My scholarship focuses on various forms of political, epistemic and religious violence. In my first book, I drew on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a passive revolution to explain the history of militarism in Pakistan's politics, in contrast to India's democracy, a comparison that seemed warranted since both were part of "British India" until 1947, hence subjected to almost a century of colonial rule (Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The British Legacy in South Asia; Westview, 1995; Routledge, 2020). In the next, I critiqued patriarchal interpretations of Islam’s scripture, the Qur'an, that discriminate against women while also proposing a theological hermeneutics that takes seriously the Qur'an's claim that God is beyond sex/ gender as well as the fact that missing from the Qur'an is a view of gender; this allows me to re-read the verses Muslims take as establishing male superiority over women (Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an, University of Texas Press, 2002; 2019; U.K., Saqi, 2019; and, Believing Women: A Brief Introduction, co-authored with David R. Finn, UTP, 2019). A lot of my post 9/ 11/ 2001 work details the West's millennium-long recycling of pejorative images of Islam and Muslims which suggests the eternal return of the repressed (Islam, Muslims and the U.S., India, Global Media, 2004; Re-understanding Islam: A Double Critique, Netherlands, Van Gorcum, 2008). More recent essays identify the problems with secular/ feminist approaches to the Qur'an that dispute its sacrality in the name of feminist justice and women's rights (Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; and Philosophy and Social Criticism). Currently, I'm writing about why provisions in the Qur'an about men's authority vis-à-vis women can be read historically and why doing so is more congruent with its “ethics of responsibilization” (to rephrase Jacques Derrida) that emphasizes their mutual recognition and guardianship.
