Abdolkarim Soroush: the Sakharov of his day?
Further to this item, Moises Naim – a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy – asks where have all the Sakharovs gone?
Perhaps he is looking in the wrong place. At a recent NED memorial meeting for Leszek Kolakowski, it was suggested that today’s intellectual-cum-political dissidents are more likely to be found in places like Iran rather than in the former Soviet Union.
Just as Kolakowski and many other Soviet era dissidents were former Marxists who turned against the God That Failed, perhaps their contemporary equivalents are people like Abdolkarim Soroush, the former Islamic revolutionary and devotee of Ayatollah Khomeini who is now a leading democracy dissident and inspiration to Iran’s green opposition.
Like Kolakowski, Soroush has become a leading revisionist, and recently issued a “coruscating denunciation” of the regime:
Alluding to the Supreme Leader’s admission that the prestige of the Islamic Republic has been damaged by reports of brutality in the nation’s jails, Soroush writes sarcastically, “I salute you for identifying and declaring the squalor and abjectness of religious tyranny…. I want to say to you that a page has been turned in time’s ledger and that fortune has turned her back on the regime….”
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