Islam And The Status Of Women

Rhetorics of Islamic Movements

The rhetoric of Islamic identity is very strong in Islamist movements. Signifiers such as "Islam," "Muslim," "Islamic revolution," ilhijab" (modest dress for women), "Islamic woman," "umma" (Islamic community), "Islam versus the West," and "neither East nor West" are essential elements of the rhetoric of Islamic move ments. A term especially important in the Iranian context is gharbzadegi.3 Variously translated as "Westoxication," "occidentosis," "Westitis," or "Euromania," gharbzadegi is an illness, "a plague from the West."

Whether the gharbzadegi is a critique of the excesses of modernization or a rejection of the whole project of modernization, the embodiment of all that is wrong in contemporary Iranian society is the gharbzadeh woman. She represents all social ills: dependency on the West, cultural imperialism, and consumerism. The gharbzadeh woman is alternatively an imperialist fifth column, a cultural traitor, and an unwitting dupe. The vaccine or antidote of gharbzadegi is the return to and the reassertion of Islamic culture and law. The veiling of women is central to the revival of Muslim identity and the reconstruction of the Islamic moral and social order. The Islamist rhetoric of Iran is especially rich, complex, and detailed. This may be because it is heavily imbued with Third Worldist and even some familiar Marxian notions. (Mason, 1984)

For example, the dependency paradigm? with its concepts of neocolonialism, imperialism, oppressed nations, voracious multinationals, and so on? was the dominant economic paradigm in the Islamic republic during the 1980s. Gharbzadegi is not a religious term but a nation alist and Third Worldist one, made familiar by the populist Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad in the mid-1960s. The terms mostaza

Fin and mostakbarin come from the Qur'an and refer to the oppressed and the arrogant, respectively. But as deployed and made popular by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his ...