Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran

By Ziba Mir-Hosseini

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781400843596

Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Ziba Mir-Hosseini is Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, SOAS, University of London. A legal anthropologist, specialising in Islamic law, gender and development, she is a founding member of Musawah Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family. Her previous publications include Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Islam and Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition.

Book preview

Introduction ________________________

Gender in Islam: The Need for Clarity

Women’s issues and gender relations have been central to religious and political discourses in the Muslim world since early in this century. There is now a vast literature on women in Islam, and more recently gender in Islam. The whole literature has been ideologically charged, and has become an arena for polemics masquerading as scholarly debate: arguments about Islam as the main cause of women’s subjugation, or as the panacea for women’s problems; and more recently, arguments that Muslim societies have denied women their rightful status, or that Muslim jurists have misconstructed the Prophet’s message of egalitarianism.¹

Gender and Islam are huge, vague topics. Each is the subject of multiple discourses and widely ranging perspectives. The same is true of their conjunction, gender in Islam, a topic too often debated through broad generalizations or platitudes. It has been addressed at three levels. The first is that of the varied interpretations and reinterpretations of the sacred texts, which are invoked as sources of authority and legitimacy for particular ideologies or standpoints on women’s rights, gender roles and relations, and so on. The second level is that of local and national political ideologies with their local historical particularities, which produce their own discourses on women and gender roles. Neither kind of discourse relates closely to the third level, that of the lived experiences of individuals and local communities: actual opportunities, power, control of resources and of self, employment, education, and gender roles and relations.

Debates about gender and Islam tend either to confine themselves to one level and ignore the others; or, more often, when polemics are involved, they follow the common (conscious or unconscious) rhetorical tactic of shifting between levels without acknowledgment. Most common is the device of comparing the ideals and rhetorics of a favored system with the practices and experiences in an opposing one. Clarity and honesty surely demand that we keep the three levels separate.

Those of us who research, think, write, and talk about gender in Islam must also be clear, both to ourselves and to our audiences, where we stand personally on issues that touch our innermost feelings of self.² I suggest that unless we are honest about our own personal, individual motives in participating, there will be no movement in the debate. I am not suggesting an individual or collective psychoanalysis, but an admission that each of us has a position. I often listen to colleagues, or read their writings, with a strong feeling that there is a conscious or unconscious agenda beneath what is presented as objectivity. I also know how difficult it is to recognize and talk about one’s often very complex and contradictory identities and positions.

If we are Muslims, whether or not believing or practicing, Islam is part of our identity, our way of fife, a culture, a system of values. We may be at ease with it, or find our position painful and ambiguous. If we are not Muslims, Islam is the other; but whoever we are, since Said’s Orientalism our position is inevitably affected by a healthy skepticism toward common Western media representations of Islam as a unitary phenomenon like no other religion, incapable of development, reflection, or self-knowledge, and above all anti-woman. Here, the shari῾a takes center stage: its mandates on marriage and women’s roles have made it for some time the gendered battleground between the forces of traditionalism and modernism in Islam. With globalization, deterritorialization, and the blurring of Islamic discourses with others, the battle is no longer contained within the Muslim world.³

There are complex issues here that have received much attention recently in anthropology and gender studies.⁴ What I wish to stress is that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the personal from the political, and what we see from what we want to see, while claiming that we have retained any academic impartiality. No meaningful discussion of gender in Islam is possible unless we are prepared first, to be clear about the level at which we are arguing and to be honest when we shift between levels, and second, to bring our own perspectives and agendas to the surface. Otherwise, we risk being locked in old polemics or in essentialisms, and end up with nothing but clichés, platitudes, and sweeping generalizations.

All these, in my view, continue to bedevil much of the debate about Islam and gender, as reflected in the unending flow of Women in Islam titles in secular and religious publishing projects, both outside and inside the Muslim world. Leaving aside works written by outsiders, among those originating inside the Muslim world two genres prevail.⁵ The dominant genre comprises studies with a strong religious tone and content, mainly written by Muslim men—and more recently women—for believers in their native language; these I would call shari῾a-based. Their perspectives and arguments range from those of patriarchy to those of gender equality, but their positioning is clear: they write to defend Islam against a perceived attack by the West, and by Western feminists in particular.⁶

The second major genre includes works with a feminist slant, written largely by women of Muslim background and culture, often in English or French and not necessarily for a religious audience. These writings—let us call them feminism-based—are by authors as diverse as Haleh Afshar, Leila Ahmed, Riffat Hassan, Azizah al-Hibri, Nilüfer Göle, Fatima Mernissi, Nawal al-Saadawi, and Amina Wadud-Muhsin. Their positioning is neither uniform nor simple. Some clearly locate their feminism in Islam, others make a point of distancing themselves from any Islamic association.⁷

Despite the fact that writers in both genres take an insider position, there has been almost no dialogue between them.⁸ It is not just that they speak different languages, literally and metaphorically, but they also use different modes of argumentation and belong to two different scholarly traditions. Yet they have much in common. Both are responding to the changed position of Muslim women, their new gender awareness, and their aspirations for full participation and equality in society. Also, both are highly skilled in shifting between the three levels, in particular when they represent and respond to the arguments put forward by their opponents. In so doing, writers in each genre become hostages to the terms of the very discourse they intend to subvert, whether Islamist or feminist, and often end up generalizing and essentializing in similar ways.

Although few of those involved seem prepared to admit it, there has recently been a kind of rapprochement, in the sense that writers in the two genres are increasingly coming to follow the same route in their quest. Compare, for instance, Fatima Memissi’s Le harem politique, published in 1987, with her Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society, published over a decade earlier. Not only is Mernissi’s approach different but the way she frames her argument has changed. Earlier she sought to expose the patriarchal inner logic of Islamic texts; now she does exactly what writers in the first genre do, that is, she seeks new meanings in the sacred texts to throw a new, less patriarchal, light on gender relations in Islam. Compare, too, Haleh Afshar’s early writings on the impact of the 1978-79 revolution on women in Iran with her writings of the 1990s. Whereas in the early 1980s she saw no way that women could realize their rights within an Islamic Republic, ten years later she has taken a partisan position on behalf of those in Iran whom she calls Islamic feminists.⁹

What has happened during the past decade to bring a change of heart in Afshar and a change of style in Mernissi? I hope that these writers will at some time write explicitly about their own trajectories, and theorize how and why their conceptions of gender in Islam have changed. The change cannot be explained away by external changes. Is it a matter of tactical moves, in the sense that the end justifies the means? Or have their interpretations and understandings of Islam changed?

It seems clear that—for whatever reasons—some writers of the feminism-based genre have moved toward positions taken by some writers of the other genre: they are at least prepared to listen to them, to take them seriously, and to borrow something of their arguments and approaches. At the same time, shari῾a-based writers are making similar, recipocal movements in the other direction.¹⁰ Here the reasons are rather clearer. One neglected and paradoxical outcome of the rise of political Islam in the 1970s was that it helped to create an arena within which Muslim women could reconcile their faith with their new gender awareness. This has happened at all three levels: textual interpretation, political ideology, and personal experience. Thus we have the emergence, now widely debated, of an Islamic feminism in the form of feminist readings of the shari῾a, with repercussions at the other levels.

My own initial premise is that gender roles and relations, and women’s rights, are not fixed, not given, not absolute. They are negotiated and changing cultural constructs, produced in response to lived realities, through debates that are now going on all over the Muslim world, through the voices of women and men who want either to retain or to change the present situation. They exist in and through the ways in which we talk about them, both publicly and privately, and as we study and write about what gender relations and women’s rights in Islam are and can be.

Second, I understand feminism in its widest sense: as a general concern with women’s issues; an awareness that women suffer discrimination at work, in the home, and in society because of their gender; and action aimed at improving their lives and changing the situation. Although some Muslim women feel uneasy with the term feminism, I retain it because I believe that it is important to locate women’s demands in a political context that is not isolated from women’s movements and experiences elsewhere in the world. Feminism is part of twentieth-century politics, and only through participation in this global feminist politics can Muslim women benefit from it and influence its agenda.¹¹ Moreover, since 1992 there has been a growing movement among women in Iran (such as those in Zanan) who remain involved in the politics of the Islamic Republic and call themselves feminist, making no apologies for using the term and drawing on Western feminist sources.

Finally, I argue that Islam and feminism are not incompatible. Feminist readings of the shari῾a are not only possible today but even inevitable when Islam is no longer an oppositional discourse in national politics but the official ideology. This is so because once the custodians of the shari῾a are in power and able to legislate, they have to deal with the contradiction between their political agenda and their rhetoric: they must both uphold the family, restoring women to their true and high status in Islam, and at the same time retain the patriarchal mandates of shari῾a legal rules. This tension has always been inherent in the practice of the shari῾a, but when the shari῾a becomes part of the apparatus of a modern nation state, its custodians may have to accommodate, even seek, novel interpretations. This opens room for change on a scale that has no precedent in Islamic history.

Perspectives on Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Iran is the main instance. After the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution, feminists examined the stated intention of the Islamic regime: a return to shari῾a and the enforcement of hejab. Some made dire predictions about the fate of women, and that they would be condemned to the status of chattels.¹²

A generation after the revolution, such predictions have not been fulfilled. On the contrary, there have been unexpected developments. First, not only have women not been excluded from public life and politics but their participation has actually increased, although in different guises and according to different rules.¹³ Paradoxically, the enforcement of hejab became a catalyst here: by making public space morally correct in the eyes of traditionalist families, it legitimized women’s public presence. Second, there are clear signs of the emergence of feminist rereadings of shari῾a texts, manifested in two currents.

The first, which reflects a shift in the official gender discourse, is evident in a number of laws, some of which amount to a reversal of the early decisions of the revolutionary regime. They include the removal of earlier bans on women studying topics such as mining and agriculture, and serving as judges.¹⁴ The most conspicuous reversal is in the area of family law. Shortly after the revolution, the Family Protection Law of 1967, which curtailed men’s rights to arbitrary divorce, was dismantled and its courts were abolished, on the ground that it was in contradiction with the shari῾a. The Amendments to Divorce Regulations, enacted in 1992, in effect reinstate the rejected elements of the Family Protection Law, though under a different legal logic.¹⁵

The second feminist current reflects an internal tension and debate among the Shi῾i clerics and intellectuals, and among women from different walks of life, both inside and outside the country. It is here that one can detect the emergence of a new discourse on women, which is feminist in both tone and inclination. One forum inside Iran is women’s journals, in particular Zanan, which has brought about a rapprochement between religious and secular women.¹⁶ Others include the Majles, the Houzeh (the Qom seminaries), and women’s groups and associations. Some protagonists in this debate subscribed to the early shari῾a discourse when it was still part of the Islamic opposition to the Pahlavis, and helped translate it from rhetoric into policy after the establishment of the Islamic Republic. During this process some of these women (and men) had to confront the patriarchal biases of shari῾a laws, and became aware that they could find support in feminism, regardless of its Western baggage, whereas they could meet only resistance in patriarchy, regardless of its Islamic credentials.

Iranians educated and living in the West have also played important roles in the formation of new discourses on women, through the substantial literature on women in post-revolutionary Iran. Taking a secular feminist perspective, and writing in English or French, they commonly depict the revolution as having been a catastrophe for Iranian women. Their writings have also influenced, and continue to influence, Western perceptions of post-revolutionary events in Iran. At the same time, they have enabled women inside Iran, operating within the restrictions imposed by the Islamic Republic, to formulate some of their demands, and the regime to produce a counter-discourse.

Yet these writers have so far avoided a critical engagement with Islamic premises on gender. One reason is that the general acceptance in Middle Eastern studies of a modernization paradigm, with its implicit progressive and activist approach, combined with an uncritical adoption of theories of women’s movements in the West, continue to blur the actual experiences of women and the politics of gender in the contemporary Muslim world.¹⁷ Current narratives of gender in Islam are grounded in assumptions that should be reexamined in order to make room for the emergence of feminist theories based on the actual politics of gender in Muslim societies in which religion is a paramount element.

Another reason is to be found in the vexed relation between feminism and religion. Saba Mahmood singles out two core issues around which feminism’s discomfort with religion is articulated: one is the claim that religion is largely a male enterprise, and has historically granted women a subordinate position; two, is the more recent phenomenon of the resurgence of politico-religious movements (in the US, the Middle East and South Asia) whose goals are considered to be inimical to women’s interests.¹⁸ This is part of the general, uncomfortable ambivalence many Muslims feel with the religious aspects of their identity, and with their relation to the West. As Leila Ahmed notes, loyalty has been a major issue in discourses of the Muslim world, not least in regard to feminism. Muslim women have always been aware of gender inequality, but since the nineteenth century feminist consciousness has been articulated mainly in the context of nationalist and anticolonial movements, and largely by the middle and upper classes.¹⁹ Unlike feminists in the West who could be critical of androcentric elements in their culture and religion, Muslim feminists have been under pressure to conform. Any dissent could be construed as a kind of betrayal, which made it difficult for them to use the existing political vocabulary to express feminist demands.²⁰ This is no longer the case. Since the 1970s, with the growth of mass literacy and mass media, and the rise of Islamist movements with mass participation,²¹ loyalty is no longer the issue, and feminist critiques and demands are very much part of the postcolonial politics of the Muslim world.

In Iran, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, women who acquired a feminist consciousness in either a Western or an indigenous form have always faced a tension between the different components of their identity: their Muslimness is perceived as backward and oppressed, yet authentic and innate; their feminism as progressive and emancipated, yet corrupt and alien. Over time, the Iranian revolution deepened the perceived divide between Islam and feminism, forcing many Iranian women—both religious and secular—to reexamine and redefine the relation between their faith and feminism, thus opening a new phase in the politics of gender in Muslim societies and fostering a new gender awareness. A crucial element in this politics is that it has created a space in which a critique of the fundamental gender assumptions in Islamic law can be sustained in ways that were impossible until very recently.

Narrative and Debate in Ethnographic Writing

I write as a native anthropologist.²² My involvement with the politics of gender in Iran, and indeed my own feminist awareness, did not begin until many years after the revolution. My experiences and views thus differ from those of Iranian women who were engaged in the early phases of the revolution, and whose writings form the main body of the English and French literature on women in post-revolutionary Iran.²³ I neither advocate an alternative model of gender relations as defended by clerics in Iran nor condemn their vision of gender, as their feminist critics have done. Rather, I seek to understand the key assumptions and premises in Islamic law that have so far delayed a serious engagement between the two positions.

This requires the establishment of a non-confrontational dialogue with the clerical protagonists. The main body of this book narrates my engagement with a number of texts and my interviews with their authors. In this, I hope to contribute to ongoing debates on the production of ethnographic texts. Recent ethnographic writing has placed authors back on the page, insisting that they examine how far their own identities and experiences have influenced their textual constructions of ethnographic reality, in order to enable the reader to identify the consciousness which has selected and shaped the experiences within the text.²⁴ The importance of this was brought home to me when I read Payam-e Zan’s version of our discussions. By changing the order in which the issues were raised, with minor omissions and additions, they constructed their own text, which, as we shall see, differs from mine—as indeed our target audiences differ: whereas theirs is scholars in the seminaries and other religious people in Iran, mine is predominantly non-Muslims and secularists outside the country.

The resumption of authorial responsibility in ethnographic writing in recent years has been accompanied by recognition of two important features of dialogue. First, it is in the dialogue between ethnographer and subjects that culture is produced. Second, dialogue, conversation, and debate actually change the participants’ views and perceptions—their culture.²⁵ In this book, much of which is a transcription of actual dialogues, I hope both aspects will be well illustrated: how cultural notions of gender in Islam are produced in these dialogues, and how all participants learn from them and change their views.

The dialogues narrated in the book represent encounters between different worldviews: between adherents of Islamic discourses on gender who are trying to respond to challenges presented by women, and Muslim women like me, with complex identities, who seek to reconcile their feminism with their faith. Some of the chapters—particularly those in Part Two—constitute an account of two different conceptual frameworks and modes of argumentation about gender issues. The clerics are guided by their own gender and life experiences, and by the theories and assumptions that inform their discipline, that is, Islamic sciences and jurisprudence as taught in the seminaries. As a Muslim woman and a social anthropologist educated and working in the West, I am guided by a different set of life experiences and academic theories and assumptions. To my knowledge, in the literature on women in Islam there is no account of such a face-to-face encounter, either between these two disciplines or between the two genders.

Religious Authority and Knowledge in Post-Revolutionary Iran

The central concern of this book, like that of two earlier studies of Qom clerics—Michael Fischer’s Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution, and Roy Mottahedeh’s The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran—is the production of religious knowledge in Shi῾i Islam, and the complex relationship between the believer, religious authority, and political action. But I start at the point in time when they finish—the revolution—and I put the focus on a subject that was marginal in their work—women. Mottahedeh makes not one reference to women. In Fischer’s book, the only time an individual woman appears is when he relates the expulsion of a female school principal at the wishes of a male religious leader;²⁶ otherwise, like Mottahedeh he invokes women only in the context of marriages among the Shi῾i leadership, or of political discourses about them.

The creation of the Islamic Republic has brought about major transformations not only in the notion of authority in Shi῾i Islam but also in the relationship between ordinary believers and religious power. Before the revolution, the institution of marja῾iyat encapsulated the notion of supreme authority in the Shi῾i world, embodied in the person of the marja῾-e taqlid, the source of emulation. A uniquely Shi῾i institution that emerged in the nineteenth century, the marja῾iyat is the product of a historical convergence of belief, epistemology, and organization.²⁷ The first, belief, refers to the Shi῾i doctrine of Imamate, according to which the Twelve Shi῾i Imams are the main sources of religious knowledge, and the believer must look to them for guidance. During the period of Absence, following the Occultation of the twelfth Imam, the ulama act as his deputies.

The epistemological base is the Shi῾i theory of ejtehad, which holds that, although the fundamentals of the shari῾a are clear, most of its details are uncertain and difficult to discern; they are a matter of informed opinion, not knowledge; they can be accessed, with extreme effort (ejtehad), only by the mojtaheds, those with knowledge of the sacred sources, skill, and piety, to whose authority the rest of the Shi῾a must submit. This submission, known as taqlid (emulation), is offered to the most learned mojtahed of the time, to whom the believer refers (Arabic raja῾, hence marja῾) for guidance. Ideally, at any given time there should be only one marja῾, to whom other mojtaheds defer and whose rulings then are binding on all Shi῾is. In other words, his leadership is recognized both by the universal consensus of ordinary Shi῾is and by the clerical establishment. In practice, this is not always the case.

The organizational base of the marja῾iyat derives from the fact that Shi῾is pay their special religious tax—the khoms (fifth)—to their marja῾, and these funds have enabled Shi῾i clerics, unlike their Sunni counterparts, to remain autonomous and independent of the state. The khoms is an annual tax levied on net income and wealth (after paying all expenses). In theory, half this tax should go to Seyyeds, orphans, the needy, and travelers, and a believer is free to administer it personally. The other half, known as the sahm-e Emam, the share of the (Hidden) Imam, should be paid to the marja῾ in his capacity as the Imam’s deputy. In practice, believers often send the entire khoms to their marja῾, via his representatives all over the Shi῾i world, and leave its administration to him. With these funds, seminaries are built, stipends are paid to teachers and students, mosques and hospitals are paid for, the needy are fed, and so on. No questions are asked: there is no compulsion on either side. Believers are free to choose when to pay their religious dues and to whom. The marja῾ is free to use the dues as he thinks fit. The system rests and operates on complete trust and freedom of choice.

Although in practice selection of a marja῾ is in the hands of a few seminary scholars, the procedure is informal and gradual, and above all, it must to be seen to be free from any government or outside interference. One element is the publication of a resaleh ῾amaliyeh (Practical Treatise), commonly known as resaleh, which can be done only after the death of one’s own marja῾, one’s teacher and mentor, whose followers are now looking for a living mojtahed to whom they can refer. A treatise contains no legal arguments or explanations; it is a kind of compendium of legal opinions, with a fixed format, starting with Rulings (ahkam, pl. of hokm) about ritual acts such as prayers and fasting, and proceeding to those relating to contracts, such as marriage, divorce, and so on. Through a treatise, a cleric establishes not only his mastery of the fundamentals and specifics of Shi῾i law but also his fidelity to authority and tradition; the format ensures that he remains faithful to the approach of those whose path he follows.

The second element is a core group of students and supporters who can actively campaign for the emerging marja῾. This again must await the death of a marja῾; only then can his followers divert their support to a senior student who has been marked out. The process is informal, and a successor gradually emerges and establishes himself. Everything must be done by his entourage: his students, his sons, his sons-in-law. He is judged for his piety, his religious knowledge, his scholarship, his austerity, and his disdain for worldly affairs and office.

At the eve of the 1978-79 revolution in Iran, apart from Ayatollah Khomeini there were five other marja῾ in the Shi῾i world. Each had his followers and supporters among ordinary Shi῾is all over the world and among clerics and students in various seminaries.²⁸ They were equal in rank and religious authority; none was recognized as sole marja῾, and none had a modern state apparatus at his disposal. The revolution changed the balance forever. None of the others shared Khomeini’s vision of an Islamic government built on his concept of velayat-e faqih (mandate of the jurist), which establishes the authority of one single jurist over all others. Yet none could overtly challenge or oppose either Khomeini or his concept, which later became enshrined in the constitution of the Islamic Republic and was ratified in the referendum of December 1979. Nor could the new notion of leadership of the Shi῾i world accommodate the old one.

As the Islamic Republic consolidated itself, a structural contradiction between the two notions of supreme authority—the marja῾iyat and the velayat-e faqih—became increasingly evident. The first has no overt political claims, having evolved through a tacit consensus between Shi῾i masses and clerics. The second, the child of the revolution, exerts power over and demands allegiance from all Shi῾is. It has no precedent in Shi῾i political thought: it invests the ruling jurist with the kind of powers and mandate that Shi῾i theology only recognizes for the Prophet and the twelve Infallible Imams.²⁹

By 1988, the tension between these two notions of authority intensified and brought on a constitutional crisis. There was conflict not only between clerical supporters and opponents of velayat-e faqih but also between factions within the ruling elite, who held differing views of authority. The resignation in March 1989 of Khomeini’s designated successor, Ayatollah Montazeri, added a new edge to the tension. Montazeri was the most senior clerical supporter of velayat-e faqih, the only one whose marja῾iyat was recognized. The crisis was resolved when Ayatollah Khomeini himself gave his blessing to the separation of velayat and marja῾iyat: the constitution was revised accordingly.³⁰

With Khomeini’s death in June 1989, the concept of velayat-e faqih and the legitimacy of its mandate had to be renewed. Khomeini’s charisma was routinized: whoever replaced him as Leader (rahbar) of the revolution would depend more on the state for legitimacy. Thus the Leadership had to be institutionalized and become firmly grounded in the apparatus of the modern state. The divorce between the two notions of authority in the Islamic Republic was now complete. President Ali Khamene’i became the new Leader; Majles speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became president following general elections in July, and simultaneously a popular referendum ratified the revised constitution.

In summer 1995, when I was in Qom, the concept of authority in Shi῾ism was the subject of lively debate—which history shows to be the sign of the passing of an era and the beginning of a new one.³¹ Clerics fell into two main camps. Some supported the velayat-e faqih and saw a merger with the marja῾iyat as inevitable. They argued that the old notion of authority embodied in the marja῾ is no longer viable in today’s world of real politics: it is no longer acceptable for a marja῾ to be knowledgeable solely in religious matters and to confine his rulings to them; he must assume Shi῾i leadership on all fronts. This camp was clearly politically dominant, and hence most outspoken. Its theological arguments were published in periodicals financed by the Houzeh (the Qom seminaries), where topics such as the qualities of the Shi῾i Leader, the selection process, and the system of payment of religious dues are debated.³² Their argument is that with the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Shi῾is have entered a new era that calls for a revision of Shi῾i organizations. They divide Shi῾i history into four eras. The era of Presence and Rule was that of the Prophet and the first Shi῾i Imam, Ali. The era of Presence and Isolation lasted from Imam Ali’s death to the end of the Minor Occultation of the Twelfth Imam. The third era, beginning with the Major Occultation, was that of the Occultation and Absence of an all-powerful jurist. The era in which Shi῾is now live is that of Occultation and the rule of the just jurist, the velayat-e faqih, which shares more with the first than with the other two eras, since Shi῾is possess political power.³³ The conclusion is that there can be only one authority, that it can only be the Leader of the Islamic Republic, the vali-ye faqih; all other ulama should defer to his authority, and all believers should pay their religious dues to his office.

The other camp comprised adherents of the old notion of authority in Shi῾ism, who favored the continuation of the old system whereby the religious hierarchy maintains a clear separation from government. They argued that choosing a marja῾ is the personal prerogative of every believer, thus no imposition can be made and no criteria can be set. A marja῾ should emerge gradually through the consensus of ulama and ordinary believers; any regulation would hinder a true consensus and thus deprive the marja῾iyat of its real source of authority, which is the people and not government. This camp was probably in the majority in Qom, but without official support they were less able to be candid about their views; they aired their arguments orally, in their lessons, or less directly in their writings—in books and journals published outside Qom.³⁴ The camp also included some clerics closely associated with government in the first decade of the Islamic Republic; most prominent among them is Ayatollah Montazeri, Khomeini’s first successor-designate as vali-ye faqih, who drew strength from the old style of politics; his classes were gaining in popularity and attracting more followers—and khoms, which in turn ensured funding for students.³⁵

It remains to be seen how these debates will evolve, and which camp will prevail. Whatever the outcome, the notion of supreme authority in Shi῾ism, in the form of the nineteenth-century institution of marja῾iyat, will no longer be the same. Although the subject was not one I could directly raise in the Qom of 1995, I could sense the passing of an old era. A mood of change in the whole system was in the air; my very presence there, my meetings with the clerics, were evidence of this, as I was frequently reminded.

The shaping of the new era in Qom is nowhere more evident than in the transformations in the traditional system of Shi῾i learning.³⁶ Theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (feqh) are still the two prestige subjects, and there are still three levels at which students study—elementary (moqaddamat, preliminaries), intermediary (sotuh, texts) and advanced (dars-e kharej, beyond texts)—but the content and organization of courses, and the relations between students and teachers, are undergoing a major shift from meritocracy to bureaucracy.

There were intermittent and uncoordinated attempts to reform the Qom Houzeh in previous decades, but the 1979 revolution gave them a different purpose and momentum. In the spring of 1981, the first Qom Houzeh Management Council was created. Its mandate was to oversee and facilitate the introduction of reforms, the transition from the old system of education to the new. This council (now referred to as the Former Council) had nine members, representing the two power centers in Qom at the time. Six were representatives of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Golpaygani (three each)—one marja῾, Ayatollah Shari῾at-Madari, was under house arrest; others kept their distance. The other three members represented the Society for Houzeh Teachers (Jame῾eh Modarresin-e Qom), a loose grouping that came into prominence during the upheavals of the 1960s, which led to Ayatollah Khomeini’s exile; this society became a major power center after the revolution.

Although it lasted for ten years, the Former Council had problems from the outset. Old hands in the Houzeh resisted its program, and various political factions challenged its mandate and authority. The members finally resigned in 1991, and in October 1992 a new council started work, with substantially greater control over Houzeh affairs.³⁷

In 1995 the Houzeh in Qom was in a transitional stage: two methods of education coexisted and competed. The old system is free of any form of bureaucratic constraints: there is no process of selection, either for students or for teachers; there are no written examinations, no graduation, and no award of formal degrees. Students can join the system at any time, any age, and any level of education; they are free to attend any lesson they wish and to remain in the Houzeh as long as they want. The capable ones in turn hold their own classes, while still continuing to attend those by the Grand Ayatollahs. Supporters of the old system argue that learning and teaching of religious sciences are a kind of duty that should be performed on a voluntary basis, without control or external constraints; their motto is the organization of the Houzeh is in its lack of organization. They fear that reform is bound to result in loss of independence and of freedom of belief and speech in the Houzeh.

The new system, which is gaining increasing currency, resembles present university regimes in Iran. There are ideological and academic selection processes for both students and teachers, set courses with defined curricula and duration, and qualifying exams and specialization in different fields. Students have less freedom to choose teachers or courses, and cannot start teaching simply by proving their academic merit. Class attendance and progress are monitored, scholarships and modern dormitories have been introduced, and student conduct outside class is scrutinized.

Ethnography of Gender Debates in Qom: The Organization of the Book

The clerics I came across in Qom fell into two broad categories: adherents of the pre-revolutionary school, now referred to as Traditional Jurisprudence (feqh-e sonnati); and those who promoted what they referred to as Dynamic Jurisprudence (feqh-e puya). Each category includes some clerics who have taken up governmental posts, known as government clerics (rouhaniyun-e hokumati), as well as others who are solely engaged in seminary activities, known as Houzeh clerics (rouhaniyun-e houzavi). Some clerics who held government positions in the early years of the revolution now engage solely in seminary activities; others took up government posts later. Likewise, some adherents of the old school later joined the ranks of those arguing for Dynamic Jurisprudence—although the reverse did not happen. Some clerics are open to modernist and reformist currents, while others see them as a threat to Islamic traditions.

Unfortunately, I was not able to meet or talk with any of the scholars in Jame῾at al-Zahra, the theological college for female Shi῾i scholars that was founded after the revolution. The college has its origin in the activities of a small group of women in the 1960s who lobbied the Qom seminaries for teachers and courses in religious sciences. By the mid-1970s, the group and their classes became a conduit for religio-political awareness for the young generation of women who were increasingly drawn to Islam. With Khomeini’s approval and funds from wealthy, traditional bazaaris, the building work started in the early 1980s, and it was officially opened in 1986. It offers boarding facilities and a wide range of courses, and attracts students from all over the Shi῾i world. In the process of its transformation into the first proper female theological college in Iran, the original group lost its modernism and is now one of the bastions of the school of Traditional Jurisprudence. In 1995, al-Zahra College was like a fortress, with high walls and gates guarded by male attendants. Despite all my attempts, I did not meet any female scholar from the college; two appointments were canceled at the last minute, and I could not get permission to enter the college. One reason, perhaps, was that these female scholars did not want to engage with someone associated with the views of clerics who were arguing for a change. They also declined to work with Payam-e Zan, which would entail transgressing the proper boundaries of male and female segregation. The male clerics who used to teach there would enter the classroom through an underground passage, and never saw any of the students. I was told that the college has now become self-sufficient, and no longer needs male teachers; men are no longer allowed inside. I found it ironic and revealing that, while male scholars in Qom seemed to have no objection to my research and were willing to meet and talk with me, female scholars avoided me.³⁸

There are three parts to this book, each dealing with texts—both oral and written—representing one of the three dominant gender perspectives that I encountered between 1995 and 1997. I present them in an order that reflects the chronology of the development of concepts, and so as to convey something of the context. Each part begins with a brief introduction to a defining text on women, and each chapter builds on and adds a new dimension to the arguments presented in the preceding one. Chapters in the first two parts begin and end with narratives of my visits to Qom in 1995 and 1997 and meetings with the authors whose texts are discussed. These accounts are intended to draw attention to the taken-for-granted, shared meanings that underlie life in Qom, the familiar routines that inhabitants take as natural. At times, I interrupt the transcripts of texts or narratives of interviews, in order to locate issues referred to by the authors or speakers within the context of wider debates on power and gender in post-revolutionary Iran.

The structure and format of chapters in each part differ, reflecting the different nature and extent of my engagement with the texts and their authors. The two texts discussed in Part One (The Traditionalists) represent the viewpoint of clerics who see the gender model in shari῾a law to be immutable and their mission to be to convince others of this truth. Chapter One concerns a text by Ayatollah Madani-Tabrizi, a senior Houzeh cleric. Chapter Two deals with a text by Ayatollah Azari-Qomi, a government cleric who was an ardent supporter of velayat-e faqih in the first decade of the Islamic Republic, but who now argues for its separation from the marja῾iyat. Although I talked with both ayatollahs, my engagement with their texts is limited to selecting passages for full translation, and paraphrasing and summarizing the rest: our views on gender and our understandings of Islam were so different that there was little room for a constructive dialogue.

The four chapters in Part Two (The Neo-Traditionalists) recount my discussions with the clerics of Payam-e Zan and their mentor Ayatollah Sane῾i. Although they, too, staunchly defend the immutability of the gender model manifested in Islamic law, they admit the need for change in practice and seek new interpretations within the bounds of feqh. As already mentioned, transcripts of these interviews have been published in Persian. I use them to shed light not only on the gender debates but also on clerical modes of thinking and argumentation. I translate my own records of the interviews almost in full. Here too, I interrupt the narrative to help the reader understand and interpret the occasions. I also draw attention to omissions and additions in the published transcript, not merely to set the record straight but also to highlight passages that the clerics saw fit either to elaborate or to omit. Unlike Part One, where the authors of the texts and I could only repeat our positions, here the clerics and I managed to engage critically with each others’ premises and argument—these four chapters are, in effect, coauthored.

The two chapters in Part Three (The Modernists) contain texts that represent a theoretical break from conventional wisdoms of Islamic feqh, and my engagement with them goes further than with those discussed earlier. Chapter Seven deals with lectures by Abdolkarim Sorush, perhaps the most prominent among the new wave of contemporary Islamic intellectuals in Iran. In Chapter Eight I discuss the work of Hojjat ol-Eslam Seyyed Mohsen Sa῾idzadeh, whose articles in Zanan provided the impetus for my research, and whose presence the reader will be aware of throughout the other chapters.

These narratives, in particular those in Part Two, must be read with a number of cautions. First, as with any other debate in the Islamic Republic in the 1990s, there were limits to the discussion that could not be transgressed, and I was never sure how far I could go. I was also anxious not to be seen as taking a Western perspective, but as someone who is not hostile to it, who appreciates and respects its values and traditions. I was keen to show that although I have lived in England for over twenty years, I consider myself Iranian and Muslim, that I understand and relate to issues as an Iranian Muslim woman, and value and respect my own religious and cultural heritage; this is my identity. Yet Payam-e Zan, perhaps inevitably, portrays me as representing the West; for example, when introducing the round-table participants, they write: Ms. Mir-Hosseini, in addition to her own views as a researcher, was voicing current [that is, non-Islamist] perspectives. They made a similar point when introducing me to Ayatollah Sane῾i, whom we will meet in Chapter Five.

Second, the texts discussed here are all by men. The absence of texts by women is due to the fact that Islamic jurisprudence (feqh)—the subject of this book—has remained a monopoly of male scholars. In Iran, as elsewhere, female scholars of Islamic studies so far have focused their energies on the field of Koranic