Citation

Künkler M. J. Muslim Minor. Aff. 2004; 24(2): 375-392.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/1360200042000296726

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The article focuses on the campaign for women's rights in the Iran of the 1990s on the basis of the reinterpretation of Islamic sacred texts. Reflecting on the discursive limits on legal discourse imposed by the current theocratic regime, secular and religious women in Iran have joined to frame arguments in favor of women's rights in Islamic terms rather than with reference to liberal human rights discourses. As women are excluded from reaching clerical positions that would endow them with the authority to engage in theologically recognized reinterpretation of the Islamic sacred texts, this encounter has hinged, it will be argued, on a collaboration with male reform-minded clerics, whose arguments the women's movement has learned to appropriate and advance for its own purposes and interests. The campaign for women's rights in Iran has thus necessitated a rare symbiosis not only between secular and religious women, but also between women and male reformist clerics—a symbiosis which has largely been neglected by scholarly accounts of the women's rights movement and whose implications for the greater reformist project in Iran have yet to be examined more carefully.