In recent decades, religious-based activism and activities in Muslim societies has been receiving increasing scholarly attention. However, to date, much of this attention is focused on activism of Islamist political parties. By way of contrast, this panel features emerging new thinking about religious-based activism and initiatives that is located at the informal and grassroots levels by diverse civil society actors, including non-governmental organizations, faith-based charity organizations, and women’s rights organizations and movements. The papers explore the ways in which groups derive and frame their activism in religious terms. Through an analysis of diverse case studies, panelists highlight the specific motives, strategies, framing processes and results of such organizations given the broader socio-legal and political contexts of their societies. Taken together, the papers will survey the extent to which such faith-based activities and organizing can be effective in garnering public support, enhancing people’s rights and interests, and yielding pressure on the elites, given the opportunities and obstacles that present themselves in a particular context. A major contribution of these papers is that they highlight the religious based activities at the informal levels that are engaged in reformulating the dominant socio-legal and political ideologies and practices of their contexts, including addressing gender discrimination from within a religious discourse; as well as the limitations that such faith-based activities may face.
Shitrit’s comparative analysis of three different religious women’s movements in Jerusalem, for instance, finds that religious women’s groups’ framing of their demands for accessing sacred spaces by enmeshing religious and nationalist claims greatly enables them to win the support of conservative religious authorities. Maranlou, presents key findings of the survey on women’s access to justice. Thorough analysis of several justice initiatives she demonstrates that access to justice can be enhanced through the application of religious understandings within the socio-legal contexts of Iran.
But whereas religious-based activism and framing can be an important opportunity structure, it is also true that it can face limitations in certain contexts. Tajali’s comparative research of Islamic women’s organizing in Iran and Turkey finds that a religious framing fails to pressure elites to address women’s political underrepresentation. Instead she emphasizes the significance of ‘internal criticism,’ in which high-ranking Islamic women publicly protest the gender discriminatory attitudes of their male leaders. Finally, Hosoya’s ethnographic research of one of Iran’s influential charity organizations sheds new light onto personal aspirations for faith-based activities that are internally driven, rather than institutionally motivated.
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Dr. Mahmoud Jaraba
Joachim Wagner’s book, "Judges Without Law: Islamic Parallel Justice Endangers Our Constitutional State" fueled a public debate in Germany in 2011 regarding the so-called “parallel justice” run by “Sharia courts”. The debate has portrayed the issue as one in which Muslims are seeking to create, in contradiction to the German legal system, a parallel legal justice system based on Sharia which will undermine the rule of law and weaken the protection of the rights of vulnerable people, particularly women. While “Sharia courts” came up in the public debate and media coverage, there was an absence of concrete empirical data and case materials encompassing facts on the ground and what is actually happening inside the Muslim community. My fieldwork in Germany suggests that although some Imams may give informal religious advice which may not be in accordance with the default norms of German law, Imams and religious leaders comprise only one actor among a variety of other actors involved in a wide and very complex system of mediation and arbitration in which religion plays only a limited role. Based on my fieldwork, I will examine how local actors mediate and negotiate a settlement of civil (or criminal) litigation in very complex processes within a community that has a significant diversity in terms of actors, knowledge, opinion, power, status, and the relation with the local government. This will be based partially on more than one hundred interviews with local Imams, community leaders, clans’ leaders, civil society activists and “participants” as well as more than two thousands documents I have gathered during my fieldwork.
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Dr. Lihi Ben Shitrit
Contested sacred sites, over which different religious groups assert claims to exclusivity, have drawn scholarly attention to the spatial interaction between religion and politics. However, the gendered dimensions of inter-communal religious-political disputes over sacred space, and women's roles in these site-specific conflicts, have been largely neglected. Using a case study of Orthodox Jewish women's activism for access to Temple Mt./al-Haram al-Sharif, this paper demonstrates how attention to gender and to women's engagement in inter-communal conflict over sacred places is essential for understanding the micro-processes that make a contested sacred site increasingly "indivisible" for parties to the conflict.
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Dr. Sahar Maranlou
In a plural socio-legal system such as Iran there is no singular meaning of access to justice. However, various factors are concerned in determining whether or not women have access to justice; from substantive protection of rights, procedural barriers and the subjective component of access to justice which steps outside of formal law and asks to what extent Iranian normative framework including customary practices and religion can promote women’s legal empowerment.
Legal empowerment or the capacity to seek legal remedy and challenge the multidimensional barriers to ‘access’ is influenced by women’s legal awareness, legal representation and law reform. While the universality of women’s access to justice is often associated with a secular arrangement, this paper argues that so called justice initiatives in a plural socio-legal context such as Iran can be successful if they engage with the society’s inherent religious dimensions.
In this paper, I examine the role of religious notions in furthering access to justice of women. I demonstrate that legal entitlements and access to legal justice is distributed according to religious readings of law and legal procedures. I introduce the concepts of hybrid justice and human rights in the vernacular to present case studies of the applications of religious understandings within the Iranian society in furthering women’s access to justice.
This paper presents some of key findings of the survey study that I have conducted on women’s perceptions and access to justice in Iran. I did interview around 120 women in Tehran to see how they understand rights, Islamic law, legal institutions, justice system, culture and other barriers to access to justice. The paper also is based on several case studies on how religious-based approaches can improve women’s access to justice. These case studies include the experience of clinical legal education in Iran where law students have used religious notions to raise awareness, legal aid and poverty lawyering for women in need based on religious teachings, and also law reform and substantive justice.
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Dr. Mona Tajali
Over the past decade, Islamic political movements have been increasingly recruiting women to decision-making positions despite the fact that the ideology they espouse often opposes women from assuming positions of public leadership. My ethnographic work on religious women’s activism in Iran and Turkey helps explain this unexpected trend by shedding light onto Islamic women’s organizing as they mobilize public support and strategically interact with male elites in their demands to increase women’s access to political decision-making. In particular, I highlight the role that a number of high-ranking Islamic women with close ties to the ruling elites played in pressuring their male party leaders to address women’s political underrepresentation. Women’s close ties to the ruling elites consist of both familial ties, such as being wives or daughters of key political and religious figures, as well as more formal ties that have evolved due to women’s long-term devotion to the Islamic movement or religious learning. I demonstrate that close ties to the leaders enable Islamic women to leverage a form of ‘internal criticism’ as a strategy to enhance women’s political rights and status from within the Islamic movements.
Through in-depth interviews with influential Islamic women’s rights groups in Iran and Turkey—namely members of Iran’s Zeinab Society (Jameh Zeinab) and the Islamic Women’s Coalition (etelaf-e Islami-e zanan), and Turkey’s women activists of the pro-religious Justice and Development Party (JDP)—this paper sheds light onto the factors that have led to Islamic women’s increasing outspokenness against discriminatory attitudes of their male leaders. It argues that despite women’s religious tendencies, many Islamic women activists deem public challenges against patriarchal attitudes of their male leaders more effective than continued emphasis on egalitarian interpretations of religious discourses. For instance, in Iran, a coalition of key Islamic party women across the political spectrum denounced the discriminatory words of high-ranking clerics who oppose women’s access to leadership positions. In recent elections, this coalition succeeded in the appointment of the first ever-female minister in 2009, and lobbied key elites to increase the percentage of female parliamentary candidates. Similarly, in Turkey, high-ranking JDP women activists publicly threatened to resign from the party to protest the party leaders’ unwillingness to increase headscarved women’s access to the parliament. This paper demonstrates that ‘internal criticism,’ in which women from within the Islamic movement challenge the gender discriminatory practices of male leaders was an effective approach to enhance women’s political status.
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Sachiko Hosoya
Scholarly research in Muslim societies has often credited Islamic charity institutions such as vaqf or zakat as the main financial resources of governmental/non-governmental welfare programs for underprivileged members of the society, since these institutions often serve as a safety net for the society. However, although Islamic charities have been gaining scholarly attention following the 9/11 attacks, to date, ethnographic research of welfare charity organizations across the Middle East, including non-governmental and non-political organizations, remain limited. This ethnographic research on Kahrizak Foundation and Kahrizak Charity Care Center based on 24 months participant observation provides a new perspective on the role of private faith-based charity organizations in contemporary Iran. This paper contributes to our understanding of modern care/rehabilitation centers that frame and often justify their activities in religious terms, and the impact of their faith-based activities on those involved with the organization as volunteers, residents, and organizers. It argues that the presence of a charismatic leader, personal ties to prominent figures, and response to donors’/volunteers’ religious motivations based on personal experiences were among the key factors that led to the development of non-governmental faith-based charity organizations in Iran. Significantly, the aspirations for faith-based activities of the volunteers of the Center are internally driven, rather than institutionally motivated. This paper also argues that the success and influence of Kahrizak’s emphasis on faith-based activities served as a model for other organizations to follow suit.
Kahrizak Foundation, which administrates Kahrizak Charity Care Centers for elderly and disabled residents in Tehran and Karaj, is a prominent example of successful non-governmental organization in the field of nursing care in Iran. The most distinct contribution of this Foundation was a creation of a management method for fully equipped modern care/rehabilitation centers by combining faith-based activities with volunteer caring efforts. The volunteers working in the Charity Care Center interpret their practice of caring for others through the concepts of redemption and afterlife based on Shia Islam, and the Foundation has been actively harnessing human power of these faith-based volunteer workers for the benefit of improving the care quality for the residents since its establishment in 1972. The Foundation and the Charity Care Center became famous in Iran, and enjoyed growing influence on welfare policies last couple of decades.
