THE experience of Iran over the last two decades offers historic lessons about the universality of human rights. Perhaps the most vital lessons are about the consequences of attempting a so-called cultural revolution to purge a nation of alien influences and in the process rejecting "Western" human rights, replacing these by standards supposedly derived from authentic/indigenous cultural models. The adverb "supposedly" is warranted, because in Iran's case, the adoption of an official Islamic ideology and a theocratic model of government were actually innovations that were presented in traditionalist guises. The pseudo-traditional scheme of placing the country under the rule of the leading Islamic jurist was advertised as the way to guarantee adherence to Islamic law. This, in turn, was identified with upholding Iran's own values and culture.

In the wake of Islamization, human rights were explicitly subordinated to Islamic criteria--as if otherwise Mien human rights could be indigenized by this process. As I have pointed out, once clerics managed to dominate Iran's government, they asserted the prerogative to deny rights according to their own definitions of Islamic requirements (Mayer, 1996). Since the ruling clerics are alone deemed capable of ascertaining what Islam calls for, ordinary Iranians had no way of challenging denials of rights made under Islamic rubrics. They were forced to live with "Islamic" curbs on rights that turned out to be arbitrary and highly politicized.

After twenty years in power, Iran's clerical regime is confronting the corrosive impact of its egregious human rights violations on its legitimacy. It is struggling to cope with a popular backlash grounded largely in Iranians' aspirations to enjoy human rights as these are universally defined. The more perceptive members of the new system have come to realize that the appeal and credibility of Iran's official Islamic ideology have become severely tarnished due to its association with flagrant abuses of human rights. As Iranians' resentment has mounted, their clerical masters have been left with an awkward choice between granting concessions to a restive citizenry hungry for greater freedoms, which might imperil their own lucrative monopoly of power, or assaying more aggressive repression, which can only increase the unpopularity of their Islamic system.

This outcome was not foreseen by many at the time of the Shah's overthrow. One reason why those who were swept away by enthusiasm for the Islamic Revolution had not initially been troubled by the policy of subordinating human rights to Islamic criteria was that they anticipated the Islamic Republic to be a utopian Islamic society without the rivalries and antagonisms that plague other societies, a society where all members would be organically bound by uniform beliefs and a commitment to adhere to perfect Islamic rules. Solidarity and harmony, so it was imagined, would be the natural outgrowths of the Islamic revolutionary elan, an elan that was expected--unrealistically, as it turned--out to outlast the early days of the Islamic Republic.

A prominent thread in official statements about the new Islamic order was the notion that the Iranian people would be united once the detritus of alien political, legal, and cultural influences were swept away. This is exemplified by the preamble to the post-revolutionary constitution, which claimed that:

   Our nation, in the course of its revolutionary developments, has cleansed
   itself of the dust and impurities that accumulated during the taghuti
   [roughly, "infidel" or "godless"] past and purged itself of foreign
   ideological influences, returning to authentic intellectual standpoints and
   world-view of Islam.

The constitution repeatedly condemned the rule of the last Shah, who was viewed as a godless ruler and the tool of foreign interests, as well as a perpetrator of human rights abuses. It was under the Shah, the constitution said, that Iranians struggling on behalf of the Islamic cause had to bear "execution by firing squads, endurance of medieval tortures, and long terms of imprisonment" and "constantly increasing repression" by a government that resorted to "the most savage and brutal measures." That is, the constitution expressly associated tyranny and human rights violations with a heathen, anti-Islamic system that had been displaced and repudiated after the nation returned to the "authentic intellectual standpoints and world view of Islam." The implication was that human rights violations were a symptom of godlessness, from which it was only a short step to the conclusion that such violations would necessarily cease with the establishment of the new godly order.

As the constitution was promising in the preamble to set up "an ideal and model society on the basis of Islamic norms," it naturally emphasized throughout the centrality of adherence to Islamic law, which was to be guaranteed by the system of velayat-e faqih, or government by the leading jurist. The preamble went on to speak as if the Iranian people unanimously supported the Islamic order, referring to Iranians as "a people who bear a common faith and a common outlook." Since human rights are primarily designed to deal with conflicts over the duties of government and the rights of the governed, for the idealists who imagined that exalting Islamic culture would automatically foster cohesion on all levels, provision for human rights could seem superfluous.

Many U.S. observers sympathized with such cultural relativist views and accepted the idea that a principle of Islamic exceptionalism prevailed in the area of human rights. U.S. academics often bought the notion that what had fostered discord, corruption, and oppression was the Shah's misrule and the ravages of Western imperialism, which had stripped Iranians of their identity. According to this way of thinking, Iranians would be uniformly content as long as their yearnings were realized to have a society liberated from the tyranny of the Westernized Shah and re-established on the basis of authentic Islamic values. Implicit in their casual dismissal of the importance of human rights for Iranians is the stereotyping of Islam as a civilization inherently opposed to human rights, as in the scheme put forward by Samuel Huntington in his now notorious article on the clash of civilizations (Huntington, 1993). When supporters of human rights decried Iran's failure to guarantee human rights according to international standards, they would find themselves denounced by others in the West for displaying ethnocentricity and for failing to recognize that cultural differences meant that human rights criteria had no place in evaluating developments in Iran. The international law scholar Richard Falk, who sympathizes with the Islamic Republic and who opines that "Islam" is entitled to have its own "civilizational approach" to human rights, embodies the tendency to imagine that Iranians need more Islamic culture, not the human rights protections valued by people in the West (Falk, 1992). When reminded that Iranian women were themselves protesting the regime's policies affecting women, many Westerners glibly discounted the reactions of such women as necessarily being those of a minority of cultural traitors. The "real" Iranians, so the received opinion held, were the ones who gloried in a society purged of distorting Western political and cultural influence.

Western scholars may remain reluctant to reassess the merits of their views even as Iranians, disillusioned after two decades of living under the Islamic Republic, have been won over to the universality of human rights. This Western tendency to denigrate the importance of human rights in societies outside the West is not limited to the Iranian case. A provocative study of the Western mindset that leads to the dismissal of human rights as irrelevant for people in living in African and Asian societies has been produced by the insightful Canadian scholar, Rhoda Howard. She has coined the term "cultural absolutism" and applies it to a view that:

   declares a society's culture to be of supreme ethical value. It advocates
   ethnocentric adherence to one's own cultural norms as an ethically correct
   attitude for everyone except loosely defined "Westerners." It thus posits
   particular cultures as of more ethical value than any universal principle
   of justice. In the left-right/North-South debate that permeates today's
   ideological exchanges, cultural absolutists specifically argue that culture
   is of more value than the internationally accepted (but Western in origin)
   principle of human rights (Howard, 1995, pp. 51-52).

Howard points out how Westerners tend to romanticize the integrated wholeness of these supposedly intact indigenous societies, a wholeness that Westerners in their individualized world appear to have lost (Howard, 1995, p. 61).

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