Women, Secularism and Human Rights

An Anthropological Approach to Women Empowerment in Contemporary Iran

Essay , 2021 , 11 Pages , Grade: 1,3

Sociology - Miscellaneous

This paper deals with the status of women’s rights in Iran, which can appear contradictory at first glance. Using Theories of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood and other Human Rights anthropologists, it gives an overview of the contemporary women's movement, its strategies and tactics. It draws a picture of the west, how it is seen in Islamic countries and discusses the impact of the Norms and Goals that it has on its gender relations in Islam.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Secularism and Iran

West on Islam

Media Representation

New feminist approaches

Daily Practices

Conclusion

Sources

Introduction

In the countries of the so-called West, there is a perception of women in Islamic countries, that reduces them to their oppression by men and patriarchy. Through the media we get the image of the Muslim woman as a victim. The Quran is seen as the source of injustice between the sexes. Often the fact is not recognized or is swept under the table that the position of women in Islamic countries is quite characterized by activity and also by protest.

Some central questions of this paper will be: does the secular and democratic state and the west pose a threat to Islam? What role does secular feminism and literature play? Is equality possible in a theocratic state, that is based on Islam? Is there such a thing as a specific Islamic Feminism?

This will be answered on the example of Iran and its contemporary Feminist Movement.

I will collect voices of scholars who have devoted themselves to the Human Rights debate and the study of female life situations in the Islamic context from an anthropological perspective. Due to my self-location in the western context, this will be an approach to the subject area.

First, I focus on the relationship between the West and Islam, as this may have to do with the Iranian government's resistance to certain developments. Based on this, the representation of Iran in the Western world through literature and human rights reports will be discussed. In addition to the scientific work of women’s rights activists through the Quran, the real life situations in Islamic societies will be examined. This should shed light in the strategies that women use to create spaces.

Secularism and Iran

Is the bad relationship between the West and Iran, a barrier on the way to equality and democracy?

In 2006, the president of Iran Ahmadineschad threw women on their way to equality way back, through declaring the human rights organization of Nobel prize Winner Shirin Ebadi as illegal.

The Reason for that was probably the Disgust of Ahmadinedschad against the West and its products. Many Islamist Iranians equate human rights with the imperialist West. Since human rights are already enshrined in the Quran anyway, they reject the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a Western ideal (Rasuly-Paleczek, 1999).

Iran voted in favor of the UDHR, has been a member of the OIC and the ILO of the UN, which would give the impression, that Human Rights have a high value.

Even though the human Rights situation of Iran is different. Islamic scholars and diplomats have sought human rights precedents in their traditions and largely affirmed UDHR, even though they rejected specific rights, such as that, to change religions or complete equality for women, and insisted divine law took precedence over secular discourse. (Messer, 1997)

Secularism is understood as the separation of religion and state. Western countries see secularism as the base for modern western forms of society and take this as their main argument against theocratic state forms. Secularism has a different meaning in Iran than in Western countries. With the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Islamists "reshaped secularity into anti-Islamic“ (Badran, 2001), because they equate it with modernization accompanying social decay. Talal Asad argues against: „“The secular“ must not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of “religion” and thus achieves the latter’s relocation.“ (Asad, 2003)

The antipathy toward the West and the exclusive attention to colonialism and external intrigues, the prevailing dependency paradigm in the Arab region has for decades contributed to a debilitating nationalist and populist politics in which a critique of self, of patriarchy, and of authoritarian polity, as well as reaching out to the world, have been lost to defensiveness, political self-indulgence, and conspiracy theory and clinging on old traditions and rules of their culture. (Bayat, 2009)

„When it comes to cultures, it is the loudest, the most powerful or the most fundamentalist who speak, and claim authenticity, which becomes a part of the vocabulary for claiming self-government.“ (Asad, 2000)

Whenever Muslim women ask for social justice and equality, which is a human right, they are often accused of importing a foreign ideology and are branded as non-Muslims by Islamist circles. In this way, Islamists attempt to delegitimize those who do not share their goals with those of political Islam and stop development in the direction of equality.

West on Islam

What are the Basic Human Rights issues in the Middle East and particularly Iran, that should be commonly taken to be of international concern?

Next to Freedom of Religion, restrictions of individual freedom, the non-democratic forms of government, there needs to be a focus seated on the limits on the rights of women and the notions of patriarchy.

Human Rights are defended as universal, independent of states - rights, that every Human gets when born. Talal Asad sees a paradox: „Human rights have universal claim to universality, paradoxically vested in a state within that certain interests and serves particular issues of national interest, economic interests in the profit of particular corporations and the great powers.“ (Asad, 2000) In the end the west gave them a new role to legitimize their social reform and cultural transformation. They sought to extend a specific legal culture beyond its original Euro-American location with the aim of emancipating the world.

The Western policymakers assume a „natural fit between the legal culture of “human rights” and the wider culture of “Western norms““ (Asad, 2000), protecting themselves from the discourse of Human Rights and becoming the leader of this form of power politics. While raising the question, who would dare to accuse the United States or its government people for violating the Human Rights, he underlines his idea, that „More attention is given to human rights violations in the non-Western world than in Euro- America.“ (Asad, 2000)

Wendy Brown said out of the position of the Western World: We need fundamentalism. We project and produce it elsewhere to present ourselves as free. (Brown, 2004)

The West uses the distribution of the idea, that the Muslim World lacks of equality of Men and Women in State and Society, to satisfy the Western women, with what they already achieved towards their freedom. This should relativize their advancements of a full realization of social equality.

It is true that the real situation of women in Iran, is still far from equality. However, most of the achievements of the last decades are disregarded: The literacy rate for women rises, Iranian students in higher education are mostly women and Iran has more women representatives elected than the US congress. (Mahmood, 2008) By pointing out just the grievances in which women in Muslim countries have to live, the West shows the supposed backwardness of the oriental society.

Islam’s mistreatment of women is used as a tool of intervention for restructuring and secularizing Muslim Population and religion itself. Saba Mahmood says that the „Western imperial power seeks to justify its geopolitical domination by posing as the liberator of indigenous women from native patriarchal cultures.“ (Mahmood, 2008) The West equates the fate of democracy with the fate of Muslim women regardless of whether it is really related. The portrayal of women as victims and the salvation through reformation towards democracy by themselves, which have the end result of treating women equally and making them the subject of religion, underline the image of saviors that they create of themselves.

Media Representation

They do a lot of effort in promoting this specific monochromatic image of the Muslim People, the different other, who act violent and misogynist. Muslim Feminist Literature has a major role in this.

The situation of women oppression is complex and complicated. What authors do, is to leave out information about the comparative context. Because of its drastically impact, I don’t want to reproduce the made out evidence, that authors like Hirsi Ali and Nafisi give, for showing that the Islam and especially Iranian Life is „ruthless in its omissions“. (Mahmood, 2008) In general they speak out of an insider victim perspective of violence, that shall just be one of the symptoms of a much larger pathology of Islam.

What do these women move to represent their home like that? The highly-numbered readers and listeners of their publications are based in the feminists and right wing politics in Euro-America, where a rising of Islamophobia is seen, due to the arrivals of Immigrants and Refugees. The right wing seeks for support of their ideology and finds them in these women, who act like they lived in the bad stereotypes and prejudices, given to Islam. Authors get popularity and political power, even without any qualifications.

They do not see the danger and the opportunistic benefit for larger political projects behind it. The image achieved fuels fear and hatred. Anti-immigration laws that target the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the population are reinforced, Islamophobia is reinforced and legitimization is given for interventions and transformation of Islam. (Mahmood, 2008)

Feminism needs to rethink its complicity with this War and should be more critical of the international power game. The Representations of facts are profoundly mediated by the fields of power in which they circulate and through which they require their precise space and form. The concern for Muslim women is paradoxically linked with the civilizational discourse through which the encounter between Euro-America and Islam is being framed right now.

„Feminist contributions to the vilification of Islam do not service either Muslim women or gender justice instead they rein scribe the cultural and civilizational divide“. (Mahmood, 2008) When the authors talk about certain misogynistic practices, from domestic violence to honor killings, they use the term Islam Culture. In doing so, they link culture and religion, which, according to Mahmood, must always be seen separately, as neither conditions the other. (Mahmood, 2008) The religion of Islam with its customs, laws and desires exists independently of the actions of the laws that follow it. To speak of changing or eradicating this so-called Islamic Culture can only be done through the internalized connection of these two great phenomena.

Mahmood cites an example: The gross difference in treatment of male violations in the US and Pakistan. While in the Western world, individual psychological treatments are initiated, the same case in a Muslim Country is associated from the west with traditional practices of a culture that must be restructured.

When the Human Development Report was published, a big discussion started about the focus that it sets on creating a frightening picture of Iran. The G8 in 2004 endorsed the U.S. plan for a „greater Middle East“ on the basis of the recommendations of this document. (Bayat, 2009) Iranians feared that the Report could be used to justify the American expansionist policy and Israeli domination in the region. The fact that the document was originally written in English was seen as a confirmation of the intended western audience of the publication and dependence of its authors. Focus is on the correlation between women empowerment and human development, which is nowhere justified and questionable. Since the suffering happens to more groups than the women, it could mean, that the trendy notion of Women’s empowerment serves primarily to satisfy again the sensibilities of a western audience. Like with Nafisis Book, the report received a western over enthusiasm, because here, the Arab world elites affirm the lack in freedom, democracy, and development and meet the idea of launching a political and social reform.

This report shows the complexity of the political processes of the Middle East and the western world and offers a look at the desire for autonomy and emancipation but also the tools for imperialistic domination.

„Human rights shall offer a certain kind of protecting Humans from Abuse and Suffering.“ (Brown, 2008) „What about the unintended effects and the possible futures that could emerge?“ The difficulty lies in recognizing „intellectual dishonesty“, if the discourse of Human Rights is used in a „cynical or sincere deployment“ and to separate human rights campaigns from legitimizing liberal imperialism. American imperialism is using the securing Human Rights mantle, while producing suffering. Following out of the Arabic elites not readiness, the whole strategy of political transformation collapses into the “realistic solution” of a “western-supported project of gradual and moderate reform aiming at liberalization in Arab countries.“ (Ahmadi, 2006) As Susan Mendus says, that a state that has indeterminate boundaries and a fragmented, conflictual identity cannot be responsible as a state for a culture of human rights. (Mendus,1995) Thus there shouldn’t be the advancement, that cultures exchange own norms with western to secure human rights, but to find their own modernity, where traditional culture aspects can exist.

New feminist approaches

A new wave of feminist research occurs in Iran, which takes Islam, not the West, as its source of legitimacy. The Civil Rights Code is based on the Sharia. (Ahmadi, 2006). The Language of the Sharia is value laden and is interpreted in a way that is positive for man. Iranian Islamic feminists have the demand not only that Sharia needs to be reinterpreted on the basis of a feminist approach but also that new laws deduced according to contemporary needs have to be written. Iranian Islamic feminists have tried to hinder the clergy efforts to prevent women from political active participation, by reinterpreting sacred texts in the context of a specific language. Clerics interpreted the word „rajol“ in a sentence about political activity, originally in Arabic with the meaning mankind, as man, which excluded women. (Ahmadi, 2006) Human Rights violations are emerging out of a dissonance between provisions of international Human Rights Conventions and aspects of Islamic Doctrine. (Asad, 2009) Islam and the Sharia have certain problems about principles that may conflict with the notion of human rights, in particular equality, but on the other side there’s a big part of sharia which is consistent with human rights.

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• College: Panteion University, Athen (Soziologie und Politik)
• Grade: 1,3
• Publication Year: 2021
• Pages: 11
• Catalog Number: V1292124
• ISBN (PDF): 9783346756961
• Language: English
• Tags: Feminism, Human Rights, Iran, Secularism, Religion, Revolution, Activism