First Saturday of Ramadan Guest Lecturer Dr. Abdulkarim Soroush

Guest lecturer for the first Saturday of Ramadan, August 14, 2010, is Dr. Abdulkarim Soroush (Farsi).  Program starts with lectures in Farsi and English followed by Maghrib Prayer, Iftar, and dua.

Widely considered to be Iran's leading public intellectual, Abdulkarim Soroush was born in Tehran in 1945. After studying pharmacy and earning his doctorate in analytical chemistry from the University of London, he then spent over five years at Chelsea College, where he studied history and the philosophy of science. A broad scholar in many fields, Dr. Soroush is also an expert in Koran interpretation, Rumi, and Persian poetry. Dedicated to reform, many of his works attempt to give a new interpretation of the shari'a drawing on the fields of jurisprudence, hermeneutics, and sociology.

Dr. Soroush is currently a visiting scholar at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. He was also affiliated with prestigious institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.