Iran’s Leading Dissident Draws Crowds, Threats

The last time Abdolkarim Soroush lectured at Tehran University, thousands turned out to hear him.

But in the exuberant crowd was a rowdy group of pro-government toughs carrying a noose. Their idea: Lynch the gentle, bespectacled professor on the spot. He barely got away.

Such is the reaction to the ideas of Soroush, Iran’s leading dissident thinker. He is asking the dangerous questions that the Islamic republic’s mullahs would prefer not to hear.

His thoughts have made him one of Iran’s most beloved--and reviled--figures, and his precarious survival is a symbol of the fragile political freedom in contemporary Iran.

Prominent in Iran since the 1979 revolution that toppled the monarchy, Soroush disputes what the members of the clergy consider their God-given right to be the sole interpreters of Islam, a role they use to justify their rule.

In large part, Soroush’s ideas are part of a growing protest of the clerics’ hard-line rule. One face of that protest showed up in the May presidential election in which a moderate reformer, Mohammad Khatami, routed the establishment’s candidate.

Soroush is another face, the intellectual side.

His supporters see him as the architect of an Islamic renaissance. But he poses a serious threat to a religious establishment struggling to justify itself to the majority of Iran’s 60 million people who have been born since the shah’s ouster.

Within the clergy’s ranks, no one can match the charisma of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late religious leader who led the Islamic revolution then held its disparate and often competing elements together through its turbulent first 10 years.

That leadership void provides an opening for the radical ideas of Soroush.

An ideologue of the new Islamic establishment in the early 1980s, Soroush now insists religion should teach submission to God and cannot be reduced to a mundane ideology to govern--a message almost the reverse of the ideas he once preached.

“Islam, or any religion, will become totalitarian if it is made into an ideology, because that is the nature of ideologies,” Soroush, 52, said in an interview.

Like other Muslims, Soroush considers the Koran, Islam’s holy book, to be God’s word. But he also believes the clergy’s interpretation of it has little to do with religion and more to do with preserving their power and interests.

“The clergy earns its living from religion. If your interests are secured through religion, then you will defend your interests first and religion will become secondary,” Soroush said.

His writings, which say every believer is entitled to his own understanding of Islam, are widely read by Iran’s university students, intellectuals and even members of the clergy. Many of his 20 or so books are best-sellers, and his numerous articles have an audience in other parts of the Muslim world.

“The young see Soroush as someone who offers something different from the traditional teachings of religious leaders or teachers,” said Mohammad Hashemi, a law professor at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran.

Soroush, who studied chemistry in Britain and pharmacology and religion in Iran, bases his elaborate arguments on intellectual influences ranging from the medieval to the modern.

The 13th-century Persian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi is one. Like the iconoclastic Rumi, Soroush speaks of a lofty, liberating Islam that would hardly be recognized by most Muslim clergymen.

Some people describe Soroush as a Muslim Martin Luther whose ideas could generate an Islamic reformation. They believe he offers an alternative to what they see as pedestrian debates over whether neckties or satellite dishes are permissible under Islam.

They also are inspired by his belief that Islam is compatible with democracy and human rights, concepts sometimes disparaged by conservative Muslim clergy as foreign.

Those ideas have landed him in trouble. His lectures used to draw thousands, but he stopped speaking for a while after he was beaten twice by pro-government militants last year. He says he narrowly escaped with his life when the lynch mob turned up at the Tehran University lecture a year ago.

Militants have also attacked the office of the monthly magazine Kiyan, which first published Soroush’s ideas.

“The people punch individuals who say such things in the mouth,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, warned in an angry speech after the publication of one article.

Soroush recently returned from 11 months in Europe and the United States, where he went to let things cool off at home. Since then, he has given just one lecture. Held in June, it drew 3,000 people.

“When I have an idea, I’m like a pregnant woman. I just have to deliver,” Soroush said, grinning.