Children of Paradise (12 page)

The antidote to uncontrolled power, in Popper’s view, was democracy. Marxists would argue that the sort of rational free choice Popper celebrated in a democracy was an illusion so long as the underlying economic structure remained unchanged. But Popper believed that the state consisted of institutions, and that its decency or cruelty was entirely bound within the design of those institutions. He wrote: “
It is high time for us to learn that the question ‘
who
is to wield the power in the state?’ matters only little as compared with the question ‘
how
is the power wielded?’ and ‘
how much
power is wielded?’”

Those words would stay with Soroush after his return to the newborn Islamic Republic, and through the decades to follow. But Popper’s distinction between the
who
and the
how
of power wielding could not have been
further from the spirit of Soroush’s times than they were when he read
The
Open Society and Its Enemies
in 1974—and marshaled its critique of Marxism to the defense of Ayatollah Khomeini.

• • •

S
OROUSH PUBLISHED MANY ESSAYS
during his Period of Constant Contemplation, but his most significant works during his London years were his books. First there was
What Is Science? What Is Philosophy?
and then
Philosophy of History
. His attacks on Marxism were useful for the Khomeinists, who saw the secular left as their greatest adversary, with the equally leftist Mojahedin close behind. In his book
Dialectic Conflict
, Soroush argued that the theory of dialectics made empirical claims in the guise of abstractions and it should stand or fall based on its empirical truth. He looked at the history of science and could find in its unfolding no example of dialectical progression. If history could not actually be shown to have traveled in dialectical fashion, what use was the theory that it always did so? Echoing Popper, Soroush described the dialectic as a theory that, like air, fit all locks and opened none of them.

Dialectic Conflict
was the book Mostafa Rokhsefat read in the barracks and that turned him definitively from the Mojahedin to what would become the mainstream of the revolutionary establishment. And Mostafa was not alone. In just the first two years after the revolution, to Soroush’s knowledge, the book sold some one hundred thousand copies in Iran.

Finally, Soroush wrote a book in London that brought him to the attention of the great theologians of his day, including Motahhari and Khomeini himself. This was a study of Mulla Sadra’s metaphysics, which he tried to enrich from his readings in the philosophy and history of science. The book was thick with footnotes citing Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Saint Augustine. Although it earned him the highest accolades at the time of its publication, Soroush would later speak of
The Restless Nature of the Universe
with something close to embarrassment, as a failed effort to reconcile irreconcilables, written during a period of his life when he had left one
station but not yet arrived at the next. “The author of that book,” he reflected in 2010, “is long dead.” In 1979, however, the book catapulted the young scholar into the Iranian scholarly elite. According to popular lore, it was Ayatollah Motahhari who pressed a copy on Ayatollah Khomeini, himself a scholar of Mulla Sadra. Khomeini took a personal interest in Soroush after that.

Soroush returned to revolutionary Iran in September 1979, without having completed his doctorate, to chair the department of Islamic culture at Tehran’s teachers’ college. He was quickly pressed into the service of the new regime, which, starting with Khomeini himself, viewed the brilliant young lay theologian as a potentially effective propagandist. Soroush went on state television to debate a prominent spokesman for the communist Tudeh Party, drawing on Popper’s critique of Marx even as he spoke for an authoritarian theocracy. When Bani-Sadr was driven from office, Soroush crowed over the Khomeinists’ victory, concluding that “
we are pleased now that the pain of having such an undesired president is over. . . . Like a healthy body that excretes its putrid parts, people have egested him.” The people, he wrote during the reign of terror that followed Bani-Sadr’s ouster, had been blessed by the coming of a beautiful spring to an arid land. They should submit to and be grateful to the Islamic Republic: “
Otherwise, God forbid, they will suffer retributions if they show no gratitude towards God’s benevolence.”

As one later critic put it, Soroush denounced the “
masked dogmatism” of the Tudeh Party and the Mojahedin even as the state he served met their challenge with its own flagrant dogmatism—dispatching gangs of club-wielding hezbollahis into the streets, setting bookstores and movie theaters on fire, and assaulting women who wore “improper” hijab. Years later, his critics, particularly those burned by his attacks on the left, would cry hypocrisy or opportunism. But it seems at least as likely that Popper’s ideas had resonated with Soroush for a reason, just one that was obscure to him as yet, and which would rise like a vapor from the peculiar alchemy of historical events and personal conviction. For as unlikely as it looked in 1981, it would be fewer than five years before Soroush really did become a
proponent of the open society, a turn that would take many of his colleagues, including those on the left and within the Mojahedin, far longer, if they made the transition at all.

• • •

F
ROM 1980 TO 1983
, Soroush was associated above all with the closure of Iranian universities, a development that would have appalled Popper no end. This association was a misunderstanding, Soroush would later protest. It was the revolutionary students, he insisted, who closed the universities in April 1980, when the campuses, like the streets, were inflamed with politics and stray arms. Iranian universities had long been bastions of the secular left, and more recently the Mojahedin. Khomeini’s followers felt themselves vastly outnumbered. This situation was intolerable to them. As the Islamic Republican Party strong-armed its rivals out of government, its allied students not only seized the American embassy but made a violent bid for control of Iran’s academic institutions, attacking the campuses in gangs of hundreds and then thousands of club-wielding militiamen. When the students inside held out, the Revolutionary Committees opened fire on them. Students and faculty fled Iran’s bloodied campuses, leaving them shuttered for what would turn out to be three years. These were the opening salvos of Iran’s Cultural Revolution, which took its sinister name from Mao’s far more dramatic campaign in China.

The Cultural Revolution came to mean three things to Iranians. First, it was shorthand for the three fallow years during which Iran lacked a higher education system altogether. Second, it was a term of art for the purging of Iran’s professoriat and even its students, all of them harshly vetted for political orthodoxy from the early through the late 1980s. Finally, it connoted the complete overhaul of the country’s educational curriculum in line with the state ideology. Two months after the initial university takeover, in mid-June, Ayatollah Khomeini made the Cultural Revolution official by appointing seven men to serve on a committee he called the Cultural Revolution Institute, charged with “
restructuring . . . higher education based on Islamic culture.” There would be no room in the restructured
universities for “
conspirators and other agents of foreign powers,” by which surely he meant both the pro-Soviet left and the Western-oriented liberals.

Soroush would recall that the institute’s members included the prime minister, whose political activities preoccupied and exhausted him to the point where he simply fell asleep in the institute’s meetings; the minister of justice, who was interested only in writing regulations, attended few meetings, and eventually left; a hardline ayatollah who hung back because he was a seminarian with no experience of university life; a prominent writer who was ill and housebound; and, in the end, only three active members. These were an American-educated professor of education, a hardline member of the Islamic Republican Party named Jalal ad-Din Farsi, and Abdolkarim Soroush. They were tasked neither with closing the universities nor with purging them. Rather, the institute’s job was to reopen the universities—with the caveat, of course, that Khomeini had pledged to reopen them only when they’d been brought into line with the state ideology and scoured of foreign influences. And so the institute was concerned mainly with revising the university’s curriculum.

Soroush was not an obvious choice for this task. In speeches in 1981 and 1982, he described the ideal Islamic society as an open one that would have the confidence to respect academic freedom and to absorb ideas from both East and West. The notion that intellectual freedom was in any way inimical to religious truth was a false one: “
We should neither limit social liberties for the sake of the Truth, nor should we use our freedom to spread myths and fallacies as the Truth,” Soroush proclaimed. Moreover, he made a heartfelt brief for leaving the hard sciences alone, to be proven or disproven by their own methods. Science, he famously expounded, was wild and had no homeland.

But the powerful Ayatollah Beheshti argued that the same could not be said for the humanities, which were shaped by underlying philosophies and could therefore be Islamic or un-Islamic. If the underlying philosophies of the humanities were Western, Soroush countered, that was only because they were produced in the West, by Westerners. The way to deal with this was not to tamper with other people’s humanities but for Muslims to
produce canons of their own in these fields, which would then necessarily take on an Islamic cast. Ayatollah Khomeini listened carefully to both sides, then sent the members of the Cultural Revolution Institute to Qom, where clerics would advise them on reforming the humanities.

The institute dispatched a team of university lecturers to Qom to collaborate on some new textbooks. The professors worked with clerics at the seminary of the very hardest-line ayatollah, Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, popularly known as Mesbah, an exponent of the use of violence to silence dissent. The lead intermediary for the university, and a friend of two decades to Mesbah, complained to Soroush that Mesbah was impossible to work with: “
After a few sentences, it comes down to fisticuffs.” The resulting textbooks, with names like
Islamic Psychology
and
Islamic Sociology
, were expensive flops that did little to alter the course of the humanities in Islamic Iran.

Other changes did take a toll, however. In the long run, censorship and forced ideological conformity would make the humanities such a political minefield that most of the country’s best students would shun them in favor of hard sciences and engineering. Meanwhile, faculty purges deprived some seven hundred qualified scholars of jobs in the period from 1982 to 1983 alone and created an atmosphere of paranoia, ideological rigidity, and physical insecurity on the campuses. The student body was rife with spies, so much that professors had to tread carefully when answering provocative questions and had always to wonder whether inquisitive students were there to be educated or to collect intelligence.

Soroush credits the Cultural Revolution Institute with tempering the worst of the era’s extremism, with publishing faculty work during the period of closure, and with making it possible for the universities to reopen in 1983. Soroush was personally responsible for introducing a philosophy of science curriculum in Iran and even making it a requirement for graduation. The purge committees, according to Soroush, did not report to the institute and were merely analogs of those that existed throughout the country in nearly all government bodies.

Moreover, the Khomeinist students—zealous, doctrinaire, extreme,
and often violent—had grown nearly unstoppable, thanks largely to their backers in government. Many professors forced out of the universities were not officially purged so much as driven from campus by the students. According to Soroush, the institute, too, viewed these revolutionary students as an excessively empowered nuisance, and it spent much of its time trying to persuade them to deal with problems in more mature ways. The students, according to Soroush, wanted to keep the universities closed indefinitely, or for twenty years; the institute sought to reopen them.

Still, one of those radical students, Sadegh Zibakalam, has suggested that when pressed morally, Soroush abdicated. Zibakalam, who went on to become a prominent political analyst and to apologize publicly for his role in the Cultural Revolution, claims that his own conscience began to prick him during the purges, and he brought his concerns to Soroush, whom he knew to be the most sensitive and tolerant member of the institute. And yet, he claims, Soroush threw his hands up: “
He did not shed any tears over this issue, appeared unflustered, and left the matter behind nonchalantly . . . as if these events were happening in Afghanistan and they were not the children of this country walking away from their homeland.” Soroush would later claim that Zibakalam had exaggerated both his own importance and Soroush’s, and that he had conveniently failed to level this charge of indifference at the other members of the institute who were perhaps more powerful than Soroush, and certainly more sympathetic to the purging.

But at another level Soroush knew, at the very least, that he was keeping poor if not deeply culpable company. His fellow institute member Farsi, for one, was a close friend of the notoriously cruel prosecutor and warden of Evin Prison. Soroush had the impression that after a day’s work, Farsi went directly to Evin. What took place in these meetings? Did Farsi introduce the radical students to the prosecutor, and if so, to what end? Whom did they denounce, and what happened to those souls? Soroush did not pursue these thoughts. But there were scenes he could not avoid or explain, moments when he grew uneasy in Farsi’s company. At an open meeting the institute held with faculty at Soroush’s suggestion, a professor gave voice to his concerns and criticism. In conclusion, the professor declared that the institute
wished to make trouble for the professors, and that the professors would not surrender. “No,” Soroush remembers Farsi responding coolly, “we do not create trouble for anybody. If somebody is a troublemaker, we will kill him.”