Rebecca Barlow - ISS 11 Womens Human Rights and the Muslim Question

Acknowledgements

I am sincerely grateful to Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh, Deputy Director of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, for his encouragement and support in the publication of this book.

Much appreciation is also due to Dr Morteza Honari of the Honari Education Institute in Tehran, and Arash Nazari, an excellent and truly invaluable interpreter.

Finally, I extend deep gratitude to the members of the Iranian womens movement for their generosity in exchanging personal opinions, insights, and experiences, especially Dr Shirin Ebadi, Dr Nasrin Sotoudeh, Sussan Tahmasebi, and Roxana Setayeseh.

Introduction

Studies on Islam and modernity exhibit something of a preoccupation with the relationship between universal human rights principles and questions of justice, rights, and representation in local Muslim contexts. Within this broad debate, this book examines the understanding, treatment, and use of human rights discourse within the womens movement of Iran.

The Iranian womens movement embodies feminist organising par excellence . It does not prescribe a particular dogma or manifesto, and there are no pre-requisites or requirements for membership. Individuals are free to contribute to the movement in distinct capacities, participating only to the extent that they feel comfortable. The movement comprises activists in a classical sense, as well as a vast constituency of women from various class, occupational, and ideological backgrounds, including both secular and religious women, journalists, lawyers, fashion designers, literary writers, actresses and film directors, and university students. This great diversity of women has come together to contest a set of state laws that limit their autonomy and freedom, and a national constitution that constructs women as second-class citizens. The Iranian regime has justified these laws as upholding an Islamic understanding of womens status in Muslim society. Any questioning of the law, argues the state, is tantamount to questioning a divinely mandated system of gender relations laid out in traditional Islamic jurisprudence. This is a powerful and dangerous accusation. So how exactly is the womens movement manoeuvring in a political climate where sensitivity to faith and culture are paramount? In this kind of context, does the discourse of universal womens human rights provide local Iranian women with a valuable point of reference to advance the struggle for womens empowerment? These are the questions at hand.

At the root of many investigations into Islams relationship with modernity is a commonly held view that human rights are the legacy of Western culture. This logic is often stretched to suggest that whereas Western societies embody a cultural predisposition towards the international human rights framework, it is considered foreign, unfamiliar, and extraneous in other cultural settings. For relativists, human rights represent a culturally constrained project: a product of enlightenment theory and European individualism with little applicability in non-Western contexts. In a world that took a paradigmatic turn on 11 September 2001, the non-Western other in this political master narrative has increasingly come to imply Muslim. Now we are faced with a philosophical, and sometimes theological, debate surrounding the universality of human rights norms on the one hand, and Islam as a complete way of life on the other.

Nowhere is this debate more entrenched than in terms of gender relations and womens status. According to the modern principle of gender equality, any distinction made on the basis of sex that has the intention or outcome of according women unequal rights to men is ipso facto discriminatory and unjust. But from the relativist viewpoint, gender equality is considered context dependent, or worse, a lofty ideal of women who are white, Western, and privileged. It is often presumed peripheral to Muslim societies organised around traditional family relations, and, further, undesirable to Muslim women whose identities hinge on religious tradition within the family structure. These presumptions emerge at least in part from images of the Muslim woman as a dutiful, and often submissive, wife, daughter, or mother. Such notions are not solely the result of the Western imagination, since there is a strong insistence from within some Muslim countries that womens human rights are inauthentic to Muslim societies, and by definition un-Islamic. The problem lies with the acceptance of such claims as the Muslim view on human rightsas if there is a homogenous and uncontested position that has somehow made its way into every Muslim society and community around the globe. Subsequently, restrictions on womens freedom in Muslim societies come to be externally viewed as reflecting a community belief in Islamic principlesinstead of the result of patriarchal political calculations by those in power. It is adherence to Islam, according to the relativist position, that precludes the resonance of universal human right norms with those following a Muslim way of life.