Marion Holmes Katz

Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University

Crones, Slaves and the Caliph’s Daughter: The Complexities of Gender in Pre-Modern Legal Texts

Monday, March 16 at 4pm
@ 121 Bay State Rd., 1st Floor

Premodern Islamic legal thought is justifiably seen as deeply invested in a male-female gender binary, but early and classical Muslim jurists also significantly cross-cut these categories with others such as age cohort and social status.   This talk asks how we can usefully complicate traditional questions such as “Was this rule good for women?”

Marion Holmes Katz is a Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.  Her research focuses on pre-modern Islamic law, gender, and ritual.  She is the author of books including Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (2002) and Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (2014).