Transnational Forms of Islamic Law

We begin this Issue by paying tribute to Dr Amir Ali Majid who assisted in the setting up this journal in 2005, which was then titled as the Journal of Islamic State Practices in International Law. Dr Majid was blind, who sadly passed away in March this year. He was the first blind person to become a Doctor of Civil Law from McGill University (Canada) and second blind person to reach a judicial post in the UK. He also served as a Reader at the Metropolitan University and was a member of the British Higher Education Academy. He sat as a First-tier Immigration Judge in the UK for a number of years. Dr Majid remained a torch bearer for race equality and disability rights throughout his life. In 2003 he received the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Distinction), the second highest civilian honour in Pakistan. He was also granted the Life Learning Award by the Kashmir and Pakistan Professionals Association on 17 July 2005. His removal from the post as judge was controversial as he was kind in his appeal to immigrants. Dr Majid will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family

Vali-e Faqih and his Female Subjects: Women in the Iranian Constitution

The 1979 Constitution of the Islamic Republic, which came about after the revolution, abolished many of women’s citizenship rights and reduced them to second-class citizens. How did this happen? What is the role of the Iranian Constitution in restricting women’s rights? How are women and gender defined and redefined by the Constitution? What is the role of the concept of velayat (guardianship) in reducing women to feeble creatures, who are unable to manage their own affairs? Analysing key articles of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, this paper explores women’s citizenship rights in the shadow of the concept of the velayat. It is an attempt to investigate the legal structure of the Constitution of Iran and its implications for women. The paper argues that velayat, and for that matter the velayat-e faqih, is a gendered concept, in two senses. First, it considers women as feeble creatures who are to be ruled by a male guardian; second, it feminises the nation and degrades its status as an agentless creature that is to be ruled and dominated by a male guardian/ruler (vali-e faqih). Whereas people in general are regarded as feeble in this framework, it degrades women’s status even further. This article also demonstrates the limits of constitutionalism and argues that understanding women’s constitutional rights and the situation of women in the Islamic Republic is inseparable from the epistemological and political pre-texts, which define and redefine women as intellectually deficient feeble subjects

Women, Power and Resistance in post-revolutionary Iran [in Farsi]

Publications of International Solidarity Network Laws Muslim Under Living Women (Women and Laws in Societies) Muslim) tries to provide information about the life, struggle and strategies of women in different Muslim countries and societies To provide equal rights. Publication of Laws Muslim Under Living Women Muslim Communities makes information and experiences of the growing women's movement accessible to a wide range of readers to make known to others the strategies and initiatives that have helped promote the independence of women at the global level

Iran’s Islamic Revolution: The Return of the Hunchbacked Dwarf

The Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran was decisive in reshaping and reframing both Iranian politics and the Middle East as we know it. This chapter investigates the historical framing of the Islamic revolution as a result of the politicization of the religious discourse in Iran from the early 1940s through the late 1970s and the steady emergence of the idea of an Islamic government as an alternative to the oppressive structure of Western modernity. The Islamic revolution marked the re-enchantment and re-mystification of politics in an allegedly disenchanted world. The chapter reveals two versions of revolutionary Islam, the clerical and the messianic, and their role in the framing of revolutionary politics. Whereas in clerical Islam the modern state was seen not as substantially corrupt but as an indispensable instrument for the establishment of the Islamic government, in messianic Islam the contemplation and reconstruction of history aimed at building a new past, hence a quite different future