Abdolkarim Soroush

Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush, a native from Iran and one of the most influential liberal Islamic thinkers, talks about the "Modern Islam and the modern West" in his interview with the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE):

Many in the West would argue that the combination of "modern" and "Islam" is a contradiction. So let me ask you directly: is a "modern Islam" possible?

In the West we had the Enlightenment. For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment was the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance. Does the Islamic world need a comparable process as the Western Enlightenment?

Where do you see the role of the West in the process of modernising Islamic societies?