Evil, Women and the Feminine

Dear .....,

Thank you very much for your response to our Call for Papers and for submitting such an interesting proposal. On behalf of the Steering Group I am delighted to say that after a double blind peer review and other selection processes your paper has been accepted for presentation at the 1st Global Conference on Evil, Women and the Feminine to be held from Friday 1st May - Sunday 3rd May 2009 in Budapest, Hungary. Your paper will make a valuable contribution to the conference discussions.

It is the 4th paper of mine which accepted to be presented in an international conference. I have many plans for this year. All previous three papers were in international conferences as well.

This is the abstract:

Female Body in Islam; Devil, Evil, Veil

There are certain conventions especially in the Islamic countries about the quality of representation and exact boundaries of revealing of female body in public spheres. Since there is an accepted tendency for people to symbolize the body and the body is capable of furnishing a system of signs, “religion” in Islamic countries plays an inevitable role in juxtaposing the signs and interpreting them accordingly. Sexuality and specifically female body has been one of the most highly controversial debates among Islamic government leaders as well as Islamic clergies over the Islam history in this regard.

After Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and establishing a so-called religious government and attempting to Islamization all aspects of Iranians lives, the privacy of women could not be remained secure and veiling from top to toe became compulsory for them in public spheres. Therefore, after more than 30 years of Islamic Revolution, that historical debate about the representation of female body in Islamic societies became more disputable in Iran in recent years. The core of this long argument is that female body is assumed just as a sensual object in Islamic texts.

Wearing colorful headscarves instead of dark colors, displaying hair beneath the scarves instead of covering completely, wearing short tight coats instead of loose long apparels are some of Iranian women employed initiatives in order to customize current interpretations of compulsory veiling.

Investigating female body politics in Iran during 30 recent years, this paper will focus on the religious texts (Qoran, the Muslim holy book; Sonath, the Prophet Mohammad and his children speeches and toziholmasa’el, Islamic contemporary clergies’ interpretation of Islamic principles) in order to decode the female body in Iran and reveal the connotations and denotations of religious defined signs in female body in this country.