As the famous French saying goes “revolutions devour their own children”. Abdulkarim Soroush is a case in point: the most prominent Iranian public intellectual, who was once appointed by Ayatollah Khomeini to bring Cultural Revolution and to Islamicize the Iranian universities, is now facing death threats for his “heretical” statements about the origin of the Koran. In a recent interview with a Dutch newspaper, Soroush, who for the past decade has been lecturing on religious pluralism and democracy at American and European universities, questioned one of the most sensitive dogmas in Islam by suggesting that the Koran is the product of Muhammad’s creative mind, and that the book does not have a divine origin. Although Western media continues to portray Soroush as Islam’s Luther, the former does not share the literalist readings of the scripture with the latter; rather, he seeks to contextualize the Koran in its particular ‘milieu’, an approach which reminds us of the 19th century German biblical scholars. Soroush’s latest statement has received a huge backlash not only from conservative ayatollahs in the religious city of Qom but also from liberal theologians in the country’s semi-secular capital, Tehran. Read full story here.
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