I want to raise some questions in this essay about the impoverished way debates on the relation among gender, religion, and human rights are often framed. I approach this issue as an anthropologist who comes from a discipline that, whatever its flaws, thinks hard about social and cultural processes and what it is to be human; I also approach it as someone who has spent her academic life thinking about and studying the Muslim Middle East, a region that carries a heavy symbolic load in the Western imagination with respect to the relation between religion and women's rights.

“Human rights” is now a technique deployed to measure the progress of states. In the last two decades it has become both the normative language of how injustice is evaluated and a means through which powerful states discipline the new world order (Grewal 121). This disciplining often relies on a relation posed between gendered violence and human rights violations, whereby the denial of women's human rights represents the pathological cultures of repressive states. But this representation—commonly assumed by states, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the public—is founded on the ignoring or effacing of political violence. Discourses about human rights attribute responsibility for gendered violations to purportedly pathological cultures, rather than to political sources. This tendency becomes apparent in the narrative told of why violations occur, as well as in the solutions proposed to these violations. What lurks beneath this disappearing act is a presumption that the world is made up of two kinds of states. One kind, described as rogue states or failed states, has a pathological culture in the place of a civil society. The other kind of state enjoys both a civil society and a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Will historians looking back a hundred years from now see the rise of human rights as an agent or reflection of the decline of national sovereignty? I take this question (asked at a recent meeting by Richard Wilson, director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut) as an expression of worry about the effects that the decline of national sovereignty is likely to have, including effects on human rights themselves. Human rights advocates will recognize an obvious reason for this worry. Human rights are often seen, correctly but narrowly, as a key line of protection against an invasive and oppressive state. But the project of winning respect for human rights also relies heavily on the state's legal and bureaucratic powers—the power to enforce, to educate, to take positive measures, and so on. This is especially true in the domain of economic, social, and cultural rights, which require for their fulfillment that states exercise what has come to be called “due diligence.” Violence against women, for example, which has only been classified as an abuse of human rights since 1993, is often perpetrated not by states but by private individuals and groups. It can come under the protection of human rights discourse only if a sovereign state, which is held responsible for intervening to punish and prevent, is strong enough to do so. Weaken national sovereignty, and you may subvert the cause of women's rights.

The cold war, many people contend, ended sometime around 1989. A number of facts, such as the United States' military hegemony, the demise of the Soviet empire, and China's impeccable capitalist record, tend to corroborate this contention. Yet, with all due respect to the memory of John Adams, stubbornness is not the privilege solely of facts. Certain mind-sets can prove just as obstinate. Dormant or sidestepped during most of the 1990s, cold war mentalities and their mantras—“trace all evil to the main enemy,” “don't let your base be troubled by nuance and ambiguity”—have indeed made a great comeback since the beginning of the new millennium, and their mouthpieces are working hard to turn George W. Bush's post-9/11 pronouncement “You are either with us or you are against us …” into a self-fulfilling prophecy (“President”). To ward off the return of these disciplinary strictures, it is tempting to resort to probably the most powerful cold war remedy of the 1970s and 1980s—namely, human rights discourse and activism. Has this remedy retained its potency in the current context? Addressing this question—or at least stressing its urgency—is the main ambition of the following pages.

as a human rights practitioner rather than an academic, I am humbled in a number of ways to be part of this conversation. I am also reminded of the gulf of perception that exists between human rights practitioners and those who write and think about the practice of human rights. One example of this is the very different sense of the human rights movement's capacity to influence change.