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Populism and Feminism in Iran: Women's Struggle in a Male - Defined Revolutionary Movement Haideh Moghissi New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994; 217 pp.
Reviewed by Shahrzad Mojab Department of applied Social Science Concordia University Montreal, Quebec
Women in the Near and Middle East have been monolithically depicted as a miserable mass of human beings drawn into submission and ignorance by Islam. In this stereotypical image, women willingly accept the dictates of a backward religion that denies them every personal and collective right to equality. This construction of the "Muslim woman," deeply rooted in the Orientalist studies of Islamic societies, was further sanctioned by the 1978 - 79 Iranian revolution, widely known as the "Islamic Revolution." Although women were often ignored in the extensive Western scholarship on Islam, the assumption of power by the clergy in Iran encouraged studies of Muslim women in general and Iranian women in particular. However, most of these studies continued to examine Iranian women within the framework of religion, thereby ignoring the more important elements of class, ethnicity, nationality and socio - economic formation.
Challenging this reductionist approach, Haideh Moghissi provides a refreshingly sophisticated analysis of the Iranian women's activism in the 1978 - 79 revolution. The focus of the book is on the political and ideological approach to women in one of the largest socialist organizations, the Organization of the Iranian People's Fedayeen (OIPF). Through this detailed case study, Moghissi provides a socialist - feminist critique of some of the current feminist perspectives which act as obstacles to...