Call for Papers: Muslim Women and the Challenge of Authority

A conference to be held at Boston University, March 31, 2012 

“The gender jihad is a struggle to establish gender justice in Muslim thought and praxis. At the simplest level, gender justice is gender mainstreaming – the inclusion of women in all aspects of Muslim practice, performance, policy construction, and in both political and religious leadership” Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad

Scholarship on female religious authority in Islam dates back at least to the 1970s and has gone through  several important phases. For two decades, most scholarship focused on demonstrating Muslim women’s poor social status and sought to locate the source of women’s oppression within religious doctrine. By the 1990s scholarship had turned to locate an egalitarian impulse within Islam that had been thwarted by the pressures of its patriarchal contexts. Over the next decade, female authored studies of the Qur’an claimed  an unimpeachable basis for female rights by holding up the Qur’anic ideal of equality as a standard by  which to judge social realities. More recently, scholars have sought to complicate the view of Muslim women’s unrelenting oppression. They have worked instead to recover evidence of past and present  female resistance and agency, demonstrating that Muslim women are carving out spheres of interpretive autonomy and successfully negotiating their public and private lives within the constraints of broader social structures.  This conference builds on the foundation of the foregoing work and aims to bring together considerations of religious, social, and interpretive authority across geographical and temporal boundaries. Continue reading Muslim Women and the Challenge of Authority →