Dr. Syed Mohammad Sadat Nejad
Reza Ansari
Since the 17th century, the culture of liberal democracy has gradually become the dominant ideology in Europe. The idea that was made of connection of liberal thought as a social culture and democracy thought as a style of running the society had its specific requirements in which women took a different position. Freedom and equality as the key slogans of liberalism and democracy, respectively, both claimed to recognize the importance of women’s position and seek to establish it.
The slogans of Western liberals have quickly gained popularity among the women’s community, and the main cause may be their past in European society. Before the enlightenment, European women were objectified by men and deprived of education and social presence. In this era, it was the men of Europe who decided for them. Some may believe that this was the same case in the East, and even after Europeans the situation was very unstable there, but the situation in the East was different from the West. In the West, first, there were fundamental problems with European ideology. That is to say, women in Western feudal society were basically out of position. Hence, if a man treated women properly, it was based of his good nature, not for the ideals of society. Nevertheless, the ideal of the Islamic world had been founded on respect for women for a thousand and four hundred years. The commandment of Islam also was to respect women’s rights. Another point in this regard was the type of confrontation in embracing liberal modernity between Western and Eastern women.
Western women immediately embraced it when they saw the ostensible and limitless freedom of the capitalist system without questioning some of its dire consequences for women. As a result of liberal democracy, although women have achieved some success in political, economic, and cultural responsibilities, with respect to the principles of capitalism and pleasure within liberal democracy, on the other side of liberal democracy, a significant proportion of women have also been objectified to maximize men’s benefits and pleasure. It could be considered as a change for worse. Taking women’s successes in Western society in addition to her failures and humiliations into account, whether in the form of a profit for the economy or in the promotion of pornography and corruption, can reveal the realities and comprehensive image of women’s position in Western culture. Although part of it is good and impeccable, a significant portion of it is black and negative.
In Iran, they faced strong opposition when they tried to force women to remove hijab and accept liberal culture, since Muslim women were neither ashamed of their positions nor seeking a way to escape from available situation as same as European women.
Therefore, cultural roots, which are bluntly obvious in current context, play an important role in defining the rights and status of women. Although Westerners seek to impose their own special conditions on the whole world in the form of globalization or human rights abuses, the evidence shows that women in Iran have never been humiliated like the West and still stand today. They have preserved themselves in the Islamic-cultural environment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.