COLUMN ONE : Islamist’s Theory of Relativity : Iranian scholar says faith is open to interpretation, challenging the dogma of hard-line mullahs. His ideas on religion, democracy could lead to a Muslim Reformation.

Abdol Karim Soroush is an unassuming figure. Small-framed, bespectacled and tenderly soft-spoken, he looks almost fragile as he sits at the big, round oak table in his office at the Research Institute for Human Sciences here.

But this gentle man is shaking the foundations of a faith that claims a billion followers--nearly one out of every five people on Earth. Both supporters and critics now call him the Martin Luther of Islam--a man whose ideas on religion and democracy could bridge the chasm between Muslim societies and the outside world.

“Soroush is challenging 13 centuries of thinking,” said Nasser Hadian, a political scientist at Tehran University. “He is proclaiming that understanding of religion is all relative. Put another way, no one interpretation is absolute. It is not fixed for all time and place. Who can say what God meant? This opens the door to all kinds of new ideas, political as well as religious.”

Put still another way, Soroush and an emerging group of Islamic writers and thinkers are making it possible to be Islamic without being fundamentalist, according to John Voll, an expert on Islam at the University of New Hampshire.

“They are creating a comprehensive, late 20th-Century world view that is, at the same time, authentically Islamic and authentically modern,” he said.

Soroush and contemporaries--such as Tunisia’s Rashid Ghannouchi, Egypt’s Hassan Hanafi and Algeria’s Mohammed Arkoun--are shaping what may turn out to be Islam’s equivalent of the Christian Reformation: a period of questioning traditional practices and beliefs and, ultimately, of upheaval.

Already, Soroush’s impact extends far beyond the realm of religion. His writings are framing a new debate about political change--not just for Iran but for the Middle East.

“Soroush is profoundly important to an issue facing the entire Muslim world,” Hadian said, “because he says Islam can be interpreted in a way that is compatible with democracy. And he shows how.”

In the region of the globe that has most resisted change, few ideas are more pivotal to the future than the relationship between Islam and democracy. Although the Iranian government has not formally reacted to Soroush’s writings and teachings, many senior mullahs and officials are widely believed to feel threatened by his words.

But for all the acclaim--his work is already the subject of dissertations in places as far away as Georgetown University in Washington--Soroush does not seek, nor even welcome, media attention.

A bimonthly magazine called Kiyan, which means source or soul , was founded in 1991 primarily to air his columns and the debate they have sparked. It now has subscribers in Asia, Europe and the Americas, including the United States.

Soroush, otherwise, is almost reclusive--probably wisely so. Friends say even his dustbin has been picked and probed to keep track of his ideas. Getting an interview can take years of appeals and pulling strings with intermediaries.

Against the hustle and honking din of downtown Tehran, the quiet chambers of the institute where Soroush is dean of faculty seem like a sanctuary. In his office, soft music plays in the background.

“Islam and democracy are not only compatible,” he began. “Their association is inevitable. In Muslim society, one without the other is not perfect.”

Soroush, who is in his late 40s, speaks deliberately and in English. Among a long list of academic credentials, Soroush did graduate work in philosophy at the University of London.

“I have given two bases,” he said. “The first pillar is this: To be a true believer, one must be free. To become a believer under pressure or coercion will not be true belief. And this freedom is the basis of democracy.

“The second pillar in Islamic democracy is that interpretation of religious texts is always in flux,” he added. “Those interpretations are also influenced by the age you live in. So you can never give a fixed interpretation.”

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Everyone is entitled to an interpretation. Although some may be more scholarly than others, no one version--by a cleric or layman--is automatically more authoritative than another.

For the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as other Muslim societies, the practical implications of Soroush’s words are profound--although he refuses to spell them all out.

“I will be better served if I do not get entangled in such political affairs,” he said, chuckling knowingly. “Let other people draw the implications and consequences.”

The most basic are equality and empowerment of ordinary believers. As did the Reformation, Soroush’s argument establishes the rights of individuals--in their relationship both with government and with God. And like democracy anywhere, the beliefs and will of the majority at the bottom define the ideal Islamic state. It can’t be imposed from the top or by an elite, such as the clergy.

“No one group of people has exclusive right to interpret or reinterpret religion. That is something to be abolished,” he explained, sitting at the table, almost buried behind piles of books.

Islam also should not be used as a modern ideology, for it is too likely to become totalitarian, he said. And the ideal Islamic republic is ruled not by mullahs or sheiks but by secular leaders.

With haunting similarity to thinking during the Reformation, in which Protestants split from the Roman Catholic Church, Soroush’s arguments in effect divide the roles and powers of church and state. That would be a stunning shift for the only major monotheistic religion that provides a set of rules by which to govern society as well as a set of spiritual beliefs.

But the change would not be total.

Like Luther, the 16th-Century German theologian who inaugurated the Reformation, Soroush is not abandoning the values of the faith. He instead argues against rigid thinking and elitism.

Islam, he says, is a religion that can still grow. He believes in Sharia, or Islamic law, as a basis for modern legislation. But he views Sharia less rigidly than does the traditional clergy.

“Sharia is something expandable,” he said. “You can’t imagine the extent of its flexibility. And in an Islamic democracy, you can actualize all its potential flexibilities.”

But does not the freedom inherent in democracy ultimately contradict Islam, which literally translates as submission ?

“Just the reverse,” he responded, a smile spreading across his face. With the precision of a logician, he built a philosophical argument as if it were a mathematical equation.

“If you freely surrender or submit, this does not mean that you have sacrificed your freedom,” he said. “You should be free as well to leave your faith. It is a contradiction to be free in order to believe--and then afterward to abolish that freedom.”

For a growing group of followers--ranging from young mullahs to regime opponents, from intellectuals to government technocrats--Soroush represents the hope of reconciliation, both within Islam and between Islam and the outside world.

“He is finding ways to reconcile Islam and modernism for educated Muslims who have had problems with traditional Islam,” said Mohammed Reza Bouzari, a businessman and Soroush follower for almost a decade. “He shows how understanding changes day by day, year by year. This is the only way to save Islam in the modern world.”

Soroush’s Kiyan columns are now the center of a feisty intellectual debate. His Thursday evening lectures at a local mosque are packed. At Tehran University’s School of Theology, where he teaches the history and philosophy of science, students wait in the halls just to see him.

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At the last national book fair, an anonymous donor contributed enough to make all copies of Soroush’s books available at half price. His most popular book just ran its fourth printing. Even critics concede that his writing in Persian is so poetic it draws readers on literary merit alone.

“This is a seed in the ground, and it is going to grow,” Bouzari said.

“It’s an intellectual revolution,” added Reza Tehrani, Kiyan’s editor.

But the movement symbolized by Soroush may be on a collision course with Iran’s powerful clergy.

“The debate is between those who accept the idea of a multifaceted, multidimensional religion that changes across time and space and those who say Islam has only one essence, and it can’t be touched, and therefore democracy is alien,” said Hadi Semati, an analyst at Tehran’s Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies.

In Iran, the latter are now in power.

“The government does not like us, but so far it tolerates us,” Tehrani said.

Many, however, fear for Soroush’s future.

“Soroush is a man of some courage, especially given the context in which he says these things and the direct criticism of the form of government in Iran today that comes out of his writings and teaching,” said Shaul Bakhash, an Iran expert at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and author of an upcoming book on the Islamic debate.

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Soroush was originally one of the revolution’s own. He returned from London shortly after the 1979 upheaval that brought the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

In the early 1980s, he was part of the cultural revolution, serving on the seven-man committee that determined Islamically correct university curricula.

He hosted one of the new regime’s early television shows on Persian poetry. Yet he can also quote vast passages from a cross-section of Western philosophers.

“We’ve never had anyone like Soroush,” Hadian said. “Very few people really know both the West and Islam, and can talk about and to both worlds. Some intellectuals here are familiar with the West but not with the religious nuances. And some clerics know religion but not the West. Even in Iran, we can’t communicate with each other. But Soroush can bring together ideas from both worlds, because he understands and has lived in both.”

The debate within Iran is echoing throughout the Muslim world. Various thinkers are looking at how to modernize and democratize political and economic systems in an Islamic context.

The extensive writings of Egypt’s Hanafi, for example, center on “bringing the faith up to date in a revolutionary way,” New Hampshire Islamic expert Voll said. “He thinks of developing the equivalent in Islam of what liberation theology was to Catholicism.”

Tunisia’s Ghannouchi, another philosopher, is working on a book titled “Public Freedom in the Islamic State.”

“Islam did not come with a specific program about our life,” he said in an interview. “It brought general principles. It’s our duty to make this program through interaction between Islamic principles and modernity.”

Ghannouchi advocates majority rule, protection of minorities, full women’s rights and equality of all secular and religious parties.

“Freedom,” he pronounced, “is superior to Islam.”

Yet his views are seen as such a challenge to the state that he was repeatedly imprisoned in Tunisia before being forced into exile in Europe.

The Reformation did not fully shake out for about 200 years with the establishment of a welter of Protestant denominations. By that yardstick, an Islamic Reformation--if that is what it turns out to be--is only in its incipient stage, and the current debate underscores that the turmoil in the Muslim world is due at least as much to internal tensions as to friction with the outside world.

Soroush prefers to avoid comparisons with Luther.

“I’m just a writer and a thinker,” he said. “I’m not thinking of doing things like Luther did.

“Although,” he paused, “perhaps Luther did not know what he was doing at that time.”

He laughed easily. “But I am well aware that these ideas, if taken seriously, might be of some use or help some radical change in the way we look at religion.”

BACKGROUND

Islam accepts the prophets and tenets of Judaism and Christianity as part of a single tradition that was the precursor to Islam. The Koran is the holy scripture revealed by God to the prophet Mohammed in the 7th Century. The five pillars are belief in the supremacy of God, five daily prayers, charity, fasting during Ramadan and pilgrimage to Mecca. It is the only monotheistic religion that offers a set of rules not only for establishing spiritual beliefs but also for governing society.