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CHAPTER SIX: Human Rights: The Politics and Prose of Discursive Sites
- Princeton University Press
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C H A P T E R S I X Human Rights: The Politics and Prose of Discursive Sites THE UNMARKED DOOR OPENED to a dim reception area where a family sat waiting. A man turned to me, seemingly responding to my silent confusion , and said, “Yes, this is the right place.” Verifying, I asked, “This is the Islamic Human Rights Commission?” He nodded, adding, “Supposedly .” I first went to the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) to interview one of its staff attorneys in the summer of 1999. Located on the posh upper northwest side of Tehran, the IHRC is housed in the lower level of an imposing high-rise residential building at the north end of Africa Street, one of the city’s most elegant strips, where one can find shops with exquisite European designs and prices to match. The taxi driver, gracious in his persistence to find the obscure address, dropped me off inside the underground parking garage of the apartment building that would lead me to the IHRC’s elusive entrance. Once inside, I was greeted by a receptionist who notified the attorney with whom I was to meet. In minutes, a young woman with a round, pale face engulfed in a black chador entered the reception area and greeted me. She asked me to follow her and flowed down the hall back to her office. There was little small talk as we seated ourselves and I began to ask about human rights in Iran. Just as we were starting, a distraught young woman with a child in tow entered the doorway of our room and yelled, “Where is the foreigner having an interview on human rights in Iran? I want to speak to the foreigner. You should interview me, not her.” She stood in the entryway and pulled her child tight, then shouted, “There are no human rights in Iran!” and swiftly moved away. Ms. Tazeh, the attorney, sat silently through it all, seemingly unmoved. Coolly, she clari- fied that the woman was disgruntled about her housing situation and sought help at the IHRC, which was powerless to provide living accommodations . At the time, the intervention seemed little more than a failed attempt at provocation, one that my host casually dismissed. The disruption , however, showcased how narratives about human rights pass through multiple discursive registers—political, social, gender, and historical . It emphasized how even my role as a person researching human rights partially shaped the discourse about Iranian human rights and also animated how human rights practices, both inside and outside of Iran, are Human Rights • 167 produced in reaction to politicized imaginings about Iran’s place in the greater geopolitical landscape. Today, questions about human rights in the Muslim MENA region often ponder the relationship between Islam and human rights, taking each as separate and distinct entities a priori. Instead of beginning with this premise of opposition and coexistence, I consider the coconstituting nature of such discourses. Instead of seeing these ideas as binaries, I explore dialogical processes that exist in various contexts of on-the-ground human rights practices. For this reason, the methodology for this chapter is different from the previous ones, which explored specific places as interpretive spaces through which notions of rights emerge. The physical space through which human rights discourses emerge in practice is elusive, like the location of the IHRC itself. Human rights, Louis Henkin famously said, “is the idea of our time” (1990: ix);1 although grounded in philosophical tracts and legal treatises, the tangible quality of human rights emerges as a discursive formation given numerous local contingencies. In this chapter I thus highlight my discussions with numerous Iranian state actors to show how they also construct the idea of human rights through multiple layers of discourse, including the transnational, which is ostensibly secular, but also discourses that invoke “culture,” “religion,” and “tradition.” The questions I consider are: what do human rights mean to the state actors I spoke with, and what conditions have given rise to and form their discourses of human rights? Certainly some have attempted to appraise the country’s record on human rights from the standpoint of the international treaties to which Iran is a signatory (Afshari 2001); others have attempted to compare the legal apparatus of human rights in Iran with that of the international (Mayer 1991). Such studies, however, have little regard for the evolving and established on-the-ground networks of human rights through which those practices travel...