The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran

CHAPTER THREE: Qur’anic Meetings: “Doing the Cultural Work”

C H A P T E R T H R E E Qur’anic Meetings: “Doing the Cultural Work” NANAZ'S DREAM Nanaz opened the meeting with a warm greeting and welcoming words. On a day when a number of new women appeared to be in attendance, she reflected on why she and a small group of friends decided to recommence the Qur’anic meetings. She began with a dream: I came upon a poor man reading the Qur’an. He was sitting on a large rock along a rushing stream. I remember that everything was green and fertile. I saw myself watching the man reading very rapidly. At once he looked up at me and cried out, “Are you deaf, dumb, and blind? Why are you waiting for someone else to read it?” “We are getting together to heal,” she said, “and to realize the answers to our problems through the Book.” Holding up her own ragged copy, she added, “We want to be advised. Our aim is to improve our understanding of the Qur’an. We read because now we are deaf, dumb, and blind. By learning what the Qur’an is saying, we will permit refuge from the Qur’an to come. We had these meetings before the revolution as well, some of you might remember.” As she spoke, she looked around the room to her companions. “But now, here, we must do the cultural work as well.” Throughout Tehran and other urban centers in Iran, women are gathering through Qur’anic meetings (jaleseh-ye Qur’an). The parameters of involvement and membership between different groups vary to be sure, but the central feature of each is to engage women in reading and discussing the Qur’an, on their own terms. The women generally have no scholarly background in Islamic theology, but by reading the Qur’an, asking questions, and familiarizing themselves with what Islam as a whole offers them, they are determining and defining how, why, and to what extent Islamic principles affect their rights and roles. The setting at the Qur’anic meetings suggests the interplay between many of the components of women’s lives: civil and spiritual, family and individual. As such, the women’s Qur’anic meeting is an indispensable component of the emerging sites that contribute to the forging of dialogue within Iran today. The hybrid character of this site, moreover, evidences the false dichotomy between public and private sites. 76 • Chapter Three In what follows, I situate the new interpretive site of the meetings in a broader socio-historical context.1 Second, I examine how the meetings become a domain for dialogue and debate. In doing so, I explore the melding of seemingly liberal values with scriptural lessons illustrating that what appears as an elision, what some term a reading of rights within Islam (An-Na’im 1995; Mernissi 1987), is more appropriately a commingling of ideas. And it is precisely at this juncture that new possibilities for agency emerge.2 JALESEH: A VITAL SITE OF RIGHTS PRODUCTION Qur’anic meetings are not new phenomena, either among the well-to-do urbanized classes or in Iran generally. Indeed, women of this class held the very same kinds of meetings well before the 1979 revolution overthrew the monarchy and installed a theocratic government in its place. These meetings, referred to colloquially as dowreh, literally, circles, are an integral part of Iranian social life and have been for many years. The meetings in postrevolutionary Tehran, however, are undergoing changes, both in their structure and in the ways in which their leaders and participants conceive of them. The changes are a result of a comprehensive social shift occurring in Iran through a particular kind of political mobilization, one that is effected by the Islamized republican processes. Thus, the shape and form of the Qur’anic meeting are a vivid manifestation of the broader national changes occurring within Iran, to which the meetings’ host refers as “the cultural work.” One of the effects of the midcentury demographic shifts that resulted in the formation of large, urbanized cities such as Tehran was the dowreh. By the early 1970s, Tehran was brimming with such meeting groups in which men and women met together regularly to discuss issues of concern. These dowreh were, by and large, meetings held by groups of intellectuals and educated professionals to discuss such topics as Persian literature or poetry, Islamic philosophical thought, or mysticism. Dowreh might also have been held for...