Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1
PhD Student in Sociology of Social Problems, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
2
Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
3
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
4
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
10.22034/jss.2026.2077581.1931
Abstract
Background and aim: Religious reformism has played a significant role in transforming perspectives toward women and expanding opportunities for their political and social participation in post–Islamic Revolution Iranian society through revisiting religious texts and reinterpreting traditional teachings. As a contemporary discourse challenging official and traditional understandings of religion, it has sought to redefine the relationship between religion and social power by reexamining key concepts of Sharia. Within this framework, women’s political empowerment is understood not as an independent discourse but as a sub-discourse of religious reformism. Therefore, this study analyzes religious reformist discourse and explains how it reinterprets or departs semantically from traditional discourse.
Data and method: Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, this article examines women-related issues in the thought of three religious reformist intellectuals: Seyed Mostafa Mohaqeq Damad, Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, and Mohsen Kadivar.
Findings: The findings indicate that all three thinkers, by emphasizing concepts such as justice, rationality, and human dignity, seek to construct a new discourse in which women’s political empowerment becomes possible not through opposition to religion, but through the reinterpretation of religion.
Conclusion: Women’s political empowerment within the discourse of religious reformism is not the outcome of theoretical consensus; rather, it emerges from an ongoing discursive struggle with the traditional jurisprudential discourse. Although this discourse has succeeded in moving the meaning of women beyond mere subordination and redefining women as rights-bearing subjects, it still remains constrained by jurisprudential boundaries in certain respects and has been unable to fully transform this redefinition into a political and institutional project.
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