My project analyzes the competing jurisprudential debate on financial compensation (diya) for accidental crimes that is currently unfolding among traditionalist and reformist religious authorities in Iran. Presently there are two categories of jurisprudential tradition implemented by religious scholars that address this issue. The first category is traditional jurisprudence, which advocates conventional precepts and garners the endorsement of the mainstream conservative religious scholars and jurists. The second type of jurisprudential tradition attempts to reconstitute the legal pluralism of Shi?ism. I look at hermeneutic methodologies employed by these religious authorities that either advocate or oppose equal diya for Muslim men and women. My project contends that that the coexistence of moderate and conservative positions has allowed reformist religious scholars to utilize the frameworks offered by Shi?i legal tradition to contest the discriminatory position advanced by the conservative religious elites. The diya debate in Iran is a symptomatic public referendum on jurisprudential debates among Shi?i religious authorities in Iran. Through textual analysis, I highlight several factors that distinguish the reformists’ approach to diya from their traditional and secular counterparts. Overall, the reformist Shi?i jurists’ critical stance regarding the sustainability of conventional jurisprudential methods has not instigated them to discard it completely but to resort to an alternative method within the framework of the Shi?i tradition. Reformists emphasize that dynamic jurisprudence is a means of coming to terms with the challenges of modernity, in contrast with the more static jurisprudential approach preferred by some of the traditionalist religious scholars. Despite their contention these two juristic positions are not static categories separate from each other; rather, there is a continuing dialogue and discourse among their advocates. Thus, they should be seen as two stages in the unfolding debates over equal compensation in modern Iran.

How and why do cultural issues incentivize conservative mobilization? Cultural grievances, some social movement scholars argue, are the subject of conservative mobilization. The ascent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the local election of 2001 and his subsequent victory in the Iranian presidential election of 2005 caught many Iran scholars off guard. Though numerous studies have focused on the liberal movements in Iran from 1997 (i.e., the electoral Reform Movement of 1997 and the Green Movement of 2009), less has been known about cultural activism of Iranian conservatives in the years before the rise of Ahmadinejad to power. Previous studies on the state politics in Iran were focused on the entire formal polity rather than conservative politics (i.e., Moslem 2002). Other Iran experts (i.e., Rahnema 2011) are concerned with ideational shifts within conservative preachers’ language rather than cultural mobilization and its relation to the state politics. Albloshi (2016), however, has made sense of the Iranian conservative politics (known in Iran as the principlist politics) regarding salient issues in their political discourses in the context of post Iran-Iraq War. Liberally-perceived cultural and social policies of the mid-1990s had tremendous impacts on the conservative politics in the country, which gave rise to various conservative identity movements from 1994 onward. The cultural grievances of conservatives before and after the rise of the Reform Movement, as I will discuss, is necessary to understand their contentious political behavior. Through a textual analysis of Sobh, a conservative weekly magazine, from 1994 to 2000, I attempt to show the relationship between perceived cultural policy threats and the rise of new conservative movements in the country. I seek to answer these questions: how and why did Iranian conservatives mobilize the socio-culturally marginalized base through a cultural politics and populist political discourse from the mid-1990s? And what have been some of the consequences of this cultural mobilization for the state politics in Iran?

The Turkish government’s intervention in the economy dominated the political environment from the 1930s on, as part of the comprehensive series of state-sponsored reforms. In 1931, statism was adopted in response to the trauma of the sequential wars and the severe local effects of the Great Depression. In addition to establishing new facilities, the government also continued to operate a handful of factories from the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. One of those factories, Feshane, was handed over to the state-run enterprise of Sümerbank (It was assigned to lead the drive for industrialization and to handle the labor force problems) and relabeled as Sümerbank Defterdar Textile Factory in 1937. The factory had employed high numbers of women workers throughout its years in operation. There is a growing literature that stresses gender, ethnicity, and race as important categories to understand the multilayered relationship between states, societies and industrial workers. However, established labor history in the Middle East narrows workers’ experiences to unionism and political activism to a large extent, and concentrates on the institutional history of the working class. The select focus of nationalist labor histories misses the social and cultural life of laboring men and women. This paper contextualizes the Republican centralized industrial program by examining the everyday lives of women workers and gendered interactions on the workshop floor in the case of Sümerbank Defterdar Textile Factory. Most of the documents need to be restudied with the social construction of gender in mind because the greatest part of the written sources is excessively male-oriented or they were written by or from the perspective of the state authorities. Hence, this study aims to discuss the possibilities of writing a gendered history of labor by finding new ways to read the archival evidence. Although workingmen are inclined to be more visible in standard records, this paper reconceptualizes the connection between gender and labor on the basis of using varying sources such as photographs, maps, newspaper and magazine articles as well as state-led documentation.

Gezi Park was an unprecedented democratic protest that took place in the Republic of Turkey in the early summer of 2013. While much has been written on the protests, the relationship between the feminist movement in Turkey and the Gezi protests remains unexplored. Even though feminist movement as such and civil society associations that were at the heart of feminist organizing did not take part in the Gezi protests as NGOs, there were many women, even slightly more women than men, in the park. These women played critical roles in shaping the Gezi experience and the feminist movement was present in diverse ways throughout the protests. In this paper, I would like to address the relationship between women and Gezi Park and explore how the feminist movement of the past three decades that played a democratizing role in Turkish politics helped shape the Gezi protests. The paper argues that even though drawing causal inferences are difficult, one could trace the assumptions in the norms, values, modes of organizing and resistance the women that participated in the Gezi protested exhibited and the feminist movement in Turkey. Feminist movement was first of its kind in Turkey in organizing protests through unconventional means and with humour the way Gezi was organized. Images of women in the park became symbols of the protest. More critically, women in the park who had internalized feminist sensibilities consistently prevented the protests from falling into the trap of sexism that the feminist movement had so powerfully opposed. Finally, the heterogeneity of the feminist movement in Turkey was reflected in the park. Women from different backgrounds, including Turks and Kurds who played different roles, students, young professionals or mothers who were housewives, became part of the resistance as the feminist movement encouraged women to resist in pursuit of their choices. The paper willl be an interpretive examination of the question based on secondary literature including newspaper articles, journals and published interviews with women who participated in the Gezi park.