erlaubt die Verbreitung, Speicherung, Vervielfältigung und Bearbeitung bei Verwendung der gleichen CC-BY-SA 4.0-Lizenz und unter Angabe der UrheberInnen, Rechte, Änderungen und verwendeten Lizenz. Oemmelen, Hyunsuk Lee, Stephanie Kühn and all other friends who made this journey a wonderful experience for me. I am also grateful and indebted to my friend Ramin Amngostar for his support and his tirelessness in our long dis cussions over the years on my research. Finally, I want to thank my dear family, especially my parents, Ezat and Gholamreza; without their unconditional love, support and encouragement this journey could not have been possible. Contents Part One: Understanding Changing Gender Norms in the Modern Era 1 Conceptualizing Gender, Religion and Islam 2 Towards a Theoretical Model for Changing Gender Norms in the Main Streams of Islamic Thought 2 1 Religion in Sociology 2 2 The Dialectical Relationship Between Religion and Human Being: Pluralism, Rationality and the Crisis of Meaning 2 3 Islam and Structuration Theory: Between Individual Agency and Global Justice 2 4 Religion and Recognition 2 5 Theoretical Approach to Analysing Changing Gender Norms in the Main Currents of Islam 3 Methodology for Comparative Research on the Main Currents of Islam 4 Women's Rights in Iran and CEDAW: a Comparison 4 1 An Overview on the History of Women's Rights in Iran 4 2 The Emergence of CEDAW as a Global Norm of Gender Justice 4 3 Women's Rights in the Current Laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Comparison with CEDAW 5 Three Streams of Thought in the Near East and Iran and Their Views on Women's Rights 5 1 Women's Position in Diverse Currents of Islamic and Secular Thought in the Near East: the State of Research 5 2 Some Aspects of the Historical Development of the Islamic Mu'tazili and Ash'ari Schools 9 Changing Gender Norms in the Dialectical Relationship Between Revelation and Human Reason

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Islamic feminism, as a discourse within feminism, aims to re-read the Qur’an from a modern egalitarian perspective, which is outside the traditional and patriarchal interpretation of Islam. Islamic feminists reclaim an ethical vision of the Qur’an by presenting a reinterpretation, especially regarding verses that deprive women from having equal rights in the family, as well as in society. However, while Islamic feminism presents a gender equal interpretation of the Qur’an and raises new discourses and debates on gender relations in an Islamic context, a critical insight of Islamic feminism can provide a new gender and religious consciousness that, in turn, develops further perspectives on gender equality in a religious context. This paper aims to provide a critique of Islamic feminism from a social psychological perspective of gender using the theory of Abdulkarim Soroush. His theory considers revelation as the prophet’s word resulting from his religious experience. Soroush defines revelation as an inspiration; in this way, revelation or Qur’an is not directly God’s word, but Muhammad’s word resulting from a divine experience. Accordingly, this paper deals with a social psychological perspective of the lived experience of the prophet as a man in a certain epoch of history, in which the lived experiences of women were not represented, and the revelation or the Qur’an is based on a male lived experience. It begins with an overview of Islamic feminists as well as the more general current of Islamic reformists and their efforts to view the revelation as the word of the prophet in order to avoid attributing the non-scientific content of the Qur’an to the direct word of God. This is followed by a critique of Islamic feminism based on Abdulkarim Soroush’s theory of the recognition of the revelation as the word of the prophet, as well as gender theories from the field of social psychology.

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