I was hired by 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 dates from 1976 when I joined Pakistan's Foreign Service, but from which I was fired in 1982 for having criticized General Zia ul Haq, who had become president through a military coup. I then worked as the assistant editor of The Muslim, an opposition paper, until 1983, when I left for graduate school in the U.S., where I was later granted political asylum.
Asma Barlas
Professor Emerita, Politics
School: School of Humanities and Sciences
Email: abarlas@ithaca.edu
Specialty: (Research Interests) Islamic/Muslim religious and intellectual history; Qur’anic hermeneutics; "Third World" Politics; Colonialism.
C.V. -
barlas.cv24 (pdf)
University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.
Much of my work engages with colonial, sexual/ textual, and epistemic politics and power. In my first book, I used Antonio Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and a passive revolution to explain the differing political trajectories of Pakistan and India after their independence from British colonial rule. In the next, I countered both canonical and secular/ feminist Muslim interpretations of the Qur'an as a patriarchal text by interpreting it in light of its conceptions of Divine incomparability and the fact that it doesn't propose a view of gender itself. Instead, it affirms that women and men proceed from a single "self," are equally God's subjects, and meant to be each other's guardians. I thus continue to argue for an ungendered Islamic theology and an ethics of mutual care between men and women. Following 9/11/01, I explored the West's millennium-long history of Othering Islam in my second Spinoza Lecture and popular writings. These also include a weekly column for the Muslim, op-eds in The Daily Times, Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, Open Democracy, and New Statesman, as well as poetry and short-stories.
Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore, Pakistan.
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 (in the U.K. by Saqi) along with A Brief Introduction, co-authored with David R. Finn. It has been translated into Bahasa Indonesian (2005), while derivative essays have appeared in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Dutch, German, French and Portuguese.
I have a Ph.D. (with distinction) in International Studies from the Graduate School of International Studies (now the Josef Korbel School), 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.
