In my last post, I addressed the deeply personal accounts of Haroon Moghul’s self- and religious exploration in his memoir How to be a Muslim: An American Story. This post will broaden that reading to consider an October 2017 interview… Read More ›
Muslim
Reconstructions of the Past 8: Hafsa bint Sirin (My Story of Her Life 3) by Laury Silvers
As discussed in earlier blogs, the sources tend to paint pious women as recluses for any number of reasons. No matter the intention, the message transmitted over time–in so many ways–is that pious women should restrict their social lives, especially… Read More ›
Reconstructions of the Past 5: Hafsa bint Sirin (“Women’s Withdrawal in the Literature”) by Laury Silvers
As I mentioned in the last entry, the textual idealization of women’s pious withdrawal extends to secluding women from public exposure in the texts themselves. Sufi and pious women were mentioned in very early sources, then dropped almost in their… Read More ›
Reconstructions of the Past 2: Hafsa bint Sirin (“Women’s Mosque Attendance”) by Laury Silvers
There is significant historical scholarship demonstrating that women’s public lives were coming under increasing restriction during the first few hundred years of Islam. Despite the differing modes of analyses and conclusions of such scholarship, there seems to be agreement that… Read More ›
The Religion of My Rape by Jennifer Zobair
Whenever the epidemic of rape in Egypt makes the news, I am destined to think of Joyce Carol Oates. Last summer, the author took to twitter to question whether Islam was responsible for the widespread incidence of sexual assault in… Read More ›
Response to “The Islamic Solution to Stop Domestic Violence” by Samar Esapzai, Shireen Ahmed, Vanessa D. Rivera, Ayesha Asghar, and Hyshyama Hamin
This article is in response to a post by Qasim Rashid of the Muslim Writers Guild of America titled, “The Islamic Solution to Stop Domestic Violence” published in the Huffington Post‘s Religion Blog on March 5th, 2012. Although this post… Read More ›
(Non-Human) Animals on the Agenda by Grace Yia-Hei Kao
“[E]thical interest in nonhuman animals is flourishing.” To my delight, the New York Times recently chronicled the growing scholarly interest in human/non-human animal interactions in a story entitled “Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall.” There are now more than 100… Read More ›
