I...do not accept Islamic human rights. If we accept that the Muslims can write an Islamic human rights declaration...from now on, we will see Buddhist human rights declarations...Jewish human rights declarations and so on and so forth...And if the standards are abolished... the weaker people...will be the ones who will suffer.
—Shirin Ebadi, Iranian Human Rights Activist and Nobel Laureate
As the 30th anniversary of Iran's Islamic Revolution approaches, it is refreshing to hear Shirin Ebadi declare that she does "not accept Islamic human rights." The problem is not merely that a cultural or religious definition of human rights can easily turn into a prescription for autocracy. The more fundamental problem is who gets to wield the ax of cultural interpretation? Mrs. Ebadi knows the answer: those who are in power, those who control the state. That is why "the weaker people" suffer. They suffer the misfortune of having their rights usurped the moment a class of religious leaders reserves for itself the right to say what it means to be a Muslim, Jew, Christian or Buddhist.
But what if that right is won through election? Ebadi knows the answer to this question as well: "The Islamic Revolution came to power with the vote of the people," she notes. But "a government that has won on the basis of the vote of the majority cannot do as it pleases. (It)...does not have the right to deprive women...of their basic rights."
Many Iranians would agree with this proposition, including Iran's former president, Mohammed Khatami. As I wrote in Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran, Khatami and his colleagues in the reform movement constituted a key wing of the Islamic Republic's original ruling family. These Islamic Leftists borrowed from Europe's revolutionary ideologies to argue for a notion of democracy that was hostile to all notions of pluralism. But after being persecuted by the very state they had helped to create, they began to rethink their original notion of democracy—as well as Islam.
Khatami's successor, President Ahmadinejad, embraced the populist myth of a unified, "people" a way to repress advocates of freedom, starting with Khatami's own allies. But such repression—accompanied by massive economic incompetence—has further alienated Iran's youth.
How much disillusionment can a post-revolutionary state endure? A lot. However estranged, most Iranians would probably agree with Ebadi, who argues that political reform can only come through—rather than against—the institutions and ideologies of the Islamic Republic. The revolution is thirty years young. No savior can substitute for the long, hard struggle to redefine Iran's multi-faceted revolutionary heritage.
Khatami, who will probably run in Iran's June presidential election, knows that his followers (former and present) are not looking for a hero. Yet he must find a way to inspire them while at the same time defining a realistic political project that will entail difficult compromises. This is a formidable challenge, to say the least.
Daniel Brumberg is an associate professor of government and director of democracy and governance studies at Georgetown University. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy. His work focuses on political, social and economic change in the Middle East and wider Muslim World.
