In most contemporary Muslim societies, women face great obstacles to serve as religious leaders - be it as judges of religious law, teachers in madrasas and hawza, or scholars of Islam - despite the fact that local cultures in the history of Islam did recognize women as religious scholars and leaders over sometime considerable periods of time.
While women are excluded from the position of judgeship according to most Sunni and Shi'a schools of jurisprudence, from the 8th -13th century women had a particularly prominent role to play as transmitters of hadith, and throughout Islamic history functioned as scholars of Islam.
Research only now turns to re-examine the role and status of women as transmitters of Islamic knowledge. This is both due to a greater appreciation of the fact that religious authority was not always exclusively male, and to the growing initiative of contemporary Muslim states to institute programs that promote the education and training of female religious leaders. After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran took on a leading role in the Muslim world in promoting institutions of learning for female religious authority, as religious learning and religious scholarship more generally became a primary concern for the state.
The panel imparts a mosaic overview of female religious leadership prior to and after the 1979 revolution. Two papers discuss the evolution and workings of female hawza in three of the country’s cities, Qom, Mashhad and Shiraz, while one paper offers insights into the lives of two leading mujtahidas of 20th century Iran, Nosrat Amin (1886-1983) and Zohreh Sefati (1953-). The 1979 revolution presents an important cesura in this endeavor. Considering that a handful of women were surprisingly well-established as students and professors in Islamic seminaries before the 1979 revolution, how has the amalgamation of religious and political authority in post-revolutionary Iran impacted women’s access to positions of Islamic teaching and authority? A fourth paper analyzes the arguments of female jurists in favor of and against Iran acceding to CEDAW. Do their arguments carry any weight in the highly legalistic theological and political debates in the Council of Expediency where the legislation is currently pending?
Beside providing a rare insight into female religious training in modern Iran, the panel offers an analytical approach to understanding the causes of female religious leadership: whether the phenomenon owes its existence predominantly to female agency, male invitation, or state initiative.
Papers are based on fieldwork undertaken in the past two years that included classroom observation, interviews with students and female and male teachers at women’s hawza; primary documents such as collected curricula and the writings of female religious authorities; and secondary sources including biographical works and media coverage.
The establishment of Jamiat al-Zahra in 1984, the first official female hawza in post revolutionary Iran, opened up new possibilities for women to enter the male-dominated clerical hierarchy. The rapid growth in the number of female hawzas increased the presence of hawza-educated women in the official religious sphere. One might expect that these women have been successful in making ‘the women’s issue’ an important topic for clerical discussion and this might eventually limit the present clerical domination over women’s affairs in general and women’s religious affairs in particular.
However, this scenario is somewhat optimistic. As opposed to the male hawzas which had a long pre-revolutionary history and had enjoyed autonomy from the state, Jamiat al-Zahra and other female hawzas in Qom were established under the initiative of the clerical leaders of the Islamic Republic, who are eager to mobilize the support of women in their political cause. This subordination of the female hawzas to the state facilitated the application of bureaucratic management and the adoption of a university-style system, and transformed hawzas into revolutionary agencies whose primary role is to train propagandists (muballigh) of valayat-e faqih (government of the jurist), rather than to train mujtahids who can issue a competent legal opinion, which is the dominant role of male hawzas.
Under such circumstances, only a small number of women can proceed to dars-e kharej (the most advanced course) to become mujtahids. Furthermore, they are confined in the gender-segregated space of hawzas, which restricts women’s access to the library and religious seminars offered by the highest-ranking authorities where the jurisprudent knowledge is transmitted from a mentor to the disciples. Therefore, even though a few female mujtahids such as Zohre Sefati and Masume Golgiri of Jamiat al-Zahra offer dars-e kharej or the women’s section of the Islamic Propagation Office of the Qom Seminaries provides the dars-e kharej for Islamic jurisprudence and principles in women’s issues, women can hardly go beyond the gender-segregated sphere.
Drawing on the interviews, documents issued by hawzas and secondary sources, the paper concludes that the priority of propagandists training over dars-e kharej in female hawzas, the scarcity of female mujtahids, and their inability to extend their knowledge beyond the gender specified issues limit the influence of female mujtahids within the clerical hierarchy. At least for now, this in no way weakens the male-centric patriarchal system in contemporary Iran.
Nosrat Amin (1886-1983) was one of the most influential female mojtaheda in 20th century Iran, about whom no publication in languages other than Persian exists. This study, by making extensive use of the main Persian-language biographies as well as her works written in Persian and Arabic, sheds light on Amin’s life, her scholarly work, her views on the social relations and her commitments to the public. Moreover, it evaluates the scope of her religious authority before and after her death, and the image that the Islamic Republic has tried to create of this eminent mojtaheda. At the age of 40, Amin was granted the first ejaze-ye rewayat certificate by some prominent ulama (including two grand ayatollahs) and was considered a scholar of the religious sciences. Her gender and her relationship to any of these ulama seem to have been largely irrelevant in these achievements. Whereas Amin could be regarded as an authoritative religious scholar among contemporary ulama during her lifetime, the nature of Amin’s authority in the post-revolutionary era has taken a different shape. It is not her scholarly works as much as her conservative viewpoints on social relations that are emphasized in the Islamic Republic.
The framework of this paper is the influence of international conventions on national legislation. I shall focus on the role of the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in the Iranian legal discourse and focus especially on the position of female jurists and theologians vis-à-vis CEDAW. CEDAW, which is signed by many Muslim states, albeit with reservations, has not been signed by Iran. The Iranian Parliament endorsed the reformist government’s proposal to accede to the Convention on 12th August 2003, but the Council of Guardians rejected this endorsement. The matter was then referred to the Expediency Council, where it is still awaiting a final verdict to date (February 2011).
The paper will analyse the arguments brought forward by three different actors: the Council of Guardians that rejected the proposal, Shahindokht Mawlaverdi (Tehran), a jurist specialized in international law, and Fariba ?Alasvand, a theologian of Qom who discusses this convention from an Islamic legal perspective. While Mawlaverdi argues in favor of CEDAW on the basis of Islamic legal arguments, ?Al?svand strictly opposes the international convention. After surveying the arguments that are brought forward in favor of and against CEDAW, the paper will try to answer the following questions: Which concept of gender roles can be inferred from these different arguments? And have these two female jurists any voice in the public discourse on the role of international conventions in the Islamic Republic? How do their arguments relate to those brought forward by the Guardian Council?
The paper is based on personal interviews, legal documents and the writings of the three actors surveyed.
The 1979 constitution endowed religious authorities in Iran with exclusive access to key political institutions and offices. How has this impacted the position and opportunities for women religious authorities? Considering that a handful of women were surprisingly well-established as students and professors in Islamic seminaries before the 1979 revolution, how has the amalgamation of religious and political authority in post-revolutionary Iran impacted women’s access to positions of Islamic teaching and authority?
We examine this question through the life and works of two Iranian female mujtahidas, Nosrat Amin (1886-1983) and Zohreh Sefati (1953-). Nosrat Amin is the most influential female religious authority of 20th century Iran, who in her own right endowed men with the permission of ijtihad. Zohreh Sefati is the most prominent female religious authority of the Islamic Republic and a member of the Women’s Socio-Cultural Council. Her writings were consulted when the legislature revised the age of legal maturity for boys and girls in the early 2000s.
The trajectories of both women were strongly influenced by the socio-political environment in which and against which they defined themselves: While Nosrat Amin underwent her formative period as an Islamic scholar at a time when madrasas were slowly being replaced by secular public schools and religious courts by the apparatus of a modern state judiciary, Zohreh Sef?ti experienced the reversal of some of these reforms when the 1979 Islamic Revolution sought to Islamicize the entire legal system and expand the social and political status of Islamic seminaries.
A comparison of the two women’s lives shows the extent to which political circumstances have shaped the opportunities for women to aspire to and acquire religious authority in 20th century Iran. The pre-revolutionary Pahlavi regime and the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic, although diametrically opposed on most policy realms, are surprisingly similar in their effect on religious education opportunities for women. Although the Islamic Republic established the first full-fledged hawza of the country in the mid-1980s, the state ordered the simplification of its curriculum in the mid-1990s, thus demoting the hawza from an institution of learning and scholarship to one of propagation. The paper closes by evaluating the state’s role in facilitating, but also regulating and circumscribing, opportunities for women to establish religious authority and thus to influence jurisprudential arguments of the ruling orthodoxy.
The research relies on primary documents, personal interviews, as well as secondary literature.
