The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran (review)

The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran by Arzoo Osanloo is not a modest book. Part historical analysis, part ethnography, and part legal argument, it addresses the origin, process, and ordinary women’s interpretation of Iran’s unequal yet empowering gender laws. In explaining these issues, Osanloo also seeks to unravel the discourse of right-wing U.S. policy pundits, such as Richard Perle and David Frum, and to critically assess the “hybrid Iranian framework” (205) regarding gender issues that blends liberal values with Islamic laws as the latter are applied and interpreted by ordinary as well as activist women in Iran. None of these tasks is easy. But Osanloo has set the terms and context for this discussion with brilliance and theoretical dexterity. Her book will be the source for scholars of law, anthropology, sociology, and feminist methodology.

The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran is at once a historical, legal, and anthropological analysis with a feminist methodology that seeks to analyze women’s experiences as they live it. Despite the book’s multilayered approach to women’s issues, its main questions are clear: How did women’s rights re-emerge as a legitimate discourse of rights after Iran’s Islamic Revolution? How have women’s rights evolved in the Islamic Republic of Iran? In a critically map of the terrain in which women claim their rights, the author explores “dialogical sites,” (12) the state’s “hybridized institutions” and “incomplete and dynamic nature” (5), the “historical trajectory” of human rights discourse, the “Islamico-civil law” (64), “ritualized religious spaces” (71), and individual women’s experiences. While the bulk of the book is devoted to dialogical sites—Qur’anic women-only study groups, Tehran family courts, family law offices, Iran’s official Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), these sites’ pointed purpose is to illustrate Osanloo’s ethnography of contemporary women’s rights discourse as a source of empowerment, or “legal personhood” (100), through which women are increasingly enabled to demand rights within a liberal Islamic and republican system of laws. At the end, the reader is left with a clear understanding of the complex intertwining of Islamic and liberal laws, modern yet Islamic institutions, and lack of clear procedure that has characterized Iranian life throughout the past thirty years.

The main thesis of Osanloo’s argument is the notion that the Iranian legal system—especially with respect to women’s rights—is characterized by a form of “Islamico-civil law,” at once Islamic, civil, political, and modern. The author explores the “unevenness, impermanence, and distinctiveness of the cultural productions of law” (146) within the context of legal institutions that the revolutionary system inherited from its royal past. Rationalization of the politico-legal order led to “greater social individuation,” (71) which, the author argues, subsequently led to an “Islamico-civil subjectivity” in which “women perform as entitled citizens endowed with rights in the court” (149). This “transient subjectivity” is traced in a rich ethnography that the author depicts with vigor. The lives of Narges, Marjan, and other women depicted in the book are not only analyzed in a scholarly way; they also provide an interesting narrative of lives of ordinary women.

The first two chapters of the book analyze the historical trajectory of women’s rights and human rights as discursive practices in modern Iran. What makes this discussion unique among such discussions put forth by other scholars is that Osanloo analyzes the history of women’s rights talk as a political, universal, and Iranian discourse with the expertise of a lawyer who is intimately familiar with international law. This analysis aims to show how the process of combining a civil judicial system with scriptural texts and shari‘a (Islamic law) has been at work since the inception of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. None of these systems, neither the judicial nor the interpretation of Islamic texts on which the new laws are based, is static. In addition, women...