“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 Four Essays on Liberty (1969).
Michael Ignatieff-Canadian author, journalist, and director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government-was recently 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, entitled “Iranian Lessons,” for the New York Times Magazine.
Ignatieff notes early on that, due to the recent victory of noted hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian presidential elections, the speaker had to alter his planned lecture. Instead of asking, “What do democracy and human rights mean in an Islamic society?”, Ignatieff asked, “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 of equating socio-economic rights with universal human rights, a project that Canadian Louise Arbour-currently the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights-is advocating and developing. Ignatieff, however, does not speak to the constituents whom he attempts so poorly to champion. Instead, he chooses to give voice to the enfranchised upper echelons of Tehran’s society.
Although his article begins in southern 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 of the more than forty per cent of Tehran’s population who live below the poverty line in the city’s south end.
Why would Ignatieff choose to not have a single conversation with anyone in southern Tehran? After all, it was this exact constituency that brought a divisive figure like Ahmadinejad to power in response to promises of practical aid. The same constituency that made Michael Ignatieff alter the topic of his lecture. Other than an overblown and prosaic description of the walled cemetery, complete with Persian poetry and tea-drinking mourners, Ignatieff does not offer much insight about the population and its challenges, and leaves southern Tehran to its impoverished mourning.
Referring to something that he coins as “Persian pleasure,” Ignatieff paints a charming picture of present-day Isfahan, a UNESCO heritage city in central Iran: “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….I 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 who are 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 an issue 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 law outright but to “reform Sharia 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 Sharia 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 had just seen 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 he 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.
This convenient disregard for the facts is unfortunately not restricted to Ignatieff alone. 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 resolution, 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….But much more remains to be discovered before historians will be able to sort out precisely responsibility between warring and innocent, and to identify the causes for the events which resulted in the death or removal of large numbers of the eastern Anatolian population, Christian and Muslim alike.”
One of the 69 historians was well known Orientalist and Islamic scholar, Bernard Lewis. Although the New York Times reported in 1915 that Armenian and Greek Christians were “being systemically uprooted from their homes en masse…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), Lewis declared in a 1993 interview with Le Monde magazine in France that what happened should not be considered genocide. 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, he 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 during the Le Monde interview when he referred to the genocide of the Armenians as “their version of history.” Ignatieff also makes a choice when he praises Iran on “the achievements of the revolution,” and continually fetishizes Persian culture throughout his article.
On July 19, 2005, two days after Ignatieff’s piece was published, Amnesty International reported that two youths, both under the age of 18, were executed in the Iranian province of Mashad for reportedly having sexual relations with one another and sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy. Prior to their execution, both were given 228 lashes for theft, 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 his 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 his article on Iran reads more like the account of a political-economist-turned-harlequin-romance-writer than that of a human rights scholar.
