Page 137 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

then raises the question of who represents the interests of the not-yet modern
in family law debates.

Notes

1. See, for instance, the contributions on Yemen, Morocco, Palestine, and Mali in the
special issue of Islamic Law and Society 10, no. 1 (2003), entitled “Public Debates on
Family Law Reform: Participants, Positions, and Styles of Argumentation in the 1990s.”
2. Gender relations and “the position of women” have been controversial topics in
both colonial and postcolonial periods, with discussions often framed in terms of the
desirability of Westernization versus the call for cultural authenticity (see Ahmed 1992).
3. If the early Habermasian notion of the public sphere was a bourgeois public
sphere or, more to the point, a male bourgeois sphere, in his more recent work Habermas
(1992) has elaborated on the contribution of subaltern groups to the production of a
modern public sphere (and the pluralization of the public sphere). Recognizing that
women are not simply denied equal participation in the public sphere like other subal-
tern groups, he points out (following Pateman 1983) that the relation between the public
and the private sphere is itself gendered, with men’s participation in the public sphere
building upon women’s domestication. This contribution expresses a different take on
the gendered nature of the public sphere by dealing with locally and historically speci¤c
notions of publicness and the ways in which gender is implicated.
4. The literature on Iran is a paradigmatic case. In her bibliographic essay, Mir-
Hosseini (1999) distinguishes between the ¤rst wave of literature published in the 1980s
shortly after the Islamic revolution and the second wave emerging in the 1990s. Whereas
the ¤rst wave argues strongly against any possibility of reconciling Islam and women’s
rights (as in Tabari and Yeganeh 1982; Azari 1983; Afshar 1982), the second wave ex-
plores these possibilities more openly. Also, some authors have shifted position, as evi-
dent when comparing references from the 1980s with Afshar 1998, Najmabadi 1998
(formerly writing under the name Tabari), and Paidar 1995, 1996 (formerly writing un-
der the name Yeganeh). In contrast, Moghissi (1994) has remained a strong proponent
of the need for secularization. In popular writings and the media, the thesis “Islam is bad
for women” is still common.
5. The main project referred to in the articles and the ¤lm is the Palestinian Model
Parliament: Women and Legislation. The aim of the Model Parliament, initiated by a
nongovernmental women’s organization, the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Coun-
seling (WCLAC) in 1996, was to identify legal provisions that discriminated against
women’s rights and to debate and build consensus around proposals for legal change that
were to be brought to the attention of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
6. The following account is largely based on Hammami and Johnson 1999; Jad,
Johnson, and Giacaman 2000; Hammami et al. 2004; and Welchman 2003. For a descrip-
tion of the different positions the participants put forward, see, especially, Jad, Johnson,
and Giacaman 2000, 147ff.; for the diversity of positions taken up by the religious estab-
lishment, see, especially, Welchman 2003. As I focus on the differences between written
texts and visual information, this is a generalizing account that does not do justice to
differences between these articles and their authors.

126 Annelies Moors