Unholy Matrimony and (Un)Veiling Feminism

In the beginning of the article Unholy Matrimony by Juliet Williams talks about how Ali’s mother was a very powerful matriarch who ruled her husband and six son. I found this to be very intriguing because normally when you think of Muslim women you think of oppression and men ruling the family. Ali’s mother wanted them to sigheh ( temporary marriage). “A contract made between a man and an un- married woman specifying the duration of a union and an amount of money to be given by a man to his temporary wife.” A temporary marriage means a loss of virginity in the Muslim culture and it also associated with prostitution. My first question I had reading this article was, why would his mother want them to sigheh. I think the answer to my question is that it stands as a proud example of Islam’s ingenuity in adapting to changing times by reconciling the demands of tradition with the realities of contemporary social life.

Ali’s mother was not saying in this case that temporary marriage was shameful. She viewed it as the announcement of an open-ended wedding engagement in the contemporary United States. Juliet A. Williams: “As a self-proclaimed feminist and a pro- fessor of women’s studies trained in the tradition of Western liberal egalitarianism, I felt almost obliged to condemn a social institution so clearly enmeshed in practices of gender subordination and exploitation ranging from the maintenance of virginity norms to prostitution.” She wanted to find a point of entry for exploring the social meaning and possibilities of temporary marriage that would not lead to stereotyped judgements about islamic women in their society. “Tamilla Ghodsi contends that the only way to prevent temporary marriage from being used to enable prostitution is to formalize and institutionalize it.” Temporary marriage as it is currently looked at exploits the most vulnerable members of society. Marriage has long been occluded by popular idealizations of marriage as a relationship whose essence lies in a mutual experience of romantic love in the United States. To end this article, Juliet Williams says that because she encountered with temporary marriage, it made her to consider her own complicated relationship with Western-style permanent marriage. 

Afsaneh Najmabadi talks about secularism, nationalism and feminism in this article. “It is about how feminism itself may have worked as a veil, about the veiling work of feminism as a boundary marker for secularism of Iranian modernity.”A problem that she is trying to emphasize in this essay is the generalization of the current discussions of islam and feminism. She then starts to talk about the culture of revolution. Woman in Iran have faced social restrictions since 1979. They are discriminated against by the shape, color and thickness of a woman's scarf. There is a very dominant culture in Iran and woman feel silenced.