Women In Iran From The Rise Of Islam To 1800

Combining scholarship from a range of disciplines, this collection of essays is a comprehensive examination of the role of women in Iranian society and culture, from pre-Islamic times to 1800. The contributors challenge common assumptions about women in Iran and Islam. Sweeping away modern myths, these essays show that women have had significant influence in almost every area of Iranian life. Focusing on a region wider than today's nation-state of Iran, this book explores developments in the spheres that most affect women: gender constructs, family structure, community roles, education, economic participation, Islamic practices and institutions, politics, and artistic representations. The contributors to this volume are prominent international scholars working in this field, and each draws on decades of research to address the history of Iranian women within the context of his or her area of expertise. This broad framework allows for a thorough and nuanced examination of the history of a complex society.

The role of women in Iran has often been downplayed or obscured, particularly in the modern era. This volume demonstrates that women have long played important roles in different facets of Iranian society. Together with its companion, Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800, this volume completes a two-book project on the central importance of Iranian women from pre-Islamic times through the creation and establishment of the Islamic Republic. It includes essays from various disciplines by prominent scholars who examine women's roles in politics, society, and culture and the rise and development of the women's movement before and during the Islamic Republic. Several contributors address the issue of regional, ethnic, linguistic, and tribal diversity in Iran, which has long contained complex, heterogenous societies.

Drawing on the complexities and nuances in women’s education in relation to the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, this edited collection examines implications of religious-based policies on gender relations as well as the unanticipated outcomes of increasing participation of women in education. With a focus on the impact of the Islamic Republic’s Islamicization endeavor on Iranian society, specifically gender relations and education, this volume offers insight into the paradox of increasing educational opportunities despite discriminatory laws and restrictions that have been imposed on women.

Examining the rapid transition in Iran from a modernizing, westernizing, secularizing monarchy (1941-79) to a hard-line, conservative, clergy-run Islamic republic (1979-), this book focuses on the ways this process has impacted the Qashqa'i-a rural, nomadic, tribally organized, Turkish-speaking, ethnic minority of a million and a half people who are dispersed across the southern Zagros Mountains. Analysing the relationship between the tribal polity and each of the two regimes, the book goes on to explain the resilience of the people's tribal organizations, kinship networks, and politicized ethnolinguistic identities to demonstrate how these structures and ideologies offered the Qashqa'i a way to confront the pressures emanating from the two central governments. Existing scholarly works on politics in Iran rarely consider Iranian society outside the capital of Tehran and beyond the reach of the details of national politics. Local-level studies on Iran-accounts of the ways people actually lived-are now rare, especially after the revolution. Based on long-term anthropological research, Nomads in Postrevolutionary Iran provides a unique insight into how national-level issues relate to the local level and will be of interest to scholars and researchers in Anthropolgy, Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.

Written by a pioneer in the field of Middle Eastern women's history, Women in the Middle East is a concise, comprehensive, and authoritative history of the lives of the region's women since the rise of Islam. Nikki Keddie shows why hostile or apologetic responses are completely inadequate to the diversity and richness of the lives of Middle Eastern women, and she provides a unique overview of their past and rapidly changing present. The book also includes a brief autobiography that recounts Keddie's political activism as one of the first women in Middle East Studies. Positioning women within their individual economic situations, identities, families, and geographies, Women in the Middle East examines the experiences of women in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, in Iran, and in all the Arab countries. Keddie discusses the interaction of a changing Islam with political, cultural, and socioeconomic developments. In doing so, she shows that, like other major religions, Islam incorporated ideas and practices of male superiority but also provoked challenges to them. Keddie breaks with notions of Middle Eastern women as faceless victims, and assesses their involvement in the rise of modern nationalist, socialist, and Islamist movements. While acknowledging that conservative trends are strong, she notes that there have been significant improvements in Middle Eastern women's suffrage, education, marital choice, and health.

In The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo explores how Iranian women understand their rights. After the 1979 revolution, Iranian leaders transformed the state into an Islamic republic. At that time, the country's leaders used a renewed discourse of women's rights to symbolize a shift away from the excesses of Western liberalism. Osanloo reveals that the postrevolutionary republic blended practices of a liberal republic with Islamic principles of equality. Her ethnographic study illustrates how women's claims of rights emerge from a hybrid discourse that draws on both liberal individualism and Islamic ideals. Osanloo takes the reader on a journey through numerous sites where rights are being produced--including Qur'anic reading groups, Tehran's family court, and law offices--as she sheds light on the fluid and constructed nature of women's perceptions of rights. In doing so, Osanloo unravels simplistic dichotomies between so-called liberal, universal rights and insular, local culture. The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran casts light on a contemporary non-Western understanding of the meaning behind liberal rights, and raises questions about the misunderstood relationship between modernity and Islam.

The state of women in Islamic societies is the subject of much interest and heated debate. Yet, these discussions and representations in the media and elsewhere rely on inadequate information and misperceptions, imagining Muslim women as oppressed victims in need of liberation by outside forces. 'Becoming Visible in Iran' disputes these widespread stereotypes, providing a vivid account of women in contemporary Iran as they go about their daily lives. Beginning at home, women are infusing dramatic change by challenging the patriarchal conceptions of their fathers, brothers, uncles and others within the intimate sphere of family and home. Empowered by education, they transport the power of their minds and being from the domestic to the public and political. Mehri Honarbin-Holliday presents the experiences of these young women who wield a key if indirect political influence on the seemingly male dominated politics of this society, as they achieve a new visibility. She shows us how women understand their place in contemporary Iranian society, and how they interrogate it, making demands for shifts in attitudes and behaviours, both at home in relation to male relatives and in the wider world. Women's daily existence weaves between the public and the private, from home to classrooms, parks, metros, cafes and taxis, negotiating socio-political limitations and the current regime's policies of female invisibility. Detailed interviews and striking narratives draw our attention to the women's reflexive and critical stance and their desires to be recognized as independent and active architects of their own personal lives, whilst also contributing to the discourses of change and a more just civil society. From this fieldwork, and focusing especially on young women, Honarbin-Holliday presents women's views on such key topics as public visibility, body presentation, and sexual curiosity, in addition to education, civil society and political and social change. Highlighting links and continuities with the history of women in Iran, from the early twentieth century to the present moment, she shows how Iranian women today strive: to be the author of one's fate, to resist narrow interpretations of religion, to conduct meaningful, rich and complex lives, to bring about change in the mindsets of male relatives, and to contribute to legal and political debates in the country. For its direct presentation of women's voices as well as its analysis and insight, this book is a vital contribution to our understanding of the lives of Muslim women and the possibilities before them today. 'Becoming Visible in Iran' is indispensable for those concerned with women in Islamic societies, gender studies, sociology, anthropology as well as Iran and the Middle East.

This book presents a translation of Bertold Spuler’s groundbreaking work on the transformation of Iran from a Persian Zoroastrian Empire to a province of the Arab Muslim Empire to a land divided by a number of Persian and Turkish kingdoms.