A mixed crowd of students, faculty and community members listened intently to the soft-spoken speech entitled "Secularism in the Islamic Republic of Iran" given by Abdulkarim Soroush, one of Iran's foremost contemporary scholars.
Dr. Soroush's lecture, last Thursday, centered on the emergence of secularism in modern Iran and sought to trace its roots and analyze its causes. Soroush believes that an Iranian republic can coexist with Islam.
He said a "tension" exists in Iran between a secular republic and the linkage between state and mosque that was created "right from the moment of the constitution being penned." Iran's constitution, the first in the Middle East, states that the ruler of Iran has an a priori (handed down from God) right to rule and is still in use today.
"And this narrow field on which we are talking," Soroush said, "is the battleground." It is this inconsistency that causes the political turmoil that divides Iran today.
The anti-secular thinking that stands in opposition to modern thought in Iran today was created under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Soroush said. It was Khomeini and his administration that sparked an Islamic revolution in 1979.
According to Dr. Soroush, who knew Khomeini intimately, Khomeini used his time in office to further anti-secularism with his "loaded language, mysticism... and the idea that people are nothing, God is everything."
The belief in anti-secularism was furthered, according to Soroush's theory, by eight long years of war with neighbor Iraq. "What else [is a better justification for war] than God's word?," Dr. Soroush asked his audience.
Much of Iran and its government is currently secular. An assembly now appoints the leader of Iran, and "religious clerics in Islam do not have any say and are virtually jobless; Islamic law is even secular in a sense too."
Soroush was an influential lecturer, teacher, and thinker in Iran before the political and religious climate there forced him to abandon these pursuits. He was a former member of several councils under Khomeini and is the author of nearly 30 books on Iran and the Islam religion.
Facing harassment from the government of Iran, Soroush left Iran several years ago for the United States and has been lecturing on Islamic and Iranian issues at Princeton and Harvard. He is currently writing Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdulkarim Soroush, soon to be published in English, in addition to revising and translating several of his other works both into English and Persian.
Soroush became involved with Iranian politics while studying in London. Studying Analytical Chemistry and then History and Philosophy of Science, he found himself surrounded by the political gatherings of Iranians. These gatherings abroad and the tumult at home drew Soroush into the fold as an activist intellectual.
Freshman Ross York-Erwin said that he thought "Dr. Soroush's insights helped further an understanding of a Muslim world that is oft misunderstood or vague in the eyes of Americans." He said that Dr. Soroush's words on modern political and philosophical ideas in Iran were "timely and relevant to current problems in the middle-east."
This speech was the last in a series called "Culture and Politics in the Middle East" that was organized by the Middle Eastern Studies Major at Tufts and co-sponsored by the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, the Department of German Russian and Asian Languages, the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Program in International Relations, Peace and Justice Studies, Department of Art and Art History, Department of History and the Dean of Liberal Arts & Engineering.
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