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*This review was written by Professor Reza Afshari, Professor of History and Human Rights, Pace University
This memoir opens a small window into the life of a fascinating Iranian woman who grew up in a provincial city, obtained a law degree in Tehran and gained, while still fairly young, access to the upper echelons of the country’s intellectual and semi-official milieus. Defying stereotyping of all sorts, Kar’s account offers an antidote to the Western essentializing tendency toward Muslim Iranians. The family was kept together by a remarkable mother who, despite a provincial upbringing and religious devotion, refused to impose Islamic dress code on an obviously attractive daughter entering high-school. With the first political rumblings of the revolution, the mother expressed her dislike for the turbaned resurgence that threatened the Shah’s modernizing efforts that she intuitively appreciated. Kar came of age in the 1960s, when competing ideologies – Marxism, nationalism, and Third Worldism, as well as their amalgam, Islamic socialism of the Shari’ati type – were delivering up to university students their dizzying political sloganeering. They impressed her intellectually, but true to an even keeled temperament that is still in evidence in her activism in exile, she remained politically unmoved. Revolutionary heroism, she writes, did not sit well with her “nature.” (p. 39) She had sympathy for political martyrs, but wished not to be one herself. Cautious, farsighted and mindful of the obdurate cultural obstacles to social progress, this young attorney was cut out to be a human rights advocate. She “would stare” at the revolutionaries on the streets of Tehran, elevating Ayatollah Khomeini to a mythical height. Then, the post-revolutionary realities hit her particularly hard with the imposition of hijab, creating predicaments whose descriptions make interesting reading. She had mistrusted the revolutionaries all along; thus, unlike many of her contemporaries she felt no aftereffect of “deep disillusionment.” She decided to stay in Iran and cope with the consequences of living a life buckled down under a regime that intellectually and emotionally repulsed her. This is a momentous segment of her life that she describes well.
As a secular attorney working within a fast changing judiciary, she had to learn the Shari’a-based language of Islamic jurisprudence, while being shunned by the glowering turbaned judges who tightly controlled it. “The more negative responses I received, the more persistent I became. I had decided to retain my right to practice law at all costs.” (p. 53) She depicts a life that had become, both professionally and personally, a series of exhausting trials. “In this land, I had the opportunity to become more familiar with the strange conditions of my life – a life in which I was a foreigner. In this strange place, the vast roots of thousands of years of tradition had risen from the depths of the murky earth to twist around me and tie my hands.” (p. 62-63) The language needs a thorough editing, but it retains a touch of its original Farsi charm. Of course she is a master wordsmith in Farsi, as evident in the longer Farsi version of her memoir published in Europe. She appeared “in full Islamic dress” in judicial offices and courts otherwise forbidden to a female attorney, whose correct hijab could hardly camouflage her secular disposition. She managed “to maneuver this difficult environment, relying only on my own initiatives…” (p. 93) She tells the stories of a number of desperate but never boring clients, from whom she learned a great deal about human rights violations. She was particularly infuriated by the new phenomenon of policing citizens’ morals. It created victims. It also generated widespread corruption among those who self-righteously enforced the rules against forbidden pleasures and who sequentially facilitated – surreptitiously and for a profit – their continuous availability.
Kar practiced law to support a single-income family of an unemployable husband and two daughters, but she remained a writer at heart. Publishing had its own perils. The bloody suppression of the early 1980s created an efficiently repressive regime that muffled Iran’s vibrant secular voices that had reverberated during the revolution. The secular artists, writers and journalists did not dare to apply for the needed permission to engage in what they expected of themselves. The forbidden territory in which nothing was allowed needed no “red line”. Thus, the 1980s signified a static period of human rights violations during which no overt claim to rights was made. Then, Khomeini died in June 1989. Assuming the presidency, Rafsanjani called for a post-revolution-post-war normalization and assigned a significant role to Islamic technobureaucrats who stressed economic development and national self-determination. This uneasy transitional period witnessed the emergence of new dissidents from within the system who had gradually become discontented with the Islamist experiments in politics. This in turn offered an opening to the most daring among secular writers and journalists who cautiously tried to reclaim their place on the national scene. The Islamist dissidents sometimes acted as cautious enablers, providing the secular intellectuals with a shaky platform to speak or a carefully delineated space to publish. (p. 106-107)
It is in this period that two female lawyers gradually found their own human rights voices – and a place in modern Iranian history: Mehrangiz Kar and Shirin Ebadi. At the end of this period and by a strange turn of kismet, the former carried her cancer-infected body into exile in the US and the latter landed in Norway to collect the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. “Why wasn’t it jointly granted to both?” I sometimes heard expatriates whispering.
The political context that shaped Kar’s renewed activism during the Rafsanjani presidency was deceptively hopeful. This book is, in its core, a portrait of the paradox of hope and despair. Through the new opening she saw an opportunity to expose the shortcomings of the existing Islamic laws, while remaining within the parameters of “progressive” interpretations of Islam offered by the disappointed insiders. However, the reality of the two-faced regime presented a serious challenge to Kar. The publicly visible technobureaucrats who were in charge of ministries regulating intellectual activities and publications offered an opening, but they rendered themselves unaccountable for the human rights abuses that were taking place. Those who were hidden beyond the walls of the security apparatus remained out of reach and capable of creating hardships for those who wished to believe in the reformist milieu that was officially on display. While the reformist side of the regime opened doors, the security side of it harassed those who dared walk through them. The hard-liners who controlled the state’s disciplinary institutions coined the epithet digar andishan (those who think differently) in the mid-1990s. Kar was one of them.
Cautious but persistent, she tested the limits of tolerance offered by the normalization agenda. “The red line” in the title refers to this larger reality. In the mid-1990s, the Supreme Leader reminded everyone of the “Islamic Redline,” setting the limits for freedoms. It set up a new stratagem to exhaust the dissidents. An unspoken fear became the subtext of the legalistic speeches Kar delivered to university students and the books and treatises she published.
Some of her most significant writings on the discourse and practice of human rights appeared in this period, creating what is perhaps the most informative human rights collection thus far published in Farsi. Women’s rights in particular offered her a suitable niche. Articles published in a magazine edited by the devout Muslim Shalah Sherkat presented an Iranian version of “Islamic feminism”. As a secular writer, Kar felt she could contribute. She wrote treatises that followed the trends established by the reformist Muslims offering re-readings of Islam and arguing that Muslims can find popular support for human rights by taking a new look at Islamic sources and revitalizing the traditional instruments of jurisprudence. (p.110-111) Not unlike American liberal scholars looking at the constitution of the United States, they approach the Koran as “a living text” that can be reinterpreted to pave a smoother path to gender equality. In the end Kar realized that the major obstacle to advancing human rights in Iran was the Islamic Republic’s Constitution that is based on the shari’a. (p. 136-37)
Finally, the value of Kar’s memoir lies in its vivid descriptions of the victims of violations who asserted their human rights claims against a repressive regime and an illiberal society. Their understanding of the relevance of international human rights laws to their lives colors their self-definitions as citizens of a modern nation-state. She witnessed the growth of many human rights “sprouts” in Iran. (p. 136) She was particularly heartened by the female activists in universities who, despite their traditional background and religious convictions, were becoming increasingly committed to international human rights. They were a new generation of devout women advocating women’s rights and seriously considering “the possibility of the separation of religion and state.” (p. 191) In describing those Iranians who asserted their human rights claims, Kar makes no reference to the “origins” of the human rights discourse – or to its philosophical “foundations”. Western scholars who still advocate cultural relativism with respect to the universality of human rights should pay a close attention to Kar’s testimonies that show many Iranians have incorporated the Universal Declaration model into their own political narratives in order to create rights-protecting legal systems in their own benighted polity. Many of them would perhaps be puzzled by the phenomenon that every time they speak of their universal human rights, some Western scholars remind them of “the Western Enlightenment”. Kar offers us a glimpse into the contemporary global histories – peoples and states charting their ways into multifaceted modernity – that have rendered the subject of the Western origins of human rights outdated and without much practical relevancy to the victims of human rights violations. The contemporary global histories have created substantive and diverse human experiences overlying the original Western foundation of human rights. Heaps of global histories have piled up since John Locke and the Philosophes walked the earth. Kar has contributed to the making, as well as the relating, of these accumulated historical experiences.
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