Freedom, the Human Being, and the Boundaries of Thought
Aydin Areta

A group of friends have criticised me for placing Abdolkarim Soroush alongside Hamid Dabashi and Bijan Abdolkarimi.
I will explain the reason briefly and simply.

Many people speak of his role in the Cultural Revolution, but I am not in the habit of judging people today solely on the basis of their past.
Change in thought over time is a fundamental human right, and we should always remain open and receptive to such change in others.

For me, the measure of an intellectual’s commitment to freedom lies in their clear answer to a fundamental question concerning the human being and human individuality:
Are you prepared to encounter a human being—especially a woman—as a free subject? Or do you regard them as an object of judgement and instruction?

A clear example is the case of Golshifteh Farahani. Instead of offering political critique, he brought her political action, or even her personal choice, before the moral tribunal of the body through expressions such as “surrendering the body to vulgarity,” and went even further by saying that “until she had passed the test and appeared completely naked, they did not admit her into the artistic family.”

Nor have there been few occasions on which he has addressed his critics in humiliating language.

In relation to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, too, his principal concern was that it might become contaminated by what he called the “banality of immodesty.”

My criticism of Soroush concerns the continuity of this angle from which he views human freedom, an angle in which I have never seen a real rupture.
For Soroush, when the “different human being”—especially a woman—comes into view, the professed commitment to freedom gives way to moral judgement.

In every social movement, what appears to concern him above all is “anti-Islamism,” and he has repeatedly said that Iranian society will reject an “Iran without Islam.” This is not religious intellectualism; it is merely the explanation of jurisprudential religion in the language of intellectualism.

Thought, philosophy and religion all begin in the human being with freedom. My fundamental criticism of Dr Soroush is that he is still not prepared to look at the human being as a genuinely free subject—at least not yet. And if the human being is not a truly free subject, then the rest of intellectualism becomes nothing more than a covering of words over the backbone of a paternalistic view of human growth and individuation.

Soroush showed that even amid systematic violence against women’s bodies, and even when human beings have been killed in connection with that violence, it is possible to shift the focus toward the “moral future of society” and the “dangers of bad religiosity,” and to perform, in the language of religious intellectualism, the same operation that government performs in the language of jurisprudence.

It is from this perspective that I place Soroush beside figures who speak of “freedom” but, at critical moments, become guardians of the boundaries of their own ideological perspective or even of ideological rule itself.

The people of Iran, in their historical struggle for freedom, do not need such intellectuals.

For thousands of years, at the foundations of our culture, we have known that genuine ethics can grow only within the conditions of choice and freedom, and even religion can achieve ethical durability only through the free choice of human beings.