In Praise of Secularism: An Appreciation of Reza Afshari

I. INTRODUCTION

Reza Afshari is an unapologetic secularist. He defends both the rights of religious minorities in Iran, and all Iranians’ right to live free from any reference to or constraints by any religion whatsoever.

II. PERSECUTION OF RELIGIOUS MINORITIES

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, members of the Iranian Baha’i community have been persecuted. The Baha’i are followers of the nineteenth century Persian prophet, Bah’u’lláh, whom they consider a messenger of God along with Jesus, Muhammad, and others. An estimated 200 Baha’i were executed in Iran from 1979 to 1984.¹ To this day Baha’i endure considerable political and legal disabilities, such as exclusion from universities and frequent harassment and imprisonment. Many thousands are now in exile, having suffered grievously from torture, imprisonment, deprivation of property, exclusion from their professions, and execution of family members.²

Other religious minorities in Iran also endure unequal rights and imposed social, economic and political disabilities. This includes the dhimmi, or People of the Book (Jews and Christians) who are supposed to be protected by Islam. So-called apostates from Islam are severely persecuted; the Iranian regime considers all members of the Baha’i religion to be apostates.

Elsewhere in majority-Muslim countries, Christians suffer severe repression, as in Pakistan.³ And agnostics and atheists are often considered apostates who risk execution by the state or by private Islamist extremists. In recent years several atheist bloggers in the Muslim world—or people who weren’t necessarily atheists, but questioned some precepts of Islam—have been murdered, imprisoned and/or tortured, as in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.⁴

Afshari objects to this persecution of non-Muslims in Iran and elsewhere. He strongly criticizes governments of Muslim-majority countries that assert Islamic “difference” in the formulation of human rights principles. He insists that members of such governments often act in their own personal, tribal, or material interests. He objects to scholars of Iran who in anthropological discussions of “agency” and accommodation via Islamic texts ignore the use of state power.⁵ He points out that the supposedly religiously-based Iranian regime actually uses secular power to persecute those who challenge its supposed moral authority. “Claiming authenticity in tradition, while struggling to seize the commanding heights of the modern state, is a spectacular political double-cross.”⁶

Defenders of those who persecute the Baha’i sometimes argue that they do so as a matter of Iranian Islamic culture. Such assertions sometimes cover much grosser, materialistic motives. If Baha’i leave Iran, their Muslim relatives inherit their property, giving some individuals strong motives to denounce their Baha’i family members.⁷ If no Muslim relatives exist, the government takes over the property, presumably distributing it to its own members or favored citizens. Citizens as well as the state benefit from the opportunities for corruption that persecution of the Baha’i offers.

III. “MODEST DISABILITIES”

Afshari, a human rights universalist, defends the right of every Iranian to choose their religion—or irreligion—regardless of the regime’s claims to cultural, religious or traditional particularism. He reminds the reader that human rights were originally formulated to protect individuals against the state, but they are also necessary to protect them against repressive collectivities. He does not tolerate any abridgement of human rights, however modest.

In 2007, Jack Donnelly argued that “A state . . . might be justified in denying certain benefits to apostates, as long as those benefits are not guaranteed by human rights. . . . It may even be (not im)permissible to impose modest disabilities on apostates, again as they do not violate [their] human rights.” Thus, he implied, apostates should be protected from discrimination or execution. At the same time, the state was not obliged to protect them “against social sanctions imposed by their families and communities that do not infringe human rights.” Donnelly based his argument in part on his encounters with Muslim students in Iran who, he believed, accepted what he called the concept of freedom of religion but who, at the level of what he called conception (“the limits of...