Questions about the future of democracy in Iran dominated a wide-ranging panel discussion Wednesday evening, titled, “Law and Society in Iran.” The Stanford Law School Program in Law and Society hosted the event, which attracted an audience of about 140.

 

The three-member panel, moderated by Helen Stacy, coordinator of the Program on Human Rights at the Freeman Spogli Institute, included Stanford professor Abbas Milani and two visitors: Farhad Ameli, a professor at Sorbonne University in France, and Mehrangiz Kar of Brown University.

 

Leading off with an “atmospheric view” of the past century of Iranian legal history, Ameli described the swing from the increasingly secularized system of justice which began with the signing of Iran’s first constitution in 1906 to the resurgence of Sharia law after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

 

Before the revolution, Ameli said, “everyone was looking for judges who knew Western law. Now, everyone is looking for judges who know Islamic, or Sharia, law.”

 

The conflict between the two systems of law – constitutionalism and Sharia – is at the heart of what Abbas called the defining conflict of the last century and a half in Iran – the conflict over modernity.

 

“What is modernity? Do you have to lose your faith?” he asked. “Does Islam lend itself to modernity? Is modernity Western?”

 

According to Milani, the Iranian government has taken a very strong stance against modernity.

 

“The notion of popular sovereignty is complete anathema to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Milani said. The government believes “the whole idea of a sovereign other than Allah was inculcated to undermine Islam.”

 

The implementation of Sharia law after the Islamic Revolution brought about what Stacy called, “a 30-year retrenchment of women’s rights.”

 

“The law has become a tool to ignore the humanity of women… in the name of Islam,” said Kar, a longtime human rights activist whose husband committed suicide last year after spending almost a decade in imprisonment. According to Kar, this repression has “barred Iranian entry into modern life.”

 

Women have historically pushed back, Kar said, with non-violent, peaceful demonstrations in favor of their rights. She believes such actions set the example for the widespread demonstrations in the summer of 2009, after Iran’s disputed presidential election.

 

According to Milani, those demonstrations, among numerous other indicators, seem to show an Iranian society that feels very differently about modernity.

 

“I think the trajectory [of Iranian society] is great, historically,” Milani said. “We now have more women poets, more women writers, more women publishers, more women film-makers than we have ever had in the history of Iran. And this is under a regime that wanted to do to women what the Taliban did in Afghanistan.”

 

In many ways, Iranian culture has already bypassed its government, Milani said. “Yet it has a regime on top of it that is trying to enforce a medieval system.”

 

Milani noted a recent survey that reported that 80 percent of Iranian high-school girls say they have a boyfriend. The government “was going crazy, saying ‘We have lost the culture war,’” he said.

 

For Mitra Parineh, a member of the audience and the daughter of Iranian immigrants, the discussion felt incomplete, but went toward explaining the Iran she had heard about all her life.

 

“I’ve always sort of been incensed at a government I didn’t even know,” she said.  With the amount of opposition to the theocracy in power, she said she couldn’t understand “why Iran is the way it is.” Her question to the panelists was simple – why have reform efforts so far failed?

 

Referencing the demonstrations in 2009, Milani said it was clear that the “regime still had a lot of fight in it left.”

 

“Don’t look at it in terms of our lifetime,” he said. “Our lifetime has been taken away from us. We have become exiles.  But we have made something here, and for a hundred years we have been resisting the bastards who have taken it away from us.”

 

Such resistance would, all three panelists thought, eventually succeed.

 

When the first constitution was passed in 1906, Ameli said, it was the work of only about 10 educated people.

 

“Do you think that with the five million Iranians living outside of the country, like all of you, we can’t find those 10 people?” he asked. “It’s just that the time isn’t right, or the price people are willing to pay isn’t as much as the people are, let’s say, in Syria right now.”