Academic Events, Lecture, Racial Justice, Social Justice
Book Talk: Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam
Description
| Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam aims to understand Muslims’ relationship with change in Islam. Specifically, it explores why Muslims are resistant to change in some areas but open to it in others. For instance, why does there appear to be so much resistance to permitting women to lead mixed-gender prayers, but rulings on slavery, child marriage, and – to a lesser extent – female inheritance have undergone changes? Shehnaz Haqqani proposes that the process of change, while complicated, exhibits certain patterns, such as the role of gender, generation, power, and lived reality. She shows that inconsistent attitudes towards change and gender affect Muslim women’s quest for scriptural, interpretive, and ritual authority. She theorizes the idea of relevance, connecting lay Muslims’ perception of some gendered issues, such as female-led prayers as “irrelevant,” to academic conversations on the politics of citation and the dismissal of feminist and women’s scholarship. The book offers a new theoretical framework for understanding the tensions between individuals and communities as they make sense of historical traditions that do not coincide with their current moral sensibilities. |
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Speaker
| Dr. Shehnaz Haqqani is currently an assistant professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender and sexuality from the University of Texas at Austin. Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam is her first book. She is currently working on her second book, which explores the “crisis” of Muslim women’s marriage to non-Muslims. Her other publications include “Can Muslim Women Marry People of the Book? A Qur’anic and Textual Analysis” in Journal of Qur’anic Studies, “A Guide to Muslim Women’s Marriage to Non-Muslims” in Tying the knot: a Feminist/Womanist guide to Muslim marriage in America, “Islam and Gender” in Bloomsbury Religion in North America, “The Pashtun Woman Blogger: Marginality, Empowerment, and the Struggle for Recognition” in Political Muslims: Understanding Youth Resistance in Global Context, and “Teaching Islam and Gender” in Teaching Islam in the Age of ISIS and Islamophobia. Haqqani also co-hosts the podcast New Books in Islamic Studies with the New Books Network and runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?! (WTP?!), where she vlogs about gender and religion. |