Elizabeth M. Bucar

Saving Face: Navigating Land Mines with Ritual Politeness in Iran

After sixteen years of production, the premier Iranian feminist monthly magazine, Zan an, had its license revoked in 2008 by the Iranian Press Supervisory Board. The fact that the Iranian authorities closed the magazine is not surprising, and there was certainly legal precedence for this: the 1986 Iranian Federal Press Law sanctions the closing of publications for a wide range of political and religious reasons including arguing against Islamic morals; endangering the “security, dignity and interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran;” insulting Islam, Ayatollah Khomeini, or other senior clerics; or committing “libel against officials, institutions, organizations and individuals in the country even by means of pictures or caricatures.” Between 2006 and 2008, forty periodicals were banned by the Press Supervisory Board, and

Introduction: The Third Wave of Comparative Religious Ethics

We all have ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, which guide our actions and judgments of others, and thus, all human action implies morality. “Ethics” is intellectual reflection on this morality. At some level, all scholarship touches on ethical issues since the choice of topic, methods, and presentation of findings all reflect the values of the investigator, even if unintentionally. Likewise, comparison is also part of any research, but sometimes only by default. In our contemporary age of globalism, people recognize that constellations of values vary between individuals and between different cultures; that morality is not fixed even in one context, but rather shifts through time and periodic controversy; and that ethical outlooks are not invented in isolation, but rather through interactions with others or practical challenges raised by new situations. Today, most people’s morality and ethics are shaped, often deeply, by religious commitments.1 “Comparative religious ethics” makes reflection on this diversity (whether cultural, geographic, historical, etc.) central to the selection of an ethical topic, the method of analysis, or the purpose of the study.

Bodies at the Margins: The Comparative Case of Transsexuality

At first glance, official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the Islamic Republic of Iran have much in common on the issues of gender and sex. Both prohibit female leadership in the clerical forms of priests or mullahs, respectively. Both understand a gender complementarity among men and women—in contrast to a radical equality—and base moral duties on this ontological distinction. Both consider the act of homosexual coitus as a sin, discourage divorce, and teach that sexual union is permissible only within the context of marriage. Taken together, these facts might lead the scholar of religious ethics to assume that sex and gender act as bridge concepts between the two traditions,1 providing an opportunity to study cross-cultural patriarchy or sexual conservativism as universal phenomena.