Faculty

My scholarship is outside my disciplinary field of International Studies and mostly about different aspects of political/ religious/ epistemic power and violence.  In my first book, I drew on Antonio Gramsci's concept of a passive revolution to trace the militarism of Pakistan's politics and India's democracy to British colonial rule, which ended in 1947 with their independence. In the next, I countered readings of Islam’s scripture as male-privileging with a theological hermeneutics centered on the absence of gender in the Qur'an as a feature of both divine and human identities. This book, Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (University of Texas Press, 2002), was published in a revised second edition in 2019 (along with an introductory version co-authored with David R. Finn). It has since been published in Bahasa Indonesian (2005), Pakistan (Sama, 2004), and the U.K. (Saqi, 2019), while derivative essays have been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French and German.

In the wake of 9/ 11/ 2001, I critiqued the West's millennium-long recycling of pejorative images of Islam/Muslims, gesturing to the eternal return of the repressed, while more recently I've argued against secular/ feminist scholarship that disputes the Qur'an's sacrality in the name of feminist/ gender rights and justice.  Currently, I'm writing about why Islamic theology needs to be ungendered if it is to describe the God of the Qur'an and also why certain Qur'anic provisions about men's authority vis-à-vis women may be time- and culture- bound rather than timeless. Indeed, reading them as such aligns with the Qur'an's "ethics of responsiblization" (to rephrase Jacques Derrida) between women and men that emphasizes their mutual recognition and guardianship.