Soroush, Abdulkarim (b. 1945)

Religious Experience

Soroush believes that the religious experience, in general, and the Prophet's religious experience or wahy (i.e., relevation), in particular, lie at the heart of the religion. In his book The Expansion of Prophetic Experience, he argues that the Prophet's religious experience is affected by his character and life at several different levels. For example, the duration of the Prophet's experiences, and thus the length of verses revealed to him, depends on the spiritual capacity of the Prophet. Verses revealed to the Prophet at the beginning of his prophecy, when he was not familiar enough with, and was even scared by, the wahy, are shorter than the verses revealed later. The content of the prophetic experience, Soroush argues, is also influenced by the character of the Prophet. Moreover, the content of wahy changes in accordance with the events of the life of the Prophet.

The Qur'an

The theory of “essential and accidental in the religion” is developed by Soroush to demonstrate the human side of the Qur'an, which is the verbalized form of the Prophet's experience. According to Soroush, the Qur'anic message consists in essential and accidental parts. While the essential part of the Qur'an is the essence of the Qur'anic message, the accidental part is not essential to its message. The accidental part could have been otherwise without affecting the real message of the Qur'an. For example, it is not essential to the Qur'anic message that the language is Arabic. The Qur'an would be in another language were the Prophet not Arab. Not only is the language of the Qur'an Arabic, but also the culture of the Qur'an is Arabic, and so the culture of the Qur'an is accidental to the Qur'anic message.

Religious Understanding

In his book The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of Shari'a, Soroush makes a distinction between the religion of Islam itself and our understanding thereof. While the religion is complete, consistent, and timeless, our understanding of the religion is incomplete, historical, and sometimes inconsistent. All we have access to, according to Soroush, is our understanding of the religion, which is human and subject to errors.

Recognizing the local and historical elements in Islam, Soroush seeks to show that the global [Page 1198]message of the religion is consistent with human rights and our modern global values.

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