Modern historiography presents, at least since the late 19th century, a significant knowledge accumulated through the painful records of human beings experiencing life under modern nation-state and capitalist economy, first in Western Europe and then in the rest of the world. It is in the light of that historical knowledge that scholars look at the international human rights discourse and practice and insist not only on their universality but also on their interdependency.

Recent scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that the human rights discourse is a modern invention and that no traditional political culture, including that of the West, could possibly envisage the notion “of equal and inalienable individual rights.” Throughout my studies on the historiography of human rights, I have maintained that we can clearly recognize, without too many qualifiers and caveats, the timing for the dawn of the contemporary human rights discourse by the appearance of the awareness of their interdependency and indivisibility. The notion that human rights are interdependent and indivisible belongs to the twentieth century. It should be clear that the standard threats to human dignity presented by the modern state and capitalist economy shape the contour of the international human rights discourse. Sociopolitical structures – and not “culture” – do the explanatory work. When the West was full of “traditional societies,” it exhibited social and political ideas and practices not that dissimilar to those of traditional societies in Africa and Western/Eastern Asia. In Iran or China, those who forcibly utilize all the authoritarian instruments of the modern nation-states cannot credibly claim cultural authenticity in Islamic or Confucian traditions. They do, and by doing so they commit a spectacular political double-cross – often to their own sociopolitical detriment. I often repeat that the “culture” that prevails in the Intelligence Ministry of the Islamic Republic has less to do with Islam as a religion than with the authoritarian state’s modus operandi, thus requiring universal rights to curb its abuses.

For all practical purposes, the logic of the nation-state, whose rulers still preserve its illiberal Third World setting, has largely overshadowed the logic of the intended theocracy, if not that of Islam itself.

 

II- Recent global histories have rendered the Western origin of human rights largely irrelevant.  In recent decades, the citizens of non-Western nation-states have been in the forefront of global movements for implementing the internationally recognized human rights. Many of the victims of human rights violations would be puzzled by the phenomenon that in discussions about human rights in Iran, or in other similarly situated polities, some scholars still bring up the Western Enlightenment, delve into discourse analysis – in a Foucauldian sense of legitimizing power and “truth” – and depict Western “imperialism” as “the other side of the coin” of international human rights discourse. The continuous domestic suppressions, cutting far more closely to the national bone than the Western postcolonial abuses, have turned the drifts of the human rights discourse inward. In fact, significant changes occurred in the contemporary global histories as peoples and states have charted their ways into a multifaceted modernity. Their histories have turned the modern history of the West into only one chapter – a significant one – in what is now a much voluminous tome, depicting the dynamic global struggles for implementing the international human rights norms and laws. As the arc of history of human rights violations has expanded globally, the accumulated experiences of living under the nation-states in the rest of the world have made the subject of the Western origins – and its uses and abuses – of human rights without much practical relevancy to the victims of violations, trapped within their own domestic contexts.

The fact that the U.S. can have no credible claim on the ownership of human rights discourse should have a salutary affect on scholars of Iran – and on human rights discourse. My suggestion to the advocates-scholars of human rights specializing on Iran is to leave the fields of studies beyond their areas of expertise to other experts. Using international standards of judgment, scholars specialized in American history and politics must reveal the truth about its government’s harmful policies and its media’s tendency to stereotypically depict Muslims; they do so admirably well. Scholars specialized in human rights discourse and practices in Iran – or other similarly situated nation-states – sometimes expand their narratives beyond their areas of expertise, exposing Western double-standards and hypocrisies. They should not; if they do, however, they must remain careful about their narratives dovetailing the rationalizations offered by the spin-doctors of the authoritarian states with egregious human rights records. The Islamic Republic has periodically produced whole new breeds of spinners, Ahmadinejad being the latest and weirdest one.

 

III- Culture is relevant but cultural relativism is no longer relevant to human rights discourse and practice. This is as true in the West as it is in the Rest. It is the main thrust of the discourse to advance the “rights-based demands for change.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights offers a “standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” It upholds a belief in the possibility of creating a society/polity that protects the dignity of every human being by according her/him equal concern and respect, and that goal can be achieved by the UN member states taking actions to mitigate and remove the culturally based prejudices. We know that in all traditional cultures the dominant groups ascribe categories such as gender, caste, race, ethnicity, and religion. A culture (like that of Iran’s) that retains ascriptive categorizations violates the rights of individuals.

Human rights scholar Rhoda Howard emphasizes that human rights reflect “one particular substantive conception of human dignity.” She adds, “In traditional societies principles of social justice are based not on equal human rights but on unequal social privileges and responsibility.” “In traditional societies principles of social justice are based not on equal human rights but on unequal social statutes and on the intermixture of privilege and responsibility.” Howard argues that dignity was “usually a concomitant of one’s ascribed status.”

Thus, the notion of “human rights” in Islamic traditions is a new invention, mainly by the generation that came of age in the second half of the twentieth century. It is meaningless to say that in Islam “human beings have certain God granted rights.” To say that “in Islamic traditions human rights are entirely owned by God” is also devoid of meaning. It is also meaningless to say that “human rights in Islam are the privilege of Allah (God), because authority ultimately belongs to Him.” Many of regulating precepts of the traditional Islamic political system “involve either a rights-less duty or are rights held because one has a certain legal or spiritual status, not simply because one is a human being.” As in most other “traditional” societies, rights and duties were largely dependent on community membership. All of these concepts are largely unfit and inapplicable in the contexts of the modern nation-state.

Human rights scholar Donnelly insists that we must understand that “human rights authorize and empower citizens to act to vindicate their rights, to insist that the human rights standards be realized, to struggle to create a polity in which they enjoy (the objects of) their rights. Human rights claims express not merely aspirations, suggestions, requests, or laudable ideas, but rights-based demands for change.”

 The notion of equal respect and concern is perhaps the most radical characteristic of the international human rights discourse that enables the individual to advance claims not only against the state, but also against the society – against the cultural norms and the ethos of her/his own society. If human rights were to be in agreement with cultural traditions there would have been no need for them. They would have become a meaningless redundancy, or a kind of psychological cushion to make everyone feel good in the comfort of his/her own cultural landscape. Human rights are less about what a culture is than about what it should become by incorporating safeguards that individual needs in order to live a life of dignity. The new culture of rights offers the individual with a “protected space” within which she will be free to choose a life-style in conformity to or deviation from the standards the society wishes to impose on me. This is the “protected space” that Neda Agha-Soltan sought. She is hardly an exception. 

Cultural norms and practices have always been relevant to human rights, largely in negative and obstructionist ways. This relevancy of culture to human rights is not to be understood only with reference to non-Western societies. More often than not the traditional Western norms and values have acted as barriers to the evolution of the universal human rights concept. Culture must be changed for the human rights of the individual to be respected. This assertion is readily accepted when we talk about Western cultures. We all demand that all Western societies change their culture and accommodate peoples of all races, nationalities and classes, granting them equal respect by overcoming the deeply rooted norms and habits of their old “national” cultures.

The conditions under which “natural rights” were being denied in the West gave momentum to the evolution of the vision of human rights. It has always been the case that the denial of rights was persistently rationalized by recourse to the existing cultural norms. Without that denial, the concept of natural rights would have never been elevated into universal human rights. The advocates of the universality of rights in the West, always a minority, had to speak of civil and political rights as human rights because they wanted these rights to trump all other political, social and cultural considerations. The advocates of what became the new language knew all too well that other considerations would always muster considerable cultural defense. Rights that do not provoke the general political-cultural sensitivities or generate strong resistance in society need not to be elevated into the status of human rights.

Thus, I think of the human rights language as being a language of counterculture, not in the sense of its common usage as an expression of bohemian existence at the margin of society, but as a discourse that struggles to become majoritarian by changing the patterns of the dominant political culture.This language of counterculture is being heard around the world because its new concepts have gained a measure of acceptability among peoples who are being ruled by the contemporary nation-states.

Thus, it should not be surprising that everywhere and among all traditional cultures, the notion of universal human rights had no significant cultural underpinnings. Again, there is no easy way to dispel this curse. Culture must be changed. The agonizing pain endured by the introduction of modernist changes into one’s culture is an equal opportunity pain, shared by all peoples of the world.

It was expected that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would act as a standard of achievement for all nation-states. And to make the necessary legal changes meaningfully effective, they should take actions to alter their existing political-cultural norms and attitudes. The Islamic Republic of Iran has tried to do the opposite. It has become the nexus between the typical oppressive modern state apparatus and the traditional-authentic cultural norms and values that discriminate and stigmatize. Through that fiendish amalgam, Iranians have been doubly inflicted – hence the ferocity of the youth’s resistance. Again, the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 had the opposite expectation from the UN member-states that were asked to enact civil rights legislations to counter culturally discriminatory practices.

 

IV- The Islamic Republic is no longer commanding a majority of the people upholding its officially-sanctioned cultural habits and norms. With the of cultural majoritarian edifice collapsing, the advocates of cultural relativism in human rights may no longer be able to identify the shared cultural traits or their adhering majority. It should signal an end for the cultural relativist paradigm in human rights discourse in Iran. It of course signals no end for human rights violations.     

In the past, scholars could advocate cultural relativism based on the assumption that the notion of human rights was a Western construct with almost no applicability to the non-Western societies, where the dominant social values were constructed on the foundation of the group rather than the individual. The degree of applicability was measured by their socio-cultural separateness (or apartness) from the West. They thought that the advocacy of international human rights would amount to cultural arrogance and ideological self-centeredness. The operating word was “ethnocentricity”.  Some non-Western scholars who had received their higher education in Western universities also espoused similar ideas. Asmarom Legesse, for example, argued that “different societies formulate their conception of human rights in diverse cultural idioms.”

The worn-out parameters through which scholars used to approach the notion of cultural relativism must be reevaluated in the light of significant cultural shifts and sociopolitical realignments that have taken place in Iran in the past three decades, revealing the scope of socio-cultural discontent. The regime was set up by a highly popular Ayatollah claiming cultural authenticity, with its foundation of socioeconomic legitimacy rested on the objectives needs of the masses.

In the case of Iran, the problem began with the Islamic Republic throwing the society’s “cultural idioms” into chaotic tailspins. The forceful Islamization drive of the past decades has significantly disturbed the image of a tidy socio-cultural divide between the authentically Islamic Iran and the alien West; it has rendered the internal “cultural idioms” largely unconvincing to a majority of Iranians. The presence of a majority of young adults disjoined from the officially-sanction cultural norms would undermine the relevancy of cultural relativism to human rights discourse.

The use of cultural relativism may have sounded rational in the late 1970s when a particular socio-cultural constellation came into sight in Iran’s political horizon and appeared authentic. The quickest way I can identify that constellation is to mention one of the best recognized political notions of the 20th-century Iranian history, the masterfully constructed gharbzadegi (Weststruckness). Ironically, Iran’s cosmopolitanism had already hatched the modern upper –and middle – class Iranians, visibly love-struck by the Westernizing patterns of life. Utilizing all the nativist vigor that an already modernizing society could muster, gharbzadegi meant to counter the prevailing social maladies associated with the West. In an inauspicious political moment, it gave articulation to a movement that coalesced class antagonism and cultural resentment. Against the background of anti-imperialist agitations of the early 1970s, the radical oppositional activisms of both left and right converged on a potent rhetorical platform. Coupling class antagonisms and cultural anxieties, it gave birth to a narrative that gained political currency as the Shah faced a multidimensional economic-political crisis. In Iran, as in some other Muslim majority countries, that conjuncture allowed Islam to be deployed to highlight the contradictions between the plights of the poor and those who were the principal beneficiaries of the Shah’s modernizing policies. Islamic cultural authenticity became a standard of judgment, sifting the dispossessed from their class oppressors.

However, not everyone who joined the Islamic revolution had actually abandoned all of his or her old patterns of thought. Many individuals felt the revolution might offer a solution to the problems that had remained unresolved under the Pahlavis, and therefore joined it, without actually discarding all their modernist patterns of thought and adopting the attitudes espoused by the Ayatollah. The forceful Islamization by a centralized state went far beyond the promising political trends that the 1960s-1970s historical conjunction had advanced. Ironically, the Islamic Republic would eventually decouple class and anti-imperialist cultural resentments, creating the current impasse.

The Islamic Republic has created the conditions of its own failure, independently. The most befuddling aspect of Iranian sociopolitical reality is the class-culture divide. The Islamic Republic exhibits a bizarre class realignment where men of peasant origins and medieval dispositions, displaying thuggery, rise to the highest level of military power; where the working class finds itself in a tactical alliance with its potential exploiters, the not-so-religious bourgeoisie; and where after thirty years of clerical rulers claiming the Islamic authenticity of the dispossessed, the pragmatically secular middle and upper classes still seem to be the nation’s cultural enchanters. The failure of the Islamic Republic to re-Islamize the society according to the Ayatollah’s vision has steadily turned the educated young adults toward the modernizing traits so recognizable among their parents and grandparents in the 1960s and 1970s.

Corruption has become endemic in the Islamic Republic. State-society interactions operate on the basis of bribes; for the right price, even the most solemn of shari’ah laws could be ignored. Class oppressors have largely lost their cultural importance. The socially managed symbolic resources and religiously encoded system of meanings have been reshaped and largely subverted in their interactions with economic-political interests of those in power. In their greed and corruption, all within a web of rivalries and intrigues, the Islamist rulers have been barely distinguishable from the secular rulers who control countries such as Egypt or Syria stuck in their Third World politics. Ultimately, the logic of the authoritarian state, which by its nature breeds corruption and greed from the top, discredited the Islamization campaign that built on the “aestheticization of poverty and self-abasement,” as explained by the urban anthropologist Khosravi.

As the raised expectations of many segments of the population were left largely unfulfilled, a gradual reversal of political fortune has taken place, separating class struggle from the traditionalist reactions toward modern lifestyles. Thus, the fateful conjecture that appeared in the 1960s – drenched in blood in the 1980s and militarized ever since – has proved to be a historical mirage, presenting no lasting, viable departure to a desirable future, for Iran or for Shiite Islam. The Pahlavi dynasty’s curse that had blended economic privileges with an exhibitionist modern lifestyle has largely been dispelled by the political realities for the majority of Iranians in urban areas.

The Islamization project so earnestly initiated by Ayatollah Khomeini, employing all the instruments of the state, has reached an impasse. In retrospect, this is not an accident. This failure should be understood in the context of the enduring changes that capitalist modernity has created in Iran. The relatively secular, modern foundations that the Shahs helped to set up have outlasted them, helping to create a new awareness of the more enduring legacies of the period’s secular and modernizing endeavors. Moreover, it is important to recall the generations who had since late 1800s embraced what they understood to be European modernity and negotiated its variegated components and meanings. The resulting patterns and norms buckled a bit under the stifling pressures of the Islamic Republic, but remaining essentially operational, shaping the lives of  youth who came of age during the Islamic Republic. Generations of Iranian poets, novelists, composers and singers, filmmakers, publishers, teachers, and academics have stood on that ground. In a broad sense, their lifetime repertoires crystallized individual expressions and gave homage to worldly experiences. Far from being fragments of the secular past preserved in popular memory of the middle- and upper-classes, this normative transmission across generations has perhaps been the most salient feature of contemporary Iran.

Millions of Iranians bursting onto the political scene in 2009 have altered the prevailing views of the class-culture divide in Iranian society. There has been a visible change in the relative strength of the two sides. After thirty years of clerical rulers claiming the Islamic authenticity of the dispossessed, the pragmatically secular middle and upper classes still seem to be the nation’s cultural enchanters. It becomes dangerous for Iran, as well as for the regime, when the “masses” no longer constitute a majority of the population.

 

V- In terms of social norms, attitudes toward the role of Islam in politics and behaviors in public, the modern middle class is no longer in the middle. The multiclass character of the 2009 demonstrations testifies to this new convergence of values and attitudes. They cannot be dismissed as an insignificant minority, permanently rendered apolitical. Newly published studies and memoirs testify to this reality. For example, Iranian-American journalist Moaveni refers to that broad cross-section of the population as “the majority of moderate Iranians, who longed for stability and prosperity.” They constitute, in Moaveni’s words, “the core of the nation.”

It is within that “core,” particularly among its female youth, that a veritable cultural revolution surges ahead; it is, unlike other cultural revolutions of the twentieth century, spontaneous and leaderless. As such, as I have argued elsewhere, it may present the most promising development for a culture of human rights emerging in the country.   

The Iranian young adults, particularly women, are hardly waiting for the appearance of new prophets giving them new rereading of the traditional texts, holy or otherwise. It is in their daily praxes of life that the youth of Tehran rampage through the conservative cultural terrains. For more than a century, Iranian women have been in the forefront of the movement to bring about cultural changes. Today, for many of them the old struggles may appear to have been an elongated warm-up. To women who came of age in the Islamic Republic, the thirty-year Islamization drive has been nothing short of a cultural nightmare, enacted on different stages with varying degrees of intensity, with no end in sight. However, the prolonged nightmare has produced its dialectical opposite, bringing forth a youthful cultural typhoon that is ripping through the clotted pathways of the conservative, patriarchal traditions, trodden by the elderly ayatollahs. Our trendy social scientists, interested in “human agency,” must stand at awe of “third generation” Iranians, with the even- more- impatient “forth generation” on their heels. 

Perhaps one of the luckiest anthropologists of her generation, Pardis Mahdavi, conducting fieldwork in the right places at the right times (Tehran, mainly in 2004, 2005, and 2007), watched the counterculture storm gaining momentum. Mahdavi focused on the modern middle-class youth and participated in “social sites” whose vibrancy reflected a visceral rejection of the imposed Islamic restrictions. Going to the country of her birth, Mahdavi did not apparently carry with her a heavy academic baggage full of discursive constructs: the West’s demeaning stock image of Muslims, the subsumption of women in the conflicting ideologies of the modern nation states (Women’s bodies having served as the grounds of “justifying imperialism or struggling against colonial domination”.), or the U.S. abuses of the human rights narrative; nor did she seek validation for her daily observations in the anti-imperialist, postcolonial, post-modernist discourses. These discourses would have almost no resonance with young middle-class women in Tehran. Observing “the daily routines, experiences, and encounters” among the youth, Mahdavi explains them in “the social context of the changes in young adult sexual and social culture.” With no trendy discursive chip on her shoulder, she stood witness to “passionate uprisings” in the Islamic Republic of Iran.    

 

Mahdavi writes,

All the while these women explained to me that what I was witnessing was a sexual and social revolution, intended to lave political reverberations. What seemed to other people to be fashion choices or responses to peer pressure actually had an intellectual architecture (for some of the youth), and some of these choices of self-presentation had a political stance behind them. I realized then that it was important to look at the ways in which the sexual revolution enacted by the young people has brought about changes in the social, economic, and political spheres of Iran…. The Islamic Republic relies on the performance of proper Islamic rituals to produce believing Islamic citizens, and thus continues to attempt to enforce such rituals of Islamic ideology as proper Islamic dress and comportment. In response, many young Tehranis are subverting those rituals in an attempt to reclaim them, as well as their own agency and citizenship, vis-a-vis the state. Many young adults argue that they are now using their bodies and their sexualities to speak out against what they view as a repressive regime. In other words, because the Islamist regime exercises much of its power through a fabric of morality (by legislating the body, comportment, and proper behavior), the young people indicate that in the absence of an option for overt dissent, regardless of how peaceful, they are attacking the regime by seeking to create a state of fitna, or moral chaos, to undermine the regime’s moral fabric….

 

Mahdavi adds that the young adults that she observed belonged the “lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle class,” who are moreover literate and more or less “secular.” What she found significant is that these young Tehranis are the source of emulation (pun intended) for “many young people from lower-class parts of town. They in fact act as “the trendsetters” among their generation. They are the arbiter of consumer taste. They are “at the heart of changes taking place in behavior, outlooks, and ideas.”

 

In other words, when these young people have decided to enact changes in what is considered acceptable in social, cultural, or sexual behavior, the effects and reverberations have been felt throughout the country. When, for example, members of the secular middle class have decided that certain types of clothing or Islamic dress are in fashion, it has taken no more than a few months for many young people throughout Tehran and in other major cities such as Mashad, Shiraz, and Esfahan to begin to emulate their styles….

 

Another young anthropologist, Shahram Khosravi, refers to the disillusioned youths as “the third generation” – a “burned generation.” Their opportunities limited in the wake of the 1979 revolution, “they blame not only the official ideologies but also the cultural norms of their parental generation.” They are “producing a social movement of change that permeates different layers of Iranian society.” Since 1990 the values and aspirations of the modern youth have increasingly shaped the perception and purpose of upward social mobility. Khosravi observes, “Status is not only about political entitlement and legal location within civil society, but also involves style.” He adds that “some groups have more power than others to ascertain what is stylish and what is uncouth.” The class-cultural divide has become quite permeable, often in the reverse of what radical Islamization may have intended. The most successful children of the “popular classes,” being propelled upward, partake in the pragmatically secular culture. Ironically, many university graduates may be unable to reestablish emotional connections with their old, religiously restrictive neighborhoods and may create their own nuclear family on the other side of the Iranian cultural divide. During the 2009 election and its tragic aftermath, many adult children of conservative fathers, even those of Islamist officials, gravitated toward Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the main opposition candidate. Not a spur-of-the-moment shift, the familial rupture is indicative of a longer trend signifying the strength of the “other” Iran.

Iranian women face an uncertain future, perhaps no less tumultuous than the past. However, the events since the 2009 election offer a new opportunity for Western human rights scholars to reexamine their approach to cultural relativism in the context of the current cultural developments and the endurance of the authoritarian nation-states in many regions.

 

  VI – I would like to conclude by registering the voice of an Iranian woman who advances the “rights-based demands for change.”

Iran’s history of the past thirty years shows that violations of human rights have become an affront to the citizens’ sense of dignity. Once a citizen undergoes the kind of punishment that only a centralized police-state can inflict, humiliation is felt in the depth of one’s soul. Religious signification dissolves; cultural determinism evaporates. Prison experiences testify to the same reality, as do show trials and confessions. Confrontations in the streets between women and the basij militias generate the kind of anger that surfaces when one is humiliated. Insults pile upon injuries. Incidentally, it was women who dealt the severest blow to the imposed hijab. It was painfully fascinating to watch young women of the “other” Iran demonstrating side by side with young men, vigorously confronting the police and the rampaging militias. They were in effect cancelling out the kind of public demeanor the hijab was intended to inculcate in the first place.

One Iranian woman offers an experience/observation that is highly illustrative of the issue under discussion here. Her voice indicates that since the establishment of the modern nation-state, an ordinary person-citizen has gradually been unmoored from communal niches that used to ascribe identity and a sense of the self. Lives have been transformed and their narratives have lost their collective sense. Today, a middle-class person regards herself a citizen of the Iranian nation-state and perceives her own personal dignity in terms of her rights as a citizen. While remaining respectful toward her elders, she will not accept the status her traditional compatriots or family members wish to ascribe to her.

This reality is poignantly epitomized by the interesting turns in the life of Fatemeh Sadeqi, daughter of the cleric Sadeq Khalkhali (full name, Mohammad Sadeq Sadeqi Givi), “the hanging judge” in the early days of the revolution. As expected, she grew up in a highly restrictive Islamic environment, but attended university, attained a Ph.D., and became a professor. She is perhaps the best example of scores of the Shiite clerics’ children who have gravitated to the more secular side of Iran. The cause of her dismissal from the university in 2008 was apparently the publication of an article on the enforced hijab. She began her account by stating, “Hijab has been the largest personal and political challenge in my life.” She added that as she grew up and became educated and informed, she noticed that it was also the most serious challenge to the lives of other women from whom she differed in many ways. She places the issue of hijab in its sociopolitical context of patriarchy and exercise of power. One of her conclusions: “Everyone knows well that there is only one solution to the question of the hijab: Covering oneself should be left to women’s individual choice. If the institution of the family, society and Islamic government depends on the hijab, then the problem is to be found in that institution, in the foundation of that family, in that society and in that government.” She adds that all of them require “bold but necessary revision.” She hints, intuitively perhaps, at a critical assertion of the international human rights discourse: Traditional culture has to change for the rights of the individual to be respected.

 

 

Addendum 1

 

The world’s cultural traditions are highly relevant to human rights to the degree that they stand in opposition to the formulation and promotion of the universal human rights. The difference is in the intensity of the hostility. The universal norms of the human rights culture must scale the high walls of the repressive cultural values and the mountains of suffocating moral debris that have been erected by the Muslim males over fourteen centuries. Hierarchies and inequalities – the seminal fixtures of the old cultural universe – define the nature of the traditional Muslim men. A culture that exhibits sex stereotyping with a seemingly uninhibited consistency does not offer a neutral ground for the development of the human rights concept of gender equality and non-discrimination. Some cultural assumptions are so deeply ingrained that to bring them up to the level of consciousness and face them in the human rights mirror requires an espistemological and emotional break with the past, a painful process at any time.

 

Secular revolution reduces the collective attributes of religion by encouraging the development of personal choices in religious belief, thus making their intrusion into public domain more difficult. That political intrusion into public sphere takes place through a religiously-charged rhetoric that aims at the mobilization of the illiterate and backward looking sectors of population. Secular revolution creates a condition under which the ethnic or religious identity is no longer a dominate feature of corporate identity. As human rights scholar Rhoda Howard argues some of the essential aspects of religious and national identity become privatized:

 

They become transitory parts of the human identity to be discarded or adopted at will. This privatizing and individualizing of cultural characteristics make protection of human rights easier in the long run, because no state or institutional boundaries need to be placed on such choices and because the state is not obliged to protect collectivities. On the one hand, a citizen can adopt any religion or ethnicity he chooses. He can convert to Baha’i, pretend to be Jewish, or wear African-American costumes. On the other hand, as long as individual human rights are protected, the state has no obligation to ensure that his community survives.