JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION最新文献

{"title":"Critical Studies of Hadith and of Islamic Masculinity: Two Important Frontiers for Future Qur'anic Scholarship","authors":"Yasmin Amin","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908300","url":null,"abstract":"Critical Studies of Hadith and of Islamic MasculinityTwo Important Frontiers for Future Qur'anic Scholarship Yasmin Amin (bio) This roundtable offers frameworks for critical reading, methods for challenging subjectivity and methodological rigidity, strategies for engaging with qurʾanic interpretive traditions, and avenues for conducting rigorous philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and structural analyses. But at least two additional critical and interrelated issues remain to be explored. First, the majority of feminist works separate qurʾanic narratives about women and men and focus on verses that deal with social issues pertaining predominantly to women (most notably Q 2:282, 4:1, 4:34, and 24:31); however, this approach preserves much of the logic on which patriarchy is built. Future feminist scholarship should devote more energy to understanding the construction of masculinity in the Qurʾan and in extra-qurʾanic sources. Second, many studies focus solely on the Qurʾan and its exegesis by employing works from the inherited canon to deconstruct, undermine, or expose inherent gender biases. However, the inherited canon, especially in the traditionally grounded episteme of qurʾanic sciences, consists of interconnected scholarly disciplines. Authors writing in the tafsīr genre use hadith (aḥādīth) to interpret the Qurʾan, but in doing so, they often disregard the painstaking classification system developed over the centuries to discern the authenticity of hadith reports. Future feminist qurʾanic scholarship should critique the misuse of hadith, particularly in instances where the misuse entrenches male privilege and undermines other instances in the Qurʾan which depict an egalitarian ethos in marriage and gender relations more broadly.1 [End Page 75] Over centuries and generations, male scholars have advanced male legislative and scholarly privileges while female interpretive authorities have been marginalized.2 Therefore, to generate more gender-based research that positively affects women's lived realities, the narrow focus on Qurʾan and tafsīr should be widened to reconstruct a more egalitarian, inclusive, and gender-just ethos for qurʾanic scholarship. Given that the Qurʾan constitutes the foundation of Islamic epistemology and given that scholars interpret it through the prophetic Sunna (the reported actions and behaviors of the Prophet Muḥammad), through qiyās (deductive analogy), and through ijmāʿ (consensus), a reexamination of the whole interpretive foundation is paramount. In particular, the abuse of aḥādīth and prophetic sīra (biographical narrations) when used to entrench prevailing gendered hierarchies and bolster discriminatory laws constitutes a complete disregard for the model prophetic legacy. Current and future generations deserve the right to interpret the Qurʾan and thereby also change the laws in the context of their changing lived realities and circumstances, thus restoring the dynamic relationship between reason and consen","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Muslim Feminist Exegetes, Not \"Handmaidens of Empire\"","authors":"Mahjabeen Dhala","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908302","url":null,"abstract":"Muslim Feminist Exegetes, Not \"Handmaidens of Empire\" Mahjabeen Dhala (bio) In her essay \"Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror,\" the late anthropologist Saba Mahmood used the term \"handmaiden of empire\" to express her wariness of how the Euro-American tropes of freedom and gender equality were directed at Muslim women.1 Her critique inspires my own interrogation of the autonomy of contemporary Muslim feminist qurʾanic discourses. We must ask ourselves: Has feminist Qurʾan scholarship become a \"handmaiden of empire\" in the context of the Islamophobic and secular underpinnings of Western academia? Have we already become unwitting bedfellows with the \"caesars and sultans\" of academia that Celene Ibrahim describes? Indeed, unabating Islamophobic rhetoric misconstrues Muslim women's embodiments of religious identity as signs of religious subjugation and has kept Muslim feminist scholarship mired in a prescriptive paradigm charted by white feminist thought. Concurrently, the secularist strategy of promoting liberal and progressive scholarship has deterred feminist approaches that argue for the empowerment of Muslim women from within the tradition. In opposition to such trends, my research centers premodern Muslim women as theologians, exegetes, and activists, and from this vantage point, I develop constructive methodologies for feminist readings of the Qurʾan, including those that consider Muslim exegesis and extra-qurʾanic literature, as advocated for in this roundtable by Hadia Mubarak and Rahel Fischbach, respectively. Moreover, secular scholars often dismiss constructive methodologies as not being \"critical\" enough based on a secularist understanding of the purpose of \"critique\" that stems from their own historical contentions within Christian-dominated [End Page 83] institutions that have claimed a monopoly on authenticating knowledge. From a Muslim epistemic standpoint, critique has functioned more as a significant feature inherent to traditional systems of Islamic knowledge production. Muslims subscribe to the monotheistic notion of God and the Qurʾan as the word of God on the tongue of God's Prophet; however, in traditional scholarship, Muslims debate details pertaining to God's precise attributes and debate how the Qurʾan should be read, interpreted, and applied to Muslim life, among other themes. In this intellectual tradition, difference of opinion is often regarded by scholars as both natural and essential. Hence, I ask: Should European Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment notions of critical scholarship be prescriptively applied to nonwhite, non-Christian, indigenous scholarship as well? Furthermore, must qurʾanic studies in Western academia, including feminist readings of the Qurʾan, comply with secularized modalities of knowledge production to be considered sufficiently \"critical\"? Put plainly, how autonomous is feminist Qurʾan scholarship in the secular academy? Where are the female indigenous voices, those voice","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Moving from Male-Centric Fallacies to Feminist Interpretive Authority","authors":"Abla Hasan","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.14","url":null,"abstract":"Moving from Male-Centric Fallacies to Feminist Interpretive Authority Abla Hasan (bio) Omaima Abou-Bakr soundly argues for finding new implications in the qurʾanic text and applying a form of structuralist analysis that generates more nuanced meanings. Abou-Bakr, along with Asma Lamrabet, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Asma Afsaruddin, Celene Ibrahim, Amira Abou-Taleb, and others, contributes to what is rapidly receiving more recognition and visibility as a Qurʾan-centric exegesis. In Woman's Identity and the Qur'an: A New Reading (2004), Nimat Hafez Barazangi boldly invites Muslim women and men to reread and reinterpret the Qurʾan. Barbara Stowasser's Women in the Qurʾan, Traditions, and Interpretations (1997) provides a study of scripturalist literature and its symbols. In Women and Gender in the Qur'an (2020), Celene Ibrahim focuses in her tafsīr on qurʾanic female figures. Nevin Reda and Yasmin Amin's edited volume Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice (2020) adds to the ongoing conversation by questioning the assumed timeless validity of the tradition of men's interpretation that arose in the early centuries of Islam. My own work applies a methodological approach using the Qurʾan to interpret the Qurʾan (tafsīr al-Qurʾān bi-l-Qurʾān). The hermeneutic seeks internal qurʾanic answers that do not invite as much external speculation and theorization. To avoid surrendering the text to the interpreters' will and inherent biases, I methodologically prioritize the qurʾanic voice itself over every other interpretive strategy. The Qurʾan, I argue, already contains all the necessary tools for its decoding. This holistic hermeneutical approach can not only help to retrieve the overall lost gender-egalitarian message of the Qurʾan but also can respond to false controversies introduced into the exegetical tradition when exegetes project explanations that result in inherent textual inconsistencies. An example is the traditional interpretation of the expression \"strike them [f., pl.]\" in Q 4:34. Much has been said and written about what is soundly considered by many as the most controversial verse in the Qurʾan. Among those [End Page 91] who have notably contributed to the discussion are Kecia Ali, Hadia Mubarak, Ayesha Chaudhry, Karen Bauer, Laury Silvers, Saʾdiyya Shaikh, Laleh Bakhtiar, John Andrew Morrow, Juliane Hammer, Celene Ibrahim, and Nevin Reda. In Decoding the Egalitarianism of the Qur'an: Retrieving Lost Voices on Gender, I argue for a holistic hermeneutical approach that starts by reconnecting Q 4:34 to its logical context. The strict application of tafsīr al-Qurʾān bi-l-Qurʾān could reveal another meaning altogether. This verse is an example of what I refer to as the male addressee fallacy. We must observe that the actual addressee of Q 4:34 is not \"husbands,\" and we must reconnect this verse to its true addressee, as specified in the beginning of Q 4:29: \"O you [pl., gender inclusive] who believe,\" that is, the community o","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nurturing Gender Justice: Qurʾanic Interpretation and Muslim Feminist Thought","authors":"Roshan Iqbal","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.06","url":null,"abstract":"Nurturing Gender JusticeQurʾanic Interpretation and Muslim Feminist Thought Roshan Iqbal (bio) Here I attempt to categorize Muslim feminists' methodological interventions that are aimed at advancing gender equality from within the tradition.1 I highlight four notable areas of intervention that have significantly contributed to this ongoing pursuit: intertextuality, intratextuality, fiqh (jurisprudence), and Sufi and philosophical texts. Intratextuality, as Amira Abou-Taleb, Omaima Abou-Bakr, Abla Hasan, and others describe it here, is the practice of comparing interconnected qurʾanic verses and terms, rather than interpreting them atomistically. It involves considering verses within the broader context of the Qurʾan's emphasis on promoting justice and equality for all humanity. Amira Abou-Taleb argues that iḥsān is at the core of the Qurʾan's moral worldview, emphasizing that justice is a crucial prerequisite for iḥsān. Gender justice, when viewed through the lens of iḥsān, becomes not only a fundamental societal objective but also an essential means to uphold the Qurʾan's moral framework. Similarly, Abla Hasan provides a contextual reappraisal of Q 4:34 using an intratextual approach. In her broader work, Celene Ibrahim looks at sexuality in the Qurʾan through a comprehensive analysis of narratives involving female figures.2 Another example is Hadia Mubarak's analysis of [End Page 59] male and female nushūz (rebellion) in Q 4:34 and Q 4:128.3 These scholars, and others, provide us with an invaluable female-centric lens through which to understand the Qurʾan's intratextuality.4 The second feminist methodological intervention is intertextuality. Intertextuality invites a reappraisal of qurʾanic meanings considering aḥādīth (oral narrations, Eng. hadith), sunna (the reported actions and behaviors of the Prophet Muḥammad), and asbāb al.nuzūl (the reported contexts for the revelation of specific qurʾanic verses). Fatema Mernissi is generally considered the first contemporary Muslim feminist to investigate the authenticity and authority of aḥādīth attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad about the issue of woman's leadership.5 Saʾdiyya Shaikh also studies the construction of gender in aḥādīth discussing women's knowledge and sexuality.6 Other attempts include Rawand Osman's study of female figures in Shiʿi aḥādīth, exegesis, and biographical literature.7 In this roundtable and elsewhere, Yasmin Amin examines the misapplication of hadith, specifically when it reinforces male privilege and undermines the Qurʾan's portrayal of egalitarian principles in marriage and gender relations. Rahel Fischbach also discusses the challenges and potential of using additional exegetical and narrative literature, alongside the Qurʾan, to foster gender-just interpretations. The third methodological intervention by Muslim feminists considers issues of fiqh. An example of this can be found in the insights of Hina Azam, who finds Islamic law to have two competing and sometimes ov","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Decolonizing the Body, Pedagogies, and Anti-Asian Hate","authors":"Najeeba Syeed","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908312","url":null,"abstract":"Decolonizing the Body, Pedagogies, and Anti-Asian Hate Najeeba Syeed (bio) A student emails me, telling me she is in tears, grappling with what it means to let go of definitions of her identity that had held her hostage to the claims of colonized religion. She asks, \"What is left?\" I've had many students send me these types of emails. They struggle with the process of coming into their own agency and defining their heritage, articulating their experiences of marginalization, and also speaking openly about their strengths and dreams. Here are four pedagogical approaches I've adopted as a professor to respond to student needs and experiences like those named above: 1. Sequence the syllabus in ways that center decolonial framing before teaching religion itself. For example, I assign Linda Tuhiwai Smith's book Decolonizing Methodologies before other texts, before teaching texts on religion and spirituality.1 This framing allowed for colonial constructs we studied later to be interrogated and examined as students were learning them. It changed the method of ending a course with critique and centered the course in this constant questioning of how religions are studied and how religion is constructed in the overall academic framework and institutional settings. 2. Teach more women. I cannot emphasize this enough. So often decolonial critique is taught only from the perspectives of authors who identify as men; adding the voices of female-identified authors may mean stretching the boundaries of what is decolonial. I've used traditional religious writers who do not name [End Page 123] the decolonial method but execute it nonetheless. They may be writing in forms that are not readily accessible as academic texts. For my Indigenous students, for instance, this meant reading firsthand narratives that were not always scholarly works, but the embodied experience of decolonizing was evident, a roadmap in the text. 3. Pay attention to what I am modeling as professor. My body is the first text in the classroom interreligious encounter that a student reads. This is especially the case when students have not encountered religious diversity in their prior experiences. Especially as a woman—a Muslim woman, a Brown woman, and an Asian woman—it is important to name when encounters are complex, complicated, or problematic. This has been very hard. So often my age, my qualifications are asked about, personal revelations sought. Familiarity and comfort with me pursued, I had to insist on being \"Professor Syeed\" while my colleagues could be addressed by their first names with impunity. More deeply, I have begun to talk about and name when my own body was experiencing violations by what we read, by what we watched, and by what was said in the moment of interaction in the classroom. This has taken practice and deliberation over time. It is done with strength and honesty and clarity; and the methods of how I handled these conflicts were greatly appreciated by my students. 4. T","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135638958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Moving from Male-Centric Fallacies to Feminist Interpretive Authority","authors":"Abla Hasan","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908304","url":null,"abstract":"Moving from Male-Centric Fallacies to Feminist Interpretive Authority Abla Hasan (bio) Omaima Abou-Bakr soundly argues for finding new implications in the qurʾanic text and applying a form of structuralist analysis that generates more nuanced meanings. Abou-Bakr, along with Asma Lamrabet, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Asma Afsaruddin, Celene Ibrahim, Amira Abou-Taleb, and others, contributes to what is rapidly receiving more recognition and visibility as a Qurʾan-centric exegesis. In Woman's Identity and the Qur'an: A New Reading (2004), Nimat Hafez Barazangi boldly invites Muslim women and men to reread and reinterpret the Qurʾan. Barbara Stowasser's Women in the Qurʾan, Traditions, and Interpretations (1997) provides a study of scripturalist literature and its symbols. In Women and Gender in the Qur'an (2020), Celene Ibrahim focuses in her tafsīr on qurʾanic female figures. Nevin Reda and Yasmin Amin's edited volume Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice (2020) adds to the ongoing conversation by questioning the assumed timeless validity of the tradition of men's interpretation that arose in the early centuries of Islam. My own work applies a methodological approach using the Qurʾan to interpret the Qurʾan (tafsīr al-Qurʾān bi-l-Qurʾān). The hermeneutic seeks internal qurʾanic answers that do not invite as much external speculation and theorization. To avoid surrendering the text to the interpreters' will and inherent biases, I methodologically prioritize the qurʾanic voice itself over every other interpretive strategy. The Qurʾan, I argue, already contains all the necessary tools for its decoding. This holistic hermeneutical approach can not only help to retrieve the overall lost gender-egalitarian message of the Qurʾan but also can respond to false controversies introduced into the exegetical tradition when exegetes project explanations that result in inherent textual inconsistencies. An example is the traditional interpretation of the expression \"strike them [f., pl.]\" in Q 4:34. Much has been said and written about what is soundly considered by many as the most controversial verse in the Qurʾan. Among those [End Page 91] who have notably contributed to the discussion are Kecia Ali, Hadia Mubarak, Ayesha Chaudhry, Karen Bauer, Laury Silvers, Saʾdiyya Shaikh, Laleh Bakhtiar, John Andrew Morrow, Juliane Hammer, Celene Ibrahim, and Nevin Reda. In Decoding the Egalitarianism of the Qur'an: Retrieving Lost Voices on Gender, I argue for a holistic hermeneutical approach that starts by reconnecting Q 4:34 to its logical context. The strict application of tafsīr al-Qurʾān bi-l-Qurʾān could reveal another meaning altogether. This verse is an example of what I refer to as the male addressee fallacy. We must observe that the actual addressee of Q 4:34 is not \"husbands,\" and we must reconnect this verse to its true addressee, as specified in the beginning of Q 4:29: \"O you [pl., gender inclusive] who believe,\" that is, the community o","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135638964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Invisibility, Anti-Asian Racism, and Feminist Studies in Religion","authors":"Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908309","url":null,"abstract":"Invisibility, Anti-Asian Racism, and Feminist Studies in Religion Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier (bio) In July of 2020, the leadership of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc. (FSR) issued a statement on anti-Black racism in the wake of the recent police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks.1 FSR committed to a series of action items to combat anti-Black racism. It also committed to ongoing self-reflection on its own history and practices as they relate to race and racism. As a part of this work, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) published a roundtable in 2022 (38, no. 1). For the roundtable, Judith Plaskow wrote a lead piece reflecting on race, racism, and the history of JFSR,2 and a series of scholars wrote short responses. The respondents included former JFSR coeditors and current board members. All current unit coleaders also offered responses. Nami Kim's response is particularly relevant for our own roundtable here. She writes that even as we continue to \"examine how 'our' work and network engender anti-Blackness,\" FSR also must attend \"to multiple logics of white supremacy and Christian hegemony, since white supremacy is undergirded by not only anti-Black racism but also anti-Muslim racism, pernicious orientalism and anti-Asian racism, and settler colonialism.\"3 These multiple logics were on our mind when Grace Ji-Sun Kim (FSR director at large) and I (FSR vice president) developed this roundtable discussion. Our hope is to continue FSR's antiracism initiatives by [End Page 107] attending to some of these complex dynamics as they impact Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. As has been well documented (and, for many of us, personally experienced), the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge of violence and hate against Asian and Pacific Islander folks in North America and Europe. But, as Nami Kim notes, the violence long predates COVID; and Stop AAPI Hate's work to document, research, and respond to the rise of anti-Asian attacks did not receive significant attention until the murders of six women of Asian descent in Atlanta (March 16, 2021).4 Clearly, anti-Asian racism in religion, the academy, and society has a much longer history than just the past three years. Our roundtable participants—Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Vijaya Nagarajan, Rachel Bundang, Najeeba Syeed, and Tamara C. Ho—have been invited to reflect on the following questions: How do you see Asian invisibility and/or anti-Asian racism in religion and society? How do you respond to that in your scholarship? How do you see Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander American voices and issues represented in feminist studies in religion? And what needs to happen in feminist studies in religion to contend with Asian invisibility and anti-Asian racism? These questions are only meant to start the conversation, as we wanted participants to have the freedom to develop their thoughts in light of their own concerns and work. A number of themes arise from th","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narratives of the Body and Shame: Degrees of Invisibility/Visibility in Public Spaces","authors":"Vijaya Nagarajan","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.23","url":null,"abstract":"Narratives of the Body and ShameDegrees of Invisibility/Visibility in Public Spaces Vijaya Nagarajan1 (bio) It is the first day of classes, spring semester, in January 2022. I am on my way to work at my university.2 I am standing at an East Bay BART station, a part of the public transportation train system in the San Francisco Bay Area. This particular day, I notice, to my surprise, that my experience in these normative public spaces is entirely different from the semester before. Every time the train screams into the station, the hair bristles on the back of my neck, and rivulets of sweat run down my arms. I press my back hard against the concrete wall, just about nine feet away from the tracks. My feet, in my fastest running shoes, are ready to run in either direction. But the problem is, I do not know and cannot know exactly where my attacker will be coming from. I am afraid, in a way I have never been before. I have spent most of my life in the United States, though not all of it. I am an immigrant from India. I arrived as an eleven-year-old Tamil girl from New Delhi in 1972, fifty years—a half-century—ago. I never expected that I would face this kind of fear as a sixty-year-old woman in the United States. I somehow [End Page 127] imagined that by now, I would feel a deep sense of belonging here inside this landscape, this place I would easily call my own. The reason is, as a child, I had simply imagined a linear curve in the degrees of inclusion I would experience as I spent more and more time in the United States. But as we clearly know, popular movements of feminism and anti-feminism, racism and antiracism, and environmentalism and anti-environmentalism do not linearly construct themselves in the historical periodicities of time. Instead, the historical timelines of racism and antiracism movements, feminism and anti-feminism, and environmentalism and anti-environmentalism are nonlinear, so that they are shaped as much by anti-racism resistance movements and racism movements propelled by specific charismatic, popular figures and the politics, economics, and religions shaping both civic and personal lives. I hope that my eyes peering over my black pandemic mask do not reveal my terror. Normally, when I was waiting for a BART train, I would have a book to read for fun in my hands, my eyes absorbed, without any sense of danger. Or I would be looking at my cell phone, texting and catching up on digital life. Or I would start talking to the person next to me, also waiting in line. But I no longer feel I can do those things. I no longer have that freedom. I watch, though, how other folks on the platform can still do those things. That incident that happened a few days ago has only touched some of us in a way that has changed us, changed our behavior, changed our standing in the world. Instead, I watch, closely scanning the faces all around me, trying to guess which one might hate the color of my skin, or the shape of my eyes. I feel strangely dis","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Islamic Feminist Hermeneutics: Between Scholarship and Lived Realities","authors":"Mulki Al-Sharmani","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.15","url":null,"abstract":"Islamic Feminist HermeneuticsBetween Scholarship and Lived Realities Mulki Al-Sharmani (bio) One critique leveled at Islamic feminist scholarship is that it is divorced from the realities of lay Muslim women.1 But is it? If I ask a Muslim woman in rural Egypt or in Finland if she has heard of Saʾdiyya Shaikh's tafsīr of praxis or amina wadud's notion of tawḥīd as social praxis, the answer might be no.2 But there is another way to pose the question: Do the questions that Islamic feminist scholars bring to Islamic texts speak to ordinary women? Can we find similarities between the interpretive engagements of these scholars and lay women's pursuits of religious meanings? My answer would be yes. My research since 2013 comprises textual analyses of the works of Islamic feminist scholars, collaborative writings with some of these scholars, and ethnographic research on lay Muslim women in Finland and Egypt who are engaging with the Qurʾan and the interpretive tradition as they live their daily lives. I argue that both Islamic feminist scholars and the lay women I have studied are equally concerned with making sense of the Qurʾan's key theological and ethical teachings and see them as integral to informing Muslim gender norms. Both grapple with the text and appreciate its aesthetics, seeing the latter as part of its overall message of beauty and justice. [End Page 95] Two examples illustrate these connections. In her scholarly writings on Sūrat al-Raḥmān, Omaima Abou-Bakr foregrounds the affective experience of encountering the Qurʾan and shows how central qurʾanic principles such as moral beauty, justice, and harmony are highlighted through the aesthetics of the text and traced back to the Oneness of God who is the source of existence in its multiplicity and diversity. Nadia, a fifty-year-old divorced Egyptian woman, grapples with patriarchal interpretations that justify polygamy, domestic violence, and child marriage. She has not read any Islamic feminist scholarship or engaged in gender activism. She is a Muslim who believes the Qurʾan is divine and normative. I have been conducting life history interviews with Nadia over two years.3 She shares how in the past she read the Qurʾan without tadabbur (reflection), but now she reflects on what she reads. In one of our interviews, she describes her reading practice: \"I feel God is telling me about himself. I see the nature around me, and I read the sura [Sūrat al-Raḥmān], and I feel God. I feel God's power and justice. And it is so musical.\" While Nadia is not using the same conceptual language as Abou-Bakr, she captures the same understanding of qurʾanic ethos and affect. She is also making connections between what she sees and experiences around her (nature) and what she reads in the text. Life's trials such as losing a son to a car accident and an abusive marriage are also a lens through which she engages with the Qurʾan. Like Islamic feminist scholars, Nadia also reads Q 4:34 in light of her knowledge o","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Queer Muslim Piety: The Hijab Practices of LGBTQ Muslims in Boston","authors":"Magda Mohamed","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines how queer Muslim pieties are constructed through sartorial practices, specifically, wearing hijab, and what these pious subjectivities suggest about gender, piety, authority, and identity more broadly in the American Muslim community. In Muslim communities, hijab is imbued with heteronormative assumptions and is often thought about in terms of modesty relating to hetero male desire. Yet people who fall outside heteronormative paradigms also choose to cover, suggesting there are alternative meanings to lift up. Based on interviews with three queer Muslim women in Boston, the author found that through donning hijab, queer Muslim women mark degrees of intimacy and privacy with others, protest and resist normative forces within Muslim and LGBTQ cultures, and secure for themselves a gendered and visible Muslim identity, while simultaneously subverting gender norms. This article shows the creative ways Muslim women have negotiated religious and secular authorities to imagine new, playfully pious possibilities for themselves and the Muslim community.","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}