In part because of my political interest in violence and in part because of some of my personal experiences as well as a Eurocentric education, I've written mostly about aspects of colonial, sexual, religious and epistemic violence. In my first book, I trace the imprints of British colonial rule on state, class, and politics in post-independence Pakistan and India by drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a passive revolution (Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The British Legacy in South Asia; Westview, 1995; Routledge, 2020). In the next, I counter patriarchal readings of Islam’s scripture that justify women's oppression with a theological hermeneutics grounded in the Qur'an's depictions of God as beyond sex/ gender (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). Many post 9/ 11/ 2001 writings detail the West's millennium-old recycling of pejorative images of Islam/ Muslims, gesturing to 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). Over the past few years, I've questioned third-wave Muslim feminist attempts to dispute the Qur'an's sacrality in the name of feminist justice and women's rights (Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; and Philosophy and Social Criticism). Currently, I am writing about Qur’anic provisions that most most Muslims treat as giving men universal rights vis-à-vis women with a view to demonstrating that these can be read as being historically contingent. Doing so, in fact, allows one to recuperate an “ethics of responsibilization” (to rephrase Jacques Derrida) between women and men that is in more in line with the Qur'anic notion of their mutual guardianship than imputing sex/ gender bias to the text.
