مجله مطالعات اجتماعی ایران
سال هفتم شماره 3 (پیاپی 23، پاییز 1392)

This paper explores Allama Tabatabaee’s views on the status of women in his work known as Almizan. Allama Tabatabaee is a prominent contemporary Shia interpreter with a wide and profound impact, so his thought is of great importance. This study applies the theological theory of Fiorenza to Allama’s interpretation. As such, Allama’s view on women in his work Almizan is considered through the method of emancipatory critical hermeneutics. Based on this method, religion is qualified to provide answers to questions and problems of today’s individuals and one can explore theology to find out the factors that emancipate and empower women. Fiorenza’s theory indicates that all interpretations are biased and no interpretation is disinterested. With such a proposition, this paper explores Allama’s social theory in the realms of marriage, divorce and heritage, inspired by his theological insight. Allama, based on his theology, considers women as similar beings to men and equal to them in dignity and worth. However, his social theory diverges from his theological insights. He believes that men and women are naturally different and because of this, they have different social rights. Men based on their nature are active and wise, while women are passive and emotional. Allama suggests that men and women’s rights are related to their nature, and since men have more natural advantages, they enjoy more rights compared to women, as such, men have guardianship over women. A comparison of Allama’s theology and his social theory reveals 'heavenly woman', inspired by his theology, and 'earthly woman', emerging from his social theory. He talks about general man and woman because he views them as dependent on their natural conditions. However, in real world, particular individuals of men and women exist, individuals brought up in specific social, historical and cultural contexts.

This papers aims to study the confrontation between tradition and modernity in the three countries of Iran, Turkey and Egypt, as three main sites of confrontation between modernity and Islam. The framework is historical and comparative and the objective is to categorize the main elite discourses of the Iranian, Egyptian, and Turkish elite in their confrontation with modernity as well as to map the relations between objective and subjective transformations in the three societies. The method of study is based on surveying the historical documents and conducting a meta-analysis on the results. The paper reveals different experiences of modernity in Iran, Turkey and Egypt as a result of their common or different civilizational and cultural bases. To criticize tradition without rejecting it and to criticize modernity without rejection is a common social and political approach in the three societies. Such approach has distinctive representatives in the contemporary intellectuals and thinkers. As a common characteristic, all three societies struggle for the development of an open, contemporary and democratic understanding of Islam and at the same time there are certain differences among them in the possession of powerful civil, social and political institutions for the development of a dialogic and critical thought. The trajectory of social thought and political action is different in the three societies, since the outset of modernity, the main cause of which could be traced in their different position and power of the civil society.

Opposing modernity is the term which represents the attempts by Muslim scholars in the early 20th century in challenging modernity and its resulting orientalist logic in a postcolonial condition. Through reversing the core ideas of orientalism under the guise of concepts such as 'the question of collapse and underdevelopment', 'the idealistic conception of progress and backwardness', and 'selective confrontation with the Western civilization', this discourse of modernity tries to adapt Islam to conditions of the mainstream logic and to defend the constructed 'authentic' with the aid of the 'modern'. Using discourse analysis framework and relying on the logic of reversed orientalism, this paper aims to read a part of this confrontation and to analyze its resulting discourse through comparative review of social thoughts of Nursi and Seyed Jamal. A critical review of these two scholars should shed light on how their theoretical attempts in defending Islam and its institutions against colonial invasion, have resulted in a reproduction of the colonial logic because of being caught in an orientalist trap.

In the mid 20th century, Saied Nursi, a Turkish Sufi scholar of Turkey inspired by the spiritual tradition of Islam founded the Nuriehs movement to promote science and religion and to reconcile the differences between tradition and modernity. Alongside and derived from the Nuriehs movement a social movement was established by the charismatic leadership of Fethullah Gülen. It aimed to serve the people and improve their education as well as their livelihood through the promotion of Islamic teachings and the native culture. Today, Gülen is known worldwide as an influential intellectual. He is remembered as the father of social Islam in Turkey. His influence, however, goes beyond Turkey's borders. The impact of his activities is so extensive that his work, and that which is continued by his followers, is named the Gulen movement. Despite most current Islamic movements, this movement is not political in nature. Its goals are rather social and educational. Gulen stood at the apex of a network which included many businessmen, traders and scientists who all aspired to achieve Gulen goals and who were managers of companies, publishing houses, schools, colleges, investment institutions, and cultural centers inside and outside Turkey. This article attempts to break the ground for an understanding of Gulen's movement, and to explain reasons why his movement was so successful. In doing so, the article uses the resource mobilization theory. Such theoretical tool, accompanied by a further analysis of Turkey's historical and political context, which was influenced by Gulan's sermonic speeches, helps to provide a body of knowledge to understand Gulen's movement. Such knowledge probes concepts such as generosity, philanthropy, insightful beliefs, salvation, and serving the people. These are some sociological aspects of Gulen's work.

The goal of this article is to highlight the role of the post-revolution urbanization in Iran and its effect on reproduction of the discourse of the Political Islam. In the past three decades, the smaller cities of Iran have undergone vast urbanization. Such development has introduced a fresh domain, compared to the larger cities and the rural areas, as new audiences seek religious teachings. Therefore, there has appeared a new consumer market for the narratives of the religious teachings in the outskirts of the larger cities, outskirts which strive to survive as margins, or satellites of the larger cities. The evaluation of statistical data obtained from smaller cities, as compared with similar data from the larger cities, show that changes in social consciousness in the smaller cities, as a result of urbanization, can be considered an important growing ground for the revival of the political Islam.

In the past two centuries, Muslim scholars’ thinking has been mainly shaped by the evolutionary needs of Muslims in the new world. These thinkers strived for an Islamic renaissance by presenting novel readings of Islam, sometimes with a glimpse at the Western conceptualizations, to produce the social knowledge that could respond to the emerging problems of the Muslim society. In the present paper, the idea of producing a local and independent social science is evaluated with an emphasis on the concept of the ‘Arabic wisdom’ in the case of Mohammad Abed al-Jaberi who is investigated regarding the subject matter, methodology, and theory. In respect to the subject matter, Jaberi’s pathology of indigenization and his concepts and phenomenology are analyzed. As to the methodology and theory, we have studied the environmental factors involved in his education and studies including the influential thinkers and the theoretical frameworks manifest in his works. The study of Abed al-Jaberi shows that he has been influenced by the Western theories in his typology of the Arab theoretical and practical encounter with the traditional world and equations in the new world, although he has, by no means, believed in a step-by-step modeling after the Western theories. His stark emphasis on the indigenousness and originality of the Arab and the Islamic sociology has never restricted him to the ideas of Arab, Islamic or Asian thinkers; rather, he interprets ‘science’ in its universal sense. His scientific heritage is indicative of a ‘special social thinking’ rather than a ‘specific social science’. On the other hand, Jaberi does not only consider modern concepts of democracy, freedom, rationality, etc., as against Islam, but he also acknowledges the benefits of such a conceptualization in rationalizing the Islamic tradition as both a must and the only alternative.

The present study seeks to show how meaning boundaries and social structure of the revolutionary woman has been formed. This goal is fulfilled through focusing on power relations and resistance as seen in competing discourses of the political, social, and cultural conflicts during the last two decades before the Islamic revolution of 1979 took place. To this aim, this paper takes a glance at the discourses of the most significant political and cultural figures of that time, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Imam Khomeini, regarding the subject of woman. It also probes the formation process of traditional and modern discourses. Then, it looks at the changing of views toward 'woman as a sex or gender subject' in the light of linguistic capacity of important thinkers of Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Motahari, Dr. Shariati, and Imam Khomeini. Then the formation of the concept of 'woman as a human subject' is explained in the meaning networks of Islamic Revolution discourses. This paper draws on the theoretical and methodological foundation taken from the strategic integration of Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive theory and Wodak’s historical discursive theory.