Kevin Dwyer's Arab Voices: The Human Rights Debate in the Middle East
Goldstein, Eric
ARAB VOICES: THE HUMAN RIGHTS DEBATE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, by Kevin Dwyer. University of California Press, 1991. 254 pp. $45., hc; $12.95, pb. The crisis in Algeria is still evolving as I...
...Although they sometimes present their views in terms of an enlightened Islam, they overwhelmingly favor the more egalitarian Western-style family and personal status codes over traditional Islamic family law...
...The occidental origin of these rights, however, complicates the task of promoting them, especially when they are attacked as inimical or irrelevant to Islam...
...It would also allow a group, such as the Baha'i, which isn't even a religion but is just a sect, to try to impose itself as a religion...
...Because the UDHR specifically permitted the acceptance of atheism, and that would allow propaganda against our religion...
...As a prominent feminist in Algiers has said, "If human rights groups had been around in 1932 they should have supported someone who stopped Hitler from coming to power through constitutional means...
...Arab human rights groups are more ambivalent about drawing world attention to abuses perpetrated by Arabs upon other Arabs...
...For Arab democrats and rights activists, the question provokes much soul-searching...
...Although Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front may have benefited from popular revulsion at the Gulf War, it is worth remembering that the party also won handily in municipal elections that took place in 1990, before Iraq invaded Kuwait...
...Dwyer completed his interviews for Arab Voices before the start of the Gulf War...
...Paradoxically, it is only to the extent that we Arab democrats can succeed from now on to separate and dissociate democracy and human-rights values from occidento-centrism that we will be able to save something from the rising tide of "isms...
...The Arab world has no thriving democracy at present...
...The crisis in Algeria is still evolving as I write, but one thing is already clear: the army's suppression of democracy in the name of democracy has posed the gravest dilemma for the human rights movement in the Arab world in the decade and-a-half of its existence...
...In Egypt, a country where thousands of detainees are held without charge and tortured each year, most of them members or sympathizers of radical Islamic movements, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) boldly declared a year-long campaign in 1992 for the elimination of torture in Egypt...
...These kinds of groups can't be allowed to insult the established religion...
...Would democrats fare better in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and other Arab countries if governments allowed genuinely free elections...
...Some Arab rights activists are prepared to take that risk...
...For other human-rights activists, the situation is akin to Weimar Germany...
...Arabs tell Dwyer that this preoccupation with individual autonomy ill fits Arab society, with its stronger notion of social obligations toward family, tribe, and community...
...people ask us everywhere...
...For us, women are equal to men in law, but they are not the same as men, and they can't be allowed to wander around freely in the streets like some kind of animal...
...The most basic international human rights instruments were drawn up primarily by Westerners in the post— World War II era and reflect a Western liberal emphasis on the rights of the individual...
...Kevin Dwyer begins his book Arab Voices: The Human Rights Debate in the Middle East by noting that "No one working on the Middle East over the last ten to fifteen years could fail to notice that the notion 'human rights' already has substantial mobilizing force throughout the region" and that the term "has wide currency...
...It is therefore no surprise that many committed human rights activists breathed a sigh of relief when the military-backed governing council of Algeria halted the electoral process after the Islamic Salvation Front nearly captured a parliamentary majority in the first round of voting on December 26, 1991...
...The best hope, they maintain, for navigating between state repression and the ascension of a religion-based tyranny is to nurture democracy and respect for human rights...
...No, the Moroccan, Tunisian, and Egyptian women's activists in Arab Voices seem to say...
...Algeria's Islamists have made it clear, in their campaign pronouncements, as well through acts of intimidation, that a woman's place is in the home, 284 • DISSENT not in the workplace, on the beach, or on the city streets come evening...
...Yes to the Shari'a [Islamic law], Yes to the Sunna [the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad]," they did not want to risk watching Algeria's democracy die at birth after an exercise of "One person, one vote, one time...
...Human rights victims are often members of political movements that, given the chance, would stomp on the rights of others...
...Despite their members' courage, however, they are not likely to play a role like that of their Soviet and Eastern European counterparts in the 1980s...
...It is not only that the question of democracy and human rights has been indefinitely postponed to the benefit of nationalism, but the concepts themselves have become suspect to the majority of Arabs...
...One can only hope that the political space that allows Arab rights activists to function will continue to widen...
...But brutal dictatorships are the exception rather than the rule, and in the last decade many governments have widened the margins of political expression and association and grown more responsive to public opinion...
...The Arab voices that animate this book, however, give divergent interpretations of the term...
...This has helped to make women's rights activists in Algeria some of the staunchest defenders of the January coup...
...Dwyer, an anthropologist who used to head the Middle East department of Amnesty International, confined his study to human rights activists and intellectuals in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco and readily admits that his informants do not speak for all sectors of society or for the Arab world as a whole...
...This fact has important implications for the direction that Arab societies will take when today's rulers loosen or lose control of the reins...
...In condemning the coup, the prominent Cairo-based Arab Organization for Human Rights said, "No matter how legitimate the fears aroused by the participation in power by the forces of political zealotry, it is not acceptable to exchange a probable danger for an actual one...
...But in the wake of three decades of repressive one-party rule, the force best SPRING • 1992 • 283 equipped to dominate the wider political space was the Islamic Salvation Front...
...After the bloody riots of October 1988, the Algerian government went further than any Arab government toward liberalizing political life— allowing a thriving civil society, a relatively free press and relatively clean elections, and some fifty political parties, including the only legal Islamic parties in the Arab world...
...Writing in Le Monde of February 6, 1991, Mouncef Marzouki, the president of the Tunisian League of Human Rights, charged that the allied war against Iraq has discredited even the indigenous human rights movement: Democrats and Arab human rights activists have never stuck out so, or run so counter to the current of their people...
...Arab human rights organizations are a reflection of this trend...
...The tension in the Arab countries between democratic values and "isms" may be the critical issue of the 1990s...
...This route carries risks, as Algeria has now shown...
...The Arab human rights movement is little known or understood in the West...
...With some exceptions, these activists are no apologists for state repression of fundamentalists...
...The coup and the halting of the Algerian elections came almost exactly one year after the start of the air war against Iraq...
...Marzouki may have overstated the degree to which the war set back the cause of democracy and human rights...
...The international rights movement is the only one available with any momentum, and greater compliance with its tenets, whatever their origins, would be a gain for the Arab world...
...Such a task is something of an impossible mission, and the West will eventually realize at the dawn of its new world order—to which it was no more than a sorcerer's apprentice—that it has unleashed all the fanaticisms and extinguished the little flickering flame of democracy that we have tried so hard to light...
...Defending their civil liberties is comfortable so long as they remain far from power...
...A Moroccan cleric spoke for many of his co-religionists when he told Dwyer: Islamic human rights, Islamic freedoms, don't mean that everything is permissible, although this is the view you tend to take in the West...
...Many members of the EOHR are motivated by political as well as moral concerns: they believe that state repression of Islamic fundamentalists has helped to transform that movement into the region's main opposition force...
...Can international norms of sexual equality be reconciled with Islamic family law, which discriminates in favor of men in matters of inheritance, parental custody, and access to marriage and divorce...
...Dwyer has given us a portrait of a movement within Arab society that is often overlooked...
...This paradox is not unique to the Middle East...
...That conflict may have set back the effort to propagate the notion of universal human rights in the Arab world...
...For example, you know that Saudi Arabia didn't subscribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...Americans are generally unaware that nearly half the governments in the region permit independent human rights organizations to function and to criticize state abuses...
...What universal values...
...Perhaps more significant is that while human rights standards and principles are energized elsewhere by growing acceptance of their universality, their reception in the Middle East is more hesitant...
...No, Egyptian human rights activist Ahmed Abdullah has argued convincingly...
...Among them is that "the notion of human rights as it is being promoted today is seen by most Middle Easterners to be inextricably linked to the actions of the West...
...And also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was for complete equality between men and women...
...Toleration of these organizations is no proof of a thriving democracy...
...Hearing the Front's campaign slogan "No to the charter, No to the Constitution...
...Should Arabs then reject the international human rights agenda as it has been set by the West...
...Linked to a West that defends the right of Kuwait but not of Palestine, that is democratic at home but shields anachronistic dictators here, democratic values are in danger of being washed away, even if that means throwing the baby out with the bath water...
...Rights activists knew they would have to confront such a quandary sooner or later, as they defended Islamic activists from state repression while praying that the persecuted would never be able to wield power...
...The issue of women's rights is central to the debate over competing conceptions of human rights in the Arab world...
...But he does make certain important generalizations...
...Such groups exist in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and Yemen...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
