My work is mostly about configurations of power and violence, specifically, colonial, sexual/ textual, and epistemic. In my first book, I trace the effects of British colonialism on post-independence politics in Pakistan and India, while in the next I counter readings of Islam’s scripture, the Qur'an, that discriminate against women, with a liberatory hermeneutics that draws on its accounts of God as beyond sex/ gender and its indifference to gender itself. Following 9/ 11/ 2001, I focused on the West's pejorative images of Islam and Muslims and, more recently, on secular/ feminist Muslim scholarship that disputes the Qur'an's sacrality in the name of women's rights and feminist justice.
Currently, I'm exploring the concept of an ungendered Islamic theology and reading some allusions to men's and women's roles in the Qur'an as time/ culture-bound as a way to recuperate its more universalistic "ethics of responsiblization" (to rephrase Jacques Derrida) and mutual guardianship between women and men.
Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (University of Texas Press, 2002), has been translated into Bahasa Indonesia (2005), while derivative essays have appeared in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Dutch, German, French and Portuguese. A revised second edition was published in 2019 (in the U.K., by Saqi), along with a brief introduction, co-authored with David R. Finn.