The Islamic Political Tradition: Can It Be Saved?

 
A Conversation with Abdolkarim Soroush and Paul Heck

Monday, March 10, 2008
4:30-6:00pm
Bunn Intercultural Center Auditorium (ICC)
Open to the public
RSVP: berkleycenter@georgetown.edu

The Islamic political tradition represents a rich array of thinking on the welfare of human society but has today been damaged by extremists committed to militant ideologies. It is now commonplace to view the politics of Islam as something to be contained—a threat to global stability. Is it possible to revisit the politics of Islam, to see what it can say to the pressing issues of the contemporary moment. Can the Islamic political tradition be saved? This event is part of our project on The Future of Political Theologies.

Abdolkarim Soroush
Abdolkarim Soroush, one of the world's leading Muslim thinkers, is a visiting scholar at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs during spring 2008. 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).

Paul Heck
Paul L. Heck is assistant professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University. His work focuses on religious knowledge and its ethical and socio-political implications. His publications on Islam treat conceptions of jihad, moral dimensions of mysticism, religious renewal, scripture-based politics, eschatological sensibilities, and the transmission of religious knowledge. His book, The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization, looks at the formative period of Islamic systems of knowledge and explores ways in which knowledge was classified and shaped in accordance with the social and political as well as intellectual concerns of the day. He has edited a collection of articles, Sufism and Politics: The Power of Spirituality. Current projects include two monographs: The Theology of Islamic Politics, which looks at the connection of faith outlook and political attitudes in Islam, and The Crisis of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization, which is a full treatment of the phenomenon of skepticism in Islam and the varied responses to it.