About the Podcast:
- How can a contemporary reader come close to the essence of the Qur’an—and does translation inevitably diminish what it offers?
- Why is Rumi’s Mathnawi referred to as the ‘Persian Qur’an’
- How can our whole existence be connected to the Qur’an, rather than merely imposing upon it what we already think?
In this episode of Thinking Islam, Dr Abdolkarim Soroush invites us into what he calls an existential encounter with the Qur’an, a phenomenological approach that moves beyond legal extraction, philosophical analysis, and even his own celebrated theory of the “Expansion and Contraction of Religious Knowledge”. The conversation begins with the fundamental distinction between reading and listening. Dr Soroush argues that the Qur’an was, first and foremost, a recited text, the voice of God carried through streets, mosques, and homes, and that this oral, musical quality is essential to its power as maw’iza (admonition). The Qur’an, he tells us, is not a book of law or philosophy but a book of admonition that demands engagement from one’s entire being, where repentance, remembrance, and sorrow are not concepts to be analysed but states to be lived.
Dr Soroush draws a remarkable parallel between the Qur’an and Rumi’s Mathnawi, exploring why the Mathnawi has been called the Persian Qur’an, not as a translation but as a text born from the same spiritual impulse, where Rumi digested the Qur’an and expressed it through his own revelatory experience. Like the Prophet, Rumi never wrote his poetry. For non-Arabic speakers, approaching Rumi may itself become a hermeneutic bridge to the Qur’anic maw’iza, a way of feeling the admonition in one’s own tongue before turning to the source.
The discussion deepens as Dr Soroush redefines kufr, not as non-belief in the legal sense, but as a rebelliousness against truth, a refusal to be humble before it. The first kafir, he reminds us, was Iblis, who refused to prostrate not out of disbelief but out of arrogance. Drawing on Rumi and Al-Ghazali, he outlines two paths to the pure heart that the Qur’an demands of its reader: moral discipline, the lifelong struggle of following God’s commands, and more powerfully, love and companionship, the presence of a transformative friend or teacher who purifies not through instruction alone but through a kind of spiritual magnetism. The companion, Dr Soroush tells us, is everything.
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Learn More About Our Guest:
Dr Abdolkarim Soroush is a distinguished philosopher of religion and a leading figure in Islamic intellectual reform and critical religious studies. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Maryland and formerly served as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tehran. Dr Soroush has held prestigious visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia Universities. His work on the theory of “Expansion and Contraction of Religious Knowledge” has profoundly influenced contemporary Islamic thought, challenging traditional understandings of scriptural interpretation and religious authority. His engagement and writings on prophetic experience, revelation, and the nature of religious knowledge continue to spark vital debates about Islam’s engagement with modern epistemology, hermeneutics and modernity.
Read More of His Insights:
- Soroush, A. (2009) The Expansion of Prophetic Experience: Essays on Historicity, Contingency and Plurality in Religion. Leiden: Brill.
- Soroush, A. (2007) ‘The Relationship between the Mathnawi and the Qur’an’.
- Soroush, A. (2000) Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (trans. and ed. Sadri, M. and Sadri, A.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
