Children of Paradise (19 page)

The Mutazilites—and Soroush—applied the same view to morality. An action was not good or bad because God commanded or forbade it. Rather, God commanded or forbade the action because it was good or bad. Morality stood independent of God and inhered in the actions themselves, so that even someone ignorant of God’s injunctions could use reason to discern good from evil. Soroush called this vision of justice “moral secularism” and himself a “Neo-Mutazilite.” Among the Mutazilites themselves, moral
secularism had led to an internal dispute, with some thinkers concluding that eternal salvation was therefore in reach even for people who had never read the Quran, so long as reason led them to discern and act on the good. Other Mutazilites found this conclusion unacceptable, as it rendered revelation ultimately unnecessary.

On the question of revelation and its provenance, the Mutazilites were radical. They argued that the Quran was a created text, rather than an eternal one, which meant that it was partly the product of its historical moment and could conceivably have been different had external circumstances been different. Soroush concurred with this view and took it even further in a book he would publish much later, in 1999
.
Soroush took an analogy from Rumi: If we wish to bring the sea into our home, we must provide a container. The sea does not stop being the sea when we pour its waters into a jug, but it does assume the dimensions and capacities of the jug. The same is true when we wish to bring the supernatural into the physical world: it takes on the temperament of its containers, namely, the prophet and the scriptures. But these containers are worldly and temporal. We must not imagine that their contours form the boundaries of the supernatural itself.

Personalities, even those of the prophets, Soroush argued, were incidental in religion. He mused that perhaps the physical gestures and motions of prayer were actually personal idiosyncrasies of the prophets. Maybe these gestures and motions were the effects, and not the causes, of the prophets’ communion with God. The rest of us imitate those postures in the possibly vain hope that they will transport us where the prophets have been. Soroush’s insight in this later book owed much to both Mutazilism and Islamic mysticism. And yet,
it led some clerics in Qom to accuse Soroush of apostasy. “
We say that the cherry is the fruit of the cherry tree,” Soroush told an interviewer during this controversy. “Do we have to say that the cherry is the fruit of God in order to be a monotheist?”

Based in Basra, Baghdad, Yemen, and in later years the town of Shahr-e Rey, near Tehran, the Mutazilites belonged to a vibrant medieval culture of Islamic disputation, penning treatises that defended their principles against those not only of more orthodox Islamic philosophers but of atheists and
freethinkers as well. At the time of the Sunni–Shiite schism over the succession to the caliphate, the Mutazilites had divided loyalties: those in Basra were sympathetic to the Sunni position, those in Baghdad to the Shiite one. Although the Mutazilites produced the official doctrine of the Baghdad caliphate from 765 through 848, their views were elite ones, eventually displaced by those of the orthodox Asharites, whose view that reason was subservient to revelation more closely reflected popular sentiments.

The Mutazilites went into near permanent eclipse. In time, Sunni Muslims came to embrace the Asharite view and to see Mutazilite ideas as heretical. But the often subterranean Mutazilite influence wove itself into the theology of the Persian Shiites and particularly the Yemeni Shiite sect known as the Zaydis. Soroush sought to resuscitate the best of the Mutazilite tradition and to remind Iranians that there was a basis for critical rationality within Shiism.

• • •

B
Y THE TIME OF
K
HOMEINI’S DEATH
, Soroush had found a vast and growing audience, mainly of religious readers who found in his theory a way out of the revolution’s moral and political impasses. It was possible, in Soroush’s Islam, to be a believer but not a follower; it was possible, even necessary, to be a good Muslim and still engage in open, critical debate, even with the clergy, and to engage the ideas of political philosophers from all over the world.

In Soroush’s view, there was no reason Muslim societies should not draw on secular political theories in order to design the best possible state. Politics and ideology were forms of human knowledge, after all, and none could really be said to be closer to the ineffable core of religion than any other. For that reason, Soroush held, to try to derive a political system, even a democratic one, from Islam was nonsensical. What mattered was that those who entered politics in a Muslim state have good Muslim values. From there, everything could be debated and contested, on rational merits, in the open air.

Soroush’s critique cut to the quick of the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy, and the new Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was intent on refuting
it. After Khomeini’s death, the new Leader’s office declared that “
the spread of thoughts which consider religion to be a dependent variable of other human sciences is dangerous and it negates the legitimacy of the Islamic state.” Perhaps Khamenei saw in the Fardid circle a like-minded repudiation of occidental liberalism and a convenient defense of the institution of his power. For, over the course of his leadership, those who considered themselves Fardid’s acolytes (Fardid himself died of an intestinal illness in 1994) became something like the official philosophers of the Islamic Republic, influential beyond their numbers inside the Iranian political establishment. Its members would rise to control many of the Islamic Republic’s cultural and intellectual institutions, including the Academy of Sciences, from which they expelled Soroush. After Fardid’s death, many of his followers turned to Foucault and the postmodernists to further their critique of the West.

Soroush countered that postmodernist theories were meaningless in a country still struggling to reach modernity, and that in any case, as he put it, the postmodernists erred in wishing to see reason dead rather than see it humble. In later years, Soroush would compare Fardid’s posthumous influence on the Iranian state to the political philosopher Leo Strauss’s on the American administration of President George W. Bush. But Soroush’s own sway could not be underestimated, nor, despite the fondest wishes of the political establishment, could
Contraction and Expansion
be unwritten. The book sold more than twenty thousand copies and provoked ten book-length responses. It was the beginning of a renaissance in Iranian religious thought.

• • •

T
HE THINKERS
at the
Kiyan
Circle did not read only Soroush. Under his influence, they engaged the unlikely field of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, absorbing its insights, and the precision of its language, into the new Islamic thought. The very fact of its nearly mathematical abstraction, its lack of reference to European history or culture, made it transferable to
Iran to a degree that continental philosophy, with its always slightly alienating embeddedness in the European context, had never been.

Kiyan
published a great deal on Popper: translations of his work, essays expounding on his views, even a 1992 interview with the man himself, conducted at Popper’s home in Surrey by a young Iranian scholar named Hossein Kamaly, who had translated some of Popper’s work into Persian under Soroush’s supervision. Kamaly would long remember that although he was close to ninety years old, Popper answered the door himself and showed the young Iranian student around his home. Kamaly had booked Popper for a forty-five-minute interview, but Popper gave him two and a half hours. An early order of business was the lengthy introduction Kamaly had written to his translation of one of Popper’s books. At a glance, Popper declared it too ambitious. Kamaly should publish it elsewhere, and Popper would supply him with a two-page introduction of his own.

If Popper had not been aware of his stature in Iran before meeting Kamaly, he certainly was afterward. When an Iranian philosopher criticized Popper on the grounds that not all of Marx’s works supported historical determinism,
Popper wrote him two letters in response, defending his view. And when Popper died in 1994, a private Iranian cultural institute held a daylong seminar in his honor, with speaker after speaker propounding on his work.

And yet, by the time of his death, Popper was barely even read in the West. He was overshadowed by Thomas Kuhn in the philosophy of science and secured little space in either analytic or continental philosophy curricula. Kamaly, years hence, would tell an American colleague he was working on a paper called “After Popper,” only to have the colleague respond with utter bewilderment, as though he had bestowed mythical status on a figure of the most minor importance.

• • •

K
IYAN WAS NOT THE ONLY
intellectual journal of its era, nor the most daring.
Adineh
published the brave remnants of the secular left.
Zanan
,
founded by another displaced editor from the
Kayhan
group, Shahla Sherkat, addressed feminist concerns, and had a close relationship with
Kiyan
, with which it shared office space. The journal
Goftogu
, founded by the philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo and several other secular intellectuals, took up the discussion of democracy, pluralism, and civil society from a nonreligious perspective. Where
Goftogu
’s editors were well-traveled, secular intellectuals from the educated elite,
Kiyan
’s were traditional-minded, religious men from the bazaar class and the lower middle class, most of them the first in their families to pursue a life of the mind. And yet the two journals established a rapport. They traded authors, engaged in discussions, worked common themes.

There were subjects on which more secular thinkers would fault
Kiyan
for its reticence.
Kiyan
published a smattering of essays by women, for example, but it did not contend seriously with the pressing matter of women’s rights under the Islamic Republic.
Soroush gave just two lectures and two interviews on the “woman question” in the postrevolutionary period, and they might have been lost had an independent scholar not documented them in a book. In those lectures, Soroush stressed that even if the holy texts described women as existing entirely to serve the purposes of men, and even if the Prophet and the imams concluded that women should therefore be regarded as less fully human than men, modern Muslims were not obligated to accept their reasoning. Rather, they had the right to question it both logically and based on contemporary wisdom.

Soroush ducked the debate, then raging in Iranian feminist circles, over the rights of women in Islamic jurisprudence, saying in an October 1996 interview that he believed it was necessary to start with philosophical principles and end with legal rights, rather than vice versa. This position was largely consistent with Soroush’s general outlook. He was a philosopher, not a political strategist. The first question should be whether it was possible to argue, as an Islamic philosopher, for the full humanity of women. The jurisprudence would follow the philosophical logic. But this philosophical discussion was not a priority for
Kiyan
, and
Zanan
focused instead on the struggle for women’s legal rights. Soroush, for his part, emphasized his
belief that there were profound differences between the sexes, which would be unnatural to efface. He seemed to hear talk of “equal rights” or “gender equality” as a denial of difference rather than as a call for universal rights to be shared among rational human beings.

It was on these and related questions that Soroush’s distance from secular liberalism was most pronounced. He argued that in the West the notion of rights had been taken too far. A Muslim democracy, in Soroush’s view, could not conceivably accord rights to homosexuals, for instance. Although an Islamic democracy, as he described it, would not be ruled by clerics or based on Islamic law, it would be guided—bounded—by the Islamic morality embedded in the hearts of its citizens and elected officials.

The religious intellectuals of
Kiyan
and the secular thinkers around
Goftogu
had substantive differences, if they cared to explore them. But the Rafsanjani years were a time more of unity than of division among these various strains of dissident Iranian thought, all of which would soon find themselves under a violent and unrelenting pressure. For the reformists came to understand, by the mid-1990s, that they had serious enemies—determined and even violent elements within the regime who saw the intellectual movement percolating through
Kiyan
as an intolerable challenge to the ruling ideology.

The
Kiyan
Circle was largely caught by surprise. Most of its members saw themselves as a dissident strain within the establishment, their developing creed as an adaptation of the revolutionary ideology to changed circumstances, to trial and error, and not as a counterrevolutionary trend. Moreover, in the far more repressive 1980s, the Islamic Republic had tolerated Soroush and his supporters. Under Khomeini, the largest and most organized opposition groups—the Mojahedin and the secular left above all—were treated as frank enemies of the state and violently persecuted to extinction. But Khomeini had abided factional differences among those he considered loyal followers, perhaps because he did not have a strong preference among them, or perhaps because until the Mojahedin and the left were vanquished, he had bigger fish to fry. Rumor had it that when asked about the essays that would come to form
Contraction and Expansion
,
Khomeini said he had no problem with Soroush’s thesis. But after Khomeini’s death, as Soroush and the
Kiyan
Circle began generating real excitement, the new Leadership revealed a thinner skin.

And so it was that in 1995, shortly after Soroush published an essay arguing that the clergy should not be paid lest it grow corrupt, Khamenei himself wrote an editorial in a state-run newspaper warning Soroush that he should not challenge the authority of the clergy. According to a close associate of Khamenei’s, the “Dr. Soroush issue” was a matter of “national harmony” and “Iranian national independence.” The speaker of the parliament referred to Soroush when he declared that “
enemies of the revolution” were “exploiting naïve people with these complicated theories to undermine their faith in order to defeat the revolution.” In Qom, too, Soroush had vociferous critics, not the least of whom was the most violent of hard-liners, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, who sneered that “
we will throw these fashionable ideas into the dustbin of history” and that anyone who spoke of multiple interpretations of Islam should be punched in the mouth.