[BRIEF NOTE] Ignatieff and Iran

[rfmcdonald]

While there's much to disagree about with Michael Ignatieff's record as a public philosopher--his views on nationalism and on torture, his easy alliance with the Liberal Party--Ignatieff's July 2005 New York Times Magazine article "Iranian Lessons" remains worth reading. If anything, his controversies have been caused by his radicalism; here, in "Iranian Lessons," he errs in the opposite direction.

At Shahid Beheshti University, I gave a seminar on human rights to a class composed mostly of young women in full-length black robes and head coverings. When I went up to shake their hands before the session started, they pulled their hands away. Such contact between the sexes is frowned upon. But in class, they were anything but docile. In often fluent English, they asked what I thought about Islamic Shariah law and its punishments, which can include stoning women to death for adultery. The challenge, I argued, is not understanding why these are wrong but prevailing politically against the religious authorities who believe that their own power depends on enforcing these penalties. The students replied that they needed help from Western intellectuals like me to get rid of Islamic punishments. I replied that while outside pressure can help, Western human rights advocacy can often have counterproductive results. In Nigeria, for example, an international letter-writing campaign organized by human rights advocates did not persuade an Islamic governor in northern Nigeria to halt the flogging of a teenage girl for having sex (she says she was raped) — and the campaign might even have persuaded him to proceed, if reports are to be believed. On the other hand, a group of female Islamic lawyers worked within the Shariah system to defend another Nigerian woman who had been sentenced to stoning for adultery, securing her acquittal on a technicality (which drew criticism from some Western human rights advocates).

The women in the class were not happy with my suggestion that they should reform Shariah from within. ''There should be one law for everybody, not two systems, one of Islamic law and the other of secular law,'' one student argued. I agree, I said, but it's not obvious how you are going to get there in Iran. The students found this too defeatist. ''We are very glad that you come to our class, professor,'' one said to me, ''but you are too nice to the Shariah law. It must be abolished. It cannot be changed.''

One professor observing these exchanges was a middle-aged man in the light brown robes and white turban that designate a religious scholar. Having listened carefully, with his long legs stretched out beneath the desk, he asked me — in fluent English — why I thought human rights were universal. I gave the answer I use in my class at Harvard — that if I were to go up to him, right now, and smack him across the face, anywhere in the world the act would count as an injustice and an insult. Human rights law codifies our agreement about stopping these intuitively obvious injustices.

But why, he pressed further, would an injustice against him also be perceived by me as an injustice? Because, I replied, human beings are not closed compartments. We can imagine what it would be like to be at the receiving end of the very blows we strike.

''You are an intuitionist,'' he said with a smile. I countered that the human capacity to understand the pain of others is a fact, not an intuition. ''But you need something stronger than this,'' he said. We continued for a while, agreeably disagreeing, but as he gathered up his papers to depart, he was smiling like someone who thought he had just won an argument. As far as he was concerned, beneath his belief in human rights lies the bedrock of the Koran, while beneath mine lies nothing but hopeful instincts.

Given his earlier likening of the atmosphere in Teheran now to that of Warsaw, Prague, or Budapest in the 1980s, given that the existing political system has proven itself incapable of reforming itself, and given that the major theoreticians of the Islamic Republic encountered by Ignatieff explicitly deny the validity of such human traits as empathy and compassion, one might think that he would have concluded his essay with a stirring call for a secular democratic republic capable of making rational decisions. But no, Ignatieff concludes his essay by leaving things in the air and arguing for more muddleness in Iran, for more hybrid polities. Ignatieff doesn't seem to take the lesson that, in fact, religion and politics do not mix, not at all, not anywhere.