Polygamy and Legislation in Contemporary Iran: An Analysis of the Public Legal Discourse

The purpose of this article is to analyze the interaction between different interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence in Iran and state law. It focuses on the public legal discourse about the new Family Draft Law in 2007–08, especially Article 23 regulating polygamous marriages and removing necessity for the first wife's permission. The participants in this public legal debate, which took place on the internet and in the media, were civil society organizations, especially women's organizations, the Shiite clergy, and state representatives. The article argues that even in a non-democratic, theocratic state such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, public discourse promoted by the named actors can challenge and influence state legislation. The removal of Article 23 from the Draft confirms this argument, but in the law of 2013 the requirement for the first wife's permission is not found. By looking at the arguments brought forward in the public discourse, the article demonstrates that the arguments are mainly “Islamic,” and none refers to international human rights, as this seems to be a kind of taboo in the political discourse.     

Marginalisation,Islamism and The Production of the 'Other's' 'Other'

Drawing on the findings of an empirical study of working-class Pakistani Muslims in southern England, this article considers the links between marginalisation, the politics of identity and the position of Pakistani Muslim women. The author shows how marginalisation (emerging from a nexus of oppressions) reinforces 'group' identity, how women are made central to 'group' identity, and how this centrality serves to legitimate their disempowerment. In this way the border that is erected to contain the group is dependent on internal divisions, the existence of which contradicts the notion of group homogeneity.     

Hotel design in British Mandate Palestine: Modernism and the Zionist vision

From the early 1920s through the 1930s, an important yet forgotten avant-garde architectural phenomenon developed in the Zionist community of British Mandate Palestine. In cities and resort regions across the country, several dozen modernist hotels were built for a new type of visitor: the Zionist tourist. Often the most architecturally significant structures in their locales and designed by leading local architects educated in some of Europe's most progressive schools, these hotels were conceived along ideological lines and represented a synthesis of social requirements, cutting-edge aesthetics, and utopian national ideals. They responded to a complex mixture of sentiments, including European standards of modern comfort and the longing to remake Palestine, the historical homeland of the Jewish people, for a newly liberated, progressive nation. This article focuses on Jerusalem's most ambitious modernist hotel, the Eden Hotel, to evaluate how the architecture of tourism became a political and aesthetic tool in the promotion of Zionist Palestine.