Abdolkarim Soroush

Abdolkarim Soroush, born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh on December 16, 1945 in Tehran, is an Iranian Islamic scholar, Rumi expert and former philosophy professor at the University of Tehran, now a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland. A leading figure in Iran's progressive religious intellectual movement, he distinguishes between religion itself and human understanding of religion, developing a theory of the theoretical contraction and expansion of religious knowledge that draws on Kantian philosophy to argue that while divine revelation is unchanging, human interpretation of it evolves and remains fallible and progressive; he has also argued for a religious democracy that integrates religious values with democratic frameworks, human rights and justice. He was named one of Time magazine's one hundred most influential people in 2005 and ranked seventh in Prospect magazine's one hundred public intellectuals in 2008.