From: lking@athena.mit.edu (Loren King)
Subject: Women and Justice
Keywords: Justice, Gender
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 19:32:56 GMT



First, to answer a point in one of Seyyed's earlier 
posts: nine women in a three hundred member parliament
hardly supports your argument about gender equality
in Iran (what's that, about a 3% representation in 
government of 50% of the population ... hmmmmmm,
sounds a bit like aparthied to me ...).

However ...

I think Seyyed and I have started talking past
each other, a practice notorious for its waste 
of band-width.  To remedy this, I want to summarize 
what I take to be the central debate in the "Politics 
of Difference" and "Women in Iran" threads, and then
present my position.

  The debate has centered upon whether or not the 
practice of hejab constitutes a just institution, 
or whether it unfairly discriminates and objectifies
women.  The first part of Seyyed's argument, if 
I understand him, is roughly this:


1) the Quar'an calls for, or at least implies, 
the practice of hejab;

2) the Quar'an is, or at least faithfully represents, 
the word and will of God; and

3) the word and will of God define worldly justice.

Therefore the practice of Hejab is just and proper.


  Now, others have pointed out (quite rightly, I think) 
that each of these propositions is far from self-evident, 
which leads to the second part of Seyyed's argument:


`Different cultures are predicated upon different 
values and different beliefs; part of Islamic culture 
involves the acceptance of propositions (1) through 
(3) above; if you don't accept these propositions, 
then Hejab doesn't apply to you and shouldn't concern 
you; if you do accept these propositions, then
you can't consistenty be a Muslim and reject Hejab.'


This is a strong argument, and it rings true with 
many of our basic intuitions about culture and value.  
Further, it supports many of the criticims we all 
(or at least many of us) have against British, European 
and U.S. acts of economic and cultural imperialism 
committed over the past five hundred years.

So it would appear that we are at an impasse: I and 
others may believe Seyyed to be mistaken, but we cannot 
consistently argue our position from within Seyyed's 
system of beliefs.  Is this impasse as formidable as it 
seems?  Are values and beliefs of different cultures 
really as radically incommesurable as Seyyed implies?

I don't think so.  I agree with Seyyed's assumption 
that different cultures embody different value/belief 
systems, but I also think that there are some basic 
values which we can make a pretty good case for, even 
across different cultures, different systems of belief.  
I think there are some ways around the radical cultural 
contextualism that Seyyed imposes upon discourse about 
values.

In short, I want to argue that, to recognize as 
legitimate differences in values and interests within a 
polity, we need a set of institutions which do not place 
greater value upon one set of interests and beliefs over 
others soley on the basis of accidental features of birth 
and circumstance.

The political theorists in the crowd will recognize this as
something similar to Susan Moller Okin's adaptation of John
Rawls's `original position.'  The idea is that, if we had to
agree upon what laws we would live under if we had no idea 
what sex we were, or what religion we believed in, we probably
wouldn't agree to laws and institutions which favoured either 
sex over the other, nor one system of belief over any other.  
We would presumeably decide upon laws which allowed the 
maximum freedom to act and believe regardless of our sex, 
colour or beliefs.

Now there are many arguments against this sort of view, 
mostly from feminist critical theorists who insist that 
divorcing ourselves from that which gives us our identity is 
based upon a typically male conception of rationality as 
divorced from the particular and embracing the general.  I 
agree with these arguments, but they don't support Seyyed's 
position any more than Rawls does, because they claim that 
particularity associated with our identity must be recognized 
by the state based upon the claims of those who are, in fact, 
`different.'  No claims to God or natural right.

I think that enforcing different codes of dress for 
different people based upon their sex is akin to forcing 
different codes of dress according to hair or skin colour.  
It's hard to justify if you're the one who suffers.

Further, I think this can be argued for across cultures by 
asking people to engage in the sort of thought experiment 
that Rawls and Okin propose: if you're male, given who you 
are now, pretend you're female and imagine if you'd be as 
free to be who you in fact are as a male.  Since you'll have 
a hard time imagining such a thing, ask women how they feel, 
and try to imagine how they could feel this way.  And if your
imagination doesn't correspond with how women say they feel
and how they are in fact being treated, then you're not
trying hard enough to understand their perspective, their
situation.

That's the rough idea, at least as I see it.  Trying to 
divorce ourselves in thought from the way things are opens up 
the worlds of the possible, from which we can try to grasp, 
however imperfectly and incompletely, the contingency and 
conditionality of the world as it is.  If we attempt this, 
we realize that we can change things, and that nothing need be 
given, nothing need be preordained by God or history.  And 
furthermore, we can do this within the context of our present 
beliefs.

Well, this gets away from soc.culture.iranian, so I'll suggest that,
if anyone wants to continue this, we should move it to one of the
feminism, religion, or political theory groups.  Let me know.



_________________

Loren King
MIT