The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran

CONCLUSION: “Women’s Rights” as Exhibition at the Brink of War

C O N C L U S I O N “Women’s Rights” as Exhibition at the Brink of War HOW A MODERN LIBERAL THEORY of rights is mapped onto an Islamic Middle Eastern society, specifically through women’s articulations of rights, has been the focal point of this book. The Iranian experiment of creating an Islamic republic from France’s postwar vision of secular democracy warrants greater attention in understanding the socio-political underpinnings of women’s perceptions of rights. An examination of Iranian women’s rights provides the perfect point of entry into exploring the secular and religious simultaneously, and for contesting the binaries to which earlier scholars have reverted when exploring Islamic states. How Islam and liberal state impact women’s rights, moreover, highlights the contingency of practices of rights. The broader relevance of my work bears on the seemingly contradictory notions of human rights and Islam. How Iranians think about these issues represents a local analysis much needed in understanding human rights cross-culturally. • • • On March 17, 2006, I was asked to participate in a discussion on relations between Iran and the United States for a broadcast on a Seattle public radio station.1 I spoke at length with the show’s producer, who asked me to address women’s rights in Iran. As it turned out, the show focused on Iran and nuclear proliferation, with all three of the other guests being experts on nonproliferation. It was unclear to me what role I, as a specialist on women’s rights, was intended to play. As my segment came to a close, I had a chance to mention the role of women’s affairs representatives in Iran’s ministries. I pointed out that each ministry has a female representative charged with overseeing the concerns of female employees. The response from the show’s host was one of surprise—not about the existence of women’s affairs representatives, but about the fact that Iranian women work outside the home. The response from the radio show’s host signaled the ease and subtle acceptance with which the binaries of Western freedom and Islamic oppression travel through our society. It led me to think about the work that the enduring trope of the “oppressed Muslim woman in Iran” does in the “Women’s Rights” at the Brink of War • 201 current geopolitical climate and then extrapolate its logic to understand how it affects the work that we as scholars do. In other words, what is the logic behind the relationship between women’s rights in Iran and the U.S. policy of regime change there? It seems to be a good thing, perhaps even a natural thing, for us to be concerned with women’s rights in Iran, but then what are the hermeneutical limits of our understanding of Iranian women’s rights and status in light of the intensified rhetoric against Iran over a thirty-year period? In Colonising Egypt, Timothy Mitchell took up the question of “exhibitions ” of the Middle East in and by Europeans. Through non-European eyes, he studied exhibitions as practices that exemplified the nature of the modern European state. He explored what he referred to as “the mischief ” of putting Middle Eastern visitors on display under the irrepressible eagerness of Europeans “to stand and stare” (1988: 2). In the world of exhibitions, Mitchell’s Egyptian interlocutors revealed, Europeans felt their gaze had no effect. The ability to see without being seen confirmed their separation from the world and corresponded with a position of power over it (26). The “Orient,” or in this case Iran, comes to be a place that one already knows, that one only rediscovers. Exploring contemporary exhibitions helps us to locate the logic of what may otherwise be regarded as natural concerns for women in Iran. Mitchell argued that a shift occurred in the culture of representation with the emergence of capitalism and the development of the modern nation-state. This book was published a little more than a decade before September 11, 2001, so perhaps a more specific exploration into contemporary “exhibitions on women’s rights” will help us trace a more exacting logic about what we “already feel we know” about women in the Middle East. And so today it would be fruitful to explore exhibitions on “women’s rights” in order to locate their variable contexts, meanings, and implications , with regard to the era that we are in. By that era, I...