Abdolkarim Soroush
Abdolkarim Soroush, one of the world's leading Muslim thinkers, is a visiting scholar within the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs during the spring 2008 semester. After a traditional Islamic education in his native Iran, Soroush studied Chemistry, History, and the Philosophy of Science in the United Kingdom. He returned to Iran after the fall of the Shah and published Knowledge and Value, the first of many books relating Islam to the challenges of democracy and modernity. In 1983, disillusioned with the course of the Iranian revolution, Soroush resigned from the Culture Revolution Council and moved to the Institute for Cultural Research and Studies, with which he remains affiliated. A prolific writer and speaker, Soroush is the author of more than 30 books. His articulate defense of rational thought and open debate and deliberation has earned him a wide following within the academy and across the Muslim world. Since 2000 Soroush has been a visiting scholar at a series of prestigious institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. In 2005 Time named him one of the world's 100 most influential people. A good introduction to his work is: Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (Oxford University Press, 2002).