Pathology of Religious Intellectual Epistemic Discourse

Soroush's epistemic construction is an amalgamation of Western and Eastern schools of thought and philosophies, making it difficult to evaluate his intellectual career. In his early intellectual life, Soroush fights with Marxism and in the rest of his intellectual era, influenced by the thoughts of the philosophers of science, he formulates the “expansion and reduction theory of religion”. Finally, by presenting the theory of "expansion of prophetic experience" and "straight paths", he declares his complete break from the Holy Book (Quran) and the Tradition as two pillars of religious sources. Feeding from Ghazali's opinions and the views of hermeneutic thinkers and philosophy of science, he fights with the thesis of ideologicalizing the religion and jurisprudent Islam, which result in his empathetic approach to secularism. The research hypothesis states that the development of religious intellectualism forerun by Soroush by separating from the Holy Book and using extra-religious sources has suffered a kind of break from religious sources. So, it can be said that religious intellectualism in the second and third decades of the Islamic Revolution has a secular approach and has shaped its identity in opposition to religion and Tradition.