If I may briefly interject, we need to appreciate that the Islamic Middle East is a highly diverse society. The parallels between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with due respect, are quite inapposite. They are completely different societies. Saudi Arabia has a conservative brand of Islam. It's a society that was largely Bedouin some generations ago.
As Ms. Afshin-Jam explained, until the 1979 revolution, Iranian women included among themselves nuclear physicists, judges, politicians, and ministers. There was a 1967 Family Protection Act in Iran that essentially liberalized sharia law in terms of child custody and divorce. If you speak with Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize laureate, you will see that what Iranian women have done since 1979 is try to go back piece by piece to where the law stood in 1967.
We should also understand the reality that Iranian women are at the forefront of the democratic movement. Of course, we all know about Shirin Ebadi, but there are many other women one can speak about. The fact that the government went out of its way to put all of these women in prison on International Women's Day is a sign of the ominous threat they represent to the patriarchal, autocratic structures they are putting in place.
The other mistake, I believe, is to look at Islam or any other culture as an artifact in a museum, something we study as if it is static or never changing. Islam, like any other religious or cultural system, is evolving. It's going through the dislocations of the transition from tradition to modernity.
In Europe in the 18th century, people were punished in the streets of Paris by being quartered by horses and by being impaled. Are we to say that is the authentic European tradition that we must preserve at all costs? That's absolute nonsense. In the same way, there is a doctrine of severability in constitutional law. We can sever parts of Islam that may have been appropriate a thousand years ago but which clearly are not appropriate today. There is a transcendent universal message that is more important in terms of understanding the core of those teachings.
In that respect, there is not a single immutable, incontestable interpretation of Islam. There are Islamic feminists who believe patriarchy is a completely man-made invention that has been imported into Islamic traditions, and then there are secular feminists who believe one shouldn't have to worry about Islam at all. So here is the multiplicity of voices, and we need to engage all of them.
On the Velvet Revolution question and whether it can be suppressed, yes, perhaps it can be, but only temporarily. The situation in China, of course, is considerably different. It has a population of 1.3 billion, and the question of control and stability understandably gives rise to a very different reality. In Iran, you don't have a population that is overwhelmingly rural. You have a very different reality.
The point is that at the end of the day, even if you can suppress political freedoms, the economic wants of the people cannot be suppressed, because most revolutions are ultimately about bread-and-butter issues. The government bureaucrat who wakes up in the morning in Tehran says, “I have to drive a taxi, work in a bakery, and sell things on the street to be able to afford my rent, while Mr. Rafsanjani lives in a magnificent palace and mansion in a revolution that was supposed to be about the poor people.”
At the end of the day, the fourth-largest exporter of oil in the world cannot provide a basic standard of living for its people. Increasing numbers of people are sinking into abject poverty, with some of the highest rates of drug abuse and prostitution. There are incredible social woes in Iran. It is a time bomb that is going to explode sooner or later, and it may not be because of lofty principles of human rights, but because you cannot govern a modern society based on some kind of incompetent and corrupt mullocracy.
There's one final point relating to what Mr. Sorenson said about worsening the situation through international attention. On the whole, I would say that is not the case. The case of the rescue of Nazanin from impending execution is a perfect case in point. Many other women in the position of Nazanin Fatehi were executed in Iran. The fact that she was not executed is solely because of the incredible international attention that was drawn to her cause.
For Ramin Jahanbegloo, initially there was concern that we should try quiet diplomacy in order not to exacerbate the situation. It became very clear, including to immediate members of his family, after quiet diplomacy did not work, that you have to publicize the situation. If the Canadian government had not publicized the situation, if the media had not publicized the situation, he could have had the fate of Zahra Kazemi. The fact that he was only subjected to psychological torture through prolonged solitary confinement, relatively speaking, is a success, because otherwise they would have broken his bones and extracted his fingernails, if I may be so gruesome. That is a reminder that international attention does work. It needs to be applied studiously with great forethought, but at the end of the day, silence is the worst possible option.
