Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran [Hardcover]

Minoo Moallem (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520243447 | ISBN-13: 978-0520243446 | Publication Date: July 11, 2005 | Edition: 1

Minoo Moallem challenges the mainstream stereotypical representation of Islam and Muslims as backward, fanatical, and premodern by showing how Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism are by-products of modernity. Writing with a deep personal and scholarly concern for recent Iranian history, Moallem refers to the gendered notions of brother and sister as keys to understanding the invention of the Islamic ummat as a modern fraternal community. Using magazines, novels, and films, she offers a feminist transnational analysis of contemporary Iranian culture that questions dominant binaries of modern and traditional, West and East, secular and religious, and civilized and barbaric.
Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister responds to a number of important questions raised in connection with 9/11. The author considers how veiling intersects with other identity markers in nation-state building and modern formations of gendered citizenship. She shows how Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism are fed by a hybrid blend of images and myths of both pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran, as well as globally circulated patriarchal ideologies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A thoughtful consideration of . . . masculinity in the constructed Muslim political community . . . and the rise of an indigenous Islamist feminism."--Intl Jrnl of Middle East Stds (Ijmes)

From the Inside Flap

"This is a stunning and original book. It will intervene in existing fields and discourses to change the way Islamic fundamentalism is viewed in the West."--Caren Kaplan, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of California Davis.

"Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister is an original and venturesome piece of work. It is daring in its willingness to test just how far the definition of 'fundamentalism' might be extended in contemporary Iran. It sketches lucidly the gendered crises of identity that have emerged there in the wake of colonization/Europeanization and decolonization."--Parama Roy, Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside, author of Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India.

"Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister is ground-breaking, enlightening, and challenges mainstream constructions of Islam as fanatic and backward. This book will similarly contribute to the writings on race and gender relations, religion and secularism, cultural nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and popular culture and visual media. The personal, biographical and visual examples are effective in making the more nuanced and complex theoretical arguments tangible and provocative. Exciting and innovative."--Ella Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies, New York University

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 278 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (July 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520243447
• ISBN-13: 978-0520243446
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,192,253 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Westernized Islamic Sociology, October 18, 2006

By 

William Garrison Jr. (Bellevue, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Paperback)

When reading this book keep a bottle of No-Doz handy. You will enjoy this book if you relish reading stuff like: "coercive displacement is a desubjectifying process"..."they merely divided patriarchy into hegemonic and subordinated semiotic regimes"... "postmodernism relies extensively on consumerism, where Islamic culture is increasingly commodified and opened to uncertainty, multiplicity, intertextuality and the collapse of time-space with no foundation." This Persian gal's turgid writing style reminded me that the 'Tower of Babel' originated in Mesopotamia. The author is opposed to how capitalism has provided so many products to the poor of Iran: "Consumer capitalism has incorporated this transnational reworking of the nation in its inexorable march to produce new consumer subjects" because women have "overarching dichotomous notions of identify in modernity by suppressing cultural hybridity or forms of inbetweeness" (p.16). By writing these thoughts the author believes that they explain the 1979 revolution in Iran; but she fails to demonstrate by how. The author also worries about "the emasculation of Muslim men produced by neocolonial modernity and the remasculinzation permitted by nationalist and fundamentalist political movements", but doesn't convincingly relate this concern to the 1979 revolution. Once a reader finishes reading this book, one really doesn't have any clearer understanding about the differences between the Sunni and Shiite sects of Islam and why they so joyously fight one another. The author jumps around her book in briefly noting the influence of the Shiite tragedy of Imam Hussein but doesn't explain why or how Hussein was killed; he just dies and then 1400 years later "de-emasculated" Shiites rebel against the Shah! Essentially, this book reflects the author's studying of some 50-75 socio-philosophers and adopts their perspectives as to how women are restricted by the religious-caste system in India or foot-binding in pre-Communist China, and concludes from those sociology studies (and many others) that women were indeed repressed by tyrannical Islamic religious imams in pre-1979 Iran -- which was made all the worse by the Shah's corrupt government. Given the generic, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all sociological "principles," one can pretty well just drop all the times that the word "Iran" appears, and substitute any other country's name. Essentially, if the postulate feels good, scratch it and adapt it. Similar to the American humorist Will Rogers, the author never met a socio-theory she didn't like (at least, she didn't condemn any here). Both Nietzsche and Hegel make their obligatory guest appearances in this sociology study. The author barely mentions any role that anti-Shah liberals and communists played in ousting the Shah. The author does not quote from the Quran to show how the Islam mullahs justify their veiling (and seclusion) of Muslim women. Women who veil show their independence from men in that they can hide themselves from the lustful looks of men; but then, women who don't veil show their independence of not fearing mens' leering eyes. One realizes that the author, having lived under the Khomeini regime, has many personal insights about the historical Islamic seclusion of women; regretfully, the author relates very little of this to the reader. The author could write numerous books based on her sociological "principles" that she presented in each chapter of this book, if she were only to open up and write about specific examples as to how the post-1979 Islamist government curtailed women's independent or public activities. For instance: Why won't the Muslim mullahs allow women to campaign for the Iranian presidency? It is ironic that after the "reform oriented" Shah was dumped, and after the successful assumption of power by Khomeini's "fundamentalist Islamic" government, that this pro-Muslim author had to eventually flee to a terrible, consumer-capitalist oriented western country (which she so loathes) in order to freely live and write about the liberated Muslim-women lifestyle that she cannot find in any Islamic-ruled country. The author fails to explain what is so endearing about Islam, from her liberated-female perspective, that the imams fail to understand. This is a book that is easy to put down, and difficult to pick back up. Sociology majors will like this book because of its extensive citation of sociology studies. Be very familiar with Islam and Iranian history before reading this book, or else you will be lost in the author's socio "time-space" worm holes. Regretfully, you are not really going to learn much about Iranian Islam in this book; what you are going to learn is that this author has read many "internationally applicable" sociology studies that seem to be able to be generic enough to fit into almost any political event in Iran (or any other country). Although this book's subtitle refers to "Islamic Fundamentalism", one really does not learn anything about the foundations or beliefs of Islamic fundamentalism. The author has many fine insights, it's just that its so tedious in trying to find them. This book is worth reading, but it will take persistency. Nonetheless, I bought this book, and will frequent it for its many sociological perspectives, which are lacking in political and historical books.