The Power Paradox in Muslim Women’s Majales: North-West Pakistani Mourning Rituals as Sites of Contestation over Religious Politics, Ethnicity, and Gender

During revolutions, rebellions, and movements, women are often called on to serve contradictory roles. They are asked to perform workpolitical, communicative, networking, recruiting, military, manual - that generally goes beyond the society\u27s usual gender restrictions. At the same time, women serve as symbols of movement identity, unity, commitment, and righteous entitlement. To fit into this idealized symbolic image, individual women must fulfill often traditional or even exaggerated feminine behavioral and attitudinal requirements, such as loyalty, obedience, selflessness, sacrifice, and proper deportment: all in all, they are to put aside any personal aspirations and wishes for self-fulfillment and give their all to promoting the values and interests of their nation, revolutionary movement, or social group

Iran

Iran lies between Iraq and, further north, Turkey to the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and the Caspian Sea border Iran to the north, and thee Persian Gulf to the south. Iran covers 636,293 square miles. In the early decades of the twentieth century, many people lived by herding animals. Some of the Kurds and the Shahsevan in the northwest, Qashqai, Bakhtiary, Lurs, and Kamseh in the southwest, Baluch in the southeast, and Turkmen in the northeast lived in nomadic camps, traveling with their animals in search of water and pastures. Beginning in the 1920s, the two Pahlavi shahs, Reza Shah and his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, worked to pacify tribespeople and bring them under the control of the central government. Now, nomads have largely been settled and live in villages or migrate to urban areas

Aliabad Women: Revolution as Religious Activity

An apparent paradox of the Iranian Revolution has been the tremendous participation of Iranian women in the revolution, in terms of the numbers of women who were active in demonstrations, contrasted to the subsequent setbacks in the position of women in Iran and their decreasing participation in public life. In this chapter, I argue that the great majority of women participating in the revolution did not consider their actions to be outside of traditional social, cultural and religious parameters. Neither did they expect their participation in the revolution to be the first step in gaining improved status and more important roles in public life. Before the revolution, the great majority of Iranian women remained outside the modern work force and were not educated. They were still constrained by traditional expectations; their primary responsibility was to children, home and husband·. Ideally, any outside activity was restricted to socializing among neighbors and kin or was contained within religious activity. Such women, although participating in the revolution for much the same reasons as men, were able to take part because revolutionary activity was defined as religious activity. As such women were accustomed to participating in religious activities and containing their activity outside of the home and their socializing within a religious framework, they felt little social pressure or self-censorship against participating in this new type of religious activity. Because the women themselves as well as the religious leaders who subsequently took over control of the country did not perceive the revolutionary activity of women to be outside of the traditional culture and religious framework, it is not surprising that such activity did not result in increased activity of women in the public sector

Wife Abuse and the Political System: A Middle Eastern Case Study

Although wife abuse is common in Iran, it is a subject which has received almost no attention from scholars and little has been written on it. The purpose of this article is to examine the problem, to show the connection between wife-beating and the Iranian political system, and to raise questions for further research. The data on which this analysis is based come from my own research as well as from published sources. The two case histories of wife abuse presented exemplify social process in a political system characterized by arbitrariness and the need to dominate. The degree to which a woman could be abused depended upon the power relationships and resources that people were able to muster in their continuous effort to control others and to avoid being manipulated themselves

Educating Young Women: Culture, Conflict, and New Identities in an Iranian Village

Anthropological participant observation during two different periods (1978–79 and 2003–08) documents dramatic change in gender identity and expectations in an Iranian village. While patriarchal definitions of females and their places and on-the-ground social conditions restricted female agency and kept women and girls under the authority of male supervisors 30 years ago, recent years have witnessed growing opportunities for females. Now most girls complete high school before marriage, and may even travel to other cities for higher education. In “Aliabad,” however, for the great majority, more education for females has not led to participation in the labor market. Ethnographic research focuses on how young females negotiate between the more traditional expectations and cultural constraints and the new opportunities to serve their own interests as best as possible. Although work outside of the home presents too many difficulties for the great majority of Aliabad females, who must marry in order to obtain financial support, females have used their education and the increased self-confidence, experience, status, and literacy to develop more influential positions within the marriage relationship, among kin and in-laws, and in the community. Young village women have been involved in constructing their evolving identities in an environment of social change and modernization

Political Roles of Aliabad Women: The Public/Private Dichotomy Transcended

Until the mid-1960s, public and political relations in the Iranian village of Aliabad were conducted through personal relationships. \u27fhe government\u27s hand had not spread into rural areas: no outside political authority or police force controlled village politics. The people themselves competed for political power and were in charge of maintaining stability. Competition between groups resulted in violence and insecurity. One had to tie personal relations together·-kin, friends, and partners.-to gather political support. Personal and domestic relations were also public and political relations, for politics was conducted through kinship and family relations. Although there appears to be no actual delineation between public and private realms in this setting, there is a strong indigenous ideology of the separation between the domestic and private and the public and political, which assumes women to predominate in the first and men in the second. Why this contradiction? To what uses is the publicprivate dichotomy put in this situation?I What are the results of encouraging such a dichotomy

Ritual and Revolution in Iran

Based on participant observation and anthropological fieldwork in an Iranian village (Aliabad ) shows the connections between Shia Muslim rituals of Moharram commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husein and his followers at Karbala, and politics, and espcially the Iranian Revolution of 1979

Grossmutter lebt allein in ihrem Häuschen: Alte Frauen in einem iranischen dorf

Seit etwa zehn Jahren zeichnet sich im Iran bei älteren Witwen zunehmend der Trend ab allein zu wohnen. In Städten war diese Entwicklung schon früher zu erkennen, aber nun ist sie auch in Dörfern und Kleinstädten nicht zu übersehen: Die Großmutter will in ihrem Haus bleiben statt wie bisher, ihren Lebensabend im Kreise der Familie des (meist) jüngsten Sohnes zu verbringen. Was geht hier vor? Da diese Entwicklung auf einen raschen Wandel in zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen hindeutet, machte ich sie zum Hauptthema meiner ethnographischen Forschung bei meinen drei jüngsten Besuchen im Dorf “Aliabad”

Women and the Iranian Revolution: A Village Case Study

All in all, the activism of the Aliabad seyyid women in the Iranian Revolution followed the lines of traditional concerns, traditional methods, and traditional constraints on the activities of women. Women hoped for improved justice, safety for their families, and restoration of a semblance of peace in the village and the nation as a whole. Women\u27s political methods were those of social interaction and use of their verbal abilities, emotional displays, and physical presence to show support. They followed the usual constraints on their behavior by marching in the company of their usual network of companions, separate from men and covered with their chadors, and did not neglect their families and households. The two changes were in the level of political involvement: national rather than local level, and the locus of political activity—Shiraz rather than the village of Aliabad. The local level of political activity was no longer the level at which policy and forces determined the safety and welfare of their family and relatives. With the Shah\u27s centralization program, power over the lives of villagers lay at higher levels. With the merging of local level politics and national level politics during the incidents of violence on December 7 and 8, 1978, women began to realize that the target of their political activism must also be at higher levels. In hopes of having some effect on national level politics and thereby on the safety and welfare of their family members, the Aliabad seyyid women traveled into Shiraz to demonstrate in the revolutionary movement In her studies of women\u27s activities in some strikes between 1917–1922, Temma Kaplan also found women to go to the locus of action and decision making regarding their concerns. She found that women organizing from neighborhood and kin networks did not form lasting organizations after their strikes, as was also the case among the Aliabad women, as they had aimed primarily at providing for the welfare of their families through their strike activities, and not at becoming involved in politics on a regular basis. Striking similarities exist between the situations described by Kaplan and the participation of women in the Iranian Revolution. Kaplan uses the concept of \ldfemale consciousness\rd to explain why women took part in strikes: they accepted the female responsibility of preserving life and wished to force the authorities into providing them with the food and necessities to do so. The Aliabad women seemed also to be concerned about the preserving of life, although in this case their concerns developed more as a result of outrage and fear about physical harm to their family members and relatives than insufficient food. One wonders how women\u27s concern to protect their families has taken form during the last several years in Iran

Mixed Blessing: The Majles -- Shi’a Women’s Rituals of Mourning in North-West Pakistan

Shi\u27a Muslim women in Peshawar, Pakistan used their performances of mourning rites to practice an oblique, undeclared contestation against their subordinate position in a harshly patriarchal society, I found during my 1991 field research. In so doing, these women nurtured resilience in the face of constant reminders of their dependency and lack of agency. Their energizing ritual performances allowed them to build up, within a protected framework, characteristics and abilities which they may later be able to apply more overtly for self advancement and influence. Brenneis (1987), Mankekar (1993), Peteet (1994), and Schieffelin (1985) argue that audiences of ritual or media are not passive recipients but participants in construction of meaning. Based on participant observation at women\u27s majales (sing. mq//es--communal mourning rituals) in Peshawar, I extend this argument to performers as well as audience. As actors and audience simultaneously, Peshawar Shi\u27a women managed to drown out messages inherent in the mourning rituals about the inferiority, dependency, and disruptive nature of females by devising keener communications from their own validating ritual experiences. They subverted Shi\u27a rituals of martyrdom recitations, mourning chants, self-flagellation, and male primacy to build up their own skills, self-esteem, and self-confidence.1 These valuable abilities and characteristics-created through their ritual practices and fueled by growing literacy, opportunities through education, and evolving social and economic conditions-then formed a realm of contention and negotiation over gender power, control, and change extending beyond the majl