Nonfiction Form and the “Truth” about Muslim Women in Iranian Documentary

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-111
Author(s):  
Niki Akhavan
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Iranian Women ◽  
The West ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Veil

More than three decades of hostile relations between Iran and the West have meant that images about Iran and Iranian women circulate in a charged political environment. In this geopolitical context, Iranian women filmmakers have often found receptive audiences abroad who turn to documentaries as sites to reveal the truths of contemporary Iran. The enthusiasm for these works, however, also exerts pressures on filmmakers to adhere to familiar narratives about Iran and Iranian women or risk losing their audiences. Focusing on Nahid Sarvestani's Prostitution behind the Veil (2004) and Mahvash Sheikholeslami's Where Do I Belong? (2007), this article examines two tendencies in recent Iranian documentary. The former film exemplifies the prevalent trend of repeating troubling but familiar tropes about Islam and Muslim women, while the latter is an example of attempts to provide a more nuanced picture of Iran's social and political problems. Placing these films in the broader context of the history of nonfiction films in Iran, the article also draws from both feminist scholarship on representations of the Muslim world and longstanding debates within documentary studies to show the high stakes of producing films about Iran and to suggest that documentary works by and about Iranian women should be more rigorously interrogated for their ethical and political implications.

scholarly journals The Muslim Veil in North America

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 110-112
Author(s):  
Shabana Mir
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
North America ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Basic Information ◽  
The West ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Veil

When it comes to Muslims in the West, nothing is a more sensational visualsymbol than the hijab. Due to the current Muslim and non-Muslim fixationon it, scholarly examination of hijab and related issues is necessary.The Muslim Veil in North America examines some of its historical, sociological/anthropological, and theological aspects. Part 1 engages with theveil’s hyper-visibility in Canada. Since the book does not engage with theAmerican experience, I am not sure why the title refers to North America.I enjoyed part 2 immensely, and will use it as a reference on the subject.The bulk of this section explores the historical development of the veil’stheological status and nature. This book is different from, say, Maudoodi’sPurdah, which sees the veil in its contemporary form as a product of historicalprocesses.This book is dedicated to diasporic Muslim women, although introductorymaterial in various chapters addresses readers unfamiliar with Islam. Undergraduates will appreciate its accessibility in comparison tomost academic texts, and it will make the subject comprehensible to layreaders. Unfortunately, this means that the book wavers between being anacademic (education, anthropology, and sociology) and a lay read. This isnot because the entire book is tailored to different kinds of readers, butbecause its two parts are rather disjointed. Part 1 addresses a more lay andintroductory social science-related reader with basic information; part 2, onthe other hand, is a highly specialized examination of exegetical and hadithhistory.The editors, in addressing a gaping void in the literature, possiblyattempt to do too much: specialized theology, history, politics, anthropology,and sampling of “voices.” I would have preferred it to be more selective.Also, “let the voices speak” is a commendable approach, but after a certainpoint we should go beyond it. There is also a line between “reportage syndrome,”writing without an adequate theoretical framework, and skillfulacademic writing, which allows contextualized voices to be heard by fellowacademics within the social sciences. I would also have preferred that thetheology and sociology chapters be connected by common threads ...

Difference Unveiled: Bulgarian National Imperatives and the Re-dressing of Muslim Women, 1878-1989

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Neuburger
Keyword(s):  
European Society ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The West ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Veil

Recent scholarship has poignantly argued that the founding of modern “Western” nation-states is to a large degree a product of their drawn out colonial encounters with “the East.” It is convincingly argued that “the West” constructed its own self-assured, national and supra-national identities in the process of “discovering” and “inventing” the exotic yet inferior “East.” Furthermore, a diverse body of scholarship has delineated the central role of discourses on gender and sexuality in the development of Western societies and, in particular, nation-states. If the image of “pious mother” became key to Western national self-images, it was the counter-image of the women of the harem—veiled, oppressed, and mysterious—that typified representations of Eastern barbarism. Furthermore, Western economic and political penetration of its colonies was to a large degree justified by the “gendering” of the “irrational Orient” versus the “rational Occident.” The “liberation” of Islamic women from their “oppression” as typified by the veil became central to Western “civilizing” missions, which had far-reaching echoes on the frontiers of European society.

scholarly journals Michael Vinson. Bluffing Texas Style: The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers of Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Brian Shetler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Rare Book ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Short Text ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life Career ◽  
Insight Into

The story of Johnny Jenkins, rare book dealer, forger, gambler, and misterioso, has haunted me since my days in library school nearly a decade ago. I first encountered Jenkins through his publication Rare Books and Manuscript Thefts: A Security System for Librarians, Booksellers, and Collectors, which was printed in 1982 while Jenkins served as president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA). I was doing research related to the history of book theft in the United States and found Jenkins’s short text (only 27 pages) to be a helpful insight into how the ABAA viewed book theft and security. Pursuing Jenkins a bit further, I quickly came upon Calvin Trillin’s fascinating 1989 New Yorker article that chronicled Jenkins’s demise. The details of Jenkins’s secret life of forgeries, gambling, and arson were fascinating; the details of his death (shot in the back of the head, no weapon found, ruled a suicide?) were macabre and confounding. A few years later, while on break at a conference in Austin, TX, I walked into a used bookstore and found a copy of Jenkins’s Audubon and Other Capers (1976), which told the tale of his exploits in helping the FBI track down book thieves in the early 1970s. The completely contradictory life that Jenkins led, coupled with his untimely and odd death, stuck in my brain in the form of unanswered questions, unclear details, and an unresolved murder or suicide. While it was not up to me to put the pieces together and offer a clear picture of Johnny Jenkins’s life, career, and death, it had to be done by someone. That someone, it turns out, was another rare book dealer specializing in Texas and the West, Michael Vinson.

scholarly journals Veil and Headscarf: Five Aspects of a Cultural Phenomenon

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannes D. Galter
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Near East ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The Relationship

The discussions about the use of headscarves and veils shape the living conditions of Muslim women in the Middle East and in Europe to this day. To overcome this situation, a thorough and dispassionate documentation of the cultural history of veiling is necessary. This paper will give a short overview of the long history of veiling and it will deal in detail with five different aspects of this phenomenon and with the various connections between Europe and the Middle East: the relationship between death and the veil in the Ancient Near East; the veil in early Christianity; the hair as an erotic symbol in the Ancient Near East; the traditional costume of the Transylvanian Saxons as a European example of the use of veils and the veil of mystery.

scholarly journals Re/claiming our identities : thinking through Islamophobia, the veil, and "the Muslim woman" in Canadian cultural productions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ameera Basmadji
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Important Concern ◽  
Muslim Immigrants ◽  
Canadian Context ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Muslim Communities

Western, Islamophobic, and Islamic discourses have resulted in a contested terrain of representations through which the lives of Muslims have been debated and consumed. Post 9/11, Muslims assumed a hyper visibility evident in their being stigmatized in the West as terrorists, and as threats to national security, democratic values, and time-honoured cultural practices in Western societies. As such, the presence of Muslim communities in Western nations is raising questions about national identity and belonging, particularly in the Canadian context. An important concern is to identify and interrogate the points of conflict and tension between Muslims and non-Muslim Canadians, particularly in regard to issues of national identity and citizenship. By focusing specifically on recent cultural productions, including a film, a television sitcom, and a novel by female Muslim Canadians, the analysis will demonstrate the extent to which the voices of Muslim women intervene into dominant Western discourses about Islam and popular representations of Muslims in the West. Special attention will be given to the symbolism of the veil to show how it has become the central marker of "difference" and one of the main "problems" affecting Western perception of Muslim immigrants and these communities' integration and assimilation into Canadian and Western societies.

scholarly journals “Un/Veiled: Feminist Art from the Arab/Muslim Diaspora”

1970 ◽  
pp. 16-20
Author(s):  
Rachel Epp Buller
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Feminist Art ◽  
The West ◽  
Arab Woman ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
The Veil

Images of Muslim women in global popular culture convey ideas of restriction and oppression: to many in the West, the covered Arab woman appears a victim, unable to express herself in word and deed. Artists and writers from within Arab cultures have challenged such simplistic readings, some offering alternative readings of living behind the veil, others offering the possibility of a feminist existence within an apparently oppressive society, all challenging the Orientalist mindset implied by such assumptions.

Meritocracy and resentment

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (9) ◽  
pp. 1146-1164
Author(s):  
Shaun O’Dwyer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Meritocracy ◽  
Chinese Political Culture

Lately it has become fashionable to speak of a ‘political meritocracy’ in Chinese political culture, which contrasts with the liberal ‘electoral democracy’ of the west. Here, however, I consider the moral psychology of an emotion that arguably shadows the history of meritocratic practices in China and in liberal democracies: the emotion of resentment, expressed by agents who consider themselves to be wronged by the high-stakes competition for status, income and power inherent in these practices. I examine the unstable nexus between this emotion and these practices and draw on Confucian, Qing era vernacular literature and modern studies of educational credentialism for insights into how the potentially destabilizing, destructive manifestations of resentment can be mitigated and channelled into less destructive, dissenting political and cultural expression. I argue that, on balance, electoral democracies have better resources for mitigating such resentment than does the ‘political meritocracy’ attributed to Chinese political culture.

scholarly journals Empowering Muslims in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
The West ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
The Veil

Diasporic Arab writers substantially differ in how they represent aspects of contemporary Arabic culture(s) in their literary works and diasporic Arab women writers have represented Islam even more differently in their works. The study investigates how Islam is portrayed in the fiction of two diasporic Arab women writers, Leila Aboulela (b. 1964- ) and Mohja Kahf. (1967- ). General literary research has been conducted on these two writers and how they represent Islam in their writing; however, firstly, most of the conducted literature is about the veil and what it adds to Muslim women living in the West. Secondly, most of the previous research tackles each writer alone. Nevertheless, the current study is predominantly different as it shows how Islam is represented in both Aboulela’s Minaret (2004) and Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) as a religion that provides an ethical pathway and empowers its adherents socially, politically and psychologically, thus lending purpose to one’s life. It also fills the gap in discussing the works of two writers from different backgrounds and in different settings and contexts in one study.

Challenging Media Representations of the Veil

2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 22-53
Author(s):  
Katherine Bullock
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
The West ◽  
The Media ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Western Media

The image of the Muslim woman’s veil in the popular western media isthat it is a symbol of oppression and violence in Islam. The forced coveringof women in postrevolutionary Iran, or lately, under the Talibanin Afghanistan seems to confirm this image of the veil. But this singularimage of the ‘veil’ is not the whole story of covering. Since the late1970s scores of Muslim women, from Arabia to Asia to the West, havebeen voluntarily covering. The re-covering movement challenges thereductive image of the veil as a symbol of Muslim women’s oppression.Due to the ubiquitous image of the veil as a symbol of oppression orviolence, Muslim women living in the West who cover often suffer discrimination,harassment, even assault. Hence, it is important to understandthe multiple meanings of the veil, and to challenge the media toimprove their representation of its meanings.

scholarly journals Re/claiming our identities : thinking through Islamophobia, the veil, and "the Muslim woman" in Canadian cultural productions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ameera Basmadji
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Important Concern ◽  
Muslim Immigrants ◽  
Canadian Context ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Muslim Communities

Western, Islamophobic, and Islamic discourses have resulted in a contested terrain of representations through which the lives of Muslims have been debated and consumed. Post 9/11, Muslims assumed a hyper visibility evident in their being stigmatized in the West as terrorists, and as threats to national security, democratic values, and time-honoured cultural practices in Western societies. As such, the presence of Muslim communities in Western nations is raising questions about national identity and belonging, particularly in the Canadian context. An important concern is to identify and interrogate the points of conflict and tension between Muslims and non-Muslim Canadians, particularly in regard to issues of national identity and citizenship. By focusing specifically on recent cultural productions, including a film, a television sitcom, and a novel by female Muslim Canadians, the analysis will demonstrate the extent to which the voices of Muslim women intervene into dominant Western discourses about Islam and popular representations of Muslims in the West. Special attention will be given to the symbolism of the veil to show how it has become the central marker of "difference" and one of the main "problems" affecting Western perception of Muslim immigrants and these communities' integration and assimilation into Canadian and Western societies.

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