I joined the Politics department in 1991 and retired from it in 2020. For half this time, I served as the (founding) Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and, in Spring 2008, also held the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. However, my career path began in 1976 with my recruitment into Pakistan's Foreign Service (Diplomatic Corps), from which I was fired six years later on General Zia ul Haq's orders for having criticized him. I then worked briefly as an assistant editor of The Muslim, an opposition paper, before leaving for graduate school in the U.S. in 1983, where I was later granted political asylum. My degrees include a Ph.D. (with distinction) in International Studies from the University of Denver, U.S., an M.A. (first position) in Journalism from the University of the Punjab, Pakistan, and a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy from Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan.
Asma Barlas
Career trajectories & Academic degrees
Scholarly & Other writings
University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.
Most of my scholarship is about configurations of colonial, sexual/ textual, and epistemic politics and power. My first book drew on Antonio Gramsci's concept of a passive revolution to explain the contrasting political trajectories of Pakistan and India after their independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The next contested traditional and secular/ feminist readings of Islam's scripture, the Qur'an, as innately male-privileging while also proposing an anti-patriarchal Qur'anic hermeneutics grounded in an ungendered Islamic theology. I continue to advocate this approach in essays and talks as well. Finally, in the wake of 9/11/01, I detailed the West's millennium-long history of Othering Islam in both academic and popular writings. The latter also include weekly columns in The Muslim and The Daily Times (Pakistan), along with poetry and short-stories in Pakistani magazines, and op-eds in Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, Open Democracy, and the New Statesman.
Believing Women in Islam : Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (University of Texas Press, 2002) has been translated into Bahasa Indonesian (2005), while derivative essays have appeared in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Dutch, German, French and Portuguese. A revised edition was published in 2019 (in the U.K. by Saqi) along with A Brief Introduction, co-authored with David R. Finn.