Knowledge Politics of the American Academia on Women’s Citizenship in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Islamoromic vs. Islamoveritic Understandings

Islam’s view on the status of women has been among the controversial topics in the American universities in recent decades. The rise of the political Islam and its embodiment in the Islamic Republic of Iran is considered by many critics as the turning point in the making of the Muslim women as an analytical category for the Western observers. This study focuses on Muslim women’s citizenship as a modern concern, and analyzes two major American academic approaches to the quality of Iranian women’s citizenship under theIslamic Republic. It addresses two textbooks, Women and Gender in Islam (1992) and An Enchanted Modern (2006), which represent the most frequently addressed textbooks in the course syllabi used at the top twentyAmerican universities in the academic year 2014-2015. The present paper, then, exploits Saied R. Ameli’s classification of discourse to compare the two prevalent discourses of Islamoromia and Islamoverita in the mentioned textbooks. Islamoromia indicates that Muslim women’s citizenship under the Islamic-oriented government is frequently put against the secular “normal” form of the state when the latter is given discursive advantage. However, an emerging voice of Muslim women about the enabling capacity of the Islamic Republic, on the Islamoveritic side, is recognized as a promising changing narrative.