Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the re-introduction
of Sharica law relating to gender and the family, women's rights in
Iran suffered a major setback. However, as the implementers of the
law have faced the social realities of women's lives and
aspirations, positive changes have gradually come about. Here Ziba
Mir-Hosseini takes us to the heart of the growing debates
concerning the ways in which justice for women should be achieved.
Through a series of lively interviews with clerics in the Iranian
religious center of Qom, she seeks to understand the varying
notions of gender that inform Islamic jurisprudence and to explore
how clerics today perpetuate and modify these notions.
Mir-Hosseini finds three main approaches to the issue:
insistence on "traditional" patriarchal interpretations based on
"complementarity" but "inequality" between women and men; attempts
to introduce "balance" into traditional interpretations; or a
radical rethinking of the jurisprudential constructions of gender.
She introduces the debates among the commentators by examining key
passages in both written and oral texts and by narrating her
meetings and discussions with the authors. Unique in its approach
and its subject matter, the book relates Mir-Hosseini's engagement,
as a Muslim woman and a social anthropologist educated and working
in the West, with Shii'i Muslim thinkers of various backgrounds and
views. In the literature on women in Islam, there is no account of
such a face-to-face encounter, either between religion and gender
politics or between the two genders.
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