Sa’diyya Shaikh, “Sufi Narratives of Intimacy...

What explains the rise of religious populism in contemporary Turkish politics and society? How does industrialization help to explain change and continuity in social and religious life in Muslim majority countries? In his new book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements ...  Show more

Helen Haas speaks with political scientist Sean Lee about the changing relationship between majorities and minorities in the Middle East, the collapse of the post-October 2023 regional order, and why questions of citizenship, identity, and political power remain at the centre of ...  Show more

Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University ...  Show more

Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza's co-written book An Anthology of Qur’anic Commentaries (vol. 2): On Women (Oxford UP, 2022) is a collection of historical and contemporary commentaries on the Qur’an. It covers five issues: human creation and the idea of “a single soul”; marital roles ...  Show more

Continuing our exploration of gender and sexuality in Islamic history we turn to the figure of the mukhannathun, a third gender category in early Islam. We trace ideas of gender as a fluid spectrum through the lives of these individuals examining their existence in the life of Mu ...  Show more

Building upon our exploration of gender in Islamic history we dive into the topic of gender bending and how it can help us see gender as socially constructed, historically contingent, and contextual. We explore multiple figures throughout Islamic history from the ghulamiyya to th ...  Show more