Knowledge Politics of the American Academia on Women’s Citizenship in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Islamoromic vs. Islamoveritic Understandings

Islam’s view on the status of women has been among the controversial topicsin the American universities in recent decades. The rise of the political Islamand its embodiment in the Islamic Republic of Iran is considered by manycritics as the turning point in the making of the Muslim women as ananalytical category for the Western observers. This study focuses on Muslimwomen’s citizenship as a modern concern, and analyzes two major Americanacademic approaches to the quality of Iranian women’s citizenship under theIslamic Republic. It addresses two textbooks, Women and Gender in Islam(1992) and An Enchanted Modern (2006), which represent the mostfrequently addressed textbooks in the course syllabi used at the top twentyAmerican universities in the academic year 2014-2015. The present paper,then, exploits Saied R. Ameli’s classification of discourse to compare the twoprevalent discourses of Islamoromia and Islamoverita in the mentionedtextbooks. Islamoromia indicates that Muslim women’s citizenship under theIslamic-oriented government is frequently put against the secular “normal” formof the state when the latter is given discursive advantage. However, an emergingvoice of Muslim women about the enabling capacity of the Islamic Republic, onthe Islamoveritic side, is recognized as a promising changing narrative.