Abstract
This essay critically examines ʿAbd al-Karīm Surūsh’s approach to religious knowledge, Islamic jurisprudence, and ijtihād within the intellectual conditions of modernity. It first analyzes Surūsh’s theory of the contraction and expansion of religious knowledge, according to which religion remains transcendent and immutable while human interpretations of it are historically conditioned, fallible, and continuously evolving. Particular attention is given to his distinction between dīn and fiqh, his critique of taqlīd, and his attempt to reconcile Islamic thought with modern science, liberal democracy, human rights, and religious pluralism. While acknowledging the reformative importance of Surūsh’s hermeneutical project, the essay argues that his account does not provide a sufficiently rigorous criterion for adjudicating among competing interpretations. His emphasis on historical contingency and interpretive plurality therefore risks collapsing disciplined ijtihād into epistemological relativism. Drawing on Bernard Lonergan’s theory of cognitional structure and objectivity, the essay proposes that historically situated interpreters can nevertheless attain objectively valid judgments through the recurrent operations of experience, understanding, critical reflection, judgment, and responsible evaluation. It further challenges Surūsh’s separation of fiqh from religious faith by emphasizing the historically integrated ethical, spiritual, and juridical character of the Islamic tradition. The essay concludes that an adequate contemporary theory of ijtihād must affirm both the historicity of interpretation and the possibility of rationally verified religious truth.
Keywords
ʿAbd al-Karīm Surūsh, ijtihād, Islamic jurisprudence, religious epistemology, hermeneutics, religious modernism, Bernard Lonergan, objectivity, relativism, fiqh and dīn.
It must be admitted that the West has reached a level of scientific mastery and outstanding specialization. In its points of reference, this evolution commands admiration, and all civilizations must benefit from the dynamic of this rationality, as they can derive lessons from the progress achieved. “Benefiting” and “deriving lessons” do not, nevertheless, mean submission.
– Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam
The desire to demonstrate Islam’s compatibility with – if not superiority to – modernity has animated the works of many of the most influential Islamic thinkers of the past century. From Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (d. 1897) to ʿAlī Sharīʿatī (d. 1977), Islamic intellectuals sought to reimagine the role and relevance of Islam in a world increasingly dominated by Western political, military, and technological power.
In this regard, ‘Abd al-Karīm Surūsh, an Iranian thinker and reformist, readily stands out. Deemed as one of the major intellectuals of the present-day Islamic world, he espouses an approach to the relationship between religious tradition and modernity that sets him both within and apart from Islamic revivalism. That is to say, notwithstanding his central activities during the 1980s as one of intellectual leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Surūsh became one of the most outspoken critics of the Islamist political regime of this country. He penned several important books as to how modern-day individuals can interpret religion in general and Islam in particular. He emphasizes the necessity of pluralism and religious tolerance both for Iran and for the Islamic world; it is not for nothing that he is called “Iran’s democratic voice.”[1] In 2004, Surūsh received the Erasmus Prize of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation; a year later, The Time Magazine selected him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.[2] As Oliver Roy maintains, Surūsh’s ideas may well furnish political reformism in Iran with a religio-political philosophy able to combine religion with modern liberal democracy, as Surūsh “provides the ‘political philosophy’ of the Khatamists: how to secularize politics in a society which cannot afford to reject its heritage and origin: an Islamic Revolution.”[3] This paper will critically review some of the innovative ways in which Surūsh’s works deal with the notion of fiqh (Islamic Law) and the issue of the latter’s compatibility with modernity. I will do this by exploring his epistemology,analyzing his approach to jurisprudence (fiqh), and then providing my critical appraisal of both.
Surūsh’s Epistemology
Surūsh gave the generic name Qabḍ wa Basṭ-i Ti’ūrīk-i Sharī‘at (The Hermeneutical Contraction and Expansion of the Theory of Sharī‘ah) to his most famous series of articles that he penned in the late 1990s. In it, he speaks about the variability of religious knowledge as reflected in the very title of the work: qabḍ and basṭ are two Sufi terms connoting the contraction and expansion of the mystic’s heart, which, for Surūsh, symbolizes the ways in which the epistemic openness of the Islamic thought has altered throughout the centuries. He thinks that insofar as we, humans, are historical beings, religion, too, must be properly historicized and understood in its evolutionary context.[4] That is, if, in the end of the day, it is an interpreter’s intellect that informs the way religious texts are made use of, his or her preconceived, theory-laden ideas will dominate the process. One’s intellect simply cannot be “free of ideas” (zihn-i khāli) in the Lockean sense of tabula rasa or in the way the objectivist Cartesian outlook once imagined it.[5] In fact, the very existence of different, if not mutually exclusive, exegeses of one and the same Qurʾānic text, Surūsh thinks, proves the reality of any interpreters’ interpretation being always subjugated to their intentions, subjective opinions, and enthusiasm.[6]
The concept of “hermeneutical contraction and expansion” helps explain the mechanism behind the adoption of Greek thought by traditional Islamic scholars. It contends that, right from its dawn, Islamic thought has adopted a conceptual framework that was at odds with its own gist and became a “Trojan horse within the fortress of religion.”[7] That is to say, Aristotelian scholasticism with its formal dialectical logics has “ossified” and even “paralyzed” the free movement of Islamic conceptual thinking, casting it into immutable and abstract molds. For Surūsh, modern philosophies are much closer to the gist of religion and are more helpful in integrating philosophy into religion. Therefore, it is only when the formal fauq-i barrisī (categorical) topics are set aside and when it is recognized that Islam does not stipulate the existence of an incontestable human interpretive authority in matters of legal rulings that there transpires Islam’s compatibility with the liberal notion of natural rights (life, liberty, property, etc.).[8]
For Surūsh, the ethical norms and intellectual responsibilities of a believer who approaches religion with critical inquiry (muhaqqiqanah) are, in a sense, fundamentally different from those of a believer who follows religion through imitation and conformity (muqallidanah).[9] Furthermore, Hallaq endorses Surush’s opinion that the method of tahqiq is a quality of both Sufi and (Western) philosophical investigation.[10] In his view, Islamic religious reformers strove to bridge the gap between the sacred and the profane, to distinguish between what is unchanging and what is adaptable, between outward form and inner substance, so as to breathe new life into Islamic jurisprudence, transform the outer expressions of religion while safeguarding its essence, and build a contemporary Islamic theology. Yet these efforts have lacked a foundational nazariyah-yi ma‘rifat-shinakhti (epistemological framework), one that can draw a clear conceptual separation between religion itself and human interpretations or expressions of religious knowledge.[11] According to Surūsh’s epistemological framework, religious knowledge is fundamentally no different from other fields of knowledge. The propositions that one accepts through faith do not possess an essential distinction from other forms of human thought in the sense that the answers that religion offers to the believer’s questions remain within the realm of hypotheses – they can be tested, debated, accepted, or dismissed – and they are always subject to the ongoing process of expansion and contraction within religious understanding. Simply put, the believer must strive to keep their faith vibrant and conscious, never abandoning the pursuit of alternative perspectives. At the same time, he or she is encouraged to regard any purely “legalistic” and “exoteric” discourse on jurisprudence as it relates to the public and communal dimension of religion as futile insofar as they fail to penetrate to the deeper, personal sphere of individual faith.
In this sense, Surūsh’s position exhibits a notable affinity with the classical Sufi critique of blind imitation (taqlīd), according to which genuine knowledge of reality is not attained through uncritical adherence to inherited authority but through “personal investigation” (Ar. taḥqīq; Tr. tahkik). As William Chittick explains, taḥqīq denotes the effort “to search out reality,” “to realize the truth,” or “to discover the truth” concerning one’s relation to the Creator and creation.[12] It refers to “what we know in ourselves and by ourselves,” in contrast to what is merely received from external authorities—whether scripture, prophets, saints, philosophers, jurists, or scientists – which, in this framework, remains “transmitted,” “imitative,” and, ultimately, a form of “hearsay.”[13]
As Jahanbakhsh points out, for Surūsh, however, this renewed notion of taḥqīq denotes the realization that, since the circumstances of human life are always in flux, humans understanding of their religions is in flux as well, depending on one’s historical epoch and the relevant degree of sciences’ development.[14] Here one can see modern philosophy of science’s (e.g., Thomas Kuhn or Imre Lakatos) direct influence upon Surūsh, as, according to it, all human knowledge is always value-based and shaped by the cultural “landscape” of the pertinent time and place.[15] Surūsh advances a bold hermeneutical thesis: the distinction between what is permanent and what is alterable in Islam is not simply given in the text or in reality itself, but rather emerges through acts of interpretation. In this sense, he seeks to dislodge the widespread assumption that, in both doctrinal and legal domains, the boundaries between “essential and non-essential,” “ambiguous and unambiguous,” and “literal and metaphorical” are self-evident, immediately available, fixed, and immune from historical contestation or the inevitably subjective – yet nonetheless real – influence of the interpreter. For Surūsh, religious knowledge is not a passive encounter with a ready-made reality; rather, it is a structured and historically situated process in which data are first received as part of a tradition and then understood – indeed, interpreted – through the consciousness of a concrete subject embedded within specific historical horizons, shaped by context and established schools of interpretation. Rather, the real is that which is intelligently grasped through the self-transcending operations of personal inquiry and thus comes to be known only as mediated through the interiority of a historically conditioned knower:
It is through interpretation that one creates the changeable and the unchangeable. The entire history of fiqh and Qurʾānic interpretation demonstrates this fact: there has never been a fixed set of changeables and unchangeables, nor a fixed set of muḥkamāt and mutashābihāt. The principle that I have adopted as the central thesis of my approach to Islamic and Qurʾānic interpretation – and which I have elaborated extensively in my writings – can be summarized in a very simple sentence: Islam is nothing but a series of interpretations of Islam. Likewise, Christianity is nothing but a series of interpretations of Christianity, and so on. For the same reason and by the same token, there are muḥkamāt and mutashābihāt in the Bible, and even in the works of Rumi, the mystical poet. After all, these are texts, and texts require interpretation. The very act of interpretation produces muḥkamāt and mutashābihāt, as well as literal and metaphorical readings. The nature of interpretation is that it is ongoing and constantly changing. It cannot be arrested. It is not subject to the authority of any particular institution or body.[16]
Nevertheless, Surūsh does not engage in a full-scale methodological critique of religious tradition. Rather, he draws upon the established sharīʿah framework as a foundation from which to expand through ijtihād (independent legal reasoning), even though he does not always clearly distinguish ijtihād from interpretation in the broader, hermeneutical sense. In other words, while Surūsh seeks to initiate critical reflection on epistemology, interpretation, and historicity – domains often shaped by poststructuralist thought – he consciously situates his project within the Islamic tradition rather than rejecting it outright. It is only when it comes to his broader intellectual aims that he appears to substitute for traditional epistemic models and the classical ethic-juristic synthesis a post-positivist, poststructuralist reconfiguration informed by contemporary scientific disciplines.[17]
Accordingly, Surūsh maintains that the disparity between the way reality is apprehended through science and the way it is accessed through faith reveals a fundamental asymmetry: the two forms of knowledge differ significantly in both scope and epistemological authority. In Surūsh’s view, religion offers only a limited measure of rational content and, as such, cannot legitimately lay claim to objective truth in the strict sense upheld by the scientific method. It is science, he argues, that embodies the pinnacle of human rational inquiry.[18]
At the same time, Surūsh does admit that there are several articles of the Islamic faith that cannot change at all, constituting thereby the “essential” parts (zātī) of religion: the imamate (imāmah), the prophethood of Muḥammad (nubuwwah), the divine justice (‘adl), the divine unicity (tawḥīd) and resurrection (ma‘ād). Forfeiting his usual stance on the centrality of Western social sciences and “rational” philosophy as it comes to the question of truth, he asserts that the truth-status of these articles is outside the vicissitudes of time and place.[19] Everything else however – including Islamic legal theory (uṣūl) – is non-essential (araḍī) and, should the need arise, to be modified.[20]
As for ijtihad, it means, for the Iranian thinker, “reconstructing,” “recompensing,” and “reconceptualizing” things. On the one hand, it helps to rediscover the neglected aspects of tradition; on the other hand, it transforms parts of the geometry of tradition’s conceptual clusters to derive new interpretations from old data.[21] He sees, however, that the present-day Islamic scholars are slow to remove the “dustiness” of the prerequisites of the pre-modern ijtihād and realize that their interpretation is overshadowed by their own hermeneutical presumptions. What they must do is to own up, in keeping with the Popperian approach, that “nothing in our mind exist which has not entered through sensory perceptions.”[22] This necessity of distancing oneself from the received wisdom of traditional approaches means that one’s ijtihād demands today more significant efforts than it did in the pre-modern times, for it is the clear-cut categories and the essential touchstones of traditional ijtihād that are to be radically transformed – as he emphatically puts it, “Ijtihād [today] is itself dependent on ijtihād.”[23] Ideally, ijtihād changes the body of sharī‘ah while retaining the gist of religion. It attends to customs and traditions of different cultures and retains the objectives of religion as far as the spirit of the latter – as opposed to its literal sense – is concerned.[24] Thus, if today one witnesses the decline of the legitimacy of the meta-narrative of traditional Islamic law, one is strongly advised by Surūsh to abandon the absolute standards and the universal categories of the traditional epistemic schemes in favor of radically historicized and aptly contextualized types of scientific queries. That is to say, one is to separate the substance of religion (its zātī parts), epitomized for Surūsh in universal human rights, from religion’s accidentals (its araḍī parts); it is this separation that lies at the very heart of Surūsh’s ijtihādī endeavor – be it at the cost of religion being eventually relegated to the private sphere.[25]
Fiqh and Dīn – A Binary Opposition?
One of the most important distinctions that Surūsh draws is that between fiqh as religious knowledge and dīn (religion itself). In his understanding, dīn is tantamount to religious faith – an inner state that is transcendent in origin and therefore complete; it cannot change. What does change, however, is human understanding of dīn, that is, fiqh or religious knowledge, which expands or contracts in response to historical, cultural, and intellectual conditions. Hence, in the modern world, dīn is no longer manifested as an all-encompassing framework for life but as one sphere of meaning among others within a plural and evolving human context.[26]
Fiqh as law indeed constitutes a part of dīn. It remains, nonetheless, forever accidental to it – belonging to the sphere of practice and human activity, which is by nature fallible. Moreover, outward law would be unnecessary if every individual in a given society were able to live in accordance with their innate (fiṭrī) love of justice: “If people act with justice in this world, disputes will cease to exist, and jurisprudence as well as jurists will go bankrupt.”[27] That is to say, insofar as modern humans are in the process of becoming culturally “mature” and increasingly free from traditional obligations, they are capable of sustaining socio-ethical justice without recourse to sacred law. For Surūsh, it is Islam as eternal dīn – not its legal system – that remains in harmony with all forms of society across the centuries: “Religion [as religious faith] does not change because a set of legal norms changes.”[28] As long as there remains even a single soul that regards dīn as the source of both theory and practice, religious tradition will continue to exist. Fiqh, however, in Surūsh’s view, consists of a body of rules or legal codes that are purely of human origin – imposed by controlling human authorities such as the state. In this sense, Surūsh conceives of fiqh in terms analogous to legal positivism: it is what it is by virtue of its form, not by reference to any agent or principle higher than itself, such as dīn or morality. In other words, fiqh derives its validity from procedural authority rather than from any transcendent or moral foundation.[29]
As Amirpur indicated accordingly, Surūsh regards the content of Qurʾānic revelation as fundamentally ethical rather than legal. In his view, it is ethics – not jurisprudence – that constitutes the universal element common to all religions. He describes ethics as the “final aim of religion” (amr-i dīn) and perceives no contradiction between religious ethics and a broadly conceived humanistic philanthropy.[30] Thus, he maintains that the essence of dīn does not consist merely in social-contract-based “institutional facts.” Rather, to act rightly, one must be convinced not merely of the validity of certain performative norms, but of the intrinsic moral value of adhering to them. Surūsh hence bemoans the lack of a self-contained, independent ethics in Islam and the fact that, historically, Muslims deemed ethics as no more than a branch of practical philosophy.[31]
Instead of deriving any “Qurʾānic” ethics, however, Surūsh conceives of ethics as a human construct. That is, for him, there are no transcendent or absolute moral values beyond historically conditioned moral systems; morality is nothing more than an anthropocentric and subjective order that individuals themselves shape and redefine. No ethical system, therefore, derives from eternally valid standards; it is always a matter of relative convenience for the individual(s) who enact it.[32] Moreover, any “eternally valid” standards of morality are, for him, a way to totalitarianism:
By ‘existing morality’ I mean our familiar exception-bound moral rules. Following these rules is the best guarantee of justice and desired moderation in society… The most important thing is to acknowledge that both natural (subordinate) morality and the eternal (detached) morality are incapable of judging a political regime. The former permissively blends morality and society, and the latter, with its metaphysical moral universalism, adjusts to all social and moral realities, for it endorses any possible social morality and rejects none. It presents such an angelic, abstract, and featureless image of justice, moderation and wisdom that it seems capable of being incarnated in the body of any beast.[33]
Hence, for Surūsh, ethics is not a precise or axiomatic science; it is always unique in the sense that it carries its own “indeterminacy” theorem. There is no religious tradition without an inherent moral system, but there can be morality without religious tradition. It cannot be denied that the deontological position of the Muʿtazilah – namely, that human intellect determines one’s obligations and rights – serves as a source of inspiration for him. However, Surūsh’s approach nonetheless departs from pure rationalism: he maintains that human reason will never be capable of formulating natural and objective categories from which one could derive an “ought” (axiological necessity) from an “is” (ontological reality).[34] For Surūsh, morality always transcends law. Hence Surūsh – perhaps unwillingly and yet effectively – reproduces an “Orientalized” conception of religious tradition as confined to the private sphere, while what counts as “law” becomes the prerogative of a hegemonic state that dominates the public sphere.[35]
Analysis
As a matter of fact, Surūsh adopts a distinctly mystical, or somewhat “Sufi,” approach, maintaining that no one can know the ultimate reality of things. That is, all human beings inevitably fall short of grasping the bāṭin (inward) dimension of things, which is known only to God. The latter fact means that legalistic Islam (islām-i fiqahātī) can hardly be contrasted with the modern statutory law, one’s rational arguments being in no wise able to verify whether the modern social jurisdictions are inferior or superior vis-à-vis the fiqhī jurisdictions.[36] In a radically skeptical vein, Surūsh says that no deductive or inductive methods of rational thinking can ever settle the issue of epistemic conjecture. Even if Popperian falsifiability is rather optimistic with regard to one’s ability to say anything meaningful at all, its purpose is only to test the refutability of theories, not to arrive at any ultimate decisions. In this regard, what the falsifiability would yield would be the plurality of exegetic variations.[37] Surūsh seems to fail to see that this plurality, however, comes forth because of relativization of knowledge, which leads the way to skepticism. Ever-altering hermeneutical interpretations, if uncontrolled by any higher viewpoint or more comprehensive perspective, yield uncertainty, nay, the Feyerabendian “anarchy” wherein “everything goes.”
Surūsh, however, does not show how one should adjudicate among these ever-changing interpretations. The problem is that taḥqīq cannot mean mere awareness of plurality or be simply interpretive participation; it is also verification, the movement from possible meaning to critically grounded affirmation. In other words, it is not enough to note that different scholars classify matters differently. Surūsh remains largely at the level of historical and sociological description: he shows that different jurists disagreed, that traditions evolved, and that consensus often emerged only over time and does not adequately theorize the inner normativity of inquiry itself. As a result, he weakens the difference between disciplined ijtihād and mere interpretive proliferation, providing no sufficiently rigorous epistemology of verification capable of distinguishing between interpretive fluidity and the disciplined judgment that one’s interpretation – whether one’s own, another’s, or that of one’s tradition – is factually correct. This is where his approach risks sliding from intelligent and reasonable hermeneutics into relativization. He repeatedly emphasizes that distinctions emerge in interpretation, that orthodoxy is historically formed, and that there is no fixed set of chargeables and unchangeables apart from interpretive activity. These statements are true only to a point, and if one presses them without developing a corresponding account of normative judgment, the result is that taḥqīq, instead of denoting a disciplined verification of truth and careful marshaling of evidence, comes to signify only a recognition that all claims are interpretively mediated. One can and, indeed does, ask: on what basis is one interpretation more attentive, more intelligent, more reasonable, and more responsible than another? The Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan (d. 1984), argues, based on his original reinterpretation of Thomistic thought, that such a basis might be the light of one’s intelligence, one that is created and contingent and yet participating in the eternal and uncreated light of God.
That is, for Lonergan, one’s acts of experiencing, understanding, judging, and valuing constitute the invariant and recurrent set of basic operations of one’s intentional consciousness, grounding a theory of objectivity in such a compelling manner that any denial thereof implicates the denier in performative self-contradiction. That is, for Lonergan, the innumerable instances of human experience, insight, judgment, and value-formation – albeit constantly informed by the overlapping orientations of one’s consciousness toward mystical, biological, aesthetic, purely intellectual, or practical goals – are but successive moments of a single dynamism of humanity’s inherent desire to understand, know, and take an existential stance toward the totality of being. Propelled by this unrestricted wonder about everything, one first experiences, or encounters, the data of the empirical world and of his or her consciousness as a given, then understands it (by asking, implicitly or explicitly, “What is it?”), then affirms the correctness of that understanding on the basis of sufficient evidence (by asking, implicitly or explicitly, “Is it really so?”), and, finally, assumes a responsible existential stance toward the resulting reality (by asking, implicitly or explicitly, “Is it worthwhile?”).[38] Any attempt to deny this recurrent structure of conscious intentionality results in performative self-contradiction, for the denier must first read these lines, understand their meaning, judge whether they refer to reality, and then evaluate them – however negatively – through the very structure being denied.[39]
Now, the objectivity attained in this manner cannot itself be reduced to historical or spatiotemporal relativity: although acts of inquiry and verification occur within the conscious intentionality of a concrete, historical knower, the simple “yes” or “no” of her judgment prescinds from any contingent conditions. In other words, once the sufficiency of evidence is grasped through one’s critical reflection, the ensuant judgment that something is indeed the case is no longer relative to the place, time, or psychological state of either the knowing subject who utters it or the object under scrutiny. Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon occurred at a particular moment in history, yet if it is factually true that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, then no future reinterpretation, historical displacement, or cultural framework can render the opposite statement true. In this sense, even one’s judging that “all truth is historically conditioned” implicitly presents itself as trans-historical in validity. This inherently unrestricted, upwardly oriented dynamism of human mind to understand, truly know, and then existentially internalize things and events points beyond merely sociological or hermeneutical flux toward a reality that can be not only experienced or interpreted, but also be known as an objective truth and an objective value.[40]
In other words, the human intellect does not merely inquire into the “whatness” of certain things or events to understand, explain, interpret, or categorize them; it also asks whether such understanding or explanation is in fact correct, or at least approximately so. In other words, beyond interpretation or explanation, the knowing subject raises a further, verificatory question: “Is it really so?” Rather than grasping the correctness of an interpretation in the very act of interpreting – e.g., simply because a statement appears “compelling” on some vague, “intuitive” grounds or because it is authoritative – the mind naturally proceeds to evaluate the sufficiency of evidence to render a judgment in the form of an unequivocal “yes” or “no.” It is precisely within this interior movement – from understanding to critical verification – that the mind attains objective reality, affirming being as what is in fact so.[41] The resultant metaphysics of true being as whatever is intelligently grasped, reasonably affirmed, and responsibly committed to, may both ground traditional doctrinal and ethical categories and safeguard them from the imminent threat of relativism – the one to which Surūsh’s project inevitably leads once brought to its logical conclusion. The fact that human beings, under different historical circumstances, interpret the same or similar data in divergent ways does not entail that no intelligibles can be objectively true, nor that truth itself is confined within historical contexts. To infer such a conclusion would be to move from the variability of interpretation to the relativity of truth. On this showing, all the authentic knower needs to do in order to overcome relativism is to deploy Bernard Lonergan’s theory of objectivity and demonstrate that the foundational truths of Islam are grounded in sufficient evidence – an imperative that the Qurʾān itself both enjoins and abundantly provides for: “Produce your proof, if you are truthful” (Q 2:111) or “Those who dispute concerning the signs of God without any proof having come to them – greatly hateful is this in the sight of God and in the sight of those who believe” (Q 40:35).
Ironically, Surūsh’s own discourse does not present itself merely as another historically conditioned subjective interpretation; rather, it implicitly claims a privileged explanatory adequacy. For instance, he boldly states that Islam is nothing but a “series of interpretations of Islam,” just as Christianity, too, is nothing but a “series of interpretations of Christianity.”[42] Explicitly or not, it appeals to standards of correctness that transcend the very interpretive relativism he himself emphasizes, thereby succumbing to a form of performative self-contradiction. In other words, what his account appears to lack is a recognition that the interpreting subject can attain correct – or at least approximately correct – interpretation.
It must be conceded, of course, that there are no interpretations without interpreters; in this sense, the immanent source of meaning is indeed the interpreter’s mind itself. The Qurʾān itself situates verified meaning and objective value within the interiority of the knowing subject, describing the resultant knowledge as “clear signs in the breasts of those who have been given knowledge” (Q 29:49). In this sense, meaning is not merely “external” or “self-evident” to the subject but is realized in one’s reflective grasp, and existential appropriation, of what is truly the case. While this apprehension of reality and true value remains inseparable from the operations of the interpreting subject, it is not reducible to subjectivity, either. Rather, the interpreter transcend relativity to any audience by recognizing that meaning is not only encountered and intelligently understood but also reasonably affirmed as factually correct and objectively good. Far from “reading” her own ideas and assumptions into the sacred text or allowing it to “speak for itself” – whatever that procedure may mean – one’s reasonable interpretation proceeds through careful investigation of the sources and their relevant contexts, the limits of linguistic expression, the available channels of communication, and the scope of her own understanding of the evidence. The decisive question is hence no longer, “How many endorse a claim?” or “How authoritative is the one who asserts it?” but simply, “What does the evidence show?”[43]
Furthermore, Surūsh seems to lead the reader to infer an insuperable chasm between fiqh and matters of faith – an inference that is factually incorrect. As Wael al-Hallaq, a professor of Islamic Law at Columbia University, observes, “The entire range of the Islamic tradition, past and present, Sunnite and Shi‘ite, never separated the two.”[44] That is to say, for Hallaq, fiqh is grounded in faith, and faith constitutes the moral praxis; this moral praxis, in turn, nurtures and reinforces faith within the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of one’s life. Although some friction occasionally arose between the two due to disagreements among their respective representatives, their overarching theoretical framework has always remained the same: a shared focus on the existence of God and on the necessity of performing good deeds and maintaining virtuous conduct. The apparent disagreements between Sufis and jurists were not rooted in any real contradiction but stemmed from their emphasis on different aspects of religion. Jurists prioritized external rules of worship and daily conduct, whereas Sufis emphasized inner spiritual growth and self-purification. Despite its focus on the inner, spiritual dimension of faith, the classical Sufi tradition was – and remains – firmly rooted in the Qurʾān, the prophetic tradition, and the legal reasoning (ijtihād) of the early scholars, emphasizing knowledge of God, sincerity, certainty, and other core virtues. In this regard, as the contemporary Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen puts it, the two dimensions are like “two schools of a university” that complement and complete each other.[45] Surūsh, however, fails to acknowledge this integrative perspective.
Moreover, as Jahanbakhsh points out, Surūsh thinks that, due to the fiqh being based on taqlīd (uncritical imitation), Islamic jurisprudence is virtually irrational and, as a system, closed to one’s free intellectual query, for it presupposes that its rulings be accepted by the individual layman without questioning.[46] Being a non-jurist, Surūsh mistakes taqlīd as an antipode of any intellectual activity, something “bereft of jural practice and devoid of commanding ontology.”[47] Yet, according to Hallaq, in this point, Surūsh fails to consider that predictability and conformity to normative jural values is quite normal for every human society: taqlīd (uncritical imitation) as a specific jural practice – as opposed to taqlīd as an abstract concept – is something without which “law, any law, ceases to count as law.”[48] That is, to say, taqlīd can function as the fundamental requirement ensuring continuity in legal and judicial practice, predictability in rulings, and conformity with normative juridical principles. Instead, according to Hallaq, Surūsh approaches the Islamic legal sciences as a “constrained philologist,” which brings in a measure of unclarity when he directs his critique simultaneously at purely legal and purely theological categories.[49]
While modern science is, by its very nature, selective (guzīnishī) and confined to the particular – thus incapable of resolving or refuting comprehensive metaphysical questions – Surūsh nevertheless regards it as generating new questions and conceptual frameworks that invite fresh answers. Yet he does not treat the nature of religious faith as a central concern within this renewed epistemology of religion. He offers no criterion of verifiability for questions such as whether theological propositions grounded in religious experience are verifiable or illusory, nor does he clarify how scientific verification relates to Popperian falsification in this regard.
Conclusion
Surūsh is no radical modernist, for he recognizes that the depth of human existence remains impenetrable to law, whether modern or premodern – depth belonging rather to the domains of mysticism and ethics. His thought emerges from the complex political and intellectual circumstances of his native country. Surūsh’s critique of traditional fiqh must therefore be understood within this context, where the dominant religious ideology has effectively transformed into an oppressive governmental apparatus that labels any individual or group differing from it as religiously “misguided” (ḍall). In contrast, Surūsh maintains that fiqh should be a tafaqquh (understanding) rather than a merely conventional exercise in defining what is ḥarām (prohibited) and ḥalāl (permitted); for him, an expansive hermeneutical openness to gradual improvement in all domains of life and knowledge is essential. In his view, any legal system – however sanctified it may appear in the eyes of its adherents – is ultimately “just” a legal code and part of the historical process of interpretation. Surūsh’s project envisions a religious democratic state in which individuals freely choose to follow what they consider a “sacred” law yet do so within an intellectual framework shaped by the questions and insights of the modern sciences (anthropology, sociology, natural science, and so forth). As Surūsh himself remarks (as quoted by Jahanbakhsh), “The mere fact that someone makes religion incumbent upon himself in a rational way is compatible with liberalism, since liberalism believes in freedom, conscience and individual choice.”[50]
One still wonders, however, whether Surūsh realizes that his hermeneutics effectively removes the principal feature of traditional Islamic law that distinguishes it from modern Western law – namely, the expectation among its adherents that both the formulation and the outcome of the law should manifest the divine command. In other words, what remains of the sacred component of Islamic law if neither the divine will nor the religious sensibilities of believers are taken seriously? Indeed, if modern philosophical anthropology and sociology serve as the touchstones for corroborating religious cosmologies and for guiding the search for a religiosity attentive to human needs, then how exactly does God remain operative in Surūsh’s Islamic philosophy, given that neither anthropology nor sociology proceeds from a spiritual framework? Surūsh does not clarify what he proposes as a substitute for the traditional sharīʿah in faith-based societies, nor how, and by whom, the proposed model of ijtihād is to be carried out. He appears content to offer only broad theoretical frameworks within which to approach this problem, without proposing any precise model of legal methodology through which modern or postmodern Muslims might “construct” their law. In other words, Surūsh aims at substituting the principles of post-positivistic differentiation and post-structuralist extension for the traditional epistemic vision and the customary ethical-juristic synthesis. As we saw, his occasional engagement with poststructuralism results in humanizing and historicizing take on Islamic mysticism, philosophy, theology and law. Religion becomes something that is grounded in the notion of justice formed and informed by the humanistic ideals of Enlightenment. The Iranian thinker thereby proffers what one might deem a theoretically alienating discourse, one that reduces Islam to the precincts of Western cognitive patterns. Surūsh has no independent method for such evaluation and choice outside the modern and post-modern traditions of Western civilization itself. In other words, unlike most Islamic revivalists, Surūsh refuses to place religion above the jurisdiction of philosophy; regardless thereof, he perceives himself to be following along the intellectual and spiritual pathways of Islamic tradition. As a result, the boundary between the traditional and the modern, or even the post-modern, remains so blurry in his works that it is difficult to clarify whether Surūsh’s self-identification with Islamic tradition is more than just a subjective claim. More fundamentally, this unresolved tension in Surūsh’s project concerns the status of objective truth itself. While his hermeneutics successfully exposes the historical conditioning of legal and theological interpretation, it does not sufficiently explain how interpretive plurality can still culminate in normatively binding judgments grounded in evidence and rational verification. Without such an account, taḥqīq risks collapsing into interpretive fluidity, while religious truth becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from historically conditioned preference. Yet the very possibility of critique, reform, and rational discourse presupposes that the human intellect is capable – however fallibly and approximately – of attaining objectively valid judgments and values that transcend merely sociological or historical contingency. In this respect, it seems that, in the post-modern West, the enduring challenge for Islamic thought may not be only how to authentically reinterpret tradition, but also how to preserve the possibility of truth and objectivity within this reinterpretation – a challenge that, as we hope to have demonstrated, can be squarely met by an adequate theory of human cognition and objectivity.
[1] Heydar Shadi, “Interfaith Dialogue and Religious Tolerance in Contemporary Islamic Thought: A Comparative Study of Fethullah Gulen and Abdul Karim Soroush,” Fethullah Gulen Web Site, November 22, 2007, https://fgulen.com/en/gulen-movement/conference-papers/peaceful-coexistence/25870-interfaith-dialogue-and-religious-tolerance-in-contemporary-islamic-thought-a-comparative-study-of-fethullah-gulen-and-abdul-karim-soroush (accessed on April 11, 2020).
[2] Heydar Shadi, “Interfaith Dialogue.”
[3] Oliver Roy, “The Crisis of Religious Legitimacy in Iran,” The Middle East Journal 53, no. 2 (1996): 215. Moḥammad Khatamī (r. 1997-2005), the fifth president of Iran, strived to democratize Iranian society while simultaneously maintaining its pronouncedly Islamic self-identity.
[4] Charles D. Fletcher, “The Methodology of Abdolkarim Suroush: A Preliminary Study,” Islamic Studies 44, no. 4 (2005), 547.
[5] Abdolkarim Surūsh, Qabz va Bast-e Teʾorik-e Sharīʿat: Naẓariyye-ye Takāmol-e Maʿrefat-e Dīnī [Theory of the Expansion and Contraction of Religious Knowledge] (Tehran: Ṣirāṭ, 1994), 215, 236.
[6] Forough Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran (1953-2000) (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 148.
[7]Abdolkarim Surūsh, Mudārā va Mudīriyyat [Tolerance and Governance] (Tehran, 1997), 439.
[8]Ashk P. Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity: Legal Philosophy in Contemporary Iran (New
York & London: Routledge, 2003), 242.
[9]Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 242.
[10] Wael B. Hallaq, Sharia: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 522.
[11] Abdolkarim Surūsh, Qabz va Bast-e Teʾorik-e Sharīʿat: Naẓariyye-ye Takāmol-e Maʿrefat-e Dīnī [Theory of the Expansion and Contraction of Religious Knowledge] (Tehran: publisher unknown, 1996), 49, 51-52
[12]William Chittick, In Search of the Lost Heart: Explorations in Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2012), 108, 110.
[13]William Chittick, Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2013), 228. As Chittick puts it, “Anyone can memorize Qur’ān and Hadith, but few can truly understand
what God and the Prophet are talking about.” See Chittick, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 5.
[14] Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism, 148, 161.
[15] Fletcher, “Methodology of Abdolkarim Suroush,” 546.
[16]Abdolkarim Surūsh, “The changeable and the unchangeable,” in Kari Vogt, Lena Larsen, and Christian Moe, eds., New Directions in Islamic Thought: Exploring Reform and Muslim Tradition (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 14.
[17]Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 245.
[18]Abdolkarim Surūsh, “Baʿthat va Buḥrān-i Huviyyat” [Prophetic Mission and Identity Crisis]. Kiyān,
no. 49 (1999), 8, in Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 211. Translation Dahlen’s.
[19]Hallaq, Sharia, 520.
[20]Katajun Amirpur, “The Changing Approach to the Text: Iranian scholars and the Quran,” Middle Eastern Studies 41, no. 3 (2005), 344. For Surūsh, examples of this araḍī part of religion might be the veiling of women or the paying of blood-money.
[21] Ashk P. Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 249.
[22] Amirpur, “The Changing Approach to the Text,” 343. The famous philosopher of science Sir Karl Raimund Popper (d. 1994) thought that any culture must be open to improvement: no human knowledge can be perfect, as any valid theory humans develop is falsifiable by definition; knowledge is always “project in progress.”
[23]Surūsh, Qabd wa bast, 1996, 49, 50.
[24] Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Shari’ah Law: An Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 53.
[25] Fletcher, “Methodology of Abdolkarim Suroush,” 534.
[26]Surūsh, Qabz va Bast, 1994, 245, 447, 486–88, 505–6.
[27]Abdolkarim Surūsh, Bast-i Tajruba-yi Nabavī [Expansion of Prophetic Experience], 2nd ed. (Tehran: Ṣirāṭ, 1999), 91.
[28] Abdolkarim Surūsh, Farbih-tar az Īdiyūlūzhī [Loftier than Ideology], 4th ed. (Tehran: Ṣirāṭ, 1994), 68.
[29]Abdolkarim Surūsh, “Taḥlīl-i Mafhūm-i Ḥukūmat-i Dīnī,” Kiyān 6, no. 32 (1996): 4–6; Abdolkarim Surūsh, “Bāvar-i Dīnī, Dāvar-i Dīnī,” in Farbih-tar az Īdiyūlūzhī, 50, in Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 247. Translation Dahlen’s.
[30]Amirpur, “Changing Approach to the Text,” 344; Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism,155.
[31]Abdolkarim Surūsh, Īdiyūlūzhī-yi Shayṭānī [Satanic Ideology], 7th ed. (Tehran, 1994), 185. Also see, Abdolkarim Surūsh, Tafarruj-i Ṣunʿ: Guftārhāʾī dar Akhlāq va Ṣanʿat va ʿIlm-i Insānī [Excursion of Creation: Discourses on Morality, Technology, and the Humanities], 3rd ed. (Tehran, 1994), 5–189, in Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology and Modernity, 245. Translation Dahlen’s.
[32] Fletcher, “Methodology of Abdolkarim Suroush,” 543.
[33] Abdolkarim Surūsh, “Akhlāq-i Khudāyān: Akhlāq-i Bartar Vujūd Nadārad” [Morality of the Gods: There Exists No Higher Morality], Kiyān, no. 18 (Tehran, 1994), 29.
[34]Surūsh, “Akhlāq-i Khudāyān,” 23.
[35] Hallaq, Sharia, 521.
[36] Heydar Shadi, “Interfaith Dialogue and Religious Tolerance in Contemporary Islamic Thought: A Comparative Study of Fethullah Gulen and Abdul Karim Soroush,” Fethullah Gulen Web Site, November 22, 2007, https://fgulen.com/en/gulen-movement/conference-papers/peaceful-coexistence/25870-interfaith-dialogue-and-religious-tolerance-in-contemporary-islamic-thought-a-comparative-study-of-fethullah-gulen-and-abdul-karim-soroush (accessed on April 11, 2020).
[37]Amirpur, “Changing Approach to the Text,” 342.
[38] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, ed. Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2017), 18, 100.
[39]Lonergan, Method, 20.
[40] Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1992), 402-403, 421-422; Lonergan, Method in Theology, 37-38.
[41] Lonergan, Insight, 509-511.
[42]Surūsh, “The changeable and the unchangeable,” 14.
[43]Lonergan, Insight, 366-371, 612. Indeed, the Qurʾān repeatedly criticizes following any forefathers or
authorities “even if they understood nothing and were not guided” (e.g., Q 2:170).
[44]Hallaq, Sharia, 521.
[45] Fethullah Gulen, “The Origin of Sufism,” Fethullah Gulen’s Web-Site, September 17, 2001, https://fgulen.com/en/fethullah-gulens-works/sufism/key-concepts-in-the-practice-of-sufism-1/24720-the-origin-of-sufism (accessed July 4, 2025).
[46] Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism, 154, 158-9; Dahlen, Islamic Law, Epistemology
and Modernity, 230.
[47] Hallaq, Sharia, 522.
[48] Hallaq, Sharia, 522.
[49] Hallaq, Sharia,520.
[50] Jahanbakhsh, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism, 161.
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