The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION HUMAN RIGHTS AND CULTURAL PRACTICE 1. The work of Franz Boas is foundational because his methodology challenged previous approaches to understanding cultures. Boas showed that a deep, interpersonal approach to understanding the way others think, exemplified through participant-observation, interviews, and historical research, sheds light on the internal logic of cultural practice. Later, Geertz’s interpretive approach to cultures (1973, 1983) added greater depth to the Boasian turn in fieldwork. In the last half century, anthropological methods have been further enhanced with more historical approaches that also take relationships of power into consideration. 2. In this sense, cultural relativism is philosophically distinct from the ethical or moral relativism that leaves us with the inability to judge cultural practices (Renteln 1988). Sahlins offers a clear account of relativism as method: “Relativism in this methodological sense, however, does not mean that any culture or custom is as good as any other, if not better; instead, it is the simple prescription that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed in their own context, understood as positional values in a field of their own cultural relationships, rather than appreciated in terms of intellectual and moral judgments of our making. Relativism is the provisional suspension of one’s own judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural order that made them possible” (2000: 21). 3. Coined by Jalal Al-e Ahmad in 1952, the term referred to the state of being plagued by the “West” and described the spread of Western cultural norms for defining gender relations. Colloquially, it referred to women who dressed in Western attire and adopted so-called Western attitudes by smoking, laughing loudly, wearing excessive makeup, and mingling unself-consciously with men in public (Al-e Ahmad 1982). 4. I am not pointing to the truth-value of such statements, but rather to the way that entitlements are discussed in terms of “rights before law” as opposed to another configuration of rights, such as through appeals to Islamic values alone. 5. For instance in France, with the headscarf debate, by the very presence of Muslims, the French are obliged to rethink what it means to live in a free society, to have rights to expression and religion. Iranian state and nonstate actors deliberately invoke the contradictions embedded in liberalism, which lie at the philosophical base of human rights. All actors must now consider readapting and reimagining human rights, even in France. Indeed in France, the headscarf issue has crystallized the question of cultural difference, the universality of human rights, and the meaning of women’s rights. 6. Certainly Iranians made rights-based claims before the postwar era, during the constitutional revolution (1905–11), for instance, and during the struggle for 212 • Notes to Chapter One equal rights for women in the Babi and Baha’i movements in the mid-nineteenth century. This rights talk, however, with special emphasis on the rights-bearing individual, has specific new meaning as part of a global hegemonic discourse since World War II. 7. Chanock (2000) points out that while such rights are not necessarily universal by nature, they have universalizing tendencies, something which he sees as a productive foil to rigid claims of cultural exception by despotic leaders. 8. See also Mehta (1999). On racial and gendered exclusions, see Razack (2000); Stepan (1998); and Stoler (1995). 9. Iranian Muslims by and large (about 89%) are part of the Shi’i branch of Islam, as opposed to the Sunni branch, which is the predominant branch of Islam. Shi’i believe that Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law and cousin, was the Prophet’s immediate successor. See Cole and Keddie (1986); Momen (1985). 10. Ninety-three percent of the women I interviewed referred to themselves as middle class or working class; 7 percent referred to themselves as poor or lower class. 11. Iran’s rate of population growth had increased dramatically in the decade after the revolution, in which time the population had more than doubled. In the early 1990s, Iran embarked on a population growth policy that has successfully harnessed runaway population growth. 12. Hoodfar (1997) echoes this view. CHAPTER ONE A GENEALOGY OF “WOMEN'S RIGHTS” IN IRAN 1. This is not intended as an exhaustive discussion of the literature. For more complete scholarly reviews, see Keddie (2000–1, 2002). 2. The names in this book have been changed to preserve the privacy of the...