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Minoo Moallem challenges the mainstream stereotypical representation of Islam and Muslims as backward, fanatical, and premodern by showing how Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism are by-products of modernity. Writing with a deep personal and scholarly concern for recent Iranian history, Moallem refers to the gendered notions of brother and sister as keys to understanding the invention of the Islamic ummat as a modern fraternal community. Using magazines, novels, and films, she offers a feminist transnational analysis of contemporary Iranian culture that questions dominant binaries of modern and traditional, West and East, secular and religious, and civilized and barbaric. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister responds to a number of important questions raised in connection with 9/11. The author considers how veiling intersects with other identity markers in nation-state building and modern formations of gendered citizenship. She shows how Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism are fed by a hybrid blend of images and myths of both pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran, as well as globally circulated patriarchal ideologies

Cet article vise à établir un cadre théorique permettant de comprendre comment la mobilisation religieuse conduit à l'élaboration d'une ethnicité islamique. Cette élaboration se fait dans le contexte des formes anciennes et nouvelles de mondialisation ainsi que des interactions de différentes relations sociales, comme le rôle sexuel, la classe et l'ethnie. En m'appuyant sur la montée du fondamentalisme islamique en Iran, je tenterai de donner une explication empirique de l'interrelation complexe de la sphère "globale" et de la sphère "locale", de l'"ethnicité dominante" et de l'"ethnicité dominée", de la "masculinité hégémonique" et de la " féminité accentuée ", dans la création et la recréation d'identités sociales ethno-religieuses.

The logic of nation-state building in the context of modernity is inextricably bound to the founding of politics -- both as conceptual & practical possibility -- on the basis of a binary dissociation of the public from the private, of rights from needs, of reason from passion. Thus, politics in its modern sense becomes tied to a secularized theological-political notion of responsibility. Further, such binary concepts are implicated in those temporal & spatial metaphors that naturalize the spheres of family & civil society, & distinguish them from the sphere of politics. These distinct spheres are essential to the construction of modern rational subjectivities & liberal citizenship. Here, with focus on the case of Iran, the notion of the "civic body" is introduced in an attempt to bring clearly into view the connection between sexed corporeality, cultural nationalism, & gendered citizenship. Through a theoretical examination of the "civic body" as both a site of political citizenship & a field of racial & sexual codification & recodification, such historical & discursive constructions as modernity, Westernization, "Westoxication," Orientalism, universalization, particularlism, masculinity, & femininity will be brought into the nexus of analysis. The intent is both to engage with the literature in the field of Iranian & Middle Eastern studies & to intervene critically with respect to citizenship as an analytical category. 51 References. Adapted from the source document.