Abdulkarim Soroush
Dr. Abdulkarim Soroush is a leading Iranian scholar, and one of the contemporary Muslim world's most influential thinkers. Dr. Soroush is renowned for his analysis of the relationship between religious and secular knowledge and authority, and hasrecently focused much of his research on questions of the cultural and religious divisions between east and west. He is also a leading expert on the poetry and thought ofRumi. Dr. Soroush initially studied chemistry, obtaining a PhD in science at London University; he then went on to study Islamic philosophy and law in Tehran Seminary. After being appointed to the Cultural Revolution Council by Imam Khomeini in 1980, Dr. Soroush served as a Professor of Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Religion (Modern Theology), Mysticism of Maulawi, Comparative Philosophy, and Philosophy of Social Sciences at Tehran University until 1996. Since that time, he has continued his affiliation as a researcher with the Institute for Cultural Research and Studies. He has also been a Visiting Professor or Scholar at a number of distinguished American and European Universities, among them the University of Amsterdam, Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown and Yale Universities, and the Wissenschaftskolleg inBerlin. He has published extensively in Persian on subjects such as ethics, governance, religious conviction and the evolution of religion, and freedom and democracy in Islam. His works have been translated into Arabic, Dutch, German, Turkish, Indonesian and English. His most recent work in English is The Expansion of Prophetic Experience (Brill 2009). Dr. Soroush has also done much work as a public intellectual, and as a result has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, among them the Erasmus Prize (2004) and inclusion in Foreign Policy's 2010 list of the 100 top global thinkers (#40).
