of these twenty or so theses. I
do not remember all of them to recite them for you. I remember the first
thesis went roughly something like this: Religiosity is people's understanding
of religion just as science is their understanding of nature. This was
the first step in separating religion from religious knowledge and you
are right about the significance of those theses.
The ideas that were first formulated in that document grew, branched
out, and developed into different aspects of my present thesis. At any
rate, my philosophical understanding of scientific knowledge as a collective
and competitive process and my subsequent generalization of this understanding
to religious knowledge opened new gates for me. From that point on, I cast
religion as a kind of human knowledge subject to the collectivity and competitiveness
of the human soul.
I remained mindful of the confrontations of the church with the early
scientists and the disparate interpretations of religion by our philosophers,
revivalists, mystics, and politicians. Thus I concentrated on the question
of whether religious knowledge is susceptible of some kind of an evolution
or, at any rate, change. We know that it is not for the faithful to decide
whether religion, as such, evolves, particularly because we Moslems believe
that Islam is the final religion ... CONTINUED
HERE
- Introduction
- 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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