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Thinkers

Abdolkarim Soroush

Islamic · Middle East · born 1945

Iranian thinker who holds that religious texts are read by fallible people, so understanding of religion changes like all knowledge.

What it is

Abdolkarim Soroush (born 1945) is an Iranian philosopher of religion. He was born in Tehran, studied pharmacy and then the philosophy of science in London, and returned to Iran at the time of the revolution. He is best known for separating religion itself from our understanding of it.

In the 1990s he became a leading voice for a reformist kind of Islam in Iran, and he played an important part in the reform movement of that decade. He trained in both secular and religious subjects, and his work draws on Western and Islamic thought alike.

The main ideas

  • Religion and religious knowledge are not the same. Religion, he says, is to be distinguished from religious knowledge, which is not itself divine. What people know about it is a human thing: limited, open to error, and shaped by their time and by the other fields of knowledge around them.
  • Contraction and expansion. He calls his theory the contraction and expansion of religious knowledge, because understanding of religion grows and shrinks as other knowledge does.
  • Prophetic experience. A second line of work, the expansion of prophetic experience, concerns how the experience of the prophet and the sacred text are understood and read.
  • Pluralism. He wrote on religious pluralism and drew on the poet Rumi, whom he is known for studying, in making his case for it.
  • Reason, liberty and democracy. His political thought sets great weight on reason and freedom and favours a democratic order.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine two people reading the same sacred passage and coming to different conclusions. Soroush would ask each of them to separate what the text says from what they, as people of a certain time and with certain learning, are able to understand of it, and to hold their reading with humility. This is an illustration of his way of thinking, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The theory of contraction and expansion of religious knowledge, his best-known idea.
  • Expansion of prophetic experience, a book that takes up the second line of work above.
  • The revolution. He returned to Iran at the time of the revolution, after his studies in London.

Questions and criticism

  • Where does the line fall? If religion and our understanding of it are kept apart, it is fair to ask how anyone can reach religion itself without going through understanding.
  • Who decides? If every reading is fallible, it is fair to ask what authority religious teachers or clerics can then have.
  • Freedom and faith. His proposals sit uneasily with those who hold that religious law has a fixed meaning, and the disagreement is part of the public debate in Iran.

Close neighbours

The page on Rumi shows the poet he studies. The pages on Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur show thinkers who also asked how interpretation shapes what a text means.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Karl Popper · He took up Popper's view that all knowledge is open to correction, and applied it to religious thought.

Other Islamic thinkers

Sources we used

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