Chapter 2 shifts the focus from urban centers to the rural north during the early Iraqi republican period (1961–75). The chapter complicates the traditional understanding of the Kurdish uprising as an exclusively nationalist movement, demonstrating that Assyrians, as well as Communists who survived the coup, were significant actors in this conflict. Starting in 1961, Assyrians like Margaret George joined the Kurdish opposition, and local Assyrian parties moved north after being denied registration in Baghdad. As the civil war continued, cooperation between the Kurds and Assyrians expanded transnationally. But the civil war had devastating consequences: depopulation of the countryside, the destruction of villages, and the loss of religious and cultural sites in northern Iraq.

This penultimate chapter is based on nearly three years of fieldwork at various Hezbollah cultural institutions in Tehran (2012–2014). Here, I examine acts of citizenship among another group touched by the legacies of the Iran–Iraq war. However, these women ascribe to a notion of democratic politics which deviates from the Western sensibilities of popular sovereignty. Contrary to acts of citizenship performed by female relatives of war martyrs, post-2009 Hezbollah–affiliated cultural activists view rights to be only one pillar of the state’s structure, and not necessarily the most important element of statecraft to be protected. They engage with the tensions which exist between the state’s Islamic and Republic elements, and the entanglement of religion and politics, but without necessarily intending to resolve or undo them in the interest of the people. In this chapter, I move into the ambit of citizenship and politics among pro-state Hezbollah affiliates in post-2009 Iran to make this counterintuitive argument: the legislation of religion is not necessarily a fruitless effort for the state even when it fails to uniformly produce its ideal religious citizen. Indeed, hybrid regimes’ contradictions and ambiguities work in different ways to produce particular types of citizens.

This chapter highlights how gender was rethought and reworked and how gender roles were remade during the 1980–1988 period to contest the established idea in political science that feminism and nationalism are incompatible. In turn, this finding also suggests that national governance from 1980 to 1988 was not as rigid and authoritarian as we previously had assumed it to be during this period.

This chapter argues that by studying statecraft as entailing acts of citizenship, Women and the Islamic Republic contributes to feminist political theory and the feminist struggle to move beyond resistance in discussions of women and the state. The importance of non-elite Iranian women to the conditioning of the state formation process is not tied to the Iranian context. Rather, my exploration of gendered citizenship in contemporary Iran can more broadly help us understand the substance of citizenship, as well as the state formation process for hybrid regimes in the region and beyond. The chapter concludes by offering a summary of each chapter that follows.

This chapter shows that during the 1980–1988 period, interlocutors in warfronts, prisons, seminaries and hospitals undermined the state’s gender limitations and discrimination by deploying what I refer to as spiritual acts of citizenship – acts of citizenship geared toward preserving one’s status as a revolutionary citizen. Spiritual acts of citizenship were constituted through the broader ethical framework that political spirituality offered during the early days of the revolution (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2016). I address the underlying historical contingencies and real-time creativity that enabled Islamic and leftist women to individually challenge national and transnational structures of power. Additionally, I show the different forms that spiritual acts of citizenship took during the 1980–1988 period. What follows offers a dynamic view of revolutionary citizenship as one interspersed with familial love, erudite poetry, and literature, significantly dependent on different avenues to self-care and contrasting approaches to self-preservation.

The legacy of war is a neglected area of research, particularly among political scientists. This chapter thus explores the legacies of violence that occurred during the first decade of the Islamic Republic through case studies of wives and daughters of war martyrs. With a focus on tensions between the tenses, I begin by illustrating how compliance with the post-revolutionary state’s political regime can nevertheless engender act of citizenship that challenge state narratives from this inaccessible temporal site where the past and present compete and inspirations arise. Next, the chapter demonstrates how individualised memorialisations of the past are more explicitly and intentionally deployed by wives and daughters to encounter gender and familial cultures today. This section illustrates the state’s transformation through a discussion of how individual memories of the Islamic Republic’s first decade are specifically utilised by women to resist and consequently remake contemporary structures of the family. Interviewees identify personal participation during the revolution and war, and the death of husbands and fathers as central to shaping their contemporary acts of citizenship. These acts bolster their pursuit of autonomy in thought and action, particularly within and through the family.

My purpose in this chapter is to concentrate on the individual’s own remembrance of the past and how she renews memories to move history forward in accordance with her own imagination, as well as on the broader constraints and opportunities that shape her present life. The interaction that takes place between individual and collective remembrance requires further attention in the social sciences and within memory studies. This trend permits the formation of a distorted conceptualisation of how change occurs and at times results in overinvesting in a linear progression of history. I marshal various sources of evidence – including a special issue published by a Hezbollah cultural institute, some of the analysed articles from which are not publicly accessible – to argue this: at least one reading of Iranian women’s conceptualisation of their status and formation of rights, roles, and responsibilities in the post-revolutionary era is its nonlinearity and connection to individual goals and memories. I contextualise women’s own words from memoirs and other texts within long-term histories of activism in modern Iran and consider the conditions, structural spaces, and opportunities that made their acts of citizenship visible, and, at times, invisible.

During different moments of conflict, post-revolutionary Iranian’s formal and informal legislation ebbs and flows between plans to condition, eliminate or limit citizenship. This trend in the country’s post-revolutionary history also leaves much space for mediation and slippages that reconfigure national governance projects on the local terrain. In post-revolutionary Iran, then, it is not only the state’s republican elements that make it unpredictable through elections and the press (Osanloo, 2009). Women and the Islamic Republic has argued that when we integrate acts of citizenship into the state-building process, we see that the post-revolutionary Iranian state is heavily conditioned by the gendered legacies of the Iran–Iraq war. Moreover, authoritarianism is an ambiguous project when examined from within society.

Chapter 4 focuses on the controversial practice of (self-)flagellation (tatbir), which involves using swords and knives to cut the body. This highly controversial ritual practice, which is traditionally performed by men, is increasingly practiced by Shirazi Shi‘i women. Shirazi Shi‘i women in London claim that they initiated this practice among women for the first time in 2007, which has influenced and inspired other Shi‘i women to practice tatbir in other European countries and in the Middle East, including Kuwait and recently Bahrain. The chapter examines to what extent the increasing number of women performing tatbir in Europe can be regarded as a form of female religious empowerment, thus influencing the gender dynamics within Shi‘i ritual practices not only in London but also among other Shi‘i communities in other European countries and in the Middle East.

This chapter provides an overview of the trajectories of Shi‘is in the Gulf and their presence in Europe. The Shi‘a in the Gulf consist of indigenous as well as migrant and, in some cases, also converted Shi‘is. Whether forced or voluntary, the experiences of migration and settlement among Shi‘is in Europe and the Middle East varies. Often coming from minority contexts of marginalization, discrimination, and persecution, Shi‘i experiences of migration are often different to those of other Muslim immigrants in Europe as well as in the Middle East. In the 1980s, large-scale displacement of Iraqi Shi‘i Muslims, for example, forced them to migrate through a multilocal trajectory of displacement in so-called transit countries such as Iran, other Gulf countries or neighboring countries such as Jordan or came first to European countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands or Germany and later moved to the United Kingdom. The national and transnational interactions and networks of these Shi‘i communities are discussed in this chapter to offer an overview of the various diverse Shi‘i communities present in Europe and the Middle East.