Muslim Women and the Challenge of Authority Lecture Series

This speaker series will bring sustained attention to negotiations over authority in a range of times and places.  Speakers will address Muslim women’s own authority to write and interpret texts, to structure their own spiritual lives, to manage wealth and make marital choices and the authority wielded by husbands and kin, governments, religious leaders, and normative texts.

The series is sponsored by: The Institute on Culture, Relgion and World Affairs; BU Center for Humanities; Institute for Philosophy and Religion; the Department of Religion; Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and the New England/Maritimes Regional American Academy of Religion.

Fall 2011 Events

 

Thursday, September 15 , 4:30pm
Juliana Hammer, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to speak
CURA, First Floor Conference Room, 10 Lenox Street, Brookline, MA

 

Living Text: Qur’an 4:34 and American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence

How is the Qur’an as sacred scripture relevant to contemporary Muslims? Is it in fact a living text? This lecture discusses contemporary interpretations of the Qur’an in their particular North American context by focusing on verse 34 of chapter 4 of the Qur’an. The verse has been of significance for Muslim understandings of gender roles and marital relations, and has engendered debate especially among contemporary Muslim scholars who have offered a range of interpretations. Embedded in these interpretations are assumptions and arguments about feminism and gender equality; but also important questions about gendered religious authority and the significance of scholars in addressing societal issues such as domestic violence. The lecture will connect these exegetical dynamics in their application in American Muslim grassroots efforts against domestic violence in Muslim families and communities. In this context, theoretical investments in gender complementarity, equity, or equality have to be translated into practical guidelines for advocates and service providers who are faced with reluctance if not resistance to acknowledge and address domestic violence. The exploration of the intersection between scripture as text and its contextual embodiment and application in American Muslim gender debates offers new insights into the gendered dynamics of religious authority and activism.

Thursday, October 13, 4:30pm
Shahla Haeri, Boston University to speak
CURA, First Floor Conference Room, 10 Lenox Street, Brookline, MA

 

From Bilqis to Benazir: A Queen, A Sultan, & A Prime Minister

‘Kings, when they enter a city, disorder it, and make the mighty ones of its inhabitants abased.  Even so they too will do.”  So says judiciously the Queen of Sheba to her advisors and counselors in the face of imminent threat of war from a formidable adversary (Quran 27, 32-33).  Rereading this Quranic text, Haeri critically discusses the politio-religious discourses, and cultural beliefs and practices that have militated against women attaining political leadership in Muslim societies.  Exploring medieval and modern examples of Muslim women who actually occupied the exalted office of a sultan or a prime minister, it problematizes the assumption of religious objections to women’s political leadership in Islam.  Are the justifications for barring women from positions of political leadership, Haeri asks, to be sought in a divine mandate, a prophetic dictum, or patriarchal cultural traditions?  What religious or cultural factors help or hinder women from occupying high political offices?  Women’s experiences with and approaches to religion and politics will be compared and interfaced with that of the male interpretations that are often upheld as the “Tradition.”

Thursday, November 17, 4:30pm
Nancy Smith-Hefner, Boston University, to speak
CURA, First Floor Conference Room, 10 Lenox Street, Brookline, MA

Islamic Authentication and Projects of Individuality: Moderate Islamists and the Politics of the Personal in Indonesia

Like many other Muslim-majority countries, Indonesia has in recent years witnessed the relative decline of ulama authority in the defining of gender roles and the pluralization and individualization of models for women’s education, romance, sexuality, and family relations.  Yet however much Muslims accommodate new ideals of gender and the individual, these must still be legitimated with reference to a putatively authentic Islam.  Smith-Hefner examines this ethical tension through the experience of young Indonesian women affiliated with the Muslim-Brotherhood-influenced moderate Islamist group KAMMI.  Because new social and ethical ideals depend on legitimating links with an authentic Islam, the new and individualizing currents in gender culture, as in other aspects of Islamic ethics, have been regularly subjected to explosive public argument and political campaigns, but have also reached into the most intimate and personal domains of everyday life.

 

Spring 2012 Events

Tuesday, January 24, 4:30pm
Kecia Ali, Boston University, to speak
CURA, First Floor Conference Room, 10 Lenox Street, Brookline, MA

The Jurist and the Saint: Sayyida Nafisa, Biography, and the Construction of Muslim Women’s Authority

Stories about the interactions between the ninth-century jurist al-Shafi’i (d. 204/820) and his contemporary Sayyida Nafisa (d. 208/824), a saintly figure descended from the Prophet, form an essential part of her biographical tradition. Since the medieval era, Nafisa said to have taught Shafi’i prophetic tradition, prayed for him when he fell ill, and participated –at his request – in his funeral prayer. Her shrine in Cairo has been active for a millennium, with votaries requesting her intercession. In recent decades, however, with scholarly attention to retrieving evidence of Muslim women’s agency, other elements of her biography have been highlighted: her knowledge and scholarly authority. Most recently, within the last decade, English-language scholarly works have occasionally stated that she led Shafi‘i’s funeral prayer. Ali uses this recently invented fact as a point of departure to consider biography, scholarly objectivity, and the construction of Muslim women’s religious authority by scholars.

Thursday, February 16, 4:30pm
Laury Silvers, University of Toronto to speak
CURA, First Floor Conference Room, 10 Lenox Street, Brookline, MA

Disappearing Women: Hafsa bint Sirin and the Textual Seclusion of Early Pious and Sufi Women

Within a few centuries of Muhammad’s death, women disappear almost entirely from Muslim biographical literature and mystical and ethical manuals. Rkia Cornell has called women’s history in early Islam a veiled tradition? Not only because of women’s absence from texts but also because the tradition idealizes female piety as silence and isolation. In her wide-ranging research on early pious and Sufi women, Laury Silvers explores and expands Cornell’s observation. By reading against the grain of biographical reports from Islam’s first century, she shows that transmitters have re-framed, de-emphasized, and even erased depictions of women’s socially embedded lives in order to construct an ideal woman whose submission to God serves the patriarchal ideal of seclusion. After a brief discussion of the social and textual mechanics of women’s disappearance from the literature, Silvers will discuss the biography of a highly esteemed pious woman, Hafsa bt. Sirin of Basra (d. ca. 100/700). Biographers depict Hafsa as a woman who did not simply retreat to her home–for homes are social spaces–but into a room within her home for some thirty years until her death. Yet Hafsa, a woman who enjoyed extraordinary intimacy with God, was also a daughter sensitive to issues of family social status, a learned woman who taught men in her home, a corpse-washer who served her community through the many plagues that swept through Basra, and a devoted, grieving mother. Silvers shows that Hafsa was indeed a prayerful woman, but that her life of worship does not seem to have been at odds with her engagement with the world around her.

Thursday, March 22, 4:30pm
Leila Ahmed, Harvard Divinity School, to speak
Location: School of Law, 12th floor lounge

Contemporary Trends in American Muslim Women’s “Feminist” Activism in the 21st Century.

The first decade of the 21^th century witnessed the emergence of a newly exuberant and dynamic American Muslim “feminist” activism.  Reminiscent in some ways in its liveliness of the American feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, this contemporary movement appears to be occurring above all among American Muslim women and thus in relation specifically to Islam. Outlining some of its most notable developments through this decade, Ahmed will also describe some of the historical and social conditions contributing to the emergence of this newly invigorated American Muslim “feminist” activism.

 

Saturday, March 31

Muslim Women & the Challenge of Authority Conference

For information, schedule, and registration click here