Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, gender segregated spaces have become a prominent feature of the Iranian urban space. On the buses, women are relegated to the back; at the universities men and women are asked to sit in separate rows and enter from separate entrances; there are women-only parks and hospitals; and soccer stadiums are open only to men. These spatial practices are often lumped under the all-encompassing term “gender segregation,” which is considered to be part of the state’s larger project of the Islamization of society, allegedly aimed at excluding women from the public sphere. This paper draws on a larger project that focuses on women-only parks, soccer stadiums, and buses, as the major sites of segregation in Tehran, and contends that gender-segregated spaces represent different features of the Iranian state’s paternalistic stance towards women; they operate differently, produce different effects, and engender different modalities of action. By taking into account the variations across these cases, this paper complicates the unidimentional theorization of gender segregation, and asks the following questions: How and through what (macro and micro) mechanisms are gender-segregated spaces produced? What are the implications of these segregated spaces for the Iranian state? What do the variations across these gender-segregated sites tell us about the Iranian state, beyond reducing the explanation to “Islamization of society”?

This paper is a preliminary attempt to present prostitution as a viable historic subject within Iranian studies in particular and Middle Eastern studies in general and to compare the various discourses on prostitution during the second Pahlavi regime and post-Revolutionary Iran. It hopes to point out that studying prostitution within the modern Iranian context can expand the theoretical discussions on sexuality and sex work within feminist scholarship and highlight the Islamic regime’s attempt at re-inventing a little known religious tradition to fit modern times. The paper seeks to highlight the emerging discourse on prostitution during the 1970s within various structures of Iranian society and to display the deep sympathy towards the character of “the prostitute.” During the Pahlavi regime, the legitimacy of the modern state was closely connected to women’s progress and by the 1970s this attempt at modernizing women had expanded to include saving and modernizing “the prostitute.” During the 1970s the discourse on prostitution entered the public domain and became politicized as it tied closely with the regime’s efforts to modernize Iranian society by changing the plight of its women; similarly the issues of prostitution and also mut’a (temporary marriage) have gained public attention and political momentum in Iran’s post-Revolution Islamic government as they relate closely to Iran’s effort to develop socially and politically along Islamic lines. In post-Revolutionary Iran, mut’a became an Islamic solution to a modern political problem. The first and second sections of this paper highlight competing notions of modernity in Iran during the second half of the twentieth century. The secular modernization of the Shah’s regime is juxtaposed with the religious modernization of the Islamic Republic. The last section of this paper takes on a separate yet pertinent approach by emphasizing the relevance of a study of prostitution in the Iranian context to feminist scholarship. It destabilizes the “prostitute” and complicates established assumptions about it. The fact that individual prostitutes have different experiences in their lives across time and space has become evident by historical and contemporary scholarship which seeks to move beyond a literature that depicts prostitutes as victims. The examples of temple prostitutes in India who gained autonomy and wealth, and high-status courtesans in Japan and China who were lovers and artisans demanding high payments, are a few of the cases that challenge the dominant debates on prostitution. This paper seeks to add the case of prostitution in Iran to this list.

Temporary Marriage and the Modern Concept of Dating in Iran Temporary marriage (Muta) and dating is perhaps one of the most contentious sexuality issues that affects youth in Iran. Today marriage in Iran is seen less as only an institution for procreation, and women have come to expect companionship along with a greater degree of emotional and sexual intimacy. This research examines whether temporary marriage provides a practical "solution" to the needs of youth in Iran as an alternative to the modern dating culture. This study places temporary marriage within the frame of gender relations and elaborate the variation of sexual and non sexual temporary marriage, the motivation and circumstances which motivates women to contract temporary marriage and the political use of this institution. In this study the legal and theological texts on the subject of temporary marriage were analyzed. In an attempt to examine the difference between the dating culture and temporary marriage in light of the dynamics of sexual politics, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted among Iranian women who had contracted temporary marriages in 2008. In Iran temporary marriage is favored by theological and legal establishment as a religiously meritorious alternative to unhealthy sexual abstinence for men over dating. Women’s sexuality and their needs on the other hand are not addressed legally, and therefore this leaves scopes for a large variety of theories on the subject. Today in Iran dating is common despite continued parental objections and state prohibitions. In order to resolve this “problem” the state reintroduced the practice of temporary marriage as an alternative to the modern style of dating. This study shows that an odd mix of feminists, clerics and officials have begun to discuss temporary marriage as a possible solution to the problems of Iran's youth, which allows a degree of autonomy and sexual freedom for women. The findings of this research indicate that cultural practices (Urf) and social pressures can erode the position of women in both temporary marriages, and dating. It further indicates that sexual politics are always on some level about power and that attempts to destabilize traditional gender and sexual relations will threaten established political, religious and family hierarchies.

The proposed study focuses on the history of the reconstruction of the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, Iran over the past 40 years. Through a close examination of the shrine’s different incarnations and current reconstruction, the study examines the predicaments and challenges of negotiation procedures in order to investigate how state ideology recomposes the notion of sacrality through new forms of urban interventions and how such new forms reinvent the politics of a sacred state. The specific objectives are to decipher and analyze: a) How the different actors (State urban representatives, Clients, and Architects) engage in the process of reconstruction of the Shrine?; b)What does their engagement operate in the context of a Religio-Ideological political context of the country?; c)What is the impact of redefining notions of sacrality on conditions under which power and capacity to govern emerge? The Shrine of Imam Reza in the holy city of Mashhad is not only the most important site for Shi'a Muslims in Iran but also a landmark of political power in today’s Islamic Republic. Today, the shrine is under supervision by the Astan Quds Razavi, a charitable organization responsible for collecting funds and contracting urban and architectural firms for the shrine’s reconstruction. The main resource of the institution consists of endowments and donations from around the world, which give immense economic and political power to the head of the organization - a prominent member of the clergy, as well as a member of the "National Expediency Discerning Council" and the "Experts Assembly" of the leading jurisprudents appointed by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. In my analysis, I will focus on analyzing the Islamic State through the institutions affiliated with the Shrine’s reconstruction. I propose using the tools of anthropological analysis to examine the practices and codes of power, and particularly the role of social actors in creating them. In the contemporary context of the Iranian state, using this method of examining power via margins of the State will ultimately lead to insights about the centers of power and their use of concepts of sacrality as political apparatus. Moreover, the study aims to demonstrate how the dynamics of urbanism can be understood as political arenas. This research will contribute to studies on Shi‘ism, nationalism, urbanism, and functioning of the modern state in the Middle East.

In this paper I examine contemporary Iranian scholastic debates over the relationship between religious experts and the commons (`amm). In particular, I examine the ways in which Muslim Iranian scholars—writing in journals published by private individuals, the Islamic colleges (hawzah), and the state—figure the role of the religious expert as both theologically necessary and circumscribed by human limitations. Current literature on Iranian reformism has broached this question of Islamic scholarship and its methods largely through writings on Islamic jurisprudence. Works such as Mehran Kamrava’s Iran’s Intellectual Revolution (2008) have demonstrated the importance of independent reasoning (ijtihad) for reformist arguments as well as moves among reformists to broaden the bases of legal thought. Dahlen Askh, focusing specifically on Islamic legal theory (usul), has analyzed a variety of positions on the role of human reason in uncovering (or creating) Islamic legal rulings (2003). Here, I draw on this earlier work to analyze debates over the nature of religious expertise and how that expertise ought to be applied in modernity. Rather than juxtaposing the modernist or liberal elements of reformist theories against “traditionalist” or conservative approaches to Islam, I place reformist hermeneutics in a genealogy of modern Islamic thought including scholars such as Ruhollah Khomeini and Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai. I argue that while many reformist, conservative, and traditionalist scholars assert the necessity of religious expertise for Islamic communities, the ways in which they figure the commons differ radically. Drawing on Talal Asad’s theories of secularization and statism (2003) I highlight the ways in which Islamic scholars engage with the very modern problems of egalitarian citizenship. Significantly, I suggest this question of citizenship has transformed Muslim Iranian scholarship and defines one of the particular problematics that figure Islamic debates in the present regardless of the individual scholar’s political position.