MORALITY BEFORE RIGHTS:

The democrat: Iran's leading reformist intellectual tries to reconcile religious duties and human rights (Laura Secor, 3/14/2004, Boston Globe)

IF IRAN'S DEMOCRATIC REFORM movement has a house intellectual, it's Abdolkarim Soroush. A small, soft-spoken philosopher with fiercely expressive eyebrows, Soroush specializes in mysticism, Sufi poetry, Islamic theology, chemistry, pharmacology, and the philosophy of science. Although he once worked for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolutionary government, he now advances a powerful argument for democracy and human rights -- and he does so drawing not only on John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, but also on the deepest intellectual traditions of Shi'ite Islam. Religion must remain aloof from governance, he is fond of saying, not because religion is false and would corrupt politics, but because religion is true and politics corrupts it.

Soroush's work is heady, abstract stuff. And yet, its hold on throngs of young Iranians -- hundreds of students show up to the typical Soroush lecture -- is so strong that Iran's ruling mullahs consider him a threat, and pro-clerical militias regularly harass and beat him when he speaks in his native land. That's why these days, he makes his home at Princeton University, where he teaches a seminar of fewer than 10 graduate students and passes all but unnoticed through the halls of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. [...]

Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution seemed to herald a new era for the Muslim world. In place of the secular, corrupt, repressive government of the American-backed Shah, Iranians imagined they would create something entirely new: a regime that would promote social justice and spiritual fulfillment, and one that would draw on indigenous cultural traditions and the theory of the state embedded in the country's overwhelmingly dominant faith, Islam.

The charismatic Ayatollah Khomeini, who had suffered prison and exile under the Shah, would replace a crass, alien capitalism with a dignified, indigenous spiritualism that rejected worldly motives. As Khomeini admonished the people, the purpose of the revolution was not "to have less expensive melons" but to lead a more elevated life.

In the end, however, Khomeini saddled Iran with something not all his supporters bargained for: the doctrine of velayat-i-faqi, or the rule of the jurist. This doctrine effectively delivered autocratic executive powers to Iran's clerics, and particularly to the ayatollah deemed wisest by his peers -- in the first instance, Khomeini himself. [...]

[W]hile Soroush makes a business of separating the rational from the divine, he is everywhere clear that his aim is not to diminish the divine but to protect it. In his seminal Kiyan essay, "The Expansion and Contraction of Religious Knowledge," Soroush argued that the essence of religion, which is immutable, eternal, and sacred, can be separated from religious knowledge, which is mutable, relative, and historical. The implications of this simple theory were far-reaching. The interpretive work of the clergy, therefore, was not itself divine; rather, the pursuit of religious knowledge was human and historically situated. Religious ideology, like religious knowledge, also stood apart from religion itself as something ephemeral and, in Soroush's view, dispensable.

As Daniel Brumberg writes in "Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran," it is precisely in separating religious knowledge from the core of religion that Soroush makes it possible to engage with Western ideas without invoking the Muslim bugbears of "cultural surrender, cultural superiority, or mechanistic `borrowing.' " Rather, one can apprehend justice, say, through reason, and reason can wield tools of worldly -- even of Western -- provenance. In any case, Soroush argues, contemporary Iran draws on three cultural wellsprings: Persian, Islamic, and Western.

Soroush believes that religious institutions and political ones should be kept separate. Doing so will allow religious life to truly flourish, because it will be chosen rather than imposed. But if this sounds like Western-style liberal secularism, it isn't. Rather, Soroush envisions what he calls a democratic religious society. Its goal is the freedom of believers to practice and live by their faith without compulsion -- but also without the "profanity" that pervades Western secular life.

Shari'ah law provides the Islamic framework for moral living, and Soroush does not seem prepared to do away with it, although he is clear that scripture should never form the sole basis of legislation. Indeed, Soroush sees Shari'ah as a form of religious knowledge rather than an article of religious faith. And so, in his view, it should be subject to rational discussion and adjustment.

It is here that my discussion with Soroush becomes most tangled and most intriguing. Shari'ah law is flexible, he tells me. It can be reinterpreted by religious scholars who may not feel that its actual provisions -- the stoning of adulterers, say -- still perform the functions God intended.

But is this not antidemocratic? Unelected, unaccountable jurists are left to make political decisions based on their interpretation of the divine intent, and the social expediency, of Qu'ranic injunctions. And what about human rights? I ask Soroush. The idea of human rights is still alien to Iranian jurists, he tells me, but when they are better educated that will change: "I am 100 percent sure that if our clerics become familiar with the ideas of human rights, not superficially but deeply, philosophically, that definitely this will influence their interpretation of Shari'ah."

What Soroush would like, then, is for Islamic thought to engage and adapt secular notions of rights. What he doesn't want, however, is for rights claims to take precedence over traditional religious morality. He certainly doesn't wish to see Iranian society become as permissive as American society, where he believes that human rights claims have unduly silenced religious believers. He says, "Like even the omnipotent god whose actions are conditioned by the concept of justice, human rights, though they are universal, must be conditioned by the idea of morality. I think human rights nowadays has been carried away." While those who advocate human rights may favor gay rights, for instance, Soroush believes homosexuality is simply immoral.

That's obviously a tough balancing act, but one that would make Islamic democracy more like America's than like the demoralized European version. That's why there's ample reason to believe that the Islamic world's future will be brighter than that of much of the West.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 14, 2004 10:39 AM