Human Rights in Iran

The Abuse of Cultural Relativism

Reza Afshari

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812201055
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Droits de l'homme

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleAre the principles set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights truly universal? Or, as some have argued, are they derived exclusively from Western philosophic traditions and therefore irrelevant to many non-Western cultures? Should a state's claims to indigenous traditions, and not international covenants, determine the scope of rights granted to its citizens?In his strong defense of the Declaration, Reza Afshari contends that the moral vision embodied in this and other agreements is a proper response to the abuses of the modern state. Asserting that the most serious violations of human rights by state rulers are motivated by political and economic factors rather than the purported concern for cultural authenticity, Afshari examines one particular state that has claimed cultural exception to the universality of human rights, the Islamic Republic of Iran.In his revealing case study, Afshari investigates how Islamic culture and Iranian politics since the fall of the Shah have affected human rights policy in that state. He exposes the human rights violations committed by ruling clerics in Iran since the Revolution, showing that Iran has behaved remarkably like other authoritarian governments in its human rights abuses. For more than two decades, Iran has systematically jailed, tortured, and executed dissidents without due process of law and assassinated political opponents outside state borders. Furthermore, like other oppressive states, Iran has regularly denied and countered the charges made by United Nations human rights monitors, defending its acts as authentic cultural practices.Throughout his study, Afshari addresses Iran's claims of cultural relativism, a controversial thesis in the intense ongoing debate over the universality of human rights. In prison memoirs he uncovers the actual human rights abuses committed by the Islamic Republic and the sociopolitical conditions that cause or permit them. Finally, Afshari turns to little-read UN reports that reveal that the dynamics of power between UN human rights monitors and Iranian leaders have proven ineffective at enforcing human rights policy in Iran. Critically analyzing the state's responses, Afshari shows that the Islamic Republic, like other oppressive states, has regularly denied and countered the charges made by UN human rights monitors, and when denials were patently implausible, it defended its acts as authentic cultural practices. This defense is equally unconvincing, since it lacked domestic cultural consensus.

Chapter 1

Islamic Cultural Relativism in Human Rights Discourse

The challenge facing human rights advocates has always been formidable: to scale the seemingly insurmountable walls of the sovereign state, to reach into its dark and cloistered domestic domains, and to lend a helping hand to courageous but lonely women and men in the clutches of its security apparatus. When the state is fanatically guided by a sacrosanct ideology, the task becomes infinitely more difficult.

The volcano-like eruption of politicized Islam (Islamism) added a new layer of repression and persecution to the already dense depository of historical injustices. Now the life of the individual could be sacrificed to safeguard not only the state but also “Islam,” especially if he or she was secular or a nonbeliever. The debates over Islamization of the state and society (the goal of the Islamist movement) have complicated the task of human rights. As the regime created new patterns of violations, the new rulers, like other ideological suppressors of freedoms, advanced cultural and religious rationalizations to justify human rights abuses. Like other ideological rulers who promised a better world, the Islamists created their own sympathizers in the West.

Political Culture: Assuming the Failure of Secularization

Islamization came over Iran on the trail of a populist revolution that gathered momentum in 1978-79 and overthrew the secular, authoritarian regime of the Shah, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. To sympathetic scholars the rise of Islamism was indicative of the failure of secularization; that assumed failure lent a new credence to Islamic cultural relativism. We often heard that the shari‘ah (Islamic law) and its principles provided solidarity and sociopolitical motivation to Muslims who demanded “the immediate application” of the shari‘ah.¹ Assuming the total failure of modern ideologies in Islamic countries, Muslim thinkers had, in the words of a sympathetic scholar, “advocated a more authentic, Islamic framework for Muslim society.”² Many Islamists praised those previously misguided intellectuals who have, thanks to “the insight of the masses, rediscovered the truth of Islam.”³ Some scholars of Islam told us that secularism was “unlikely to receive broad and lasting support in the Muslim world” and that secularism was “receding.”⁴ Many observers spent the 1980s anticipating a cataclysmic battle between Islamism and secularism, which would lead to a crushing theocratic victory in many Islamic countries. This confrontation has proved much more complex than the singular image of a receding secularism projected by the Islamists and their Western sympathizers.

In 1994, I argued that in the praxis of life in a changing world, we cannot reduce secularization to a cast of mind or a mental trait, nor should we characterize it as a set of abstract principles or an antireligious ethos. The success or failure of Muslims to internalize a secular outlook and values should be determined by what they actually do. Their culture demonstrates internal confusion, and their cultural self-explanations cannot be trusted. If one juxtaposes traditional values with a secular outlook and values, one must note that the weight of tradition is a heavier burden on a Muslim's mind than on his or her actions. The latter are often far more responsive to the practical needs of a changing society than the mind is willing or able to recognize.⁵

“Written and spoken words expressing modernity's sentiments and values unsettle the traditionalist mind,” observed Muhammad Mokhtari, the secular intellectual who was killed by security agents in 1999. It fails to locate manifestations of modernity in what people do, imitating Western patterns of city life and architecture and using Western-designed furniture, machines, household items, and everyday appliances. “The traditionalist mind attaches importance to discourses.” For this reason, Mokhtari added, the traditionalists who surround themselves with Western artifacts perceive the secular intellectuals' words as the main culprits, the evil transmitters of modernity and agents of undesirable cultural transformation.⁶

Secularism manifests itself abundantly at the level of human conduct in Iran, in the profane and practical attitude toward contemporary life, ultimately rejecting the permanency of anything that claims legitimacy beyond its rendered value. Values converge as people increasingly share in a global commonality of needs, desires, aspirations, and frustrations.

Secular habits have become habitual, and people discover small truths that cumulatively replace the Truth of tradition. Already they have proved more tenacious than the zealotry of the Islamists. As the religiously propelled political storm blew overland, raising a whirlwind of collective hysteria and fear, shrouding women in the dark hijab (Islamic covering), and hiding Islamist radicals in the veil of their own fear of modernity, the secular undercurrent continued to flow under the vast swathes of Iranian life. It seeped through cultural fissures, nourishing habits that conform more to the this-worldly and chaotic ethos of contemporary civilization than to the wisdom of tradition or the revealed word of God. Today, life on the streets of Tehran is a bewildering hybrid spectacle. As the dust of the Aya-tollah's Islamization has settled, new habits have taken hold, pragmatically motivating people in their essential socioeconomic actions. With social and economic processes still grounded in an enormous bureaucracy fueled by oil money, all avenues to an individual's “life chance” are as consumption-oriented and money-driven as were the fast tracks under the Shah.

The demise of modern secularism has been greatly exaggerated in Iran. Individualized, atomistic, and competitive, the society that cultural conservatives have dreaded has arrived, and religiocultural incantations will not dispel it. Universalized human rights, with their focus on the individual, are not responsible for its arrival; they offer protection for individuals. Assuming the total failure of modern secularism in Iran, the Islamists attempted to reconstruct the state to conform with an organicist politics. To justify their actions, they offered cultural relativist arguments that asserted the superiority of their “Islamic” model of government.

The Islamic Republic Claims Cultural Exceptionalism

Human rights scholar Rhoda Howard has identified five theoretical challenges in the 1990s to the universality of human rights: radical capitalism, traditionalism, reactionary conservatism, Third World nationalism (left collectivism), and status radicalism.⁷ The Islamic Republic of Iran has presented perhaps the strongest case of a combination of two of these challenges, that of traditionalism and Third World nationalism.

These challenges have reinvigorated theoretical debates over the relevance of culture to human rights. Those engaged in the debate often make evidential references to Iran's assertion of Islamic prerogatives that limit the scope of universal human rights. Cultural relativists advance divergent positions. They all relish the view that human rights do not constitute the cultural ideal adhered to by the world's ethical systems, with the exception of the West. The most uncompromising among them maintain that it is a country's indigenous traditions, and not the UDHR, that should properly determine the scope of rights that are granted to its citizens. They pamper cultural sensitivities especially in areas where human rights challenge patriarchal patterns of authority-subordination.

They often see universal human rights as an expression of the ethical value of Western culture and closely scrutinize any civil and political right whose introduction might require changes in the local cultural tradition. They see their historic responsibility in the preservation of their culture and not in its adaptation to the norms of a universal human rights culture. They assume the existence of many different lifestyles, each underpinning a particular form of governance that would determine the scope of human rights accorded to individuals. They also claim that their Islamic tradition possesses countermodels for every social-legal model that the West can offer.

The officials in Iran used the opportunity created by the debates over universality vs. relativism in human rights to challenge the universal normative consensus that has been formed around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). They challenged the Commission on Human Rights, which expects all states to adhere to international human rights laws.⁸ A self-serving fidelity to “Islamic cultural tradition” conveniently cast aside several of the universal human rights. As well understood by human rights scholars, human rights are not only universal but also interdependent and indivisible. One cannot allow derogation in one right without negatively affecting other rights that are left seemingly unchallenged theoretically.

The central challenge that the Islamic Republic presented to the universality of human rights lay in its assertion that religion—namely, Islam—is the supreme cultural principle, more important than any ethical construct that bases its claim to legitimacy on sources other than revelation. The immediate political context was created by the assertion made by Ayatollah Khomeini that the Islamic cultural norms were being corrupted by Western-style freedom, causing immorality in young men and leading young women astray. Questioning the universality of human rights, the regime's ideologues offered their own version of human rights for which they claimed validity, beyond time and space. The claim was grossly misinformed. In the summer of 1995, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, urged his foreign affairs functionaries to reject “the Western notion of human rights.” Referring to the values that the Islamic system was trying to inculcate globally, he asserted, “Today the Islamic system is questioning the identity, goal, and capability of the Western system, and the most superior Western thinkers are gradually realizing the tediousness of the Western system. Thus, the civilization that began with the Renaissance is coming close to its finale. Human beings today are searching for a substitute for the Western system, and the inclination toward Islam in the United States, Europe, and Africa emanates from this situation.”⁹

Khamenei was not alone in his misperceptions. President Muhammad Khatami won the presidency on a popular reformist platform in 1997. As the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 1990, he declared that the decline of the West would herald “Islam's global leadership in the next century.” He added that the Islamic Republic must prepare “to be the model for other countries by replacing anti-values with values.”¹⁰ Like Khamenei, Khatami was proposing a new doctrine of universalism based on Islam.

The United Nations has formulated human rights standards solely for protecting individuals from abusive states and societies. The clerics politicizing Islam injected a huge dose of metaphysics, from one particular religious tradition, into human rights debates, shifting the theoretical focus of the discourse away from the state's protective responsibilities. For some fifteen years, they envisioned a different kind of task for the state, one that protects the individual, before everything else, from his own probable religious-moral lapses. Considering the term “human rights,” the Islamists placed the stress on “human” and not on rights, making sure that they first obtained a “true” human being, mindful of God's presence and fearful of divine injunctions, before considering his rights. The goal was to create the perfect human (ensan-e kamet), which stood in “sharp contrast with the goal of Western liberalism, which created normal human (ensan-e normal).”¹¹ This approach justified coercion by claiming to be fulfilling a higher vision of human freedom, one that was achieved by the true discovery of God. Western-inspired liberty was deceptive; true liberty came only when the individual discovered God by freeing himself from all worldly attractions. In this understanding, the focus was on obligation and not right—not the individual's right to freedom of religion and conscience but his obligation to believe in the revealed religion. Commensurately, only the rightly guided opinions that were based on Islamic teachings were worth protecting.¹²

Dr. Hossein Mehrpur was a layperson appointed by the Islamic judiciary to counter charges of human rights violations in the UN in the early 1990s. Following the teachings of Islamist ideologue Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, Mehrpur asserted that Islam considers the gradual perfection of human beings to be the purpose of the Creation, and they achieve perfection by paying “attention to the Creator of the universe.”¹³ For Mehrpur, the true worth of human beings manifested itself only in worshipping God and observing religious rules. Thus, the only criterion for judging the superiority of some human beings over others was the degree of their piety and righteousness. “Islamic doctrine does not accept polytheism and blasphemy, and it believes that every effort must be made towards creating the sovereignty of monotheism and God's religion, because a human being without morality and an exalted soul does not possess real human value. To pay attention to this reality was to value human dignity and honor.” The state could achieve this goal by preaching, offering guidance, debating, and reasoning.

Mehrpur blamed the United Nations for remaining indifferent to religious values:

The Commission on Human Rights and other UN organs give no consideration to religious values; it can even be said that there takes place, under various excuses, a kind of struggle against religious values and beliefs. They do not take moral precepts seriously. Nor do they seriously consider the possibility of placing limitations on the individual's liberty for the sake of proper moral necessities that are also considered in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 29-2). No government would ever be reproached for providing unlimited liberties that are against moral precepts and correct religious values. However, if a government establishes limitations on its citizens for the sake of the protection of public morality, it will be questioned and blamed in UN resolutions.¹⁴

What Mehrpur and other religious ideologues failed to understand was that those who formulated the universal human rights norms were aware of the danger inherent in a situation where a contemporary state arrogated to itself the power of deciding for citizens what were “correct moral necessities.”

What if some individuals offered resistance to this divinely determined human dignity? Then they will be confronted in order to remove this obstacle to human beings' exalted progress. The Islamists used the Qur'anic exhortatory concepts related to struggle against “infidels, polytheists, and corrupters” to facilitate that achievement. Mehrpur asserted that Islam considers the promotion of irreligiosity to be contradictory to the dignity and worth of human beings. It is precisely for the sake of protecting fundamental human rights that Islam forbids “religious and moral carelessness.” According to Mehrpur's logic in the early 1990s, Iran could not protect human rights unless a proper religious environment was established.

What the reformist President Khatami entertained for an Islamic civil society was similar to the restrictive views expressed by other clerics who controlled the coercive instruments of state power. Like Mehrpur, Khatami saw the Islamization process as one that inculcated taqwa (virtue and piety) before granting liberty to citizens. Again, freedom was depicted as a Western concept, understood by “natural” human faculties, not religiously refined. The Western notion leaves the religiously unsophisticated to judge freedom's scope by his natural impulses for freedom; this could only lead to errors, since he is not guided by the compass of Islamic taqwa. Taqwa channels the natural, raw instinct for freedom in a religiously virtuous direction. Obviously, citizens with taqwa have a higher moral worth than those without. Ayatollah Motahhari, whose influence on men like Mehrpur and Khatami was clear, taught that liberty without taqwa would lead human beings astray.¹⁵ Thus, ensan-e ba-taqwa (virtuous human) was the same as ensan-e kamel (perfect human). Motahhari's view could be a fine sentiment if expressed by a cleric in a state that makes a clear distinction between political power and religious teachings. In a theocracy, however, it immediately provokes a number of troubling questions: How does the state instill taqwa in citizens? Who defines taqwa ? Can one gain taqwa without necessarily being loyal to the Ayatollah's rule (velayat-e faqih)? Can a teacher or a secular philosopher teach lessons on taqwa ? What should we do if the official taqwa set forth by [state] school propaganda is in conflict with taqwa taught in the family? Is it possible for a secular person to live a righteous life?¹⁶

Of course, this understanding of human rights contradicts the letter and spirit of the UDHR. Mehrpur observed that Article 26 of the UDHR provides for compulsory elementary education, since the international community understood the necessity of basic education for citizens. If education is important enough for the growth of human beings to be made compulsory, “Why cannot the worship of one God and the rejection of atheism be equally compulsory?”¹⁷

That he posed the point as a question was perhaps indicative of the fact that Dr. Mehrpur, who had served in the Shah's judiciary before the revolution, lacked a strict Islamist turn of mind. A genuine Islamist assertion came from a younger high official in the Foreign Ministry, in a prepared speech to an international audience in Tehran in 1991. Ali Qaderi considered the “limited value” of the UDHR. However, like many other officials at that time, he questioned the legitimacy and continued validity of the universal norms. These officials insisted that “Islamic doctrine had very limited presentation and reception at the time the Declaration and the two Covenants were formulated.”¹⁸ Pronouncing the world that was made without them morally and religiously defective, Qaderi demanded, in effect, that the world should pause, acknowledge their arrival, and accede to their demands by reconsidering many of the norms of international human rights laws, so painstakingly put together by the preceding generations.

Taking the UDHR to task, Qaderi asked: Is the Declaration's philosophical foundation rooted in natural law or based on social contract? Is it evolving today? Is it so complete that it has become eternal? Does it contain those common principles that religions share with each other concerning the rights granted to human beings, or is it itself the “mother of religions” to which the state must profess? Has it considered all general human rights? Do human beings possess other rights beyond what occurred to its authors? Can what is essentially the result of the specific experiences of a nation or some nations in a specific geographical location be considered “the epigraph for all locations?”¹⁹ Qaderi was toeing the line of argument advanced by the clerics.²⁰

A look at the history of the UDHR will show that its thoughtful and deliberative authors did in fact deal with major issues and questions related to the world's cultural and religious diversities. The human rights scholar Paul Gordon Lauren has observed that some of the drafters were quite familiar with “the pluralistic philosophical and cultural traditions of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia…. Indeed, their extraordinary ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• A Note on Transliteration
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Islamic Cultural Relativism in Human Rights Discourse
• Chapter 2. The Shiite Theocracy
• Chapter 3. The Right to Life
• Chapter 4. The Right to freedom from Torture
• Chapter 5. The Right to Liberty and Security of Person and to freedom from Arbitrary Arrest
• Chapter 6. The Right to a Fair Trial
• Chapter 7. The Right to freedom of Conscience, Thought, and Religion
• Chapter 8. Renounce your Conscience or Face Death: The Prison Massacre of 1988
• Chapter 9. The Right to Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion: Iranian Religious Minorities
• Chapter 10. Official Responses to the United Nations: Countering the Charges of Violations in the 1980s
• Chapter 11. Change of Tactics after Ayatollah Khomeini's Death
• Chapter 12. The Special Representative's Meetings with the Judiciary and Security Officials
• Chapter 13. The Right to Freedom of Opinion, Expression, and the Press
• Chapter 14. The Most Revealing Cases of Violations of the Right to Freedom of Expression and the Press
• Chapter 15. The Rights to Participate in the Political Life of the Country and to Peaceful Assembly and Association
• Chapter 16. The Rights of Women
• Chapter 17. UN Monitoring, 1984-2000: Mixed Results
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments