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IRAN: Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran

2008; Middle East Institute; Volume: 62; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1940-3461

Fatemeh Keshavarz,

Islamic Studies and History

IRAN Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran, by Nima Naghibi. Minneapolis, MN and London, UK: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. xxx + 148 pages. Notes to p. 166. Works cited to p.179. Index to p.187. $22.50 paper. Reviewed by Fatemeh Keshavarz At a particularly troubled moment in East/West relations, Nima Naghibi's book Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran calls on feminist studies on Iran to interrogate one of their core concepts, that of global sisterhood. She considers this investigation urgent, particularly in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, which has strengthened Western feminists' propensity for rescuing their Muslim from the tyranny of Islam. Naghibi is also concerned with the success of anti-feminist states in co-opting the feminist language to promote their vision of modernity in separating the civility of the West from the barbarianism of the Rest. In this she is inspired by prominent earlier voices such as Leila Ahmed (p. xxii). Naghibi contextualizes the development of the above trend carefully, and keeps her personal authorial position in the foreground. Rethinking Global Sisterhood opens with an introduction mapping out its methodology and goals, which unfold in four chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter focuses on female Christian missionaries and travelers who observed and discussed the social status of Iranian women in the late 19th and early 20th century. The second chapter is an exploration of the complexity of the notion of hejab, the Islamic dress code now mandatory in Iran. Here Naghibi demonstrates, successfully, the naivety of equating this practice with a lack of agency among women who wear it, asking secular diasporic Iranian and Western to grow to appreciate the complexity of the position of Iranian women activists within the Islamic Republic (p. 73). She dedicates the third chapter to global sisters and their attention to Iranian women's rights immediately before, during, and after the 1979 revolution. This is a particularly difficult chapter to write. Feminists across the secular/ Muslim divide would present these years in contrasting lights, some as true steps in Iranian women's emancipation and others as window dressing by a heavy-handed state that did not care about the human rights of either gender. Once again, Naghibi is admirable in clarifying her personal position and working hard to present a fair and balanced perspective. Rather than focusing on the nature and impact of the Women' Organization of Iran (WOI) led by the late Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi's twin sister, Princess Ashraf, she focuses on the major disconnect between Western feminism and the social and political realities of Iran. Furthermore, Naghibi demonstrates that just as their earlier missionary counterparts needed the Iranian to rectify their own troubled social position, some twentieth century Western feminists were equally in need of subjugated Iranian as a contrasting Other for their own image. …