This session showcases four recently published books of significance for the study of women and gender in Islamic studies: Mulki Al-Sharmani, Islamic Feminism: Hermeneutics and Activism (2024); Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues (2024); KD Thompson, Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America (2023); Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza, Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur'an: A Patronage of Piety (2024). Scholars other than the books’ authors will offer short presentations that provide a summary of the book including the core arguments; identify and analyze the book's methodological and theoretical contributions and significance; formulate key questions the book raises, particularly regarding gendered authority, tradition, feminism, and decoloniality; and reflect on how the book advances the field and informs their own research. The presentations will be followed by a discussion of common themes, methodological and theoretical trends, and highlight other books published since 2019.
The paper discusses the book Islamic Feminism: Hermeneutics and Activism by Mulki Al-Sharmani published by Bloomsbury in 2024. The analysis highlights how the author combines textual analysis with anthropological research to provide a holistic understanding of a field that remains obscure to many. The book examines the epistemological and methodological contributions of nine prominent scholar activists and points to the value-added benefits of cross examining their works in conversation with one another. The discussion provides a critique of the main arguments and sheds light on the contribution this book makes to the study of women, gender, and Islam.
Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues (The Dial Press, 2023) is a landmark publication of key methodologicaland epistemological significance for the study of gender, sexuality, and women in Islamic studies. Lamya H carves out a space for ambivalent readings of the Qur’an, grounded in her experiences as a queer Muslim woman, rather than relying on academic or conventionally authoritative readings of the Qur’an to grant authority to her own knowledge of the Qur’an’s guidance. Therefore, Hijab Butch Blues merits study as a methodological intervention in knowledge production about the Qur’an which is significant for the study of gender, sexuality, and women in Islam – even if outside the category of books conventionally deemed academic or scholarly.
This presentation examines Katrina Daly Thompson's "Muslims on the Margins" (2023) and its theoretical framework of "discursive futurism" as a generative lens for understanding ethical aspirations among middle-class Muslim women in North India. Thompson's ethnography of queer Muslim communities reveals how marginalized Muslims actively create futures through embodied practices rather than merely envisioning them. I place this framework in conversation with my research on the triadic ethical labor—mushaqqat (struggle), sabr (patience), and khidmat (care)—that Muslim women in India employ to navigate between divine determination and agentive possibilities. Both studies illuminate decolonial approaches to Islamic knowledge production that challenge dominant narratives of Muslim women's agency. By examining how differently marginalized Muslims across transnational contexts employ ethical practices to construct alternative futures, this comparative analysis contributes to debates about gendered authority and embodied feminism.
Bauer and Hamza's Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur'an: A Patronage of Piety offers methodological innovation through its synthesis of intratextual Qur'anic studies with historical inquiry into gender and class-based social relations in late antiquity. The authors identify the paterfamilias figure as the addressee of many Qur'anic ethical imperatives—due to his accumulated social capital and not an inherent spiritual superiority. The Qur'an reconfigures his social authority to some degree by emphasizing female dignity and the rights of the poor and oppressed within the existing patronage structures of the period. The work advances feminist scholarship by emphasizing a Qur'anic vision in which social privilege demands greater moral accountability. By centering their analysis on Qur'anic moral imperatives, Bauer and Hamza highlight didactic aspects of Qur'anic discourse that have been deemphasized in the broader field of academic Qur'anic studies, a field that has focused on cross-religious convergences until recent decolonial Muslim scholarship has insisted on the novel contributions of the Qur'an to humanistic virtue ethics.