The list of documentaries and selected parts of each are accessible on this page. These documentaries are parts of “Neshaneha” collection.

Dr. Karim Rastegar is a Psychiatrist and neurologist by profession and a scholar in the Quran. He received and completed his studies at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (SUMS) and University College London (UCL). He is currently a Professor Emeritus of SUMS, where he teaches neurophysiology to medical students as well as post-graduate students in neurophysiology. However, during this time of more than 5 decades, his main passion has been studying the Quran with a completely different approach to the prevailing one.

This approach was born when confronted with the realities of the society he had set out to reform through his years of political opposition and imprisonment as a member of the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq (MELK). (Dr. Rastegar was one of the earliest recruits to the organization, where he was a member from 1965 to 1975.) He realized that understanding the laws governing one’s society is imperative to the success of social reforms, and the reason as to why all social revolutions had failed up to then. Human knowledge, especially the existing schools of social reform such as Marxism, were lacking the tools required for such reforms. Additionally, Islam, in its existing form that was passed down from one generation to the next, did not meet his and his comrades’ expectations of a desirable society.

From then on, he embarked on a journey to understand whether the existing interpretation of Islam could lead to social reforms or whether the Quran, as the only reliable source among Muslims, held the knowledge of the laws governing human societies? No Islamic scholar had approached the Quran in order to extract such knowledge from it, which meant there were little to no references. Given the deep knowledge of the Quran he had acquired as a teenager, the only thing he was sure of was the existence of cryptic messages in the Quran that no exegete had ever been able to explain. Held in solitary confinement and living through the hardest period of his life, with faith in God, he gave up armed resistance, left the MELK organization and politics altogether in a quest to understand the Quran’s view of the governing laws of nature and in particular, human societies.

He knew that the best way to understand the laws of society is to understand the behavior of its members, i.e. human beings, he chose to study Neuroscience and Psychiatry. One of the greatest mysteries and conundrums of human science has been the existence or non-existence of the soul. During his post-graduate studies at UCL, he developed an empirical model, inspired by the Quran’s definition of the soul, which shed light on the subject in addition to revealing the less understood aspects of the human psyche. The soul is just one aspect of the human psyche, the other is the brain, which is the most complex material system in the physical world of creation. Dr. Rastegar realized that in order to understand this complex system, he should be able to explain life and its evolution. He was faced with the question that; Given the shortcomings of biology and evolutionary science in explaining the brain and its mechanisms, can the Quran provide answers to these questions? In his attempt to solve these problems he discovered the Quran’s unique expression and language, through the “Mutashabihat”, in describing the realities of the world of creation. Once the veil of the “Mutashabihat” was lifted, he came to understand the universe from the Quran’s perspective.

Human science is relative when expressing the truths of the physical world, but the science of the Quran is absolute. However, one has no choice but to transition from the relative to the absolute. In other words, understanding the absolute science presented by the Quran, requires accurate understanding of the empirical sciences. Although this endeavor cannot be fulfilled by one person alone, yet Dr. Rastegar believed it was his religious duty to set out to study and understand the science presented by the Quran. Over the decades, and by the grace of God, he has successfully revealed most of the truths of the world of creation, expressed through the “Mutashabihat”, and has penned many books on the knowledge extracted from the Quran. His books, which are mostly in Farsi, include topics such as, life, anthropology, sociology, religion, theology, and the world of the hereafter. This website is intended to present his decades of research in the Quran.