Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister

Abstract

This book examines the construction of gender and patriarchy in Iran during the onset of modernity, the Islamic revolution of 1979, and the post-revolution era. Among the many works published by prominent scholars of Islam and Iranian women’s studies, Minoo Moallem’s investigation of the construction of gender by neo-colonial modernity and political movements of a nationalist or fundamentalist orientation deserves special attention. Inspired by Michel Foucault as well as Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, Moallem incorporates a post-modern and a transnational feminist approach by arguing that post-modernity should be used as a framework to study the growth of modernity (p. 20). Challenging the popular belief that fundamentalism is a return to the roots and early periods of a tradition or a culture, she finds it “in dialogue with modernity” (p. 13) and thus argues that the Islamic fundamentalism observed in the twentieth century is a postmodernization phenomenon; in her words, “a by-product of the process of modernization” (ibid.). Nevertheless, she does not actually consider fundamentalism to be a truly post-modern phenomenon, since it does not respect the “concept of difference,” as is the case with nationalism. Moallem questions the stereotypes presented by the travelers and foreign diplomats of the late-eighteenth to early-twentieth centuries concerning the harem, the veil, women, and so on. She challenges their vantage point in creating “otherness” and portraying Islam as barbaric. Although many works deal with women, patriarchy, and the construction of gender under the Pahlavis, the author offers a new reading and shows how the two rulers’ forceful steps in the name of modernization and progress led to the establishment of a nation-state in which each individual – man or woman – was socialized to perform his/her role according to the “natural and social division of labour” (p. 74). Her work is timely, especially now when Islamic fundamentalism is defined and analyzed by the politics of power through the global media. In the case or jihad, for instance, the author states that for fundamentalists, and more specifically in Ayatullah Khomeini’s view, there are two types of jihad: ...