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

The United States’ superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of th ...  عرض المزيد

Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalized work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region ...  عرض المزيد

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 ...  عرض المزيد

The theme for season 5 is gender and sexuality in Islam. In our first episode we provide the framework for understanding gender, sex, and sexuality in the Islamic world. We discuss three influences on the framework: cultural beliefs, the Qur’an, and the philosophical tradition of ...  عرض المزيد

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 ...  عرض المزيد

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 ...  عرض المزيد