Islamic politics, human rights and women's claims for equality in Iran

Abstract

Polemical assertions about the civilisational clash between Islam and Christianity, and Islam's incompatibility with human rights and gender equality are frequently heard these days. Political Islam, however, is far from homogeneous, and the modernist and reformist currents which have emerged in many diverse contexts often seek to embrace both human rights and gender equality. This paper analyses the diverse currents of thinking that feed into the reformist orientation in Iran. The need for change and reform is being voiced not only by secular forces, but also by the ‘true believers’, who have included male lay intellectuals, some clerical authorities, and a number of feminists with an Islamic orientation. These disparate streams of reformist thinking constitute a genuinely local effort to move Islamic politics out of the cul-de-sac of traditional Islam by endorsing modernist and universal values of human rights, democracy and gender equality. While these emerging voices represent a paradigm shift in Islamic thought, their political impact has been far from significant. The reasons for this weakness are complex, and include both domestic and external factors explored in the second half of the paper.

Notes

This paper has benefited from useful comments made by Yusuf Bangura, Terence Gomez and Peter Utting. The usual disclaimers apply.

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2 O Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

3 TG Jelen & C Wilcox, ‘Religion: the one, the few and the many’, in Jelen & Wilcox (eds), Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, the Few and the Many, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

4 P Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

5 P Paidar, ‘Gender of democracy: the encounter between feminism and reformism in contemporary Iran’, dghr Paper, 6, Geneva: unrisd, 2001, p 5.

6 A Najmabadi, ‘Hazards of modernity and morality: women, state and ideology in contemporary Iran’, in D Kandiyoti (ed), Women, Islam and the State, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991, pp 48 – 76.

7 A Najmabadi, ‘Feminism in an Islamic Republic: years of hardship, years of growth’, in Y Yazbeck Haddad & J Esposito (eds), Islam, Gender, and Social Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 59 – 84.

8 H Moghissi, Populism and Feminism in Iran: Women's Struggle in a Male-Defined Revolutionary Movement, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1994, p 183.

9 Z Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

10 The Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji condemns this system as a form of ‘sultanism’. S Bakhash, ‘Akbar Ganji: letter from Evin Prison’, The New York Review, 22 September 2005, pp 46 – 47. As Garton Ash explains, this political system has some similarities with a communist party state: both have parallel hierarchies of ideological and state power, with the former ultimately trumping the latter. T Garton Ash, ‘Soldiers of a hidden Imam’, The New York Review, 3 November 2005, pp 4 – 8.

11 A Najmabadi, ‘Feminism in an Islamic Republic’.

12 M Kadivar, ‘Human rights and religious intellectualism’, Aftab, 27 and 28 (Tir, Mordad and Shahrivar 1382), 2003.

13 Ibid, p 107.

14 C Kuzman, ‘Critics within: Islamic scholars’ protests against the Islamic state in Iran’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 15 (2), 2001, pp 341 – 359; and Z Mir-Hosseini, ‘The conservative – reformist conflict over women's rights in Iran’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 16 (1), 2002, pp 37 – 53.

15 Soroush was one of the key ideologues of the Islamic Republic in its formative years, and participated actively in the reorganisation of the universities during the ‘cultural revolution’ that involved the dismissal of many secular professors. He was gradually disillusioned and then distanced himself from the establishment, before becoming an open and ardent critic. His public lectures have been banned in Iran and he now spends most of his time outside the country. For samples of his work in English, see http://www.drsoroush.com/English, last visited 16 March 2005.

16 C Kuzman, ‘Liberal Islam: prospects and challenges', Middle East Review of International Affairs, 3 (3), 1999, pp 11 – 19.

17 P Paidar, ‘Gender of democracy’, p 21.

18 Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender.

19 Ibid, p 215.

20 The most extensive analysis of Sa'idzadeh's thinking and writing is provided by ibid, on whose work I rely here. Sa'idzadeh was recently defrocked.

21 Mohsen Kadivar served a two-year prison sentence but continues to write and give public lectures outside the country. For samples of his writing and lectures in English, see http://www.kadivar.com/English, last visited 16 March 2006.

22 Nuri, cited in Mir-Hosseini, ‘The conservative – reformist conflict over women's rights in Iran’. The issue of the veil is a sensitive one: under Reza Shah's modernisation drive, in 1936 the veil was forcibly removed and all women had to appear in public without it. The Islamic Republic, on the other hand, forcibly imposed the veil on women in 1980.

23 S Mokhtari, ‘The search for human rights within an Islamic framework in Iran’, The Muslim World, 94, 2004, p 474.

24 Interviewed in Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender, p 252.

25 Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender, p 250.

26 While clerics like Sa'idzadeh would not quote or cite Soroush (since he is regarded as an intellectual lightweight in the seminaries), the influence of his thinking on theirs is very clear.

27 M Kadivar, ‘Human rights and religious intellectualism’.

28 Ibid, p 109.

29 Ibid, p 111, emphasis added.

30 Kadivar, ‘Human rights and religious intellectualism’.

31 Ibid, p 112.

32 H Afshar, Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case Study, Women's Studies at York, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998; and Mir-Hosseini, ‘The conservative – reformist conflict over women's rights in Iran’.

33 Z Mir-Hosseini, ‘The quest for gender justice: emerging feminist voices in Islam’, Islam 21, 36, May 2004, p 3.

34 The women's journal Nida' (The Call), which is the organ of a quasi-governmental organisation headed by Khomeini's daughter, Zahra Mostafavi, is a good representative of this group.

35 Afshar, Islam and Feminisms, ch 2.

36 Ibid, pp 42 – 43.

37 R Eftekhari, ‘Zanan: trials and successes of a feminist magazine in Iran’, in R Eftekhari, Middle Eastern Women on the Move: Openings for and the Constraints on Women's Political Participation in the Middle East, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Middle East Project, 2003, p 16.

38 A Najmabadi, ‘Feminism in an Islamic Republic’. The dominant method of reformist interpretations of women's issues has been to use the more woman-friendly sources from an already existing set of texts.

39 Ibid, p 68.

40 Ibid, p 75.

41 Eftekhari, ‘Zanan’.

42 Mokhtari, ‘The search for human rights within an Islamic framework in Iran’.

43 N Todidi, ‘International connections of the Iranian women's movement’, in NR Keddie & R Matthee (eds), Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002. Todidi explains, however, that, despite ‘some movement toward moderation, a disturbing continuity was reflected in the … opposition to certain egalitarian aspects of the Beijing Platform for Action, placing Iran among the leading conservative Muslim states in alliance with conservative Catholic states led by the Holy See’ (p 213).

44 I use the term ‘opportunistic’ here advisedly, not as a criticism of the electorate but to underline the point that Khatami was able to gain such a majority because he stood against a candidate that represented the conservative establishment. Hence a pro-Khatami vote was first and foremost a vote against the conservatives and for change.

45 F Halliday, ‘Iran's revolutionary spasm’, at http://www.opendemocracy.net, accessed 2 July 2005.

46 In a fascinating analysis of the 2005 election surprise, F Halliday, argues in ibid that the Iranian revolution is moving after 20 years not into a ‘reform’ phase but into a ‘twenty-year spasm’—a second reassertion of militancy and egalitarianism that rejects domestic elites and external pressure alike (as in Russia in the second purge era of the late 1930s, China during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, and Cuba in the ‘rectification’ campaign of the 1980s).

47 C De Bellaigue, ‘New man in Iran’, The New York Review, 11 August 2005, pp 19 – 22.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Halliday, ‘Iran's revolutionary spasm’. While the election result and the conservative backlash that it represents had many different social and political reasons behind it, the control and manipulation of the election process by the conservative forces (including, very importantly, the security and intelligence services), which was most probably part of a much broader and more intricate strategy to reassert themselves, should not be underestimated.