Islam and Gender

The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran

Ziba Mir-Hosseini

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400843596
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Französische Geschichte

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.

Part One ________________________

THE TRADITIONALISTS
GENDER INEQUALITY

Introduction to Part One ________________________

MOST CLERICS IN Qom consider the pronounced patriarchal bias of shari῾a legal Rulings to be immutable. Inequality between the sexes they take for granted: it is rooted in sacred tradition, but it also makes sense to them intellectually. It reflects the world they live in, a world in which inequality between men and women is the natural order of things, the only known way to regulate relations between them.

I call these clerics, and their gender views, Traditionalist. They wield a great deal of power, and most religious texts produced in Qom represent their perspective. They all ground their arguments on the naturalness of shari῾a law and its compatibility with human nature, as formulated by Allameh Seyyed Mohammad Hosein Tabataba’i and later elaborated by his student, Ayatollah Mortaza Motahhari. Their texts and views have been discussed by others;¹ my aim here is to locate them in the context of the Islamic Republic in the 1990s.

Allameh Tabataba’i, who died in 1981 at the age of seventy-eight, was the most renowned Shi῾i philosopher of this century, and the first to address the question of gender and women’s rights from the perspective of Islamic philosophy. Despite his command of jurisprudence, which could have earned him more prestige and authority in the Houzeh, he chose not to pursue it, but instead devoted his scholarship to philosophy and exegesis, in which he excelled and became Allameh, the highest title reserved for nonjurist scholars. His monumental, twenty-volume Koranic commentary, al-Mizan fi-Tafsir al-Qur῾an (Balance in the Exegesis of the Koran), commonly known as al-Mizan, was written in Arabic between 1954 and 1972. In Polygamy and the Position of Women in Islam, a small book in Persian published during his lifetime, Allameh articulated all that is implicit in the writings of the Traditionalists, both those who remained in the Houzeh and those who became involved in the politics of the Islamic Republic.

Allameh Tabataba’i was teacher and mentor, recognized in both Shi῾i and Sunni religious circles, and among academics both inside and outside Iran. ² Throughout his life, he kept away from politics, both in the Houzeh and outside, yet he came to contribute to the founding political and gender discourses of the Islamic Republic.³ This was managed by his students, who developed and spelled out the ideological dimension of his writing; notably Morteza Motahhari, whose seminal text on women became the official discourse of the Islamic Republic on gender.

Motahhari takes his arguments almost verbatim from Allameh Tabataba’i’s al-Mizan, but his own text, whose language and mode of argument are more accessible to outsiders, is the better known outside traditional Shi῾i scholarship. Motahhari taught both in religious schools in Qom and at universities in Tehran, and during Khomeini’s exile in Najaf (1963-1978) he became one of his representatives in Iran. After the victory of the Revolution in February 1979, he became a member of the Revolutionary Council; in May that year he was assassinated.

His text bridges the traditional and modern worlds of the Shi῾a and is rooted in one of its divisive debates. The occasion of this debate, conducted in a women’s magazine, was the enactment of the Family Protection Law of 1967. The popular women’s magazine Zan-e Ruz was then campaigning for radical reform of the Iranian Civil Code, whose articles on marriage and divorce reflected dominant opinions within Shi῾i feqh. Among prominent reformers was Judge Mahdavi Zanjani, who had prepared a forty-article proposal to replace some of the articles of Book Seven of the code, which deal with marriage and divorce. This alarmed the religious authorities, and a leading Tehran clergyman approached Motahhari to prepare a defense of the code. Motahhari agreed to do so, provided it was printed intact. This was accepted and Zan-e Ruz, as a goodwill gesture, printed his original letter containing the proviso. Motahhari’s first response appeared in November 1966 as a direct rejoinder to the first article in Judge Mahdavi’s proposal. Mahdavi’s sudden death ended the debate after six issues, but Motahhari continued his contributions, which had attracted a large readership, for another twenty-seven issues. In 1974, he compiled them into a book, The System of Women῾s Rights in Islam.⁴

The System is divided into eleven parts, each dealing with a cluster of rights and obligations arising from marriage. It starts with marriage proposal and engagement, the subject matter of the first articles of Book Seven of the Civil Code, which was also the starting point of Judge Mahdavi’s proposal. In the following parts, Motahhari deals with temporary marriage, women and social independence, Islam and modernity, women’s human status according to the Koran, the natural basis of family laws, differences between men and women, dower (mahr) and maintenance, the question of inheritance, the right to divorce, and polygamy. In each part, Motahhari chooses his facts and sources selectively, especially when he invokes Western scholarship to justify the different treatment of women in Islam. Although he admits the injustices done in the name of the shari῾a—the plight of divorced and abandoned women was widely highlighted by Zan-e Ruz—he blames this state of affairs on un-Islamic society and men who abandoned Islam.

Motahhari’s arguments remain the most eloquent and refined among those that hold the concept of gender equality to be contrary to the shari῾a. They provided the Islamic Republic in its early years with much-needed validation for its gender policies. In 1981, his book was translated into English, and by 1995 it had been reprinted in Persian over twenty times. The bulk of the vast post-revolutionary literature on women, especially that produced by the official Islamic Propagation Organization, not only follows Motahhari but reproduces his arguments verbatim.

The two chapters that follow discuss texts by two high-ranking clerics articulating Traditionalist views on women in the domain of feqh. Ayatollah Madani, the focus of Chapter One, has kept aloof from the politics of the Islamic Republic, turning a blind eye to state policies bearing directly on women’s role in society. Ayatollah Azari-Qomi, the subject of Chapter Two, is by contrast a senior cleric who has been actively involved in politics.

¹ For example: Azari 1983c, Ferdows 1983, Ferdows 1985, Mahdavi 1985, Nashat 1983b, Paidar 1995, Yeganeh 1982, 41-48, and Yeganeh and Keddie 1986, 126-28.

² In the late 1950s, he began a lifelong dialogue with Henry Corbin, the French orientalist; and in 1963 he was asked to write the volume on Shi῾ism for a series intended to present “Oriental religions through their authentic representatives.” Allameh’s text was published as Shi῾ite Islam in 1975; see the preface by the translator, Seyyid Hossein Nasr 1975, 17-19.

³ For his views and their impact on the discourse of the revolution, see Dabashi 1993, chapter 5.

⁴ Motahhari 1991, xxxvii-xl.

1 ________________________

Women Ignored: Grand Ayatollah Madani

SOME OF THE high-ranking clerics who have remained in the Houzeh since the revolution make a conscious effort to keep their distance from the politics of the Islamic Republic. They do this by retreating into the scholastic, ivorytower world of the Houzeh, and ignoring what is happening outside. For them, the texts produced by Muslim jurists over the years have dealt adequately with women and their rights. Whatever was necessary has already been said and done. The Islamic position on women, and the relevant legal Rulings, are crystal clear. There is nothing to discuss: women have been given their rights.

Ayatollah al-῾Ozma Seyyed Yusef Madani-Tabrizi is one of these clerics. A highly respected scholar, he was born in 1928 in Tabriz in Azarbaijan. Educated in the Tabriz Houzeh and then in Qom, where he studied feqh and its Principles under Ayatollahs Borujerdi (the last sole marja῾) and Mohaqqeq al-Damad (a renowned scholar), he produced his treatise in the early 1980s. He is thus a marja῾, but only a minor one and in the old style.

I visited Ayatollah Madani one hot evening in early September 1995, on my first visit to Qom. I had arrived in the early morning with my cleric friend Sa῾idzadeh and his daughter Zahra, for a meeting with the editorial board of Payam-e Zan (see Chapter Three), which lasted well beyond noon. In mid-afternoon I visited the shrine; when it became cooler, Sa῾idzadeh and I browsed in the bookshops. I came across several books and pamphlets on women that I had not seen in Tehran. Soon each of us was carrying a large bundle—booksellers in Iran wrap purchases in paper and tie the bundle together with string. With more bookshops to go, Sa῾idzadeh said, “Why don’t we leave these somewhere before we go on? We could leave them in the offices of the Society for Houzeh Teachers.” He once worked at the society’s research and publication section, and the guards knew him. I welcomed the idea. As usual, I was having great difficulty managing my chador while carrying something; and I noticed that Sa῾idzadeh seemed rather uncomfortable. Zahra, his daughter, was no longer with us, and he was obviously not at ease to be seen with me alone in Qom. In the two bookshops we had visited, he had deliberately kept his distance; only at the cash desk did he come to add some books that he thought I might want to buy. Much later, when I had learned more of Qom’s unwritten laws, I also understood how inappropriate it was for clerics to be seen in the street with women and carrying bundles.

As we approached the society’s building, Sa῾idzadeh said, “There’s a Grand Ayatollah who lives in the alley just back here; I studied under him and I have his authorization (ejazeh). His name is Madani-Tabrizi and his views on women are traditional, but he allows and enjoys disputation with students, and you can certainly engage him in debate and ask about women’s position in Islam.” It was getting close to evening prayer time; I knew Sa῾idzadeh was eager not to miss his prayers, and was looking for somewhere to go, but did not know what to do with me. For my part, I was hot and felt stifled inside my maqna῾eh headgear and chador.¹ We left our bundles of books with the guard, and turned down the nearby alley.

Ayatollah Madani’s house was jonubi (on the south side of the street), with its garden on the sunny far side of the house. Like all other houses in the row it was a two-story building with high walls and curtained windows. But the main door was open. Sa῾idzadeh shouted “Ya Allah!” and went in, as I waited outside. He came back with the khadem, and said that the ayatollah would see us after prayers. A khadem is a cross between a steward and a doorman, who runs errands and is in charge of receiving visitors; the word implies service in a good cause, without expectation of reward. Shrines and mosques also have khadems as attendants and gatekeepers, one of whose jobs is to keep women under control in public—as we shall see. Ayatollah Madani’s khadem was a tall, grim-faced man in his late sixties; he did not look at me and gave no response to my greeting. He was obviously put out by our arrival. I thought perhaps it was because we had come just before prayer time and disrupted his routine, but I soon realized that it was not our timing that upset him, but my very presence. However, he showed us the way, Sa῾idzadeh in front and me behind.

We entered a hallway. As in the residences of all distinguished ayatollahs, this area was the biruni, outer quarters, frequented by male visitors and students. Up a short flight of steps to the right was a reception room. A large, heavy curtain on the far wall led to the courtyard beyond. On the left-hand wall was a basin with taps, and to the right of the basin a washroom with a toilet; to the left of the basin, a door led, presumably, to the next-door house, used as andaruni or inner quarters where the family lived, with its own outside entrance for female guests.

We took our shoes off and climbed the steps to enter the reception room. It had a window opening onto the courtyard, but a curtain was drawn over it. Apart from carpets covering the floor, the room was simple and austere. There was no furniture apart from a couple of large cushions and, by one of the windows, a low writing desk, next to which lay several large bundles of books tied together with string, like those I had just bought. The khadem turned on the ceiling fan and brought us a jug of iced water and two glasses. I thanked him but again he left the room without responding. Sa῾idzadeh followed him to do his evening prayers. It was hot under my black overcoat, headgear, and chador, and the elastic band (quite a useful innovation) that held my chador in place was hurting. Sitting down facing the door, I helped myself to some water; it was Qom water, salty in taste but cooling. I felt uneasy and apprehensive about meeting a Grand Ayatollah; I didn’t know what to expect. I was also offended by the way the khadem ignored me. I wondered whether to take my chador off and just keep my headgear; eventually I decided to keep my chador on, took out my fan and gradually cooled down.

When Sa῾idzadeh came back into the room he sat by the door, with his back just inside the threshhold, so that he could be seen from outside. This was the way he sat whenever we were alone in a room, so as to avoid breaking the rule of khalvat, which prohibits two people of different sex who are unrelated to each...