American academia

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 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.