In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for _Corriere della Sera_ and _le Nouvel Observateur_. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. _Foucault and the Iranian Revolution _is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. (...) Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In this important and controversial account, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson illuminate Foucault's support of the Islamist movement. They also show how Foucault's experiences in Iran contributed to a turning point in his thought, influencing his ideas on the Enlightenment, homosexuality, and his search for political spirituality. _Foucault and the Iranian Revolution_ informs current discussion on the divisions that have reemerged among Western intellectuals over the response to radical Islamism after September 11. Foucault's provocative writings are thus essential for understanding the history and the future of the West's relationship with Iran and, more generally, to political Islam. In their examination of these journalistic pieces, Afary and Anderson offer a surprising glimpse into the mind of a celebrated thinker. (shrink)

In 2012–13, we signed up for Facebook in seven Middle East and North Africa countries and used Facebook advertisements to encourage young people to participate in our survey. Nearly 18,000 individuals responded. Some of the questions in our survey dealing with attitudes about women’s work and cosmetics were adopted from a survey conducted by the Frankfurt School in 1929 in Germany. The German survey had shown that a great number of men, irrespective of their political affiliation harbored highly authoritarian attitudes (...) toward women and that one sign of authoritarianism was men’s attitude toward cosmetics and women’s employment. We wanted to know if the same was true of the contemporary MENA. Our results suggest that lipstick and makeups as well as women’s employment are not just vehicles for sexual objectification of women. In much of MENA world a married woman’s desire to work outside the house, and her pursuit of the accoutrement of beauty and sexual attractiveness, are forms of gender politics, of women’s empowerment, but also of antiauthoritarianism and liberal politics. Our results also suggest that piety among Muslims per se is not an indicator of authoritarianism and that there is a marked gender difference in authoritarianism. Women, it seems, are living a different Islam than men. (shrink)

Romantic love is a social fact in the Muslim world. It is also a gender politics impinging on religious and patriarchal understandings of female modesty and agency. This paper analyzes the rise of love as a basis of mate selection in a number of Muslim-majority countries: Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, Tunisia, and Turkey where we have conducted Web-based anonymous surveys of Facebook users. Young people increasingly want love in their married lives, but they and the communities in which they (...) live remain uncomfortable with the mating practices through which such love has traditionally been achieved in the Western world. The paper explores the religious contradictions and the gender politics of modern heterosexual love. (shrink)

Despite their regional, ethnic, and linguistic differences, the recent social and political upheavals of the Middle East have shared one basic concern. From the 2009 Green Movement in Iran to the 2011 Tunisian revolts which ignited the Arab Uprisings, and from the first Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt in 2012 to the protests in Turkey’s Taksim Square in 2013, a central issue has been how to establish a democratic state with a modern constitution while adhering to many shari’a rules and (...) regulations. This debate is not a new one in the Middle East and, as this article will demonstrate, it has been a central theme of Iranian politics ever since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. At the time of that first Iranian revolution, Iran was ruled by two sets of laws, shari’a religious law and ‘urf customary law. Shi’i clerics, with their elaborate institutional hierarchy, controlled shari’a law, which was considered the more important law of the land, whereas the monarch and local rulers were nominal guardians of ‘urf laws. Soon the novel discourses of the Constitutional Revolution would create a paradigm shift in Iranian society.1 Constitutionalist clerics had assumed that a new political order reformed ‘urf rulings, leaving shari’a laws more or less intact. They were stunned by the realization that a constitutional order revamped both legal systems and overturned sacrosanct social and religious hierarchies. Many clerics resisted these reforms. The result was a bifurcated set of laws that institutionalized clerical authority, while also placing limits on clerics in legislative and judicial branches of the government. (shrink)

In Spoils of War, a diverse group of distinguished contributors suggest that acts of aggression resulting from the racism and sexism inherent in social institutions can be viewed as a sort of "war," experienced daily by women of color.

Western stereotypes often characterize gender relations in Muslim-majority societies as uniformly traditional and patriarchal. Underlying this imagery is a unidimensional understanding of gender ideology as moving along a single traditional-to-egalitarian continuum. In this study, we interrogate these assumptions by exploring variability across and within Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian (MENASA) societies in beliefs related to two regionally salient gender principles: women’s chastity and marital patriarchy. Data from a new online survey of Muslim Facebook users show substantial heterogeneity across (...) and within six MENASA societies in support for these principles. These data also reveal a multidimensional structure, in that societies show different configurations of chastity and marital patriarchy beliefs, and each of these gender principles is influenced by respondents’ religious beliefs and gender status in different ways. Although religious absolutism predicts agreement with both gender principles, piety is associated with support for chastity but not for marital patriarchy. Results also show a clear gender divide in attitudes toward hierarchy in marriage but not with respect to chastity. Findings complicate broad-brush depictions of patriarchy in the region and corroborate previous research on the multidimensionality of gender beliefs and the multifaceted attitudinal influences of gender and religious beliefs. (shrink)