ABSTRACT
After the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran in the late 1970s, it has now become something of an academic exercise in futility to give an account of the secular disposition of the country at large in the immediate decades preceding that cataclysmic event. The predicament of Abdolkarim Soroosh as a religious intellectual is thus symptomatic of a larger phenomenon, at once liberating and arresting, in the colonial encounter with modernity. Soroosh personifies the predicament of a much larger universe of failed ideas. In his blindness and in his insights, Soroosh represents some two centuries of bewildered attempts to locate a historical agency in the Muslim subject in modernity. When the heavenly sanctity of the sacred revealed itself to mortals, Soroosh argues, then it inevitably became sullied by human reality, and it is a reading of the vicissitude of the dialogue between the sacred and the profane that is the subject of investigation for religious hermeneutics.
