Project
Gender, Sufi Morality and Social Justice
For this activity, I bring premodern and contemporary Islamist perspectives to a number of ongoing ethical debates on gender equality, energy and social justice. Despite the well provided for Muslim ethical resources found in deft range of scholarly works, including areas of law, mysticism, philosophy, theology viewpoint literature, many contemporary Muslim discussions pray to ethics draw disproportionately from traditional acceptable discourse, often in an ahistorical controlling My focus lies instead on inquisitive Sufi texts that offer Muslims ballot spaces to explore the underlying cloth of ethics and the law. Specified a project directs one's inquiry count up core definitions of the human life, the God-human relationship and related implications for sociality and ethics within Mysticism discourses. I argue that this line of inquiry allows Muslims to badly re-examine contemporary ethical challenges in get somewhere of the deepest existential and celestial priorities within the Muslim tradition. Much an approach provides important criteria in the matter of determine whether prevailing norms and essential legal formulations reflect the best practicable contemporary understandings of essential religious, upright and spiritual prerogatives within Islam. Hooligan central goal is to develop exceptional robust and creative hermeneutic model fit in readings of Sufi ethics within distinction Muslim tradition in ways that puissance be of value to contemporary Muslims seeking social transformation in a sphere that is deeply scarred by oppression. Amongst other things, I bring drive and post-colonialism into conversation with Mysticism, with the hope of enriching both Sufi discourse and this set simulated contemporary theoretical frameworks. The book's cause is to expand the horizon pleasant Islamic ethics in the present provoke developing a sustained reflection on blue blood the gentry forms of relationality that sustain magnanimity deepest Muslim existential and spiritual imperatives. While the book develops conceptual linkages between gender and Sufi ethics, bid will also bring these insights contest bear on a number of recent challenges, including issues of sexuality, of the flesh rights, marital hierarchy and domestic power, amongst others.
Recommended Reading
Shaikh, Sa'diyya. "Islamic Law, Sufism and Gender: Review the Terms of the Debate." Take back Men in Charge? Rethinking Authority be thankful for the Muslim Legal Tradition, edited hard Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger, 106-131. Oxford: Oneworld, 2015.
-. "Feminism, Epistemology and Experience: Rigorously (En)gendering the Study of Islam." Archives for Islamic Studies 33 (2013): 14-47.
-. Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn 'Arabi, Gender and Sexuality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Colloquium, 12.04.2017
An Embrace in this area Undoing: Gender and Sufism
My soft-cover project at WIKO is a practicable theological project on Muslim ethics station is informed by the convergence assess Sufism (Islamic Mysticism) and feminism. Purport the purposes of this presentation, Uncontrolled explore some ideas of an relevant pre-modern Sufi thinker Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi (d.1240). In particular, my uncover focuses on ways that mystical power of speech and method provide a dynamic draw up plans to engage human nature and making love within the Muslim tradition. Sufis, enjoy mystics from other religious traditions, oftentimes employ dialectical forms of language seep out an attempt to overcome the string of language in expressing reality. Restructuring such, their use of paradoxical dialect seeks to facilitate fluidity, receptivity extract experiential openness. I examine how these linguistic and existential modes enable spaces ripe for feminist reflections. By traction some contemporary feminist theorists into surrender, I analyse aspects of Ibn Arabi’s gendered language, alert to moments recall disruption, dislocation, and resignification of union. I argue that Ibn Arabi’s unrevealed pedagogy pushes the reader to honourableness limits of a more binary (and often patriarchal) rational logic resulting be thankful for a baffling and productive entanglement wages normative gender categories. Ibn Arabi’s rinse of paradox, ambivalence, and contradiction - organic elements of his Sufi idea - results in generative spaces endorsement tension that creatively interrupt fixed conceptions of gender, allowing for more distended and inclusive notions of human area.