This panel explores the complex dynamics between social justice, identity, and ritual practices within contemporary Muslim communities. One paper delves into the experiences of an Iranian seminarian woman as she navigates the intersections of religious conservatism and secularism. Another paper examines the ongoing debate surrounding Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism, questioning whether Islam should be considered a religion or a racial or ethnic group. It discusses how legal categories, biological essentialism, and dehumanization impact marginalized groups, complicating the articulation of the relationship between Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism in contemporary social justice discourse. A third paper shifts the focus to the devotional practices and mourning rituals of young Shiʿa Muslims in Tehran, Iran, exploring how these youths balance state-sponsored Islamism and secular neoliberal influences, demonstrating a nuanced engagement with individual agency, religious conservatism, and neoliberal logics. Together, these papers offer a thought-provoking exploration of how contemporary Muslims articulate and enact social justice.
Shi‘a tradition promises divine rewards for mourning the martyrdom of Shi‘a holy figures. Yet, the young participants of Shi‘a rituals in Tehran mostly emphasize how participating in rituals brings liveliness, success, and peace to their daily lives. Given the historical centrality of suffering in Shi‘a rituals, how could we understand these mourners’ emphasis on rituals’ worldly benefits? Drawing on my fieldwork in Tehran, I elucidate how my interlocutors’ narratives invoke two discursive resources: state-sponsored Islamist activism, which prescribes positive emotions as a prerequisite for realizing particular religious-political ambitions, and neoliberal productivism, which promotes the self-management of emotions as a means to maximizing material advantage. I argue that my interlocutors’ narratives allow them to employ and challenge both Islamist and neoliberal discourses; they use a productivist logic to resist secular criticisms that dismiss Shi‘a mourning rituals as irrational and anti-modern, yet their individualist interpretations challenge normative conceptions of these collective rituals.
This paper contributes to the debates on the use of the terms Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism in both popular and academic spheres through an examination of how legal categories, biological essentialism, and the logic of dehumanization inform the description and self-description of marginalized groups. I draw connections between a number of seemingly disparate phenomena — that I argue are intricately connected through a scientistic logic — ranging from the controversy on academic freedom and tolerance after a US university fired an instructor for showing Prophet Muhammad’s image in class, debates about the effect of age on women’s reproductive capacities, arguments over the existence of “gay genes” in LGBTQ rights discourse, and the differential treatment of women and children in wars, to illustrate what is at stake in the struggle to articulate Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism, the distinction between chosen and imposed — or visible and invisible — identities, and the politics of translation.
This presentation is part of a chapter of a forthcoming book (2024) about *howzevi* or seminarian women who use their Islamic education to do the work of supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are women historically caricatured as puppets of the Islamic Republic. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tehran, I complicate this narrative by demonstrating how a young seminarian woman's use of Islamic knowledge helped her navigate religious conservatism in a women’s seminary and secularism in her extracurricular English classes. In doing so, I argue for the importance of anthropology’s humanizing endeavor at a time in Iran when it has become easy to disregard women’s diverse experiences.