Where is Soroush?

The likelihood of Khameini losing power or influence or even the advancing of a progressive step toward a change in the sharing of power in the “Islamic Republic of Iran” as a result of the 2009 post-Presidential Election Protests is virtually nil.  Khameini, on the otherhand, has pushed forward a more likely scenario – the rise of a Shia Imamate to replace the Ottoman Caliphate that broke apart during World War I and then found its terminus after the Turks and Greeks battled it out – a trail of blood that led to Ataturk’s decision to abolish the caliphate in 1923. 

The decision of Khameini to writeoff the opposition’s demands for a new vote and his refusal to even offer a vote discrepancy investigation has led to a remarkable climax of Moussavi momentum, highlighted by electric prod and baton wielding uniformed and plainclothesed riot control troops cracking heads and jailing dissidents on behalf of the present administration of Ahmadinejad and the concerned echelons of the Mullocracy.  The confirmed deaths of 17 “Mousavi Martyrs” now have a symbolic face in the beautiful young Nada, while unconfirmed twitter reports are detailing the excesses of the Khameini’s police, including seemingly outlandish and inconceivable reports that the crowd control efforts had degraded to wildly wielded axes and the maiming of entire swaths of protestors, has literally silenced the Western Media.  The lack of confirmable, first hand sources and footage has shut out the Western Televised world. 

69 people die in a Market explosion in Iraq, yesterday, and it is not a highline feature on 24 hour news networks…80 Taliban soldiers die in Pakistan’s tribal region of South Waziristan due to US predator strikes…where is the focus of the Media?  On the news they can accurately cover…the South Carolina Governor’s indiscretions.  Domestic political corruption and people magazine styled filler plagues nightly newscasts alongside human interest and environmental think pieces.   

More than anything, what this Khameini choice of omission has achieved is the submission of Western Media.  More powerful than any propaganda could ever be, the blackout of Journalists and dissident voices from the intellectual sphere of Iranian thinkers is better, in the long run, than disinformation which will later be proven false due to the existence of leads for Westerners to trace and debunk.  No, Khameini has learned the omnipotent power of omission to silence public activism abroad…this he has learned from North Korea and China. 

To prove this point, where is Soroush?

In 2006, both Time and Foreign Policy magazines listed Abdul Karim Soroush as a notable top ten influential world thinker.  Listed as a dissident reformer by these publications, his history is intimately interwoven with the creation of the Islamic Establishment during the Khomeini Revolution.  After falling out with the Establishment of the Wilayat al Faqih in the first decade of the Revolution, Soroush’s theories of knowledge led him to reject, in principle, the infallibility of the clerical elite in their interpretation and application of Shariah Law and the dictates of Muhammad in the political sphere. 

As early as 1995 and 1996, commentators like Robin Wright were suggesting that Soroush may be the Martin Luther that Islam has been waiting for in the much opined reformation of Islam into a moderate force for democracy and peace.  It would seem that this influential Iranian intellectual should be in the mix on the streets and speakhards of Tehran beneath the green banners of this Moussavi counter-cultural Revolution if indeed the infallibility of the Ayatollah is to be questioned in full and in a manner that resounds with the crowds of opposition Moussavi supporters. 

So, where is Soroush?  Moreover, why is it important, moreso now than ever, that we, in the West, are updated to his whereabouts? 

The life of Soroush is a remarkable testament to the power of ideas.

Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Soroush led the charge to re-educate Iran’s population.  This re-education began with Khomeini’s decision to close all of the Universities of Iran and purge those professors and administrators who agreed with the secular reading of the Pahlavi dynasty.  In Ali A. Allawi’s new book The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, the former Minister of Defense and Finance of the Iraq post-Baathist governments notes (on p.125) that “as a member of the Cultural Revolutionary Committee, [Soroush] was responsible for revamping the Iranian higher education system, the vetting of academics and the reconstitution of the curriculum.”
When the universities reopened not two years later, the 1500 professors had diminished due to the Khomeini purge to a slight percentage of the total and then mushroomed to around 6,000 under Soroush’s efforts at vetting qualified candidates.  These new professors and doctors embarked upon Re-Islamizing the public in the new world order of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

A similar process of purging was underway in Iraq under the hardnailed Iraqi assault on the Shia Clerical establishment by Saddham Hussein in his epic quest to eradicate illiteracy in the regime; a campaign which acted as a front for the purging of the Da’wa activists of the Shia mold, agitating and performing insurgency attacks in Iraq on behalf of the Ayatollah in Iran.  In this geopolitical frame, then, it is likely that the Najaf ministries of the Shia faith, for a time, found harbor and refuge and employment in the University system of Iran.  Moreover, it is likely that the virtual entirety of the clerical Shia world of mujtahids are beholdened, in some shape or fashion, to the likes of Soroush.

Soon, however, this Khomeini loyalist would square of with the clerics and indirectly champion Democracy and Human Rights in the name of Allah and as a result of his theories on the nature of knowledge.  

In essence, the Soroush world view posits that there is a profound difference between religion and religious knowledge.  This framework actually places the jurisdiction of Shariah Law and the aegis of the ulemas and mullocracy and clerical scholars (mujtahids), Ayatollahs included, into the realm of “religious knowledge” – not religion.  In Soroush schema, religion is immutable; however, religious knowledge such as the Quranic interpretations (tafsir) of the Established Jurists and the religious edicts of the Ayatollah himself, are not only fallible, but necessarily (as a matter of justice) reviewed and policed periodically by the governed people, who as the source of power are charged to police doctrinal lessons.  Indeed, the Soroush model of religious knowledge and his understanding of the fallibility of the jurist is the cryptic Islamic equivalent of individual rights, in that the citizens of a nation or state must be protected from the excesses and tyrannies possible in a leadership, which continually seeks to empower itself to the rank of immutable infallibility.

Needless to say, the Soroush model of knowledge advances the notion that plurality, democracy, and human rights are sacrosanct options of society, simply because it bucks at the doctrine of Jahaliya, which claims that all outside knowledge is of the age of ignorance.  Moreover, Soroush’s concept of knowledge places the enforcement measures of “religious police” in any Islamic Society at the behest of the will of the people who should hold the power to direct and focus the force of morality upon the excesses of the clerical establishment rather than upon the imposition of a severe Islamic Faith on the citizenry. 

The Islamists and radical elites that were set in motion by Soroush’s very own effort,at the dawn of the Shia revolution, at this point turned against and shouted down his ideas even as the re-Islamization set itself supposedly into full swing in the spirit of Khomeini’s vision of freedom laid out in a 1978 Der Spiegel interview, which declared that Iran would be a free society in which “all the elements of oppression, cruelty and force will be destroyed.”  

The clerical Islamic Establishment quickly realized that their newly won power was now being challenged by the elemental theories of Soroush and the father of the modern university system in Iran was quickly and savagely attacked and harassed by the elites.  He was not put to death for his dissidence, perhaps, primarily due to the fact that most of the elites owed their livelihood and position to his vetting and friendship.  More or less, Soroush was outcast by the Islamic Establishment, refused to remain silent and became over the last two decades the most outspoken critic of Iran within the republic.  More and more he has spent time in Western locales, in self-imposed bouts of exile, as his popularity as a reformer has leveled out, internationally, on par with the likes of Tariq Ramadan in the progressive Muslim frame of reference.

Considering that the rising voices of dissident intellectual thinkers like Soroush, in this time of upheaval against the dictates of the Ayatollah Khameini, are not receiving a full forum in the West to push a clarion call for the advancement of ideas aimed at reining in the clerics and mullahs and debunking the myth of the infallability of the Ayatollah to the ambit of the people, it is unlikely that the Western world will learn of the progressive reformist intellectuals like Soroush nor his intellectual push for freedom, until they read of him in captions beneath photos of his assassination…or learn of his languishing in Evan Prison years too late. 

Until voices like Soroush are given full form and time to depict a new day in Iran by the Western Press, the likelihood of the Khameini’s decision to exercise his writ of omission will yield the lessons of authoritarian totalitarianism to the fields of Iran rather than the flowering of democracy’s daisies.  Unfortunately, the Western Press has no idea where to look for the voice of the movement.  The voice of the Moussavi movement, if it is indeed a progressive agitation against the infallibility of the Clerical Establishment and the Ayatollah’s immutable powers, is found in the teaching and speech of Abdul Karim Soroush. 

Soroush, Soroush, where are you?

Gary H. Johnson, Jr. (6/25/09, 8:00pmEST)