When asked about this during Khatami's visit to United Kingdom, he said "You know for centuries we have been under dictatorship so we cannot get to a democracy all of a sudden, we have to go step by step" Campaigns against intellectuals After the Iranian Revolution, the Cultural Revolution and the Chain murders of Iran were two major campaigns that involved the imprisonment, torture, emigration, and massacre of Iranian scholars. Intellectual circles in late 20th century Intellectual circles in postrevolutionary Iran can be classified into the following categories: Revolutionary intellectual circles The main figures in this category are Ali Shariati, Jalal Al Ahmad and Morteza Motahhari. Morteza Motahhari was the main theorist and thinker behind Iranian revolution. He is considered to be one of the most influential philosophical leaders of pre-revolutionary Iran and the impact and popularity of his thought continues to be felt throughout Iranian society many years later. Reformist intellectual circles Main figures in this category are Mehdi Bazargan, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Mostafa Malekian, Mohsen Kadivar, Alireza Alavitabar and Hossein Bashiriyeh. The unifying traits of these intellectuals include their recognition of reform in the Islamic thought, democracy, civil society and religious pluralism and their opposition to the absolute supremacy of the Faqih. The rise of religious intellectuals can be followed through the writings of Abdolkarim Soroosh. Soroosh's main idea is that there are perennial unchanging religious truths, but our understanding of them remains contingent on our knowledge in the fields of science and philosophy. Unlike Ali Shariati, who turned to Marxism to bring a historicist perspective to the Shiite thought, Soroosh debates the relation between democracy and religion and discusses the possibility of what he calls religious democracy. Influenced by Persian mysticism, Soroush advocated a type of reformist Islam that went beyond most liberal Muslim thinkers of the 20th century and argued that the search for reconciliation of Islam and democracy was not a matter of simply finding appropriate phrases in the Qur'an that were in agreement with modern science, democracy, or human rights. Drawing on the works of Molana Jalaleddin Balkhi, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Popper, and Erich Fromm, Soroush called for a reexamination of all tenets of Islam, insisting on the need to maintain the religion's original spirit of social justice and its emphasis on caring for other people. Other influential figures in these circles are Saeed Hajjarian, Ahmad Sadri, Mahmoud Sadri, Ezzatollah