Urban women’s boycotting of the 2005 elections in Iran cleared the way for hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ascension to the presidency and a subsequent regression in women’s rights. This serves as an entry point to an understanding of the intricacies of a feminist movement in which women subjected themselves to an ideologically conservative president as part of a conscientious and contentious strategy for achieving equal democratic rights. If not through formal politics, what articulations and organizational capacities are available to and employed by women to demand and influence reforms within an Islamic Republic? This paper will examine three facets of the women’s movement in Iran; first, the role of women in mobilizing support for and successfully electing the reform candidate Mohammad Khatami to the presidency in 1997, and how the successes and failures of reform politicians and women in government reflected the limits of formal politics to elevate Iranian women’s rights through legislation from 1997-2005. Second, the paper will address how Iranian feminists have employed an Islamic justification for women’s rights that is both compatible with the prevailing Iranian politico-religious context, and useful in reconciling secular and Islamic feminist perspectives under a common cause. Finally, the implications of various feminist approaches to engaging in “informal” politics will be explored; specifically, the organizational structures supported through the use of new media that mobilizes feminist solidarities and collective action, pressuring the Iranian regime from within and without. The efforts of Iranian women reveal a movement that is not content with gradually reforming within, or conforming to, a restrictive legislative process; rather, Iranian feminists have adopted an Islamic modernist position focused on the removal of religious authority from the state, based on the recognition that the achievement of a fully democratic political space is fundamental to the adaptability and sustainability of the women’s movement.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution established a theocratic regime in Iran whose leaders based much of their legitimacy on their bellicose opposition to the United States. However, US President George Bush’s 2002 speech grouping Iran, Iraq and North Korea into an “axis of evil,” and the demonstrated willingness of the United States to use its military might to overthrow one of the members of this axis, presented the Islamic Republic of Iran with the very tangible prospect of invasion. The course of this research has been to determine how Iran’s leaders adjusted their public attitudes to account for this possibility. This has been done through an examination of the translated speeches of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader and its most powerful figure, as collected in online archives and international press reports. While it might be expected that Iran’s leader would slacken his traditional bellicose anti-Americanism in an effort to mollify the vastly more powerful United States, we find this was not the case. Khamenei’s speeches from January 2001 through the fall of Saddam Hussein in May of 2003 show the Iranian leader’s public attitude in regards to the US threat remained essentially unchanged. Despite the massive invasion of Iraq, Khamenei continued to espouse his long held belief that the United States would not invade his country, but would rather seek to undermine the Islamic Republic through subversion and “cultural aggression.” Combined with his belief that the United States and the Islamic Republic will forever remain fundamentally opposed, regardless of what actions Iran might take, Khamenei’s speeches reveal the ineffectiveness of force as a lever to sway Iranian behavior.

As hundreds of thousands Pakistanis inundated the cities of Lahore and Karachi to hear the rising cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan speak, commentators and politicians alike were left baffled: how did the peripheral figure and his respective party become a formidable voice in Pakistan’s politics within a few months? This paper will argue that the ascension of Imran Khan’s party, the Tehreek-e-Insaaf, can be attributed to its adoption of Post-Islamist rhetoric of religiosity and rights, which came to be publicly appealing following the formation and failure of the Islamist conglomerate the Muttahida Majles-e-Amal. Due to Postcolonial Pakistan’s institutional divide between State and society, as well as Islamism’s failure to bridge such a gap, Pakistan is experiencing a Post-Islamist turn, where a novel relationship between political institutions and the public sphere is being negotiated. In conclusion, this paper will contend that Post-Islamism may prevail given Pakistan’s pre-existing democratic institutions.

Historically, Islamist leaders — from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Jamaat e Islami in Pakistan and Bangladesh — have insisted that Sharia law is applicable to the modern nation state without political molding. Upon obtaining political power, however, they have always significantly moderated their conservative religious politics and adjusted their ideology to pragmatic realities. In my research, I ask what happens when an Islamist group does not moderate their politics to match political realities. I argue that any Islamist group which does not align their ideology with pragmatic realities after achieving power is destined to become a failed revolution. To test this theory, I analyzed the Afghan Taliban, a group which made no attempt at altering Sharia law to meet political demands domestically and internationally. Ultimately, this led to their deterioration as a political party. Through this, I conclude that it was the direct implementation of politically unmodified Sharia law which undermined their once robust popular support and lead the regime on a path to collapse. In turn, this paper implies that a government truly based upon Qu’ranic law is not sustainable in the modern world. In my research I relied entirely on an extensive literature review. I reviewed the premier literature on Islamist movements in and out of Afghanistan, as well as extensively on the history and ideology of the Taliban revolution in Afghanistan. Additionally, I reviewed Theda Skocpol’s theory on revolution to place the failed Taliban revolution in the frame-work of contemporary social science.

In the wake of the Ottoman Empire, Mustapha Kemal sought to modernize the republic of Turkey, ushering it head-first into the 20th century. His manifested ideas resulted in a huge departure from the country’s Ottoman past. An officer in the Ottoman military, Kemal viewed the empire as decadent and corrupt, embarking on a journey of reformation that altered the future of Turkey forever. Independence and democracy were at the forefront of Kemal’s mission, and in Kemal’s mind these pursuits were inseparable from secularism and nationalism. Kemal claimed that politics corrupted religion and that only secularism could restore purity to Islam in a post-Ottoman world. However, the 1970’s saw the rise of the National Order Party, an Islamist political group. Unfortunately for the ambitious party, unrest and a failing economy framed their rise to power and in 1980 the military took control of the government, claiming that the Islam in government was unconstitutional. The military used Kemalism to legitimate that, and several future coups even though Kemal himself stated that the military should also be separate from politics. The resulting struggles between Islamic groups and the Kemalists saw the rise of the AKP, a group composed of Islamist actors. The AKP has straddled the fence between secularism and Islam, promoting social, democratic, and economic growth. The argument proposed shows how Muslim leaders have moderated themselves and become the heirs to Kemal’s Revolution by following Kemalism's tenets for modernization: republicanism, statism, nationalism, popularism, revolutionism, and secularism. By examining the current economic and political academic discourses concerning Turkey's historic and current events I am able to contradict the debated notion that assumes that Islam and democracy are not compatible while taking it a step further to assert that a party with Islamic roots has continued one of the most successful revolutions in history.

Since the attacks on September 11, 2001 the international eye has fixed on the effects of political Islam and the impacts that transnational Islamic organizations such as al Qaeda have on global politics. A critical impact of transnational Islamic organizations is their involvement and impact on nationalist struggles. By using Chechnya as a case study this paper analyzes the effect of transnational Islamic organizations, in particular al Qaeda, on a nationalist struggle. This project is the result of my extensive research and a peer review process in an attempt to understand how nationalist struggles are changed by transnational Islamic organizations. Chechnya has been fighting for independence from Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in two separate wars. Al Qaeda started to become involved in Chechnya after the first Chechen War of Independence and their presence has caused dramatic changes. During the Second War for Chechen Independence there was a dramatic shift in both ideology and practices by the Chechens. New organizations, such as the Islamic International Brigade (IIB) appeared and preached a hard line of fundamentalist Islam in addition to carrying out violent attacks in the name of Islam and Chechnya. Their tactics shifted from local guerilla warfare to grandiose terrorist plots within Russia proper, including taking over a school in Beslan which resulted in the death 300 Russians. In addition to the large scale attacks suicide bombing became a technique the Chechens used, though there is debate on whether this is the result of al Qaeda. My research studies how the battle for Chechnya changed from nationalism to jihad, and how this case study can shed light on the question of how transnational Islamist organizations impact nationalist struggles.