زهره نصرت خوارزمی

Islam’s view on the status of women has been among the controversial topics in the American universities in recent decades. The rise of the political Islam and its embodiment in the Islamic Republic of Iran is considered by many critics as the turning point in the making of the Muslim women as an analytical category for the Western observers. This study focuses on Muslim women’s citizenship as a modern concern, and analyzes two major American academic approaches to the quality of Iranian women’s citizenship under theIslamic Republic. It addresses two textbooks, Women and Gender in Islam (1992) and An Enchanted Modern (2006), which represent the most frequently addressed textbooks in the course syllabi used at the top twentyAmerican universities in the academic year 2014-2015. The present paper, then, exploits Saied R. Ameli’s classification of discourse to compare the two prevalent discourses of Islamoromia and Islamoverita in the mentioned textbooks. Islamoromia indicates that Muslim women’s citizenship under the Islamic-oriented government is frequently put against the secular “normal” form of the state when the latter is given discursive advantage. However, an emerging voice of Muslim women about the enabling capacity of the Islamic Republic, on the Islamoveritic side, is recognized as a promising changing narrative.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought instructional and administrative possibilities and problematics in higher education internationally. In such conditions, the developing countries suffered challenging times for less personnel preparedness, deficiencies in technological infrastructure, and restricted sources of finance for investing. This study argues that Iran's higher education was already pressured under the UCMs before the emergency transition to online education. It therefore focuses on the University of Tehran (UT), one of the most affluent Iranian universities, which stands as a role model in quality and excellence at the national and regional scales. It employs the reflexive thematic analysis method to  cover a comprehensive body of COVID-driven content at UT’s website, including news, administrative notes, and announcements on new official regulations, teaching guidelines, and consultative commentaries for mental well-being. It provides an analytical model based on three major themes, A) students: technical and emotional support vs. onerous regulations, B) prosociality and social responsibility, C) instructors at University of Tehran: highly expected simultaneously ignored. These major themes entail different subthemes and motifs that unveil UT’s developing solutions and obstacles to foster fruitful exchange within the UT community. 

Islamic feminism is one of the movements that developed in reaction to the revival of political Islam in post-Islamic Revolution Iran (1979). The present study attempts to seize the major nodal points around which this discourse has been formed. Using Margot Badran’s theory of the convergence of secular and Islamic feminisms, this study also explains the tenets of Islamic feminism in a country where filling the gap between the secular and the Islamic is rejected. It focuses on the analytical articles published by Zanan and Zanan-e-Emruz magazines as two prominent platforms for Islamic feminists to highlight their answers to the modern concerns of Iranian women. The results indicate that the major discursive nodes include: a) women’s Ijtihad and the re-interpretation of the holy texts with a women-friendly outlook, b) human equality exempt from sexuality, c) demands for a conventional notion of justice, and d) recognition of women’s socio-political capacities vis-à-vis their family identities.  

: The post-colonial conditions provided a good opportunity for Muslim women to shift their strategic position from a unit of analysis for westerners to the agent of active knowledge production. For many, Islamic feminism is considered as an alternative knowledge to bring about an epistemological emancipation from Orientalist ideas. Nevertheless, the present study shows, this is not free of ambiguity and problems. This study focuses on a book entitled Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed (1992) as one of the most influential sources of Islamic feminism, which is considered as an international academic source and is part of the most frequent textbooks in syllabi in American universities for decades Regarding the issue of the current article, that is, the challenges of thinking on the boundary of Islam and modernity for Muslim women, the supremacy of presuppositions and modern gender ideas have been explored in Islamic feminism. This superiority of discourse is to the extent that by using the critical discourse analysis method and understanding intertextual connections with other first-hand Islamic historical and jurisprudential sources, Ahmad's reading can be much distorted. As such, the paper tries to unveil the necessity of re-considering internal ambivalences and discursive complications of the book, considering its logic in approaching early marriage, polygamy, and veiling through Ahmed's creation of complex binaries such as Jahiliah (ignorance) vs. Islam and the Prophet vis-a-vis his female counterparts.

Piety for Muslim women is an internal source of agency, which motivates their social presence and fulfills their political commitments. In spite of the prevalence of Orientalist views on Muslim women for centuries, a new space has opened under transnational feminism in recent years to re-consider their socio-political interpretations. The present paper discusses the situation of women in West Asia, where global terrorism has emerged with a recently developed counter-terrorism outlook among Muslim women. Defending the Shiite sanctuaries in Syria and Iraq against the Takfiris symbolically embodies this counter-terrorism ideology, for which hundreds of Muslims have sacrificed their lives. This study explores the ideas and ideals of Shiite Iranian and Afghan women who have lost their husbands in Syria or Iraq fighting against the ISIS. Deep semi-structured interviews depicted their definitions of “martyrdom” as a new and transnational identity. In addition, the analysis of their understanding of opportunities and challenges, within the family or at a social scale, revealed five major themes: a) transnational solidarity of the Islamic Ummah, b) the significance of jihadi culture to preserve the global peace, c) strong Shiite leadership/Wilayat-al-Faqih, d) motherhood a simultaneous opportunities and challenges, and e) intersectionality of motherly challenges for Afghan women.

General Soleimani’s View on Humanistic Aspects of Resistance vs. Terror: A Thematic Analysis of His Speeches during Two Last Years before Martyrdom Terrorizing general Soleimani in January 2020 has brought the confrontation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States into a new moment which is considered by many IR scholars as a paradigm shift. The present paper is an attempt to delve into the Western, in particular American, sources in order to find how they mis-represent Soleimani as the “leader of the terrorist front”. It, then, addresses an intentionally ignored side which is grasping Soleimani’s outlook on the resistance axis in term of a transnational front with a humanitarian outlook at its heart. The paper looks to produce such an alternative knowledge by employing Atlas.ti software and reflexive thematic analysis. It covers a comprehensive list of Soleimani’s speeches and will which were given during his last two years of life. The extracted motifs lead to four major themes, including: a) the individual maturity and empowerment as a prelude to shape the resistance front, b) the dominance of the transnational and global concerns, c) the disciplinary hierarchy within the resistance front, d) resistance as a log-term social and political engine of development.

Recent years have witnessed a surge in research on the impact of the cyberspace on social movements. The feminist movement has built a vocal platform online which attempts to underscore sexual violence against women. Scholars have begun to suspect that the internet has ushered in a new wave, the fourth wave of feminism. The fourth wave’s main feature is its reliance on social media. The accessibility, reach of a widespread audience, low costs and user-friendly environment have encouraged women to use social media to speak out against various forms of sexual violence directed against women. It is also assumed that going forward; the movement will also tackle issues such as the gender pay gap, neoliberal policies, maternity leave, and cultural sexism. Moreover, the internet-based movement is striving to bring to the fore the topic of intersectionality, that is, the intersection of oppressive institutions, and the attempt to rectify the failings of past waves by representing those oppressed by multiple institutions such as sexism, classism, and racism. This commentary provides an overview of the emerging academic literature on the fourth wave of feminism and critically reflects the lack of social realism in its existing form of knowledge production.