Persian Journal, Iran
July 27 2005
The Persian Pleasure Principle and the Relative
Samira Mohyeddin – Persian Journal
What the historian says will, however careful he may be to use purely
descriptive language, sooner or later convey his attitude. Detachment
is itself a moral position. The use of neutral language (“Himmler
caused many persons to be asphyxiated”) conveys its own ethical tone.
(Isaiah Berlin / Introduction to “Five Essays on Liberty”, 1969).
Recently, Micheal Ignatieff, Canadian author, broadcaster, and
director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University, was invited to Iran by an
Iranian NGO known as the Cultural Research Bureau, to lecture on
human rights and democracy.
On July 17, 2005, Ignatieff wrote a lengthy editorial about his
experiences in Iran for the New York Times Magazine Titled Iranian
Lessons, Ignatieff begins his article by noting that because of
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent win in the Iranian presidential
elections, Ignatieff had to alter his planned lecture. Instead of
asking: “What do democracy and human rights mean in an Islamic
society”?, Ignatieff asks: “Can democracy and human rights make any
headway at all in a society deeply divided between the rich and the
poor, included and excluded, educated and uneducated?”
Initially, one thinks that Ignatieff is speaking to the necessity for
equating and associating socio-economic rights as a human right, a
project that Canadian, Louis Arbour who is currently the United
Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights, is advocating and
developing. Ignatieff however does not speak to the constituents,
which he attempts so poorly to champion. Instead, Ignatieff chooses
to give voice to the enfranchised upper echelons of Tehran society.
Although his article begins in south Tehran, with a detailed
description of a walled cemetery dedicated to those who senselessly
perished in the first gulf war, Ignatieff does not address the
concerns and confines of the more than forty percent of Tehran’s
population that live below the poverty line.
Why would Ignatieff choose to not have a single conversation with
anyone in southern Tehran? After all, it was this exact constituency
that brought Ahmadinejad to power. The same constituency that made
Micheal Ignatieff alter the topic of his lecture. Other than an
over-blown and prosaic description of the walled cemetery, complete
with Persian poem, and tea drinking mourners, Ignatieff does not
offer much insight and leaves southern Tehran to its mourning.
In 1985 the United States Congress tried to pass a resolution
officially recognizing the massacre of more than a million Armenians;
specifically referring to the “genocide perpetrated in Turkey between
1915 and 1923.” Sixty-nine historians sent a letter to Congress
disputing this, writing:
As for the charge of “genocide,” no signatory of this statement
wishes to minimize the scope of Armenian suffering. We are likewise
cognizant that it cannot be viewed as separate from the suffering
experienced by the Muslim inhabitants of the region. The weight of
evidence so far uncovered points in the direct of serious inter
communal warfare (perpetrated by Muslim and Christian irregular
forces), complicated by disease, famine, suffering and massacres in
Anatolia and adjoining areas during the First World War. One of the
sixty-nine historians was well known Orientalist and Islamic scholar,
Bernard Lewis.
Although the New York Times reported the atrocities in 1915: “Both
Armenians and Greeks, the two native Christian races of Turkey, are
being systematically uprooted from their homes en masse and driven
forth summarily to distant provinces, where they are scattered in
small groups among Turkish Villages and given the choice between
immediate acceptance of Islam or death by the sword or starvation.”
(“Turks are Evicting Native Christians,” New York Times, July 11,
1915.), in a 1993 interview with Le Monde magazine in France, Lewis
declares that what happened should not be considered genocide — and
that calling it genocide was just “the Armenian version of this
story.” In a second interview a few months later, he referred to “an
Armenian betrayal” in the “context of a struggle, no doubt unequal,
but for material stakes… There is no serious proof of a plan of the
Ottoman government aimed at the extermination of the Armenian
nation.”
Although Lewis is not a human rights or genocide scholar, he is a
historian, and like Ignatieff, who purports to be a human rights
champion extraordinaire, has a certain responsibility. I am not
suggesting that Ignatieff’s self-induced myopia regarding the abysmal
human rights record of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is on par with
genocide denial. I am arguing however that we all make choices. Lewis
made a choice when he referred to the genocide of the Armenians as
“their version of history”. Ignatieff also makes a choice when he
praises the Islamic Republic of Iran on “the achievements of the
revolution”, and continually fetishizes Persian culture throughout
his article.
Referring to something that he coins as “Persian pleasure”, Ignatieff
paints a picture of present day Isfahan: “I spent a night wandering
along the exquisitely lighted vaulted bridges, watching men, not
necessarily gay, strolling hand in hand, singing to each other, and
dancing beneath the arches – came away from a night in Isfahan
believing that Persian pleasure, in the long run, would outlast
Shiite Puritanism.”? Never bothering to define what “Persian
pleasure” is, Ignatieff disregards Iran’s multicultural,
multilingual, and multi-ethnic reality, and instead chooses to paint
a little miniature of boys and men frolicking with one another, BUT
NOT NECESSARILY GAY, and just leaves it there.
Ignatieff also trivializes women’s issues by making repeated
references to women’s dress, make-up, and hair. Yet, Ignatieff fails
to mention that the covering of women’s hair, however miniscule it
may seem these days, is mandatory for women in Iran, and failure to
do so carries the penalty of 102 lashes. After lamenting the fact
that “young Iranians are so hostile to clerical rule”?, Ignatieff
goes on to make an audacious suggestion to the female students that
he speaks to in the university telling them not to reject sharia out
right but to “reform shariah from within.”? Irrespective of
Ignatieff’s deluded prescription, what was heartening was the answer
that those female students gave to Ignatieff’s suggestion: “You are
too nice to Shariah law. It must be abolished. It cannot be changed.”
Early on in the article, Ignatieff describes how he came upon the
scene of a small student led demonstration regarding the elections in
Iran and was witness to a secret police officer attempting to abduct
one of the students and push him into the back of an unmarked
vehicle. Ignatieff goes on to describe how some of the demonstrators
came to the aid of the student by punching and kicking the officer.
Ignatieff’s next assertion regarding what he has just been witness to
is quite puzzling and disappointing. Referring to the student who had
managed to wrangle himself free, Ignatieff posits “In a more
genuinely fearful police state, he would have gone quietly.”? Is
Ignatieff suggesting that Iran is not a police state? Although
Ignatieff does recognize that the Iranian government does not give
much credence to the concept of human rights, he fails to offer any
critical assessment of the situation of human rights in Iran.
Two days after Ignatieff’s publication, on July 19, 2005, Amnesty
International reported that two youths, both under the age of 18,
were executed in the Iranian province of Mashad for having sexual
relations with one another and a 13 year-old boy. Prior to their
execution both were given 228 lashes for consuming alcohol and
disturbing the peace.
Unlike Ignatieff’s idyllic miniature of late night Isfahan, these
boys ARE NECESSARILY GAY, and were hung for being so in true medieval
fashion. This is where Ignatieff’s dreamy and congenial romance with
Persian pleasure falls apart. Ignatieff’s self-induced myopia
regarding the socio-political situation of Iranians, particularly the
young, is the specific reason why Ignatieff’s article on Iran reads
more like the accounts of a political economist turned harlequin
romance writer, than a scholar of human rights.
NOTE: Bernard Lewis’s denial of the Armenian Genocide can be found on
the Turkish embassies website
().
Samira Mohyeddin is a graduate student at the Institute for Women’s
Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto