Islam and Gender

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses "Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran" which is about shari'a law relating to women. The book is fieldwork based on discussions with three religious scholars from three different interpretational perspectives of the shari'a laws, positioning them in social, cultural and political contexts and examining scholarly texts. The paper explains that this informed account of the day to day struggles of women activist within the Islamic judiciary system and how the political ground has influenced set ways of thinking within the ulema and public.

From the Paper:

"In the early 1980s, Mir-Hosseini began working in Iran on Islam and gender in order to obtain a divorce. The book is divided into three sections and it is constructed so that each chapter reveals how Mir-Hosseini engages the subjects and texts. Mir-Hosseini conducts animated interviews with clerics in the Iranian religious center of Qom and she surveys the aspects of gender with Islamic jurisprudence. Mir-Hosseini inspects how clerics of modern Iran have perpetuated and modified the notions of gender with Islamic jurisprudence. The emphasis of Mir-Hosseini's book is the exploration of the various notions of gender that inform feqh, the Islamic jurisprudence."

More papers on Islam and Gender:

• Essay # 36032 : "Women and Gender in Islam"
• Persuasive Essay # 104437 : "Religion and Gender Inequality"
• Term Paper # 25701 : "Social Class and Gender in Political Analysis"

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