Islam’s view on the status of women has been among the controversial topics
in the American universities in recent decades. The rise of the political Islam
and its embodiment in the Islamic Republic of Iran is considered by many
critics as the turning point in the making of the Muslim women as an
analytical category for the Western observers. This study focuses on Muslim
women’s citizenship as a modern concern, and analyzes two major American
academic approaches to the quality of Iranian women’s citizenship under the
Islamic Republic. It addresses two textbooks, Women and Gender in Islam
(1992) and An Enchanted Modern (2006), which represent the most
frequently addressed textbooks in the course syllabi used at the top twenty
American universities in the academic year 2014-2015. The present paper,
then, exploits Saied R. Ameli’s classification of discourse to compare the two
prevalent discourses of Islamoromia and Islamoverita in the mentioned
textbooks. Islamoromia indicates that Muslim women’s citizenship under the
Islamic-oriented government is frequently put against the secular “normal” form
of the state when the latter is given discursive advantage. However, an emerging
voice of Muslim women about the enabling capacity of the Islamic Republic, on
the Islamoveritic side, is recognized as a promising changing narrative.
Source: Journal of WORLD SOCIOPOLITICAL STUDIES
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