[From Dag Forssell (950128 1130)]
I posted recently on my reading "The crime of Galileo." I have now
found that there were TWO translations of Galileo's "Dialogue"
published in 1953. U of Chicago published the update by Giorgio de
Santillana of the 1661 Salusbury translation. This text may be
closest to the original, baroque style of Galileo. U of California
published a new translation by Stillman Drake with a foreword by
Einstein. This translation is more readable in my opinion, with
notes Galieleo wrote in the margin of his personal copy reproduced
in the margin of this translation.
On the subject of intellectual revolutions, I find the following of
interest. Our hero clearly anticipates autonomous control of
perception at the systems concept level. I find the account quite
refreshing.
Best, Dag
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Front page article in the Los Angeles Times. January 27, 1995
ISLAMIST'S THEORY OF RELATIVITY
Iranian scholar says faith is open to interpretation, challenging
the dogma of hard-line mullahs. His ideas could lead to a Muslim
Reformation.
By ROBIN WRIGHT TIMES STAFF WRITER
TEHRAN--Abdol Karim Soroush is an unassuming figure. Small-framed,
bespectacled and tenderly soft-spoken, he looks almost fragile as
he sits at the big, round oak table in his office at the Research
Institute for Human Sciences here.
But this gentle man is shaking the foundations of a faith that
claims a billion followers--nearly one out of every five people on
Earth. Both supporters and critics now call him the Martin Luther
of Islam--a man whose ideas on religion and democracy could bridge
the chasm between Muslim societies and the outside world.
"Soroush is challenging 13 centuries of thinking," said Nasser
Hadian, a political scientist at Tehran University. "He is
proclaiming that understanding of religion is all relative. Put
another way, no one interpretation is absolute. It is not fixed for
all time and place. Who can say what God meant? This opens the door
to all kinds of new ideas, political as well as religious."
Put still another way, Soroush and an emerging group of Islamic
writers and thinkers are making it possible to be Islamic without
being fundamentalist, according to John Voll, an expert on Islam at
the University of New Hampshire.
"They are creating a comprehensive, late 2Oth-Century world view
that is, at the same time, authentically Islamic and authentically
modern," he said.
Soroush and contemporaries--such as Tunisia's Rashid Ghannouchi,
Egypt's Hassan Hanafi and Algeria's Mohammed Arkoun--are shaping
what may turn out to be Islam's equivalent of the Christian
Reformation- a period of questioning traditional practices and
beliefs and, ultimately, of upheaval.
Already, Soroush's impact extends far beyond the realm of religion.
His writings are framing a new debate about political change--not
just for Iran but for the Middle East.
"Soroush is profoundly important to an issue facing the entire
Muslim world," Hadian said, "because he says Islam can be
interpreted in a way that is compatible with democracy. And he
shows how."
In the region of the globe that has most resisted change, few ideas
are more pivotal to the future than the relationship between Islam
and democracy. Although the Iranian government has not formally
reacted to Soroush's writings and teachings, many senior mullahs
and officials are widely believed to feel threatened by his words.
But for all the acclaim--his work is already the subject of
dissertations in places as far away as Georgetown University in
Washington--Soroush does not seek, nor even welcome, media
attention.
A bimonthly magazine called Kiyan, which means source or soul, was
founded in 1991 primarily to air his columns and the debate they
have sparked. It now has subscribers in Asia, Europe and the
Americas, including the United States.
Soroush, otherwise, is almost reclusive--probably wisely so.
Friends say even his dustbin has been picked and probed to keep
track of his ideas. Getting an interview can take years of appeals
and pulling strings with intermediaries.
Against the hustle and honking din of downtown Tehran, the quiet
chambers of the institute where Soroush is dean of faculty seem
like a sanctuary. In his office, soft music plays in the
background.
"Islam and democracy are not only compatible," he began. "Their
association is inevitable. In Muslim society, one without the other
is not perfect."
Soroush, who is in his late 40s, speaks deliberately and in
English. Among a long list of academic credentials, Soroush did
graduate work in philosophy at the University of London.
I have given two bases," he said. "The first pillar is this: To be
a true believer, one must be free. To become a believer under
pressure or coercion will not be true belief. And this freedom is
the basis of democracy.
"The second pillar in Islamic democracy is that interpretation of
religious texts is always in flux," he added. "Those
interpretations are also influenced by the age you live in. So you
can never give a fixed interpretation." Everyone is entitled to an
interpretation. Although some may be more scholarly than others, no
one version -- by a cleric or a layman -- is automatically more
authoritative than another.
For the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as other Muslim
societies, the practical implications of Soroush's words are
profound--although he refuses to spell them all out.
"I will be better served if I do not get entangled in such
political affairs," he said, chuckling knowingly. "Let other people
draw the implications and consequences."
The most basic are equality and empowerment of ordinary believers.
As did the Reformation, Soroush's argument establishes the rights
of individuals--in their relationship both with government and with
God. And like democracy anywhere, the beliefs and will of the
majority at the bottom define the ideal Islamic state. It can't be
imposed from the top or by an elite, such as the clergy.
"No one group of people has exclusive right to interpret or
reinterpret religion. That is something to be abolished," he
explained, sitting at the table, almost buried behind piles of
books.
Islam also should not be used as a modern ideology, for it is too
likely to become totalitarian, he said. And the ideal Islamic
republic is ruled not by mullahs or sheiks but by secular leaders.
With haunting similarity to thinking during the Reformation, in
which Protestants split from the Roman Catholic Church, Soroush's
arguments in effect divide the roles and powers of church and
state. it would be a stunning shift for the only major monotheistic
religion that provides a set of rules by which to govern society as
well as a set of spiritual beliefs.
But the change would not be total. Like Luther, the 16th-Century
German theologian who inaugurated the Reformation, Soroush is not
abandoning the values of the faith. He instead argues against rigid
thinking and elitism.
Islam, he says, is a religion that can still grow. He believes in
Sharia, or Islamic law, as a basis for modern legislation. But he
views Sharia less rigidly than does the traditional clergy.
Sharia is something expandable," he said. "You can't imagine the
extent of its flexibility. And in an Islamic democracy, you can
actualize its potential flexibilities." But does not the freedom
inherent in democracy ultimately contradict Islam, which literally
translates as submission?
"Just the reverse," he responded, a smile spreading across his
face. With the precision of a logician, he built a philosophical
argument as if were a mathematical equation.
"If you freely surrender or submit, this does not mean that you
have sacrificed your freedom," he said. "You should be free as well
to leave your faith. It is a contradiction to be free in order to
believe--and then afterward to abolish that freedom."
For a growing group of followers--ranging from young mullahs to
regime opponents, from intellectuals to government technocrats--
Soroush represents the hope of reconciliation, both within Islam
and between Islam and the outside world.
"He is finding ways to reconcile Islam and modernism for educated
muslims who have had problems with traditional Islam," said
Mohammed Reza Bouzari, a businessman and Soroush follower for
almost a decade. "He shows how understanding changes day by day,
year by year. This is the only way to save Islam in the modern
world."
Soroush's Kiyan columns are now the center of a feisty intellectual
debate. His Thursday evening lectures at a local mosque are packed.
At Tehran University's school of Theology, where he teaches the
history and philosophy of science, students wait in the halls just
to see him.
At the last national book fair, an anonymous donor contributed
enough to make all copies of Soroush's books available at half
price. His most popular book just ran its fourth printing. Even
critics concede that his writing in Persian is so poetic it draws
readers on literary merit alone.
"This is a seed in the ground, and it is going to grow," Bouzari
said.
"It's an intellectual revolution," added Reza Tehrani, Kiyan's
editor.
But the movement symbolized by Soroush may be on a collision course
with Iran's powerful clergy. "The debate is between those who
accept the idea of a multifaceted, multidimensional religion that
changes across time and space and those who say Islam has only one
essence, and it can't be touched, and therefore democracy is
alien," said Hadi Semati, an analyst at Tehran's Center for
Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies.
In Iran, the latter are now in power.
"The government does not like us, but so far it tolerates us,"
Tehrani said.
Many, however, fear for Soroush's future.
"Soroush is a man of some courage, especially given the context in
which he says these things and the direct criticism of the form of
government in Iran today that comes out of his writings and
teaching," said Shaul Bakhash, an Iran expert at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Va., and author of an upcoming book on the
Islamic debate.
Soroush was originally one of the revolution's own. He returned
from London shortly after the 1979 upheaval that brought the
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.
In the early 1980s, he was part of the cultural revolution, serving
on the seven-man committee that determined Islamically correct
university curricula.
He hosted one of the new regime's early television shows on Persian
poetry. Yet he can also quote vast passages from a cross-section of
Western philosophers.
"We've never had anyone like Soroush," Hadian said. "Very few
people really know both the West and Islam, and can talk about and
to both worlds. Some intellectuals here are familiar with the West
but not with the religious nuances. And some clerics know religion
but not the West. Even in Iran, we can't communicate with each
other. But Soroush can bring together ideas from both worlds
because he understands and has lived in both."
The debate within Iran is echoing throughout the Muslim world.
Various thinkers are looking at how to modernize and democratize
political and economic systems in an Islamic context.
The extensive writings of Egypt's Hanafi, for example, center on
"bringing the faith up to date in a revolutionary way," New
Hampshire Islamic expert Voll said. "He thinks of developing the
equivalent in Islam of what liberation theology was to
Catholicism."
Tunisia's Ghannouchi, another philosopher, is working on a book
titled "Public Freedom in the Islamic State."
"Islam did not come with a specific program about our life," he
said in an interview. "It brought general principles. It's our duty
to make this program through inter
action between Islamic principles and modernity."
Ghannouchi advocates majority rule, protection of minorities, full
women's rights and equality of all secular and religious parties.
"Freedom," he pronounced, "is superior to Islam."
Yet his views are seen as such a challenge to the state that he was
repeatedly imprisoned in Tunisia before being forced into exile in
Europe.
The Reformation did not fully shake out for about 200 years with
the establishment of a welter of
Protestant denominations. By that yardstick, an Islamic
Reformation-if that is what it turns out to be--is only in its
incipient stage, and the current debate underscores that the
turmoil in the Muslim world is due at least as much to internal
tensions as to friction with the outside world.
Soroush prefers to avoid comparisons with Luther.
"I'm just a writer and a thinker," he said. "I'm not thinking of
doing things like Luther did. Although, perhaps Luther did not know
what he was doing at that time."
He laughed easily. "But I am well aware that these ideas, if taken
seriously, might be of some use or help some radical change in the
way we look at religion."