Issue 1

 Hamid R. Yazdi

A couple of weeks ago, Iran, again, made the headlines of most major newspapers worldwide, this time not because of the storming of the American embassy or on occasion of being placed on the axis of evil. This time it was about Iranian Shirin Ebadi on becoming the first Iranian woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Who would have thought?! But now that a nation’s fight to achieve its freedom and rights was brought into spotlight through Ms. Ebadi, was it rightfully viewed as so? Or was it deformed, metamorphosized, and molded into the old West versus East rhetoric?

Reactions were mixed both at home and abroad, ranging from equating Ms. Ebadi’s achievement with that of Islam to comments from within Ms. Ebadi’s native Iran undermining her achievement and implying that she is simply a puppet used by the west in order to make a political statement against the Iranian regime. It seems that both fronts have lost sight of a simple fact: Ms. Ebadi’s plight as a human being for all humanity.

Here in Canada, both Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail did not fail to mention that Shirin Ebadi “is the first Muslim woman to receive the honour” and “the first Muslim woman to win the award in its 102-year history,” respectively. The New Yorker was no different in its approach: “the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.” As though being a Muslim had to do with anything; as though anything good that comes out of that region of the world has something to do with Islam or being a Muslim. Not that there’s anything wrong with being Muslim per se, but attributing the battle of a nation to find its own definition of freedom and democracy to a specific faith is at best naive. This limited and limiting approach has long characterized the West’s simplistic view of the Middle East. History is rampant with failed western experiments to dictate its own concepts of democracy to this region: The “liberation” of Afghanistan and Iraq are the recent ones; Iran itself was no exception. Yet, the western media insists on attaching the epithet “Muslim” to anything that comes out of that region, at times – as in the case of Ms. Ebadi – a genuine attempt to create an illusion of the ultimate coexistence of Islam and western-style democracy, at times to simply demonize the region for political/expansionist reasons, and at times perhaps to objectify “the Other.” In its long and troubled love-hate relationship with the Mid. East, the west has often lost sight of the fact that democracy is an ethnocentric term and that we should focus on ethnic democratic developments rather than force-feeding western democracy or interpreting such developments as a step towards democratization / westernization. In response to this simplistic view, and also in response to those from within Iran who consider Ms. Ebadi’s achievement a “western trophy,” it is no coincidence that Shirin Ebadi herself had this to say: "The fight for human rights is conducted in Iran by the Iranian people, and we are against any foreign intervention in Iran."