Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran by Minoo Moallem (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. 267 pages.)

Abstract

This book examines the construction of gender and patriarchy in Iran during
the onset of modernity, the Islamic revolution of 1979, and the post-revolution
era. Among the many works published by prominent scholars of Islam
and Iranian women’s studies, Minoo Moallem’s investigation of the construction
of gender by neo-colonial modernity and political movements of a
nationalist or fundamentalist orientation deserves special attention.
Inspired by Michel Foucault as well as Caren Kaplan and Inderpal
Grewal, Moallem incorporates a post-modern and a transnational feminist
approach by arguing that post-modernity should be used as a framework to
study the growth of modernity (p. 20). Challenging the popular belief that
fundamentalism is a return to the roots and early periods of a tradition or a
culture, she finds it “in dialogue with modernity” (p. 13) and thus argues
that the Islamic fundamentalism observed in the twentieth century is a postmodernization
phenomenon; in her words, “a by-product of the process of
modernization” (ibid.). Nevertheless, she does not actually consider fundamentalism
to be a truly post-modern phenomenon, since it does not respect
the “concept of difference,” as is the case with nationalism.
Moallem questions the stereotypes presented by the travelers and foreign
diplomats of the late-eighteenth to early-twentieth centuries concerning
the harem, the veil, women, and so on. She challenges their vantage point in
creating “otherness” and portraying Islam as barbaric. Although many
works deal with women, patriarchy, and the construction of gender under the
Pahlavis, the author offers a new reading and shows how the two rulers’
forceful steps in the name of modernization and progress led to the establishment
of a nation-state in which each individual – man or woman – was
socialized to perform his/her role according to the “natural and social division
of labour” (p. 74).
Her work is timely, especially now when Islamic fundamentalism is
defined and analyzed by the politics of power through the global media. In
the case or jihad, for instance, the author states that for fundamentalists, and
more specifically in Ayatullah Khomeini’s view, there are two types of jihad: ...