Children of Paradise (13 page)

And yet, perhaps typically, Soroush, far more than his consistently hardline colleagues, would be scrutinized for decades regarding his activities in the early postrevolutionary period. That was partly because, as his stature rose, the consistency of his moral character became a subject of national concern. But it was also because Soroush refused to apologize. He himself had not harmed anybody, he would insist as late as 2010. Had he lent his legitimacy to the forces of violence and repression? Might he have used his proximity to power to protect those more vulnerable than himself? Should he have spoken up for those he disagreed with when they were treated brutally, as he himself would one day be? Soroush built a wall around his period of complicity, and to his critics he often replied:
Why are you asking me? The men to the right and left of me were worse.
Ordinary Iranians who found in his writings relief from the sweltering closeness of authoritarian thought and practice could not have the satisfaction of making their author into an uncomplicated moral hero as well. So went not only Soroush’s story but that of the Islamic Republic.

Soroush tendered his resignation from the Cultural Revolution Institute in 1983, the year it was expanded to include nearly twenty members, many of them high-ranking clerics. He was the only member ever to resign from this institution, which still functions today. There was no longer any need for its work, he concluded; and in any case, his reservations about the undemocratic turn of the country’s politics at last got the better of him.

• • •

W
HEN
M
OSTAFA
R
OKHSEFAT PUBLISHED
Soroush’s essays in
Kayhan-e Farhangi
, they were a sensation. Soroush may not have offered recourse to embattled faculty when he had Khomeini’s ear, but in the realm of ideas he was a warrior. He was a fierce defender of rationality in irrational times, willing to stand alone against an establishment that could not silence him so long as Khomeini was alive. He argued for humility at a time
of grandiosity, for incrementalism at a time of visionary utopianism, and for openness at a time of profound xenophobia.

In Iran of the mid-1980s, a place where all opposition to the ruling ideology had just been forcibly crushed, Soroush obliquely criticized
velayat-e faqih
and the rigid Islamic moral code its proponents had imposed. Soroush wrote in 1984: “
The prophets were not sent to angels, nor did they view humans as imperfect angels [to be transformed into] perfect angels. Man is man and he is not to be transformed into an angel.” If humans were perfectible, he reasoned, and politicians charged with their perfection, then those politicians who saw themselves as God’s deputies on earth might come to believe they were infallible, and arrogate to themselves special rights and privileges. There was hardly a way to read this but as a direct critique of Khomeini.

Soroush challenged the clerics by writing about religion as though it could be discerned through the work of reason and observation. Such work, like all human endeavors, was always flawed and always subject to improvement. Still, he argued, although faith might be ineffable at its core, the human effort to understand and apply God’s truths was one grounded in the limits, the methods, and the temporality of all human studies, whether they took as their subject politics, pharmacology, or the divine. To their benefit, all disciplines of human knowledge were interconnected: an advance in mathematics could produce advances in theology, if only thinkers were open to them. Openness was nothing to fear, in Soroush’s view. There was no such thing as a separable, monolithic Western tradition that threatened to impinge upon Islam. Ideas belonged not to any one culture but to human history.

In publishing Soroush’s essays, Mostafa raised an eyebrow at the establishment that had embraced him.
Kayhan-e Farhangi
was an organ of the state, and yet the essays it published pushed the official intellectual discourse to its outer boundaries. Mohammad Khatami, Mostafa’s boss at
Kayhan
, was nervous. Mostafa knew that he published
Kayhan-e Farhangi
on Khatami’s sufferance. If he wanted it to survive, he could not make it only a platform for Soroush but should publish his critics as well.

The most formidable opponent Mostafa found for Soroush was a philosopher named Reza Davari Ardakani, who, along with Jalal Al-e Ahmad, the author of
Westoxication
, had been a student of Ahmad Fardid, an oral philosopher who brought the ideas of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to Iran in the late 1950s. Fardid and his students took from Heidegger the view that science was merely a philosophy. According to the Iranian thinkers, it was a Western cosmology in competition with Islam. The world was primarily composed of either scientifically discoverable facts or Islamic truths; it could not be both, and so the verities of Islam must be acknowledged as primary, and protected from the methods and assertions of science.

Davari extended his view of science to the social contract. The liberal view of government reduced it to an agreement forged among mortals, each of whom sought to maximize his rights. But where in this worldview was there space for a higher truth—moral and social values that existed neither by law nor by agreement, but because God had ordained them? For Davari, liberalism was yet another symptom of a civilization gone awry, one that prized individual freedom over divine truth. A virtuous society should be governed instead by guardianship and in accordance with revelation. The alternatives, including democratic governments committed to civil and human rights, were corrupt and vacuous. Of the freedom of religion articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Davari wrote in 1982: “
Modern man sees his own image in the mirror of Truth and instead of entering into a Covenant with the Truth, he has entered into a covenant with himself.”

Davari believed that the political problem with the West was the product of its metaphysical problem. The very foundation of the Western tradition, its core insight, was the belief that humankind, rather than God, occupied the center of the universe. This humanism had led the West to subordinate religion and philosophy to science and technology—to choose popular sovereignty over guardianship—and then to export its own affliction globally. The Western intellectual tradition was singular and indivisible, in his view. Outsiders could not pick and choose among its thinkers or its products; all of them ultimately led to, or fed from, humanism. Even Islamic
philosophy, with its ancient Greek influences, was impure. Davari turned to Sufi mysticism to argue for the annihilation of the self, the renunciation of worldly attachments, and submission to God, which ultimately became submission to the state, governed as it was by God’s vice-regent on earth.

• • •

T
HROUGHOUT THE MID-1980S
, Soroush and Davari’s mentor, Fardid, waged a vociferous public battle. Because both philosophers were associated with the ruling regime, their debates were fully aired before the public, neither side beyond the pale of acceptable thought. It would be the last such open contestation over political philosophy under the Islamic Republic.

Iranian intellectuals, perhaps thrilling to the aura of purpose, often describe the battle as a war by proxy between Popper and Heidegger. Soroush had introduced his readers to Popper’s thought, which became so faddish that around 1985 three different translations of
The Open Society
appeared in Persian. Thanks to Soroush, Popper attained a celebrity in Iran that undoubtedly exceeded his renown in Britain or Austria, where he was mainly regarded as a philosopher of science and a proximate critic of Viennese positivism. In Iran, Popper’s was a household name.

As for Heidegger, his history in Iran was a curious one, as entangled with the idiosyncrasies of Fardid’s life and mind as Popper’s was with Soroush. Fardid was known as an oral philosopher because he produced nearly no written work. And yet, long before Heidegger’s abstruse and difficult philosophy was ever translated into Persian, Fardid transmitted a version of it to students who would gravitate to Iran’s hardline Islamism. Whether this version was faithful to the original was ultimately beside the point.

Fardid, who studied continental philosophy in France and Germany in the 1940s, was not a practicing Muslim. But he saw the West as a nearly unmitigated evil, and he believed Islam was a useful antidote to its darkness. From Heidegger he took the notion that “truth” and “being” had once been accessible to men, but that Western metaphysics since Plato had
cast them into obscurity, at last leaving the West empty of religiosity and spiritualism, enamored instead of its technology, which was nothing but a tool for domination. Fardid heralded the rise of an authentic East where “truth” and “being” remained uncorrupted. In Iran’s Islamic Revolution, he saw what Hegel famously saw in Napoleon: history on horseback.

After the revolution, Fardid’s hatred of the West grew virulent, his thinking conspiratorial, and he saw everywhere the villainous pushers of Westoxication lying in wait to roll back Iran’s revolutionary gains. Although the German philosopher’s masterwork,
Being and Time
, would not be translated fully into Persian until 2007, Fardid and his acolytes offered Heidegger as an antidote to the forces of Westoxication. The atheistic Heidegger, the atheistic Fardid claimed, was “
the only thinker whose ideas are consistent with the Islamic Republic.”

Fardid was charismatic, learned, ebullient, and persuasive;
a former student recalls that Fardid would hold classes at his home, his acolytes emerging blinking into nightfall, unaware of time or space, hunger or fatigue. Like Shariati, he loved to provoke, to contradict himself and say things he didn’t believe; but more than Shariati, from the depths of a boundless intellectual arrogance, Fardid styled himself the wise fool, prone to mischief, sarcasm, and feigned ingenuousness. He delighted in insulting people of influence but extended himself generously to freshman students who had nothing to offer him. Although many Iranian intellectuals would claim him for their mentor, Fardid distanced himself from all of them. When a young writer dedicated an essay in a newspaper to Fardid, claiming the old man had taught him all he knew, Fardid remarked, “
Every spring I buy grass seed from the store across the street and cast it in my lawn, but what grows there is just quaint and curious weeds and not what I have put in the ground. The same is true of those who claim my legacy or oppose it. They bear no resemblance to what I have sown.”

At the behest of a mutual friend, Soroush paid a brief visit to Fardid shortly after the revolution. The encounter was pleasant enough, but afterward, according to Soroush, Fardid spread the rumor that Soroush was a social democrat, which at the time was a term of abuse in Iran. It would
turn out to be the least of the epithets the two men slung at each other for the remainder of Fardid’s life. Soroush’s embrace of Western science and analytic philosophy was a direct challenge to Fardid’s demonic view of the West. It was a challenge to the spirit of the revolution, too, to the extent that spirit was defined by nativism. And so the two philosophers and their allies believed they were struggling over the very soul of the revolutionary state.

According to Soroush, Fardid became an unapologetic proponent of the use of violence against all he saw as enemies of the state, of Islam, of the rising East. As Soroush put it, Fardid taught that
everything said outside Iran about justice, human rights, democracy, tolerance, and freedom was a lie, and all the world’s cultural and political organizations were conspirators. Therefore Iranians shouldn’t concern themselves with these pretty words and should instead advance their aims with violence. Even Fardid’s former student describes some of his postrevolutionary lectures, collected in a book called
Premonitions from the End of Times
, as nightmarish and rambling.

Just as, in the West, a debate has long raged over whether Heidegger’s active membership in the Nazi Party was the inevitable consequence of his philosophical views, Fardid’s postrevolutionary embrace of extreme Islamic fundamentalism has raised similar questions in Iran. Soroush never endorsed the efforts of Heideggerians, Eastern or Western, to dissociate their hero from Nazism, and he believed that Fardid’s philosophy, too, was fascistic at its core. He would tell an interviewer of Fardid and his circle: “
If these people attack liberalism, it’s from the position of fascism, not Islam or socialism or anything else. . . . In other words, it’s the negative and reviled part of Heidegger’s philosophy that has become the lot of us Iranians.”

Fardid and his circle took a correspondingly dark view of Popper and Soroush.
In his lectures in the 1980s, Fardid argued that Popper propagated a degenerately permissive liberalism; he was an enemy of Islam and a purveyor of ignorance. In 1984, Fardid attacked both Soroush and Popper, writing: “
What is this rubbish they advocate as philosophy, these are insults to the history of humanity. . . . These people are managed by the international Jewish organizations and I shall inform Imam Khomeini of their
conspiracies. . . . I, Ahmad Fardid, have a short message to Imam Khomeini: Abdolkarim Soroush will destroy this revolution.”

Fardid’s admirers took up the battle in essays they wrote for publication, with the most prominent of these being Reza Davari Ardakani’s contributions to
Kayhan-e Farhangi
. Davari, who had studied philosophy in Tehran and theology in Qom, also styled himself a Heideggerian and considered analytic philosophy “antiphilosophy” compared to the true tradition of the continent. In a 1985
Kayhan-e Farhangi
review of a Popper translation, Davari scoffed, “
Who is Popper? Our enemies abroad use him to oppose the revolution, and there are people within the ranks of the Islamic Republic who sanctify him and regard any attack on his ideas as sacrilegious.” Popper, Davari wrote, only pretended to champion freedom and knowledge, in the hope of seducing the people of the Third World into accepting their subservience. In reality,
Popper’s pseudophilosophy served the march of science and technology, and the eclipse of religion, Third World emancipation, and social justice. This critique of Popper gained currency in conservative religious circles, where the denunciation of the Viennese philosopher rose to a drumbeat in state-run newspapers and Friday prayer sermons.