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  {
    "file": "kecia/Divorce and Slavery in Islam_ Summary of Dr_ Kecia_tbrTZD5XPYg&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748697670.opus",
    "text": [
      "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.",
      "Today we're continuing our discussion of Keisha Ali's classic Sexual Ethics and Islam, Feminist Reflections on the Quran, Hadith, and Jurisprudence. This is the 2016 edition. The book was originally published in 2006. I recommend the 2016 Edition it's more revised and more expanded and updated. You'll recall of course that I promised to do a few episodes or several episodes on this book instead of just one like i've been doing for the last",
      "So in the last episode, we talked about the main points of the book, the introduction and chapter one which was on all things marriage. In this episode, We're going to cover Chapter two, which is on divorce and Chapter three, which Is on slave concubinage or sexual slavery or just the idea of a man being allowed to sleep with A woman that he is enslaving formerly known as his female slave quote unquote but we don't use that language anymore That's inappropriate now for chapter two again on divorce",
      "In this chapter, the author highlights the inequities of divorce laws in fiqh and how these inequities are part-and-parcel of the whole system of marriage that classical and historical Muslim jurists designed. We read about many different kinds of divorce that the fiqhh allows Muslims. There's talaq which is a unilateral type of divorce conveniently available to men only for whatever reasons whenever he feels like it.",
      "which is a type of divorce that is available to women only, Fasq or judicial divorce, which is also available to woman only and a divorce that a woman can initiate based on the conditions of her marriage contract. Now let's begin with one of the most ridiculous types of divorces, which are triple talaq when a husband says I divorce you three whole times and voila! The wife is divorced just like that. And BT dubs? You know how they say",
      "are so logical, which apparently is the opposite of emotional. Yeah, that's said by literally the same exact folks who invented the idea of a triple talaq, which allows a man again to divorce a woman for whatever reason he wants in a whim just like that and triple talaaq is absolute meaning the husband can't take it back during the iddah or the waiting period",
      "considered makrooh, not haram. So it's disliked or reprehensible or something that you shouldn't do but it's not haraam. This is only the Sunni view. For Shia jurists all divorces require witnesses so no divorce is valid without a witness and only one pronouncement of divorce is at a time. So therefore triple talaaq in Shia fiqh",
      "ask questions like can i divorce my wife over muslim men are starting to ask questions. like can I divorce my Wife over a text message or is my divorce valid if I do it via a text? Let me answer that question for you, if it is unethical it is objectively un-Islamic so no not Islamically valid. I don't care what the patriarchy tells you",
      "It cannot possibly ever be okay with God. Folks, we have got to revise our understanding of Islam so that we can say with a straight face that something is unethical and still view it as Islamically acceptable. That's not Islam! That's patriarchy! That you! Okay, so of course Islam does recognize divorce as a necessary thing that exists. Not as a necessarily evil by the way. That really really important. Divorce is not an evil thing in Islam. The Quran explicitly permits it.",
      "Islamic sources recommend reconciliation whenever possible and more appropriate, but divorce is an option that is available to everybody, to all Muslims. And do not trust people who say it's not encouraged or that it's again unnecessary evil because as Professor Asifa Qureshi-Landes shared in a Facebook post a couple of years ago, it's NOT khulaa or a woman's divorce that is discouraged by talaaq which is a man's divorce.",
      "nature of talaq. Because you see, the English word divorce isn't a good equivalent for the Arabic word talaaq because in the fiqh, not in the Quran but in the Fiqh Talaaq is very specifically the husband's choice to end the marriage and the husband can do it whenever he wants to regardless of his reasons again because the patriarchy allows men to act on their emotions and the wife gets absolutely no say in it when a man talaques his wife she gets to keep her mahr",
      "to at the time of her marriage. Theoretically, she gets this. She doesn't always get this. We talked about this in the last episode, the connection between mahar and divorce and marriage. Hopefully you remember. But the patriarchal logic is that mahar is a price that a man pays his wife for sexual access to her, for having sexual access",
      "she has to return the mahar that's the important connection but she doesn't always have to give her her mahar back in every divorce another type of divorce is a judicial divorce which is more preferable than hula because the wife gets to keep her mahr this way the wife can dissolve the marriage through the court so she has involved a judge in this if she has what are considered legitimate reasons again legitimate according",
      "Whereas the fiqh, again conveniently, allows men to divorce for whatever reasons at any time. The women can divorce only under certain reasonable conditions. Reasonable according to whom? You guessed it, according to the patriarchy. So something like not liking your husband doesn't count according to fiqhh, not according to Islam. Which explicitly contradicts a hadith on divorce, one of the many hadiths we have on divorce in which the Prophet Muhammad",
      "does allow a woman to divorce her husband whom she recognizes is a good person, a person of good character and everything but she just isn't attracted to him. And so he tells her okay you're divorced just give him back what he gave you for mahar. The fiqh however says no no no you can't just divorce someone just because you don't like him. These reasons vary from school to school though and this is really important. So for some schools for something like the husband not providing",
      "abuse is legitimate grounds sexual impotence is legitimate ground imprisonment or disappearance the husband's imprisonment of his appearance is another ground but the Hanafi school is interestingly the most restrictive when it comes to divorce if the marriage has been consummated according to the Hanafif then the wife has almost no legitimate reasons to get a divorce not abused, not life imprisonment",
      "care of her, not providing for her. Nothing that the other even this sometimes seemingly strictest schools like Hanbali considered legitimate reasons. It is so ridiculous folks that if her husband goes missing or goes to jail she would have according to the Hanafi fiqh she would wait until he would either die naturally or until he is 100 and or until",
      "is irrational like that you understand the author finds that the maliki law maliki fiqh offers the most generous grounds for divorce for women including non-support so the husband not taking care of not supporting his wife abandonment and injury not abuse but injury physical or otherwise khula again one of the divorces initiated by a woman by",
      "return the mahar in this case it is considered absolute by almost all the jurists meaning the husband cannot take her back or they cannot get back together during her waiting period. In another type of divorce a wife can divorce her husband because she has stipulated in her marriage contract that if x happens whatever that x is that they agreed upon in their marriage contract then they will be divorced automatically. In this case you do not have to involve",
      "kinds of stipulations, these conditions that we can put in our marriage contracts. They are not the solution to the inequities in divorce laws and fiqh, and they certainly don't restrict the husband's right to a unilateral divorce. The assumption, the default remains that the husband can do any of this stuff anytime he wants. He can still get a divorce anytime he want but for the wife to do it she has to put it into her marriage contract. That is not a privilege. Why do I have to say it in my marriage contract?",
      "my husband also has a right to and it should not be unilateral for anyone. Unilateral anything should be completely prohibited because that's exploitation of a person's vulnerability in too many cases but the author is very careful to note here as she always is, that while these theoretical ideas, these rulings at all can seem very bleak from Muslim wives they're not necessarily reflective",
      "for example that these rules are flexible or very flexible in practice and some research even suggests actually that they were perhaps more flexible in the past judges and courts were much more flexible when it came to women seeking divorce than they are today but of course understandably that varies that reality varies from place to place and situation to situation and context to context oh and fun fact did you know that abu khanifa said that a woman should",
      "woman should and may, Islamically speaking, kill her husband if the husband continues to seek sexual access to her once they have divorced. She shouldn't kill him aggressively or using a murder weapon though because hello that's not feminine but she can use poison or drugs or something else something more feminine less you know less aggressive now you'll recall from our previous episode on this book",
      "one of the main points of the book is that so many of the rulings on marriage and sex and divorce and family in fiqh, not necessarily in Islam, do not apply to contemporary Muslims. You normally expect religion to provide you with ideals that you can work toward but if these, if the stuff that's in fi'q are our ideals then God help us all. Many Muslim countries have sort of acknowledged this",
      "and marriage, divorce, etc. They have responded to it in different ways using the language of reform. In this chapter, the author discusses current prospects for reform, the ways that Muslim majority countries have attempted to modify these ideas. For example, some have tried to completely illegalize triple talaq or require a court intervene in divorce cases",
      "legitimate reasons to divorce their wife, or not requiring the husband's consent for something like khula if the wife returns her mahr herself. But the author notes that these are all methods that only attempt to curb men's impulsive and extrajudicial use or abuse of talaq. They don't address the root cause of the problem. So, for example, these reform efforts still treat these privileges, like male-initiated tala'q as Islamically legitimate.",
      "that the man has this right to begin with, and they're not working to get rid of the connection between marriage and ownership. And the fact that with some exceptions, the wife has to return the mahar in order to initiate a divorce is also an obstacle for women. All right, so that's chapter two. And now we're gonna talk about chapter three, which is on sexual concubinage or concubination sexual slavery. So in this chapter, we learn a lot of disturbing stuff",
      "a lot of other stuff like the rules of concubinage. Oh, a concubine is a woman that a man gets to sleep with or rape because enslaved people are not entitled to consent in sexual relations without marrying her. Now, a concovines primary role is sexual but the men according to fiqh is also entitled to sexual access to any women that he quote unquote owns",
      "Enslaved women generally weren't the same as concubines. Not every enslaved woman was a concubine, and concubins were given extra privileges that other enslaved people were not given like better food, better clothing, and sometimes not having to do any household labor at all. Yeah so much for the whole no sex before marriage or no sex with anybody you're not married to crap that is shoved down women's throats all the time. In the fiqh",
      "concubines as well as to have sex with as many women that he wants to whom he has enslaved in addition to up to four whole wives and folks the scholar's evidence for allowing men to have as many concubins as he wanted that the quran doesn't limit this number yeah that's their evidence and side note when muslim feminists today use a lack of quranic prohibition on something or",
      "on something or a Quran, a specific claim in the Quran for something and then we argue that therefore this should be allowed because the Quran doesn't prohibit it. We are laughed at because apparently that means that we don't know Islam. Do you see how patriarchy gaslights and manipulates women? On the one hand, the Quran's supposed silence on the number of concubines a man is entitled to means that a man can have as many as he wants to but on",
      "conscious Muslims say, oh the Quran is silent on this issue so maybe that silence is permission. The patriarchy says no no no, silence in that case means prohibition. What I never understood here is why there's even a limit on polygyny at all then? Because really ethically speaking there's absolutely",
      "since I want more than four wives and I can't have them, I'm gonna go and have 86 concubines instead. And I get that a part of the answer here is that the status of the wife and the concubine or the enslaved woman is not the same. I get it. But my question is not simply about permission but about ethics here. How ethical and unethical is any of this? If limiting polygamy was supposedly a question of ethics what's happening with concubinage?",
      "who legitimately claimed that it was disbelief, it was kufr if a dude wanted to marry four women and a thousand concubines and someone dared to criticize him for doing so. The critic according to these dude scholars is the one committing kufar not the person marrying four wives or having thousands of concubins just for pointing out to the sexual exploiter that you can't be doing shit like this man",
      "like this man, the Quranic verses granting a person sexual access to the person that they have enslaved are not gendered. But given that men like to pretend that they are the ultimate audience of the Quran, they did decide that God is talking only to them. Oh but actually there's a very powerful anecdote that Kisha Ali talks about in her other book on marriage called Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam where a woman does argue",
      "to sleep with the men that she's enslaving. And Omar, the Khalifa Omar is like yeah something must be wrong with you mentally if you think this is allowed to you. Now the ways that Muslim jurists in the past or historical Muslims talked about slavery or sexual relations with enslaved people isn't something too unusual since slavery was historically common and officially illegalized only very recently. Viewing women and girls as sexual commodities",
      "not treated as a condemnable thing in the past. By enslavers though, because enslaved people did find it condemnable. But also the fiqh idea of ملك اليمين or ownership by the right hand comes from the Quranic ما ملقت أيمانكم Some contemporary Muslims like to pretend that this never happened and that a man could only sleep with his slave women if he married them first but this isn't",
      "I have even heard some contemporary dude scholars explaining it as, well why would he marry her since he purchased her and that serves as a mahr essentially. In other words through mahar, through the daur, a man buys his wife just like a man buy's a woman that he will enslave and will have sexual access to by paying another person.",
      "or Maharad Dower and the purchase price isn't unusual for pre-modern fiqh, and we talked about this in a previous episode. But when contemporary Muslims or contemporary Muslim preachers use this argument it is especially disturbing. The Prophet Muhammad had at least two concubines, Marya Qibdiya or Mary of the Copt being the more famous one although some Muslims today think that",
      "think that's not the case, that never happened. Humans of the weird human species just like to rewrite history like that. Oh also did you know that some Muslims were legitimately not cool with abolishing slavery which is why it took a really long time in certain Muslim majority countries because how dare we forbid something that God did not explicitly forbid? And the arguments",
      "are so similar to those in Christian context that it's almost as if it has nothing to do with God or religion or scripture but with people's egos and privileges. Muslims in fiqh are prohibited from enslaving other Muslims, but what is interesting here is that conversion to Islam did not grant one freedom. I can't imagine what kind of a world we would be living",
      "if conversion to Islam meant freedom from slavery. You see, the scholars had this option. They could make this a ruling. They would have decided that conversion to islam meant freedom form slavery. I mean it would've been so easy and greedy people who want more converts to their religion would've gotten what they wanted, a higher number of followers of their religion and slavery would eventually end much faster than the way that it did in reality. But then again",
      "But then again, if that were the case, if we didn't have slavery anymore who would feed the greed of the dudes who benefited from slavery? The author here points out that the Quran does acknowledge slavery as a reality and also offers several ways for freeing enslaved people. For example, freeing a slave is required as expiation for certain sins which suggests that the Qur'an does not expect a person's status as enslaved to remain permanent and it expects it to change.",
      "also that the Qur'an doesn't seem to think slavery is just. Now, theoretically there were certain rules in place for how one was supposed to treat their people they were enslaving. So for instance, fiqh tells us if you mistreat a person who you are enslaving then they would be freed with no compensation to you as an enslaver. Slaves were entitled to marriage and could marry off by their enslavers. An enslavery could not simultaneously enslave a woman who was his wife. If an enslaviour slept",
      "his female slaves then any children born from that were to be free and were considered legitimate children of the mother's enslaver, of the master. And these children theoretically had the same status as any free children born to the man's wives. And the woman could no longer be sold to anyone else and upon the death of her enslavers she was automatically freed. She and her kids were both automatically freed",
      "like the specific details I just gave, to claim that see Islamic slavery was so much better than say American slavery and that's why it's not haram. If done right, it's no haram, it is not immoral. But this kind of apologetic is not okay because it totally misses the point! The author also in this chapter talks about some of the different ways that contemporary Muslims today deal with you know this problematic part of our past. So for example,",
      "Some Muslims completely deny that slavery ever happened or that slavery was ever allowed in Islam, or that the Fuqaha ever allowed it and so on. Others talk about slavery as if it is not abolished, as if its still happening and acceptable morally. And then there are those who explain it and justify it defensively and apologetically. So for example they might say that when God gives permission for sleeping with enslaved people,",
      "The author points out that these apologetics aren't sufficient for internal Muslim reflection and in my opinion, not in the author's opinion necessarily it's total crap. Because why do you have to enslave someone, the captives, to ensure they're integrated into society? Why do you sleep with them to ensure that?",
      "contemporary slash modern views or these modern questions or rationales that we provide for slavery are in clash with historical Islamic ideas. Do we accept these past ideals and ideas as Islamically acceptable just because they happened? Just because that was the norm for a certain class of people in the past from the enslaver's perspective? What are the implications of the Prophet Muhammad sallalahu alayhi wa sallam and his companions practice of capturing",
      "the women and giving permission to men, to capturers, to essentially rape the captured women? What are the implications of all this for contemporary Muslims? Is it binding because Prophet Muhammad permitted it or did it himself like say having a concubine? Or can we reject it today? If it is not binding today for today's Muslims because times and contexts are different what does that mean about what else were allowed to disagree with past Muslim scholars",
      "Muslim scholars on just because today our standards, our ideals are different from theirs. Because you see it affects the ways that we define the word sunnah or think of the Prophet Muhammad as a model for Muslims, for all Muslims everywhere at all times but clearly with exceptions and that it turns out sometimes means revising his life to fit our own contemporary ideals so",
      "Islam, onto the Qur'an, onto Prophet Muhammad, things that are important to us. So the chapter like all the others also points out that like the other topics discussed in this book marriage divorce same-sex relations and so on in the discussion on slavery the main problem at hand seldom gets serious critical consideration people talk around it",
      "Quran, Sunnahs and Fiqh's acceptance of slavery as a legitimate thing. The fact that none of these sources ever really explicitly condemned slavery including concubinage. And the remnants of the legal practices of slavery universally continue to haunt us especially in the context of gender relations. This scriptural acceptance poses problems for us even as most of us today condemn slavery.",
      "ways for us to think about these issues. And for Muslims who want to use Islamic arguments against slavery, here are two. The Quran implicitly does seek to abolish slavery and the men of fiqh didn't interpret these verses as calling for abolition because of their implicit biases we all have them and I would also argue explicit biases of theirs. There are reasons to believe that",
      "and the enslaved if we look at certain verses carefully. And I discussed some of those in my dissertation, in my chapter on sexual slavery. Slavery was also never intended or designed as a permanent reality, and this is clear from the way that the Qur'an talks about slavery. It's possible that the Prophet Muhammad didn't directly or explicitly abolish it even though he had the choice or the opportunities to yes because of the limitations",
      "mission to spread Islam. Fatima Mernissi, in the episode that you recall we did on her book The Veil and the Male Elite, discusses the restrictions that Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam faced as a prophet when it came to gender relations or when it for the most part the obstacles that he had to overcome were mostly powerful elite insecure men some of whom unfortunately are given the title of sahaba companions these arguments do have valid points",
      "acknowledges but they're not sufficient and certainly don't answer the question where is god's justice in permitting an injustice like slavery if slavery was indeed an injustice and the quran talks about it like it is an injustice. And the author is very clear about the purpose of raising these questions and having this whole discussion, they are relevant to larger issues of ethics again the title of the whole book is sexual ethics and Islam",
      "ethics and Islam. She asks, and I quote, how can one reconcile God's justice and goodness with the injustice of slavery? Or does viewing God as just and good necessitate acceptance of slavery as part of the divine plan for humanity? I don't have the page number for this. Oops. All right. I am all fired up and I have to go to my Taekwondo class. So I will",
      "Stay feminist and stay kind. Salaam!"
    ]
  },
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    "file": "kecia/Dr_ Kecia Ali - Muslim Scholars_ Islamic Studies_ _ai5XF-bP3KE&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748698591.opus",
    "text": [
      "Thank you very much. Does this sound okay? In 2005, when my first book was forthcoming I was invited to speak about gender and Qur'an interpretation at Loyola in Chicago by AAR member Marcia Hermanson During the Q&A session a man in the audience",
      "a community member unaffiliated with the university, spoke up. He objected to my feminist approach. Did I know about William Chittick's book The Tao of Islam? I heard the objections which makes an argument for Islam's balanced treatment of the masculine and feminine. In my response I first explained that I found the books argument provocative",
      "And then I pointed out that as the cover clearly states, the book was not written by Chittick at all but rather by Sachiko Murata. Chittik is her husband. This was not acceptable to audience guy who could not let it go and clarified that they both wrote it. Now the term mansplaining was not yet in circulation but this seems like a pretty clear illustration of it.",
      "I am not going to devote my entire 40-minute talk tonight to unpacking the sexist assumptions embedded in this audience member's attribution of the work of a woman scholar of color to her white husband or his attempt to put me in my place. By approaching Islam from a Western perspective, he suggested, he believed I was imposing inauthentic views. There were complicated dynamics at play",
      "white Muslim academic doing engaged scholarship, challenged by a non-white Muslim community member citing though erroneously another academic scholarship in the university space. Tonight's gathering is also a hybrid though with more food and the IIIT is an academia adjacent religiously grounded organization",
      "of reforming Islamic thought. And the scholars after whom this lecture is named, Lois and Ismael Farooqi about whom I will say more in a little while also had hybrid careers roots in academia and also in political and social organizations as you already heard Ismail Farooq was a founder and chair of the study of Islam group here at AAR which",
      "Some of you are probably more familiar than others with the history of AAR, so I just want to say a few brief words about it which are germane to the larger questions I'm raising here tonight. The AAR itself has deep roots in Protestant religiosity. It was founded in 1909 as an organization for biblical instructors and even bore the acronym NABEE for decades before adopting its current name",
      "It's been AAR since the 1960s, and that name change was the fruit of internal debates over the proper approaches to the study of religion which continue to reverberate throughout the organization in the academy. The AAR is a big tent this is a phrase I hear at my board meetings but should it be? Do theological",
      "alongside critical and analytical approaches to the study of religion. And even the framing of those as separate is itself a decisive move. These questions about the appropriateness of scholarship grounded in confessional, as well as other moral and political commitments, of course affect those of us who study Islam and Muslims whether Muslim or not. Islamic studies is a contested and fluid field at the intersections",
      "philology and textual studies, and religious studies. And it's also a microcosm of broader debates around professional formation, exclusionary and discriminatory practices, and what constitutes serious and legitimate scholarship. I'm going to talk about all of these things but i want to spend a moment first saying something specific about the question of commitments. This year 2017",
      "commitments, religious and otherwise seems heightened. A sense of imminent threat permeates many of our institutions, our communities, and our nation. Existing problems these are not new problems but existing problems seem to have intensified and existing dynamics seem to accelerate it. Inside academia we have a crisis of adjunctification you've seen the signs if you've been wandering the halls only about a quarter",
      "tenure line positions. We have soaring publication expectations, at the same time we witness the decline of humanities research funding and even in some cases the demise of university presses. There are hopeful glimmers like the rise of open access peer-reviewed publications but those are counterbalanced by new challenges to tenure, the systematic plundering of public education not to mention",
      "for women in the academy. In our local and national spaces, we have what Juliana Hammer has called gendered Islamophobia. We also have racialized discrimination against Muslims alongside an overlapping with anti-black racism, also gendered. We've the Muslim ban. We have continued American military interventions overseas. You have a never ending war on terror.",
      "if I glossed over the seemingly unending stream of credible public accusations of powerful men, of all political persuasions in all professions including Muslim scholars and community leaders and academics for sexual harassment abuse assault and rape. These larger issues and contexts matter but i want to ground my remarks firmly",
      "within the AAR. So as my colleague alluded to in the introduction, I've been at AAR a lot. I've attended AAR for nearly two decades. I came to my first conference in 1999 coincidentally here in Boston and the rise in terms of the number of people studying Islam at the Aar in that time has",
      "program unit to six, from dozens of scholars who attend regularly to hundreds. And although there are no firm statistics I think those of us who have been here a while also perceive an increase in the proportion of scholars come from Muslim backgrounds and or are practicing Muslims. With this demographic shift questions about insiders and outsiders emerge more frequently.",
      "Is study of Islam at AAR a place where inappropriately constructive Islamic theological work is being done? Is the program unit being run by a cabal of progressive Muslims with activist agendas, as some charged a dozen years ago? The opposition there, by the way, came both from those concerned with the need for safely critical distant religious studies approaches and from Muslims uncomfortable",
      "of the individuals involved? Or perhaps, as been asked more recently, are there just simply too many Muslims involved for there to be good old-fashioned objective scholarship? And this is not I would say a question that's often raised about our colleagues in Jewish studies. Though they're of course the question of what it means to be a Jewish scholar operating in the academy continues",
      "about the relationship between religious commitments and scholarly practice. In Islamic studies, this issue has recently been engaged both more and less productively and thoughtfully in panels, in Q&A sessions, and in journal forums. When framed most usefully these interrogations consider not only religious identity but also scholars' implicit biases",
      "including non-religious beliefs, their political and ethical commitments as well as the positions from which they do their scholarship. Included in that question of political and ethic commitments might be for instance seeking racial justice or ending domestic violence or opposing persecution of religious minorities. Outside of the natural sciences at least,",
      "Women scholars, feminist scholars, especially black women and other women of color were essential to poking holes in the myth of a morally neutral observer positioned nowhere and with no stakes in any potential outcome. There's always power at play. And power is an essential element in my primary topic this evening which is about gender in the academy. That's my not very deft segue.",
      "from the observation that sexism thrives in academia. Women make up more than half of contingent faculty, in positions that are typically insecure and poorly paid. They're less well represented at the other end of the spectrum. There's discrimination in hiring for tenure track jobs, in getting tenure in those jobs especially for scholars of color. There are often delays or rejections when seeking promotion.",
      "found discrimination at every stage in every sort of department, in every institution. Discrimination in peer reviews when they're not doubly anonymized. Women receive fewer grants and substantially more harassment especially online. More service, especially burdensome and not very prestigious service is assigned to female faculty. All male panels are shockingly frequent as are all or mostly male anthologies",
      "Pay disparities persist at all levels. This study recently that I found the most galling, absolutely the most calling was the one showing that when a tenure clock stoppage for parenthood, for new parents was offered it was the male faculty who took it who ultimately benefited and had no discernible outcome for female faculty. So despite all of this academia has a reputation as a bastion liberal values",
      "or feminists and other impractically utopian social justice advocates. In reality, the academy remains thoroughly although unevenly sexist as well as racist, ableist, transphobic, homophobic, and the list could continue. Women in Islamic studies are not by any stretch of the imagination a monolithic group but we confront challenges related both to who we are",
      "The academy can be a potential haven for Muslim women scholars, sometimes frustrated and marginalized in patriarchal community spaces. However, as Aisha Chowdhury recently pointed out in her critical historiography of Islamic legal studies, the pitfalls are myriad. In my experience, those who investigate the Islamic intellectual tradition,",
      "sufficient traditional credentials. Those engaged in constructive projects investigating Muslim history and Islamic tradition partly in the service of more flexible feminist readings also garner objections. Opponents include, again, those committed to a critical objective stance in religious studies and also from philological text-centric approaches in Near Eastern studies. You just can't win.",
      "Now, secular feminists inside and outside academia including some who also identify as Muslim may also consider any attempt to engage the Muslim tradition constructively as wrong-headed apologetics. Muslim women's studies in the Western Academy I'm not finished with a list of criticisms yet has also been and I think rightly criticized by scholars and thinkers including Fatma Sidet and Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente",
      "Fuente, for failing to engage or as treating only as a primary source for their analysis the work of Muslim women writing in other languages and or living in the global south. In failing to these scholars and practitioners on their own terms, these critics argue again I think correctly that Western scholars replicate colonial power structures those",
      "who wish to collaborate with or cite such thinkers, however confront a variety of obstacles including gatekeepers such as peer reviewers or tenure committees who may deem them even insufficiently prominent to be the subject of an analysis or insufficiently rigorous or too activist and the same of course is sometimes said of Muslim women academics own scholarship on Islam.",
      "Within Islamic Studies Broadly Written, there is a renewed conversation about how to define Islam and our collective professional enterprise that was sparked in part by a recent sprawling book that seeks to define how we understand and study Islam. Despite the author's basic contention that the best way forward is to shift focus from",
      "the extensive gender-aware scholarship on Islam and Muslims, let alone integrates its insights. Sadly his is by no means the only recent study to ignore women's scholarship. In fact there are two trends somewhat at odds that characterize scholarship over the last decade. On the one hand there has been a flourishing of works under the rubric of Muslim Women's Studies or Islamic Gender Studies",
      "studies. Dozens of significant articles and books have appeared on women's Qur'an interpretation, on medieval Islamic mysticism, on Muslim feminism, on gender and Islamic law, on Muslime theology. Women engage with classical in modern Muslim sources and explicitly or implicitly discuss the parameters of that canon. Is it scripture only? Is it interpretive works? If so which ones?",
      "which ones, and if depending on which ones with which methods. Recently there have also been a smattering of secondary studies that analyze Muslim women's scholarly output including its emergent canon and classics. On the other hand numerous male scholars continue to publish on the Muslim tradition classical and contemporary without taking any of this work into account. I'm going to give you some specifics.",
      "In a 2013 essay, I looked at four books by three Muslim male authors. One of these authors works within the academy. The second is situated primarily in the academy with a crossover following and a presence in Muslim communities. The third is primarily known as a religious figure who also holds an appointment in a university. I'm going to give you some salient features of these books which were all published by respected university presses.",
      "Author 1 wrote a study of modern Muslim intellectuals with a chapter on women law and society that names only three women in an index that names 240 individuals.",
      "whose Qur'an and woman has had global impact, and whose ideas about the Quranic creation narrative as essentially egalitarian have become commonsensical to many even if they do not cite her or reference her when they echo it. One of this scholar's books has in its index 187 men and eight women. The other has 137 men",
      "that names only four Muslim women, all from Muhammad's seventh century community and all but one from his household in the main body of the work. This book segregates every book by a Muslim woman into one lengthy endnote and says nothing about them or their authors anywhere else. Despite the picture of women on the cover of one of author two's books",
      "of discussing women's issues, deferring them to a later date and a future project. The third makes repeated rhetorical appeals to men and women or twice as often women and men I use Google Books to search so I counted who will reform Muslim thought in thereby the world yet despite his pleas for Muslim women to contribute to this process he ignores those who've done",
      "however, might have the most to answer for. His study of the modern Muslim tradition deals with major shifts in educational and political structures, with transformed patterns of religious learning and pervasive endemic violence toward women especially in the Indian subcontinent from the late 19th century to the present. In its discussion of the Middle East and South Asia gender issues figure prominently. The index entry",
      "for women has 15 subheadings. Marriage has 10 subheading. The book names formative period scholars, medieval luminaries and contemporary pundits and academics. As noted a scant three of them barely more than 1% are women all teaching in contemporary Western universities and none so far as I know identifying publicly as Muslim and certainly not writing from that identity",
      "identity. These omissions notwithstanding, women people the pages of this book especially in the chapter Women Law and Society. They're victims of honor crimes they are objects of harassment their unwilling brides a few are named in the text but the only Muslim woman who sort of merits an index entry is the Indian divorcee whose rotten treatment by her ex-husband",
      "over Islamic law and spawned the ironically named Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Divorce Act. She appears sort-of in the index as Shabano Controversy, parenthetically India. There are no female scholars thinkers or leaders cited concerning either of the books major topics religious authority for internal criticism even the 30 page bibliography is light on works by women with no more than two or three female authors per",
      "authors per page. Leila Ahmed's canonical 1992 Women and Gender in Islam is missing, so too is Samira Hajjah 2010 Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition Reform Rationality and Modernity. Despite a number of very good monographs by women on women in early 20th century Egypt which is the time and place the book discusses extensively there",
      "Muslim nationalist feminists or the writings of Aisha Abdurrahman. This book is by a careful scholar who clearly has gender issues on his mind, so one must ask how is it that despite the centrality of Muslim women's issues to the story he tells when looks in vain for Muslim women ideas? How",
      "not because this book is exceptional, but because it so clearly illustrates a much larger, deeper, broader problem. Women's ideas in general and Muslim women's ideas, in particular are not taken very seriously. Not by religious scholars, not by academics, and not by ordinary Muslims. This pervasive pattern as I have argued elsewhere has profoundly negative consequences for Muslim communities",
      "Muslim communities, but it also weakens scholarship about Muslims and Islam. And continues to perpetuate a distorted picture in which only men's ideas matter. I will give one more example. This illustrates the pattern of surface level allyship that does not actually impact scholarship. The year after my essay appeared, a major study of Islamic law was published",
      "published. Its author had previously written incisively on modern juristic misogyny within the Muslim tradition. In his reconsideration of The Place of Sharia, he nonetheless manages to overlook volumes of work by women scholars. The index has entries for many men but women number in the single digits among them the Prophet's wives Aisha and Khadija, contemporary Iranian lawyer Shirin Ibbadi",
      "And most surprisingly, Monica Lewinsky. The context there—this needs a little context—it was one Muslim leader's claim which the author terms blatantly absurd that Sharia would perhaps have kept Clinton's misconduct from becoming a political accusation since there were not four witnesses to his adultery. Well I think we'll just leave that there.",
      "this book of women thinkers and writers on Islamic law might bother me less if that same scholar hadn't raved about another volume of essays published within the year. Bar none, this is the best treatment of women in Islamic law that I have read in the past 20 years. Profound eye-opening and even exhilarating it is difficult for me to take seriously any student or scholar dealing with",
      "dealing with the subject of guardianship of men over women in Islam unless or until they have read and digested this book. Now, given their respective publication dates it's probable that he did not have his volume in hand while he was drafting his book. We'll give him a pass. However some of the contributors to Men In Charge including author and co-editor Ziba Mir Hosseini",
      "of guardianship for two decades. He does not cite a single one of them in his book. So why does it matter? Certainly neglecting to cite women is bad for women personally and professionally. Citation and reputation are the currency of the realm in academia. My insistence that",
      "read and cited could be, and in fact has been on more than one occasion dismissed as sour grapes. You're just mad because he didn't cite you. When women... He should have! Right? Anyway... When women point out bias we are often accused of whining,",
      "contents who take ourselves too seriously. I disagree. The problem is that others are not taking us seriously enough, but it's not just a problem for women. It's also bad for scholarship. Scholars who fail to engage the complex and serious work women bring to the table thereby weaken their own scholarship and that of everyone who relies on them to get a sense of the literature",
      "debates. You don't have to agree, but you do have to engage lest you replicate arguments that were discussed and in some cases dismissed a decade ago. Certain existing structures of authority and ideas about what's canonical and who is serious scholar make this possible. And again the problem",
      "to religious studies, or even to academia. But within Islamic Studies the problem is particularly acute when the male scholars publishing are those with seminary study and traditional textual training who then demand similar credentials from female interlocutors. The claim that one is only writing about or engaging with qualified scholars rings hollow",
      "in such a way that women are defined out. Now, that's not to say that tailoring Islamic education for women or doing all of the things necessary to make it more accessible and widespread would resolve the problem. As many of us know instinctively, and as a recent study of academic context showed when women move into a profession or gain a credential, that credential becomes less valued. So if",
      "started attaining the title of Ustada or Shaykha, I think we might find that those accomplishments would become devalued as well and new criteria would be invented for what's necessary to be taken seriously. Now here I want to shift a little bit to talk about different sorts of labor remaining with this question of devaluation. The devaluations of work that is conventionally considered feminine",
      "The academy as a gendered space operates in tandem with broader gender patterns of social life, even as the Academy values certain kinds of products over others. And here I'll beg indulgence from every single one of you. I asked to tell me where your book is in the process over the last two days. It's a lot of you! I care about you as healthy balanced people. I also really want your books to get done.",
      "So to be continued. As to the gendered organization of social life, speaking in generalities, caregiving, child rearing, homemaking are considered women's work and in drafting these remarks I was actually initially very reluctant to bring them up to mention practical issues when you know a lecture of this sort should be a place for big ideas not humdrum accounts",
      "not very glamorous, non-intellectual labor in our homes and also in our institutions. But the reality is that equitable solutions for this unglamorous work is how we get the ability of women to make fully their contributions to scholarship. And here now I want to circle back to the Farrukhis, the academic couple whose honor tonight's lecture has given.",
      "One cannot discuss the gendered academy without mentioning the two-body problem. Now, for those who might be unfamiliar with the term if there are any civilians in the audience, the two body problem is our weirdly science fictiony name for the recurrent problem of couples with two academic careers who given the vagaries of university hiring rarely attain the holy grail",
      "perhaps through a spousal hire. Any of you on the market this year, good luck! We're rooting for you. Instead partners get at best yearly lecturer appointments or eke out a meager living course by course. Some opt for long-term commuter marriages if there are two good jobs that aren't in the same place. The two body problem is experienced much like child care difficulties or unequal distribution",
      "to be solved by individuals, but it is a systemic problem within academia structurally related to the way jobs and job markets and job searches and job security are organized. And of course it's a gendered problem. Lois Lamial Faruqi recognized persistent societal issues around the way Western societies organize gender family",
      "of music and the arts concerned with Muslim cultures. In her articles, and in a posthumously published slim book of essays, and I toggled back to it but the computer is a little twingy tonight so we're just gonna stay right here she tackled a number of issues women, Muslims society, and Islam that revolved around the ridiculous American expectations for women",
      "very pointedly the devaluation of women's unpaid care work. Her solutions involved what she considered essentially Islamic models of extended family life and benevolent patriarchy. If contemporary Muslim feminists question her prescriptions, most of us would nonetheless agree with crucial elements of her diagnosis. Academia may not be unusually bad for women compared to other professions but",
      "But the ways in which it is bad are heightened when we consider two career couples, especially those with children. And the two-body problem and its assumptions about couple normativity open up a whole other can of worms that I won't get into here. Although there are exceptions, often in a two scholar marriage, the male is the more prominent partner and the more desirable hire. At least one reason for this as another study released this month showed",
      "explicitly dismissed by departments as viable candidates in informal department deliberations, the assumption being that her husband won't move. This is never true with regard to a wife no matter what her position is. In Islamic studies, that's as true as in any other field and for most of you here tonight Ismail Farooqi is likely to be even more recognizable name. If you google Lois Al-Farouki Temple University,",
      "from newspaper headlines from the 1980s.",
      "scholar and his wife, and in another article it identifies Ismail Farooqi as a religion professor at Temple University where his wife also taught. I want to linger on that phrase, his wife is also taught this is not about Muslim patriarchy this is good old-fashioned American gender discrimination and its every bit as potent today as it was 30 years ago when the headline",
      "to online crowdsourced encyclopedias. And her Wikipedia blurb reads, Lo Islamia al-Farouki was an expert on Islamic art and music and was married to Ismail Farouki. Ismail Al-Faruqi's Wikipedia summary says nothing personal. Ismael Raji Al-farouki he was a Palestinian American philosopher widely recognized by his peers as an authority on Islam in comparative religion",
      "of inclusion and representation in Wikipedia are themselves fascinating as the historian Claire Potter has shown, and they're deeply problematic. But I think it's very important that we think of Dr. and Dr. Faruqi's scholarly reputations as part of a larger pattern. I should note that as someone interested in Muslim thinking about gender, I was familiar with her long before I was",
      "society and Islam in 1994 or so my notes on the inside of the book tell me I was a graduate student then in history with a few years before I would switch to religion I was at newlywed it wasn't yet a mother once I was writing about gender and Muslim thought a decade later balancing teaching research and family life I engaged more directly with her work I was keenly aware",
      "But it strikes me that too often we focus on the disagreements and overlook what is actually a great deal of common ground. We can disagree very meaningfully about, for instance, QIWAMA, and agree about the need for larger supportive structures that do not require individual women in nuclear households, professors or not, to single-handedly undertake homemaking parenting and caretaking especially",
      "especially in a society that refuses to value those things. And I want to toggle back from the home to the academy, just as Lois Alfarochi insisted that a full life could include both meaningful work and valuable caregiving activities, and she herself found ways to do both, I want suggest we also need to think about care work as work and care work at work.",
      "women faculty do a disproportionate amount of service often the departmental chores and some of the answer is redistribution of service more equitably among department members this is a conversation my department has been having so I'm happy to talk to some of you about this but some labor-intensive time intensive forms of advising and mentoring that fall primarily to women especially women of color especially black",
      "because they are most often performed by women, they are devalued in much the same way that Al-Farouki pointed out that women's care work within family is devaluing even though it is crucially important. Al Faruqi reminds us to ask not just whether a particular value system is gender equitable but also whether its valuing the right things how do we struggle against",
      "work that's done disproportionately by women. Do we reward it with money, with course releases, with writing support, with research leave? Reshaping the division of labor in academia is important and individuals if were able to shift our ideas about the valuation of teaching advising administration and scholarship can find our own most meaningful work but in the academy I'm going",
      "definition include research and writing because that's how we share our ideas. That's how participate in ongoing conversations. Making it possible for women to do more scholarly work is part of the puzzle, but the other piece of that puzzle is that scholars of all genders have to be reading and citing and circulating this work which",
      "or sharing service equitably, or not doing those things is not a highly theoretical analysis of the neoliberal university. We need those analyses but we also need practicality and transparency about how we do the work that you do what we do in our hiring, what we're doing on grant making, what are we doing on committee assignments, and our speaker invitations,",
      "our peer review and our editorial review, and in our scholarly citations. Editors of journals and editors at presses and peer reviewers and book reviewers all looked at those books that I talked to you about. And they published them anyway. We need to be asking as many times as it takes where are the women? If there aren't women why not?",
      "There may sometimes be a good answer to this question, I suppose as a theoretical possibility. But more often there isn't and it's just a matter not even of a deliberate desire to exclude women but of patterns of citation, of inherited forms, of how we define whose scholarship matters. Now in closing, I want to connect these questions about the treatment of women's scholarship",
      "of women scholars to the ubiquitous problem of harassment, abuse and assault that has existed but we're certainly becoming aware of more publicly in the last few months. Of course, and here's an important caveat a man who engages with women scholarship or publicly affirms feminist ideals might still be a predator there are no guarantees",
      "Ignoring women's words and ignoring women, those are dehumanizing acts. Using women's ideas without giving credit or assigning that credit to someone else isn't physical violence but it is a violation. It assumes that women's idea are public property, that they're freely available for the taking. Now another seemingly opposed practice which I explored at some length",
      "Continuing to write and publish as though women scholars haven't been having serious scholarly conversations about, for instance, domestic violence or the use of enslaved women for sex or minor marriage or personal law reform is irresponsible at best. It's also a concrete manifestation of the belief that women are simply unimportant.",
      "Failing to cite women, failing to engage women, and failing to listen to women are part of a spectrum of acts that demean and devalue women. They are building blocks of a culture in which as every news cycle reveals harassment and abuse and assault our epidemic. Part of what this means then is",
      "also involve far more mundane fixes to persistent problems of gender discrimination against women. This may seem like bad news, but it's actually good news. It is a concrete problem that we as scholars of Islam can take practical steps to fix. Doing our scholarly work in a way that changes the world for the better seems to me",
      "really excellent way to celebrate the legacy of the Farooqis. Thank you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Dr_ Kecia Ali - Q_A Session - Muslim Scholars_ Isl_eig8CghVzIY&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748701493.opus",
    "text": [
      "Thank you, Keisha for your lecture. One I think very crucial question that I have. You've essentially accused the academy male scholars of having arbitrary standards of excellence for inclusion of scholarship worthy",
      "scholarship worthy of consideration. Now I think we would agree, you and me that there are certain kinds of skills that are absolutely indispensable for engaging in early Islamic legal history let's say so I mean I would really be interested in having some concrete examples where do you think some work has been dismissed on arbitrary grounds? And then if you could articulate more theoretically what",
      "every scholar, male or female, Muslim or non-Muslim should have? And why we don't just follow that rigorously in our graduate programs. So it's a great question because it illustrates I think a number of the dynamics that I've been discussing. The problem of formulation of standards is precisely a gendered problem.",
      "are worthy and what skills are needed to carry them out is going to differ depending on what kind of project one is doing. If you're doing a study of a classical Muslim legal text, you need to read Arabic okay? I think we can agree on that but do you need have read that text with a Hanafi scholar who has a chain of authorities, who comes through particularly or",
      "But nobody in the academy would say that you haven't studied the habitus without following that narrative.",
      "but you haven't studied with the chef, so you're not qualified. I mean, I think that this is really a problem and it's really cute that you think that a list of standards of excellence would solve this for us, but that's not where it's going to be solved.",
      "I just don't even know how to answer that particular question. Good evening, Dr. Ali. Thank you for this excellent lecture and also I realize as you're speaking towards the end of this discussion that really at the core is the issue of viability of women which is one aspect",
      "if you can talk more about that because you said women's ideas could be taken and this is the same kinds of boundary violations that happen in sexual harassment and rape. So, the boundaries of women both intellectually and physically are violated they're viable rather than inviolable. Yeah. Inviolable so would you comment further on that? And thank you again. Thank you I think that's a really wonderful question",
      "Arab men give presentations at two different conferences that basically recapitulated the argument of sexual ethics and Islam without mentioning me once. And then went on to make some corrections. Now, ideas come to be part of a zeitgeist I get that. And in some ways the biggest compliment to a scholar is that their ideas become conventional wisdom. But a book that I published ten years ago",
      "and other people read and teach but don't cite in their own work is not that kind of a work. Perhaps you could make a plausible case for Amina Wadud's ideas about egalitarian creation as having occasioned that shift, and that's perhaps a reasonable reason for say a leader of the Islamic Society of North America to talk about egalitarian creation",
      "in a way that assumes the work she's done and doesn't cite it. But when it shows up in a scholarly narrative, then that's not okay. And it's not ok for a book that treats Amina Wadud as an American interpreter of the Qur'an not to cite in that chapter any of the work that women scholars have done on Waduds Qur'aan interpretation. It's just not OK.",
      "of viability, right? It's a larger question. It's the question about women's ideas. Of course it's actually really a question about woman's bodies and insofar as it's a question with women's bodies, it's erased question in America. It is a question social location and class. And you know if it's the questions that we confront with boundary violations large and small",
      "be willing to bet that every woman in this room has had plenty of instances where they have to decide if defending a particular boundary is worth the hassle. Right? And sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it",
      "and elsewhere. My question is actually very simple, which is about mentorship. I think those of us who watch you and learn with you and from you almost every time we see you at the AAR, you are around people, your mentoring people who are coming into this field and giving feedback to people, correcting dissertations and all that. Can you share with us some best practices that you found that you think can help create",
      "And to follow along what you've been talking with us about, how do we do that without that burden of mentorship also disproportionately falling on the very female faculty that you've already been talking about being overburdened? It's a great question and the answer is you do more of it. Right? I mean, you line edit the dissertation drafts, right? You have those phone calls, you know, you DO the things that need to be done.",
      "students male and female is there a gender angle here right you say to your students are you citing these scholars why not right and when you get a book to blurb from a publisher this goes beyond mentoring but it goes to best practices you look at the book in if the book doesn't you know if it omits to cite women who",
      "Mentoring is one of the best things that we get to do as professors in the academy. And feminist mentoring, right? Is mentoring not just of women, right I think the most important kind of feminist mentoring That we do with male scholars is not that the mentoring we do at Male Scholars is the most Important Feminist Mentoring. I don't mean that.",
      "scholars is not about making them feel bad to be men, right? I want to be very, very clear about that. But it's about helping them become aware of things that because they are men in the academy, they may not perceive as realities and probably nobody ever suggested to them that they need to think about women, women's ideas, women thinkers, women books. For women it becomes part of the conversation particularly where there",
      "group of women scholars. It's an obvious thing for us to talk about and so, for both men and women mentoring men bring it up explicitly. It is not hard."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/ICB Wayland Ramadan Reminders Dr Kecia Ali 2020 05_N5nphg8kadQ&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt0gcJCbAJAYcqIYzv_1748701200.opus",
    "text": [
      "Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Happy Mother's Day to those observing it and a wish for solace and comfort for those who find today difficult, whether because of estrangement or loss or simply the distance that we may have right now between ourselves and those that we care for. As I got in contact with mothers in my life today,",
      "of Zoom calls and phone calls, and dropping things off to the local folks while wearing a mask. And talking briefly from a good 10 or 15 feet away. Extraordinary times and extraordinary measures. It's about our current moment that I mostly want",
      "shows us about where we are and what it teaches us about, where we might go. Ramadan always comes as a disruption to our normal schedules anyway. The pandemic is perhaps the biggest disruption many of us have ever faced to our",
      "a major new experiment. And I've been thinking a lot about Muslim adaptations to this current crisis, in part because I was teaching my Islamic law class when it started to about 20 mostly non-Muslim students. We didn't go back to Boston University after the break.",
      "remote mode and because of the timeliness of the topic we spent both the class midterm and our closing unit thinking about the impact of this pandemic on Muslim legal thought, and also on individual and community Muslim practice. So I'm going to focus my remarks",
      "I'm going to talk a little bit about the aims of Islamic law. I'm gonna say something about the role of intra-Muslim debate, and I'm gong to talk about the reality of divergent experiences of Muslim community life and Muslim ritual life.",
      "about what lessons we might take forward into whatever the new normal ends up being. Before I get to those specific points, I want to say something really briefly about one of the main challenges that we face when we talk about Sharia or when we talked about Islamic law because we're talking about a legal system but also about an ethical code and a mode",
      "of ethical reasoning, and also a set of regulations governing ritual. And all of these levels can get mixed up and also legitimately overlap when we think about how to do ritual during the middle of a pandemic. We're thinking about rules, and we're thinking abut ritual, and were thinking about the ethics of this situation. How do we manage risk?",
      "about potential harms to ourselves and others. And we can get confused sometimes because we're dealing with the textual sources of the law, so Qur'an and Sunnah. We are dealing with rules of jurists, the Madhhabs or legal schools. We're dealing pronouncements of contemporary scholars who come from a variety of kinds of training and have a variety",
      "appointments. We're dealing with decisions of local religious leaders and community organizations like ICB Wayland, and then of course we have these sometimes contradictory pronouncements of governments in various levels of governments and governments that may, like those in Wayland in Massachusetts in the United States not officially subscribe to a religious ideology",
      "or in Saudi Arabia that do and seek to promulgate their rules about this moment of crisis in ways that are religiously justified or justifiable. And, of course another level of complication not only can these things sometimes differ and diverge from each other",
      "is or what the rule is, they may not always follow it perfectly or even follow it at all. So when we talk about a range of Muslim responses to this novel coronavirus, we have to be clear that we're talking about a huge range of things. I try to clarify these things for my students over",
      "is to get them to understand three things about Islamic law. One, it's a sophisticated system of thought and practice that two, is internally diverse and three changes over time. And I feel like all of those things are actually really important to emphasize especially for non-Muslim students because there can be",
      "Islam as somehow simple or even simplistic, to think of it as unified. There is just the one idea or the one answer and also to think about it as timeless that this is simply what Muslims do all Muslims do it they do it because their religion tells them to do it and its all just right there. And in fact what we see actually if",
      "if we think about what's going on since this pandemic began, even before anyone termed it a pandemic. We see actually that none of those stereotypes of Islamic law is accurate. So we see the sophistication and the complexity and the systematic nature of the law",
      "think about the way that numerous Muslim responses have been grounded in this so-called maqasid al sharian, or the aims or the purposes of the law. So Sunni jurists define these as five, deen, religion or faith, life, intellect, lineage and property. Now",
      "typically comes first in these lists doesn't mean that practicing religious obligations takes precedence over maintaining life. In fact, it could be argued and has been argued that religion requires the sustaining of life. And so one is upholding religion precisely by preserving",
      "individual Muslims. There are of course principles in place for thinking about norms and exceptions, so there's a maxim for instance that says avoiding harm takes precedence over obtaining benefits but we also see just even at",
      "of normal rules in a situation of danger. So for instance, Imam Shafi'i back in the eighth century wrote in his major book and I'm going to tell you the name because it's Mother's Day, it's Kitab al-Umm or The Mother Book. In his Kitab Al-Ummm he writes that obviously even though eating pork is forbidden if someone",
      "of starvation, obviously they can consume pork in order to sustain themselves. Now when it comes to something like COVID-19, it's not merely a matter of danger to an individual or exemption of an individual from a particular obligation",
      "the risk to a particular individual might not be tremendous from coming to Jammu, for instance. If someone is young and healthy and has no pre-existing conditions and isn't immunocompromised and so forth, the reality is that person might become a vector of transmission",
      "about this virus and about the impacts that it has even on otherwise young and healthy people, and the lingering health effects. The less and less, it seems like some people just really kind of aren't in danger from it. But the point holds that one of the things one has to account for here unlike in a number of other circumstances is the potential harm that one might bring to others by participating.",
      "And so here's part of what arises in this complex system for thinking about balancing the purposes or then principles behind the rules of the Sharia with the norms for ritual obligation themselves.",
      "which is intramuslim dispute. Now Ramadan is a famous time for inter-muslim dispute, we have what one person has called the moon wars right and there are long standing and very vigorous debates about whether or not one can calculate Eid at the start of Ramadan",
      "or whether a trustworthy reporter must in fact cite the moon and what does it mean, cloudy and so on and so forth. This year, the big debates have for once not been over moon citing. We find instead all whole range of things for Muslims to disagree about. Whether mosques should be closed,",
      "have social distancing during Jummah. Is virtual Taraweeh permissible? We've seen Jummas over Zoom, we've seen socially distant Janazas. Actually my son actually had to talk his grandparents out of going to a Janaza today and staying by their car",
      "is risky for them. They're over the age where they're deemed especially vulnerable, but this social pressure and the social desire and the religious imperative to be part of the commemoration of a Muslim life is incredibly powerful. We've seen the cancellation of Umrah and we might see the cancellation",
      "Hajj. We've also seen, I heard from my in-laws just today but we've seen on social media grief and concern over the loss of communal spaces for worship and that goes along with the shuttering of mosques for Jummah and the debates over the legitimacy of virtual Tarawih prayers",
      "Now, for instance on the subject of virtual Taraweeh prayers there are as one might expect competing legal opinions about the legitimacy of this. And one of the issues that arises is the question of is a Taraweer legitimate if you're not located in the same room as the Imam?",
      "As my colleague Shaban Amir pointed out when people were promoting this line of argument, what does this mean about those masjids? Not ICB Wayland but quite a number where women are not in the same room as the Imam leading the Tawiyyat prayer or for Jummah for that matter. What does it mean when the Fiqh Council",
      "America early on in saying that they weren't closing. This was before it was officially a pandemic, but that they were not going to close mosques. Nonetheless, they wanted women children and elderly men to stay home, but healthy men of the appropriate age could in fact come to the mosque and we are reminded that doing so was an obligation. These are reminders",
      "that when we think about legal reasoning and when we thing about what are the pieces that go in to making an argument about how to proceed in a particular moment, different people take different things into account. And so what might it mean if we're now debating",
      "debating the legitimacy of virtual Jummah. Not that we don't want to go back to face-to-face, shoulder-to shoulder in the Musalla when it's possible but the fact that we can't do it now or shouldn't do and mostly aren't doing it now what does that mean in terms of opening up possibilities for later?",
      "not just in fact for the question of women who might be watching Jummah on a closed circuit camera or an audio feed, but what does that mean for people who have a disability? That means they can't get to the mosque. Or for people for whom there isn't a mosque within",
      "within driving distance of their homes, or for people who have childcare or elder care responsibilities at home. All of these things end up being questions for communities to begin to think about which takes me to something else that I wanted to talk about today. Some communities have already been adapting",
      "been adapting for access. Some smaller inclusive mosque communities have been live streaming their services for people who don't have a welcoming mosque community within accessible distance or people who can't, for whatever reason physically attend the mosque because their mosque is inaccessible for some reason",
      "These are already experiments in making communities virtual. They're not entirely unprecedented, Second Life some of you are probably old enough to remember Second Life. You could do Hajj in Second Life right? You could have mosques in Second life people built spaces that were places for",
      "for the virtual experience, at least a gaming experience of worship. Now it's not a game, it's serious. Now in asking about these questions about how do these experiments perhaps give us something to think",
      "like moving forward out of lockdown that raises a whole other set of questions right and one of them is this question of differential access applies to people in actual lockdown it's actually one of my least favorite things to hear people talk about being",
      "being in prison. It is difficult, it can be difficult and it's more difficult for sure for some than for others but Ramadan in particular is a time where incarcerated Muslims have a very very difficult time not that incarceration isn't always difficult but",
      "difficult to follow. Now in theory, prisoners are entitled to reasonable accommodations, to standard practices and this means both halal meals and meals available on the schedule that they can eat while they are fasting for Ramadan so incarcerated people have",
      "Virginia prison this year that they simply didn't provide meals to large numbers of prisoners, making those prisoners either unable to fast or to effectively endanger their health entirely because they simply refused to provide meals outside of the normal calendar for the normal timetable for those meals.",
      "that thinking about incarcerated people during this Ramadan in particular is so important, is because of the outsized impact of COVID-19 on incarcerated people. It's simply not possible to social distance in jail. Jails and prisons often do not make hygiene supplies freely available",
      "whom they are incarcerating. In some places people have to pay for soap, they may not have the option to wash their hands regularly and they don't have access to testing or options necessarily for treatment even though in theory they do, in practice they tend not to. And apart from one Navy ship where we",
      "COVID-19 have been nursing homes, prisons and jails, and meat packing plants. So in thinking about what we do, in thinking Muslim responses to COVID- 19 yes it's important to think",
      "what don't we do in our mosques, which is Jummah and Taraweeh for the most part as well as iftars. But it's also really important that we think about what do we do to provide resources",
      "are most affected and most endangered by what's currently happening. I've spoken to you about Believer's Bailout before, you know about that initiative. There have actually been a number of important decarceration strategies, movements, and campaigns including in Massachusetts Families for Justice and Healing which has been focused on MCI Framingham the women's prison",
      "and advocating specifically for getting women held in pretrial facilities out, but also for women who are medically vulnerable, who are eligible for parole and so forth. Both as justice for the individuals themselves and also as a public health measure because the thing that I think",
      "we know as Muslims and a thing that those of you who are doctors or health professionals know, and the thing that any of us who have loved ones in prisons or in nursing homes or in other places where people live and work very close together absolutely know is that this is not",
      "tackle one person at a time, right? This is something that as miserable and as dangerous and as deadly as its effects have been nonetheless proves how united we are. How much we have in common and how bound up our lives and our well-being is with one another. Thank you",
      "Thank you, Keisha. If there are any questions please feel free to chat them in or if you want to unmute can put your hands up and I can unmute you. I just wanted to first of all say happy Mother's Day to all the moms who have joined us and Keisha do you too? Thank you. And I know",
      "your Mother's Day to join us and give us this some food for thought so appreciate that immensely thank you I did have one question actually while we are waiting for others given that all these thoughts and debates are happening how I'm just curious where which direction or is there sense of a direction",
      "debates are going in or is there some thought, or some body that's thinking about what the new future would look like and that we can subscribe to or hear or listen to? You know it's a really interesting question. A colleague of mine once referred to Sunni Muslim religious thought as a Sunni free-for-all right everybody just sort",
      "there and people offer all kinds of opinions, all kinds legal reasoning. There are people who have years and years and training. There're people and credentials. There's people with years and informal study and public health backgrounds.",
      "have academic training and some interest in looking at the product. And then there are individual lay Muslims who are sorting this out for themselves. What I will say is it seems to me that most communities these days are closed",
      "closed, right? Most communities these days most mosques in the U.S are not open for Jummah they are not doing iftars they are Not doing taraweeh The thing is a number of mosques also function effectively as social service centers So there was actually a piece in the New Yorker uh, not very long ago about Masjid Allah in Philadelphia where",
      "where children actually often depend on the mosque for food. And the mosque has a number of other community support services that it runs, and it actually stayed open for a little while for Jummah not four weeks but was open early on with the dispensation that the governor had given designating houses of worship",
      "houses of worship as essential services precisely in order to fulfill most of those community functions. And I think ultimately the Imam, as he was quoted in The New Yorker his reasoning was basically yes it's a religious obligation for men to come to Jummah and yet because this is such",
      "such a transmissible contagious virus because the risk to the community and to individuals is so high, we just can't be open for these services anymore. And I think that line of reasoning, the balancing of competing priorities is absolutely right which is Muslim communities even where governments allow",
      "allow for the possibility of services, making those hard choices. There are some things however that communities haven't had choice about so for instance in New York City which has actually a pretty significant proportion of Muslims in its population we see",
      "not just the genaza prayer, but for washing and shrouding before burial are actually not able to be followed in many cases because the overwhelming death toll in New York has meant that funeral services for anyone can't proceed as",
      "as one might normally expect. Thank you, Keisha. I'm just unmuting one more. Faria Riales, she would like to ask a question. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, As-salamu alaykum. So I have a question about actually mental health right now. I notice online a lot of different groups that I'm part of where people are struggling with they want to fast",
      "to fast of course it's an individual you know decision but like i see that cycle like it's the mental health toll of all of this this happened to one of my brothers where we even though my parents are older than 60. we had to force him to go live with my mom and have him stop fasting it was just sort of like taking an impact you know on i felt like he was gonna just make it yeah um how are the communities dealing",
      "exemptions? I was just curious if we could touch upon that, because that's a major issue right now, I think, that we're not addressing. Yeah, I-I think we mostly aren't addressing it and I've actually seen relatively little around fasting until the last couple of years about you know people for whom fasting might be sort of medically okay, right so people who aren't say diabetic or hypoglycemic,",
      "who in theory don't have a physical ailment that would prevent them permanently from fasting, but who may for instance suffer from disordered eating. And fasting could exacerbate anorexia or other kinds of mental health issues where fasting is just gonna be sort of the one thing that puts them kind of over the edge",
      "terms of their ability to cope. And I actually, there may very well have been traditionally trained Muslim scholars who have weighed in on this question. I know a number of Muslim women thinkers have done so. I'm not aware of anybody with formal traditional training who has but last year and the year before, I actually really noticed that there was a lot more conversation online specifically around",
      "around eating disorders and the impact of eating disorders, the impact fasting on eating disorders. In this case I think one line of argument one might potentially venture and I haven't seen anybody do this and you know I of course am not a mufti so I'm not offering you a fatwa on this question but I think there's",
      "There's a line of argument to be made about potentially mental health stress in this month being like other kinds of illnesses. So, this is not like somebody anorexic for whom fasting is always going to be really potentially very, very dangerous. But this might be more like somebody who let's say has the flu, right?",
      "the flu, right? And can't fast when you have the flu because if you do, you're going to impede your body's healing or make your illness worse. The argument could be an analogy to that which is to say if your mental health is fragile right now and fasting",
      "Certainly, I think a lot of people are very much making those kinds of calculations very informally based on the sense that they just can't do it right now. And once things are normal or whatever the new normal is going to be, just like with physical illness",
      "you fast, you make up the days when you're better. This would be, you know, you makeup the days, um, when the pandemic is over and you are able to maintain some kind of equilibrium. Thank you, uh, Kishia. And with that I think we let everybody go. Thank everyone for joining us. We are having another session again Friday Khatara Saturday",
      "Saturday 4.30 talk and then Sunday 4. 30 talk next week so please watch out for the zoom links or watch us on Facebook live the video for this talk would be available on our website as well oh let me not forget Wednesday at 9 I think when is it nine thank you so much Assalamu alaikum"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Illicit Sex _zina_ in Islam_ Dr_ Kecia Ali_s Sexua_UOZg_Kd1UWs&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748698516.opus",
    "text": [
      "Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Hello, Salam and welcome to hashtag what the patriarchy where we are working to completely uproot the patriachy from Islam. Hashtag inshallah, hashtag I promise we got this. This is Shahnaz. So we're back continuing our summary of Qisha Ali's fantastic book",
      "book sexual ethics and islam feminist reflections on the quran hadith and jurisprudence and this is a 2016 edition that we're talking about it was originally published in 2006. so far we have covered three chapters of the book on marriage divorce and slavery and in this episode we'll cover chapter four which is on illicit sex quote unquote haram",
      "acts and forbidden partners elicit sex in Islamic jurisprudence. Fit. What we're going to talk about in this video, and what the author covers in the chapter are among other things the following. What is zina? What even makes zina unacceptable morally? And what makes a marriage morally acceptable? Then we'll talk about the punishment of zina. We'll talk abut the discrepancies between classical fiqhi ideas on sex and sexual ethics and today's Muslims'",
      "Okay, so what even is Zina? Well, Zina is sexual intercourse between two people who are not legally and Islamically permitted to each other.",
      "or married to each other for sexual purposes. We've established already what legitimates sexual contact, and that would be the mahr slash the daur, the thing that the husband gives his wife at the time of marriage, or purchasing the person that you're about to have sex with. So enslaving someone. This is again according to fiqh, not necessarily according to Islam. You understand, of course, that my definition of Islam is not limited to fiقh, and fiqhh doesn't break or make Islam. Islam is much grander, it's much more profound, and it's far beyond the fiqht.",
      "beyond the fiqh. Plus, fiqah changes all the time and is by definition not binding. We don't have to agree with it. We do not have to live by it on the time in all contexts. And that's because fit literally is the interpretation of the Sharia. And historically, it has been a select group and class of people men actually a select class of men whose interpretation of all things Islam survived. We will talk about how that happened in a different episode.",
      "the relationship between fiqh and sharia in a different episode but for now you can just think of fiqah as men's interpretations and opinions that are not always correct and often contradict the quran and that's because islam cannot be limited to the qur'an alone either and these opinions change all the time because fit is still happening and it's literally a human historically a very male endeavor so back",
      "In fact, is zina sinful or immoral because there was no da'wah, no mahar involved? The point is what makes an Islamic marriage moral. What determines, what factors determine that sexual access to another person is legitimate? The author asks an excellent question here. Does the da'ah and unilateral access to divorce by the husband make marriage moral? Are those the factors, a unilateral",
      "those are the only two factors that determine if marriage is legitimate, halal or morally acceptable? Is religious marriage like nikah but no involvement from court or registration of marriage sufficient to make sexual contact between two people licit, halala, acceptable, permissible? Where does the lawfulness of marriage rest? And my personal favorite question, what is God's stake in marriage? Why is God so invested in marriage.",
      "about our own sense of ethics and sexual ethics in particular. They may not tell us as much about the Islamic sense of sexual ethics, however. Of course, the classical ideas on marriage and sex aren't compatible with our ideas today. And we're not talking just about classical Islamic ideas but also non-Islamic, non-Muslim ideas too. You see like other ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean codes and laws, historical Muslim texts and Islamic laws too to quote the author here",
      "held the view that the individual status of a legal relationship between two parties determined whether sex was licit. And this is on page 73 of the second edition. So, a person's status as free or enslaved, their status as an enslaver or the enslaved, they're marital status and of course their gender and sexual orientation etc are the things that determine who another person had sexual access to and whether they needed the person's consent in order to have sex with them.",
      "Like ancient Greek-Roman biblical laws on sex, in the fiqh too, the man and woman are not equal in their access to sex. The man gets to have up to four wives, an infinite number of concubines, and an infinite amount of mutawwifes by the way all simultaneously. The woman can in the meantime have sex with only one man her husband or someone that she's in a nikah or a mutawwaith or her enslaver slash master.",
      "the male fiqh that only men can have multiple sexual or romantic partners or spouses because fun fact here, the Quran actually does not forbid polyandry and it was a thing before Islam in the Arab cultures. And it was pretty common historically and it's still legitimate in some parts of the world but how would polyandr work you ask? Well you see while the men of fiq pretend like",
      "for example, that's actually not an Islamic obsession. That's not something that God is invested in at all. In the past as well as today in communities that have polyandry or women having multiple sexual partners at one time there are systems in place to take care of the question of whose baby it is. One system is not to care at all about whose baby because the baby or the child is believed to belong to the whole tribe, the whole community. Everybody takes care of this baby. This is everybody's baby.",
      "is everybody's baby another is to designate somebody in the community who decides whose baby it is and the leader's decision is binding and of course in the 21st century like today we have dna testing the point here is that when you say something that you think is so brilliant like the reason that women can't have multiple sex partners is because how will we know whose baby",
      "question of lineage and paternity if you want those answers. And also, can menopausal women or infertile women or women who have opted not to have children go ahead and have multiple sex partners? Because there's no issue there of children or paternity or lineage and so on. And if your answer is no then you never really cared about the question of children",
      "status as a free or enslaved person, or your class basically and your gender. Yeah, I'm not so convinced that that's established by the divine. It's established exactly the same folks say men who are then able to benefit and profit off of these corrupt and unjust conclusions. Oh, I should probably make it clear that what I'm just saying now about sexual access",
      "talking and not the author. She doesn't talk like this. And so, the reason that these classical ideas on marriage and sex aren't compatible with today's ideas on sex and marriage or sexual relations among Muslims is that for one, the historical scholars allowed slavery and they allowed sex with an enslaved woman. And while today we hopefully agree that sex with a enslaved person is by default rape you should know that the historical",
      "but they claimed that the consent of the concubine or the woman that you were enslaving was not needed for sex or for whether the man could ejaculate inside of her, possibly making her pregnant. They did debate and mostly agree that a man needed his free wife's consent, the free woman's consent in order to have sex with her and or to ejacuate inside of But not if the woman",
      "with enslaved women and essentially raping enslaved women, they also allowed child marriage, forced child marriage at that. You should read my dissertation for more details on this. And today, officially at least, both of these things, slavery and child marriage are legally unacceptable pretty much everywhere in the world even if the age of consent varies dramatically from country to country. And we also largely agree that consent plays an important role",
      "role in the morality of sexual activity. It's not the only thing that matters and it shouldn't be the only things that matter, but it plays an important role and it's kind of a big deal. Also today we have informal alternative kinds of marriages or sexual access to other people than the permanent by intention marriage kind like nikah. There is mutaa for example which is often translated as temporary marriage but you should know there is a big question mark with the word temporary because it can range from",
      "literally 99 years and it's something that is considered very shi'i but a lot of Sunnis also partake in this and Sunnis did not always historically consider it a haram or something unacceptable. Mutai is a time-bound marriage that the woman too can initiate by the way big deal there's Zawaj al Misyar or marriage in transit where it's a travel marriage where you marry somebody temporarily while you're traveling because",
      "to let's say your spouse and through a travel marriage you end up having access to somebody that you're not legally married to but you marry them temporarily. And this spouse, the spouse that you get from a misyar marriage does not have the same rights and obligations et cetera as a spouse through anikaf does. And there is zawaj urfi, a customary marriage it's a religious marriage that is not registered with the court. And it may even be a secret marriage",
      "you marry this person but you can't afford to honor the social financial legal practical and other obligations that come with a marriage oh let's talk about sexual desire now sexual desire is totes legitimate in the quran hadiths and the fiqh and you can even desire someone that you don't have Islamic or legal access to but that doesn't mean you go and have sex with them for instance you might be married to person A and you sexually",
      "person be. We're not talking about same-sex relations here, we'll do a separate video on same- sex relations which is coming up in a different chapter in this book. That means that instead you go and look at them once okay sure but then you go have sex with somebody that you do have sexual access to like a spouse or if you are in the past according to fiqh not according to Islam the person that you are enslaving I do not endorse this I think this is absolutely immoral and unethical and unacceptable and having sex with your spouse especially",
      "rewarded by God and it's a form of worship since you're doing it within the limits that God has placed on you. And speaking of sexual desire, the fiqh recognizes female sexual desire and so do Muslims and so does Islamic literature which reminds me you should read this really fantastic book by Pernilla Myrna about basically female sexuality and female desire and even same-sex female desire an activity I did an interview with her and I'll put the link to",
      "so you can go ahead and listen to it. As for the punishment for zina, it's equal in the Quran for women and men, 100 lashes but it's not equal for enslaved and free people. The punishment for an enslaved person who commits zina is Quranically half that of the free person which should tell you that the punishment from zinai can never possibly be including for adultery stoning to death. Not a Quranic thing by the way. The Quran doesn't mention stoning",
      "of the in the Islamic legal tradition has been that married people committing zina or adultery, in this case are to be stoned but non-married ones are to lash. Stoning someone to death is a biblical punishment for various offenses not necessarily exclusively for sexual offenses now since humans and I mean men here decided that adultery warrants stoning as a punishment they also had to come up with specific guidelines for how that would work so fiqh then gives us",
      "a detailed and very, very stringent set of guidelines for what counts as proof of somebody having committed adultery. So, for example, there must be four eyewitnesses and only adult male Muslim people count as witnesses. And don't worry, that's not a Quranic thing who must be able to testify to having witnessed penetration. It's not just like, OK, two people were lying in bed together so we assume they must have had sex.",
      "must have had sex. No, you have to have literally physically witnessed penetration. The idea here seems to have been to completely avoid giving the punishment and if they are found to be lying or if anyone accuses an innocent woman of zina then the accuser gets almost the same punishment that a person who has committed zina gets in the Quran 80 lashes. Also fun and significant fact here even if a man sees his wife in bed with another man",
      "man, he cannot take the law in his own hands according to fiqh and must produce three eyewitnesses to the act. And if he can't then it's his word against his wife's word. And the Quran tells us that if his wife says that she didn't do it by swearing four times then she didn' t do it and her word has to be taken here. And this even if the husband too swears four",
      "Still, the wife's word is what counts in the Quran not the husband's words. We'll talk about female testimony in a different episode but this is a huge deal that the wife s word is taken against her husband. The fiqh however because of course adds that the husband who is accusing his wife of adultery has the right to deny paternity of any children in such a case and is not required to take care of them.",
      "course because the men of fiqh are obsessed with paternity and male lineage, and maintaining male privilege through their father's lineage like that. You understand? I have opinions about men who invent laws based on their personal whims and emotions and insecurities but that'll have to be a separate episode another time. Just know for now that we do not have to trust any of this stuff that comes out of systems, this desperately obsessed with male lineage.",
      "about the contemporary Muslim. I'm not going to go into detail here, but the author talks about the implications of new technology like DNA testing to determine paternity and whether this is necessarily a good thing for women. Basically one of the most influential things in Islamic ethics is the don't ask, don't tell policy so basically if there's no incriminating evidence to delegitimize—and i hate this word—a child then don't go searching",
      "and the challenging questions that arise from essentially combining two different systems, the historical classical Islamic legal system and a contemporary modern civil judiciary. So as we can imagine then Muslims today are facing a crisis of sexual morality. The author does wonder if today's Muslims can do away with the patriarchal and sexist limitations of both historical and contemporary double standards while also acknowledging",
      "to sexual relationships. Basically, the existing laws that we have are sexist and classist, and they need to be done away with and replaced with more egalitarian, less sexist, ideally non-sexist, non-patriarchal ones, but in such a way that we can still have boundaries within sexual relationships.\" An obstacle to talking frankly and productively about illicit sex like premarital sex is that there's a general refusal",
      "The don't ask, don't tell ethic that I mentioned earlier is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that it discourages people from probing into other people's private affairs in order to incriminate them but also bad in that prevents people from having an honest and necessary conversation such as one about the fact that many Muslims are not waiting until marriage to have sex. And because illicit sex is considered sinful talking about it openly supposedly means you",
      "someone else's sins and that's not cool. But the author notes, that only means that the problem will continue because premarital sex is taking place in high numbers especially as humans wait longer to get married than ever before and also of course the social double standard of say male virginity versus female virginity means that consequences of not talking about this issue openly",
      "men even if they are treated or viewed as legally as equals in the coda of the chapter the author talks about some recent cases or changes related to sexual ethics and quote unquote illicit sexual relations many of which focus on punishing women more harshly for breaking quote-unquote islamic legal rulings and as the author analyzes them one thing that she says that i want to quote here",
      "about male dominance will not take us nearly far enough. Page 95. In other words, we have to acknowledge and do something about Islamic law's basic presumptions about male dominants which harm women in many, many ways such as when it comes to say the kids that they might bear out of wedlock or in marriages that are not recognized by the state or by classical fiqh-e Islam and of course",
      "The coda for this chapter is one of my most favorites ever. I love the author's writing style and she has a very professional way of speaking in writing, and her tone is always professional. But I feel like in this coda there are certain phrases and sentences that she writes, like score another one for patriarchy, that are so wonderfully done and that are productive and necessary and they make me blush. Also finally one thing that I have to note here",
      "is that Islamic law is actually very complicated, both in practice and in theory. So even as the scholars are creating all these, in many cases, very strict rules and guidelines, they weren't necessarily applied in practice. But today's Muslims have a very, very problematic, and I want to say simplistic idea of Islamic law, and it's kind of a problem. All right, so I'll stop here. Next up is a summary of chapter five,",
      "which is on same-sex relations in Islam. Thank you all for watching. Please stay kind and stay feminist, and I'll see you next time, inshallah. Salaam."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Islam _ Authors - Dr_ Kecia Ali - Part 4_mov_BivhjpHIuJU&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748701579.opus",
    "text": [
      "Yes and no. So the reality is that Muslim women for many centuries have been putting conditions in their marriage contracts, and having pretty good luck with that in courts depending on what it is they do in the contract and how carefully and tightly its worded right? For the most part the thinkers that I look at here are very unfavorable to various kinds of conditions in marriage contracts specifically the ones that women always want",
      "women always want, right? Not taking any other wives, not taking any concubines, not relocating me from my hometown. And there's no condition a woman can put in to protect herself from the possibility of talaq, right. She might be able to stipulate it at a particular point in the future but she also might not. There might be things that would happen in the interim that would lead to her losing that right so these jurists were really mostly not in favor",
      "about allowing these conditions and allowing women to adjudicate on the basis of them. The other thing is that conditions about second wives or moving away from home, things like that were conditions which wouldn't actually prevent the husband from taking a second wife if he contracted another marriage it would be valid. The only thing she could do was put in conditional divorce if that happens then she could get the divorce right?",
      "But that was a sort of automatic thing based on his power of divorce rather than anything else. So yes, people do find ways to put conditions in marriage contracts but the fact is that it's not a panacea at least for these legal thinkers because to their mind I mean Imam Shafiq on the question of borrowing against future spouses through condition and the marriage contract says she can't do that. She'd be narrowing what God made wide for him.",
      "I was curious about the practice of arranged marriages versus, you know, by a parent or father as you mentioned versus other ways.",
      "for their minor children of both sexes, boys and girls as well as potentially there was dispute about this never married adult women. Once an old woman had been married then she absolutely could not be married off without her consent in the future and once a boy had arrived at a particular age he also could not marry off rather than have to do his own marriage or give a proxy to someone else",
      "As far as the question of how this works today, virtually every contemporary Muslim majority society has raised the age of majority and has done away with compulsory marriage. That is to say, has taken away from fathers the right to marry off their children without their consent. There are still social pressures in many places that lead to coerced marriages",
      "marriages. It happens even sometimes in countries in the West. The question of coercion and consent is a very complicated one because law is certainly not the only factor, and this is a big debate actually in feminist legal theory, and I don't mean Muslim feminist legal",
      "coercive as to constitute non-consent, all kinds of things. As far as just arranged marriages in general I think particularly among more educated classes what one typically sees is facilitated marriages which is a slightly different thing but actually I suspect that Saeeda Reshma has more to say on the subject than I would about arranged marriages",
      "arranged marriages and coerced marriages. You probably have your finger on the pulse of that, at least in U.S., a little more. Well I think it is culturally relevant and there's a lot of social pressures applied and many people don't really realize that among Muslims even that really you... It's not permissible to coerce a woman to get married against her will.",
      "Does that answer your question?",
      "just looking at sort of, to the extent in which I would be very oppressive to a woman who can't do so much violence. What do you suggest for how to address those situations in a modern context where we're basically relying on American law to protect us because for someone in the Sharia law as it is without the presence of judges",
      "who can kind of take them out of that situation, which I guess in the early period of Islamic law, the crime detectives could help with considerations of that. When that doesn't exist, we're kind of left with nothing but the type of law. Do you want to say something about this as well? Well, I mean, in the theory of domestic violence here,",
      "contradiction to the way marriages discuss. Forcing a wife to have sexual relations, for example is considered abuse whereas I think in Islamic theological discussions that's just the way it's supposed to be. Well yes and no so marital rape which by the way wasn't a crime in all American states until",
      "American state until sometime in the 1990s, right? It doesn't compute as a category because rape is a property crime. Right? Which can't be committed by the husband because this sexual access is illicit. That doesn't mean he's necessarily entitled to have sex with her forcibly. The Hanafis allow for it although they tend to dislike it but other jurists in fact say no this isn't permissible if she refuses him he can withhold support or do these",
      "do these other things, right? So the discourse about it is sort of troubled by the fact that people are confusing a lot of levels of discussion. They're confusing a level of kind of, is this permissible? Is this ethical with a level what's the legal category that we attach to it? Do we call it rape? Well if what we mean by rape and this was the British Muslim thinker or scholar",
      "thinker, scholar who said this. Oh there's no such thing as marital rape in Islam. Well I sort of felt sympathetic for him because I knew what he meant which was to say this is a legal category that doesn't sit comfortably here but on the other hand what he needs to be saying is this is totally unacceptable behavior and you know leave aside the issues of definition forced sex is not okay under any circumstances",
      "question about secular law now versus what Muslim judges did back in the day, the kind of institution that most of them talk about and that most legal works talk about in the case of an abused wife is actually not a necessarily judicial intervention or the pronouncement of divorce although Maliki jurists have a broad category",
      "which is grounds for judicial divorce, but usually that you send them to live with trustworthy neighbors. There's a huge reliance in these texts on a sort of notion of a self-policing community and the assumption that other people are going to intervene to stop bad things from happening. And part of the issue, and this would have been an issue also",
      "cities in Cairo, 20th century and the 19th century. It might have been an issue in borders in Ottoman Aleppo is that some of the things that are formulated in the early period, some of institutions for making sure that women are essentially safe no longer exist. And so once you bring this state in",
      "the American state, it's also the modern Pakistani nation-state or the modern Egyptian state or the Modern Syrian State. You're talking about a fundamentally different way of approaching the question of law and its relation to people's lives. So I don't know if that entirely answers your question but... Well just adding a note on domestic violence issues insofar as",
      "of the Prophet as a source of law, then you know if the prophet behaved in very respectable cordial manner with his wives and women in general it's not always I think brought in strongly as it could be but that should be strong argument made from my terms of defining I think family law for modern day. The issue of course is once you bring in",
      "precedent, then there are other issues like concubinage and polygamy for that matter that come up. Well you know if it was listed for the Prophet what are we going to do about it today? Which is I sort of hesitate to bring this up rather than ending on this very lovely note about the beauty of the prophetic example but I think these are hard questions that we need to come up with and this is what the jurists were doing even though some of their answers are ones they don't agree with. We need to",
      "of addressing the range of things that are in our authoritative precedence. Thank you.",
      "she chooses for herself, which would be the case if her father were alive or not. In the ninth century it depends very much on her age. Under some rules, the Hanafis allow mothers to contract marriages for their daughters as well as for their sons. Other schools didn't but there the grandfather would step in or the girl's brothers if they were of any age or uncles. Plenty of people around do that",
      "suitable she could go to a judge. That's who would contract the marriage as far as who would choose I think it's also important to note that even if there is this paternal power to contract marriages, to the extent that particularly among the elite there was a certain level of gender segregation women were in a position to go and do the visits to actually do the networking",
      "we kind of have this paternal power. On the other hand, the influence rests with women.",
      "Quran and other religious texts. And I think that's a great idea. I do think, I like that you said the Quran and",
      "results from not reading broadly in the interpretive literature and other kinds of important texts. Of course, the Quran is absolutely central. Of Course people need to interpret it. Of of course Muslims of all kinds both genders, all walks of life need to be engaged in that reading and discussion but there's a lot of richness also elsewhere that needs to be brought into the discussion. Right, and also on that point",
      "about the Quran and other religious texts. With the nature of globalization today, it's simply impossible to do a study of Islam without looking at what's going on with the other religions, especially with this sort of opportunistic way that a lot people use religious history like you were saying. People don't realize that up until fairly recently, the woman pledged to obey and the husband to cherish. So there's a kind of political correctness",
      "correctness of the right in which people have sort of an idealized version of, say, Western history or Christian history. And then this becomes kind of a pressure that's projected upon the Muslim where there has to be cooperation between people looking at the Quran critically, people looking into Bible critically, other texts critically and having a broader view. Absolutely."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Islam _ Authors - Dr_ Kecia Ali - Part 5_mov_fVBBAbbc-pA&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt0gcJCbAJAYcqIYzv_1748698301.opus",
    "text": [
      "Hi. First of all, thank you so much for coming out here. I really appreciate all the work that you've been doing for Muslim women. And I have a question regarding how, as you said, with the gender-based specifics for the man possessing the...",
      "entering the workforce and whatnot, it's not so much clearly that the man would provide a dowry so much and that he would be owning the contract of marriage. So how does that play into the 21st century in regards to that? Is it economic or is it gender-based? I think this is one of those areas where what we're seeing is that particular rules that worked more or less well as part of a coherent system",
      "system no longer function in their totality. We end up with certain things like dowry becoming sort of symbolic and then both spouses under civil law, not just in the United States but say in Morocco for instance with the recent reform of the Moldova or elsewhere having equal civil rights within the marital partnership we see this as a very different kind",
      "of a very different kind of marriage. What hasn't happened yet is an attempt to reconcile those things, and attempt to say if we're not going to base marriage on this particular legal foundation, and in point of fact, in most of the Muslim world nobody talks about ownership or dominion or control, right? We still have, because it is this central symbolic element",
      "of Muslim masculinity, right? It's very threatening to talk about doing away with Allah for all kinds of reasons. Just like it's threatening to do the way with Dower because this is... There's a lot of social stuff that goes along with this, right. But what we do? Muslim marriages are not really any longer based on this analogy to ownership or control and yet we have these vestiges of this system so how do we make it work?",
      "How do we make it work? What kind of new sets of regulations can be put into place? Is there an alternate contractual model? Do we think of a partnership model, right? What would that mean? How do you negotiate that? How to deal with the fact that there are explicit Quranic passages that talk about a different model. Do you say well in the seventh century this was the appropriate model and we're doing something different now? In practice virtually everywhere Muslims",
      "but actually admitting to that and saying we've chosen not to use this anymore becomes complicated, right? That's a very fraught kind of move. And it'll be interesting to see what Professor Azamian has to say in January. I mean he is the one who's really addressing these kinds of questions about Islamic law in contemporary nation-state system. You should come back and ask him. Yeah, that's on January 15th and you can sign up for our newsletter",
      "our newsletter for the events on that. See, we got the plug-in. Yeah. Thanks. Absolutely. Asalaamu Alaikum. Wa Alaikum Assalam. I know a case where... I know of a case were a Muslim got involved in domestic dispute and the brother was beating his wife. The police have called when the police arrived this brother",
      "use the verse in the Quran, and I know you're probably sure what verse I'm going to mention. I know what verse you're going to say. It gives him permission to be his wife. The translation actually says, be her husband. The word in the Qur'an is ad-duribu. And the word is darabah, which is a hit in the first form. But if I'm correct or wrong, it's in the fourth form in the Qu'ran. It's not. It means imperative.",
      "imperative, which is why it's wa in dribuwa. And it's wan dribu because you can join the wow with that. So if you could comment on that because this brother was actually doing more than even the translation said. He was physically abusing him. Right. And he used that as justification. I think this speaks to the issue of first of all, he should not have done that. That is a bad thing.",
      "thing right so let's just be very clear right regardless of the words in the Quranic text he should not have done that and the fact that he's justifying himself by reference to the Quranist test is I think a perversion of many things about that text and about what it means to be a moral human being",
      "The fact that he's quoting the Qur'an to justify this, I think actually speaks to something that stems out of what has been in some ways a positive development in Muslim communities which is the democratization of scriptural interpretation and the increasing familiarity of lay Muslims with meanings of the Qur-an. But the flip side of that",
      "is that people turn to the text and assume they can understand it. When in fact there is a voluminous tradition of serious, subtle, sometimes mind-bendingly misogynist, and sometimes unbelievably humanistic and subtle interpretation of the range and depth of meanings in this text.",
      "you assume that you can go to the text and you can look at it, and you could look at the English translation and maybe memorize the Arabic phrase. And then be able to say what it says. You've really departed from the Muslim tradition as it was historically practiced for centuries. So what you find if you go back to the medieval commentaries on that verse taken as a whole which starts out",
      "over women or men stand up for women. It gets translated in all these kinds of ways as protectors and maintainers, or breadwinners, or guardians, or in charge of. The whole framing of this verse is about a particular kind of social relationship. It's assumed to be about a marital relationship, and it's assumed both about unconditional preference that God has given to men more than",
      "that comes from a marital transaction where men support women and women obey men. This is what all of this interpretation says. I think it's really a good thing that people are reinterpreting this text, I think there should be more women interpreting the Qur'an in other texts but I also think that the bypassing of all of these interpretive literature as sort of tainted because of the patriarchal presuppositions",
      "interpreters and you know, I mean they lived in the 14th century, in the 10th century. In the 12th century of course they were patriarchal right? And of course there were men who saw things in a particular way because that was how society was set up. Bypassing this whole tradition means that there's an assumption that you take the words and then you know what they mean and then",
      "felt perfectly reasonable saying, yeah absolutely the word means strike. The likely is Yusuf Ali's edition it's not there in the Arabic text. He's getting it from the commentaries where they're saying, okay it means strike fine but let's bring in the example of the Prophet who said do not strike God's female servants right? And so because there's this kind of Qur'an centrism and this reluctance to go outside",
      "text and a willingness to discount the interpretive tradition for some good reasons in some cases we get things like people saying but the Quran says I can. And that comes up frequently in the work that we do. Yeah, and that's kind of a possible influence from sort of American quasi-Christian culture in which the Bible is seen as something that's self interpreting",
      "all the history. So it's very common in American context for someone to say, well let's write here in the Bible writing these words, ignore what every commentator has written and then apply that directly to your situation. And even if you're not Protestant this way of thinking permeates American culture so I mean this is something we as Muslims would have to look out for. Right. I will also think in fairness point out",
      "when somebody's interpreting, for instance the first verse of that same surah which says, Oh people revere your Lord who created you from a single soul and created from its main thing. From the two of them countless men and women spread far and wide. Well I was once at a wedding where Imam recited this in far more melodious Arabic than",
      "And the English translation of this is, God created Adam and out of Adam created Eve. So there are some benefits to sticking to the Quran and only the Quran. I know one of the reasons I think I started doing the reading on my own way back when I was in college age was because I'd read translations or interpretations by people like Maulana Maldudi that's so misogynistic.",
      "misogynistic. I was, you know, to remain a Muslim and really get the spirit of Islam, I had to kind of look at it on my own. So it's such a blessing when...I read Dr Amina Wadud's Quran in Women, and I think she is in the audience somewhere. And so I'm just thrilled to read this to see that more women are going into it. I don't expect this will have quite the global impact of that but it's a modest contribution",
      "that builds on what other people have done. Well, thank you so much for your questions."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Islam _ Authors Dr Kecia Ali Part 1_5aDRfaJze18&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748700641.opus",
    "text": [
      "Welcome, Keisha. Thank you. So this is her book Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. And it's actually an academic book but it's a very exciting and groundbreaking book because we hear all the time about marriage questions, gender questions in Islam",
      "in Islam. Very few people have gone and explored the intellectual history, the foundations of development of Islamic law on marriage and gender. And I was just wondering, Keisha, what inspired you to write this book? I had to write a dissertation. I mean that's part of it. Certainly those who are graduate students in the audience know that it's important to pick a project that is both exciting enough",
      "for the years that it will take, and not so humongous as to swallow you whole. I managed the first and not-so-much the second. From prospectus to publication took me 10 years. So this is the fruit of a long process. I actually started out very much interested in contemporary questions about feminist interpretation",
      "legal reform in Muslim majority societies. I was reading a lot of history at the time, I was also in the mid-1990s reading the really exciting work on women and gender in Muslim history that had started to emerge. Nila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam, Denise Felberg's book on Aisha, Nikki Keddie and Beth Barron's edited anthology, Women in the Middle East. And interestingly all of these things were converging",
      "on a portrait of the present that seemed to be really disconnected from the past. What people were producing in the late 20th century, trying to talk about how Muslims should treat questions of women and gender was very Victorian in its orientation. It didn't seem to me to be reasonably connected",
      "beginning to read about in some of these other sources. And what was interesting also, about this new body of scholarship on women and Islam, was that none of it was really talking about law even though law, especially family law, was occupying the center of a lot of contemporary literature about Muslim women. Women's status in Islam, gender equity in Islam. A lot of it is about",
      "marriage and a lot of it drew on law, and yet there was seeming to be a real mismatch. And then I started reading the legal sources themselves and then I was hooked and there was no turning back and I ended up writing about the 9th century.",
      "Okay, I'll just speak loudly. In your research you came across a lot of information in terms of how marriage was seen possibly other religions as well because we get a lot from the Jewish traditions and also the Christian traditions. Could you reflect a little bit about in general how marriage",
      "I think that's one of the most important things that I realized over the course of my research, is that if you're trying to understand marriage in Islam's formative centuries, the appropriate place to look for parallels is not 20th century Morocco. Right? Or for that matter, the 16th century Ottoman Empire. It's late antiquity. Right. What are the Romans doing? What are",
      "Christianity is a little bit of an outlier because of the strong pro-celibacy trend in a lot of the interpretive literature. But, in terms of what Muslims are doing in the 8th century and 9th century or for that matter back in the 7th century, the parallels to other kinds of ancient Near Eastern legal systems are very strongly apparent. And the places where Muslims differ",
      "are also really telling. Because even though there are any number of things that these traditions have in common, which is to say a strong role for the father in our aging marriages of children or certain kinds of male dominance within the marriage unit, right? So if the husband has certain rights that the wife doesn't have. Sexual double standards, sexual use of slaves. In all of these respects",
      "of these respects, Islam draws from a pool of available options but then makes particular kinds of choices guided by the Quran, guided by Sunnah, guided be the cultural milieu of the various early jurists. But also and particularly as the centuries go on and move towards the period I talk about in the book which is mostly the 9th century",
      "So certain things that were options in other traditions don't show up in the Muslim tradition. And other things that other traditions dealt with differently, like the legal personhood of slaves because there is a strong recognition of the potential religious personhood and a concomitant notion of their legal person who they can marry which they couldn't do in these other traditions certainly not in Roman law then you're faced",
      "with new kinds of problems that, say the Romans didn't confront which is you're a slave owner. You have a male slave who wants to get married well okay but what does that mean for your control as a slave-owner over his labor or his mobility if it's a female slave even more so right how do I husband and master control what's going on with her? And one of",
      "after perhaps six months a year of working full-time on the project was that slavery was not just a sort of marginal distraction from what else was going on. It wasn't just that there were some Muslims who happened to be slaves and so Muslim jurists had to think about it. The reality is that by thinking about slaves as legal subjects, as well as chattels in thinking about slavery as one kind of important interpersonal",
      "interpersonal relationship that could be used to model others, all of Muslim jurisprudence about marriage and family and household was affected. Very interesting. And then also speaking of the eighth and ninth centuries, can you tell a little bit about that time? Because your book conveys something of the drama of this. There's very much a human element, there's a social element, the personalities involved,",
      "stereotype of Middle Ages, then you jump ahead to like Beatles 1960s or something. And can you tell us something about how the eighth and ninth century, the Silk Road era is different from say Victorian period? I could say a lot about that. Let me start by telling you what the original image for the cover of this book was going to look like. I was telling someone about this just before we started it was sand dunes",
      "and then some footprints, right? And then the title in this sort of pink cast to the whole thing. My eldest daughter looked at it she said, It looks like Harry Potter walk by with his invisibility clock on. This is not what we were going for. I emailed my editor and they said these guys were in cities, right. They weren't out in the desert somewhere. This was not a kind of primitive Bedouin thing going on, right, they're in Cairo",
      "They're in Cairo, they're in Baghdad, there are circles of jurists who were meeting and arguing with one another. They're a conversation certainly with the rulers, the middle of the 8th century is the transition from the Umayyad dynasty to the Abbasids but most of the people that I'm studying and looking at works attributed to students of Abu Hanifa and Imam Malik and Imam Shafiq",
      "Actually, the books are attributed to Imam Shafiq but his students put them together. This is before you get the big flowering of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and then the huge upsurge in philosophy and theology and the inquisition about particular theological positions. So this is still sort of a fluid time. But one thing that really happens",
      "that was not the case in the seventh and early part of the eighth century is that you start to get systematization of legal thought. So it's not people giving positions on topics, its people really beginning to argue with one another. And by arguing they refine their doctrines because say we debate and you ask me something for which I don't have a very satisfactory answer and I sort of splutter",
      "I'm going to go back to my teaching circle and I'm gonna ask about that. And the next time we meet or the next I mean someone else from your circle, I'm have a better answer.\" But part of what that means is not just coming up with new reasoning it may also be suddenly altering particular kind of trajectory of argument. So one of their really salient conclusions I think of this book and one",
      "but ended up thinking about is the extent to which this is almost a sort of closed universe. These are scholars arguing with one another and the products of their conversations on the one hand, are meant to have broader relevance although it's not like a legal code that the judges will then go directly apply. But a lot of what they're arguing about is not so much because they think these are the precise",
      "but because they want logically defensible positions. They want to be unassailable, which leads to them taking things to their logical conclusion because they know that people in a competing circle are going to be coming to question them about it. And then eventually these go on to develop in the 10th century into the legal schools that we know today, the Maliki, the Hanafi, the Shaafi, the Hanbali,",
      "school a little bit later and of course the Jaffa days are there but it's a different trajectory they're mostly not arguing at this point with the other states of Java Assam you know can I try this okay just as I could speak loudly enough well you know what kind",
      "discussions on marriage and Islam, and legality of the gender roles. You know to me, you know that the Prophet Muhammad's marriage with Khadija was such an equal partnership in fact she was actually his boss. And I don't know how they reconcile that reality with using terminology used for slavery. Right so first of all",
      "the marriage of the Prophet to Khadija doesn't get much play in the legal sources because it shows up in this literature but there isn't a lot of precedent that ends up being directly relevant to the kinds of questions they're asking about, right? Because you don't have a lot",
      "life and where you do have reports of particular marital incidents, you're usually getting them from the Medinan period of his career or you're getting them say directly from some of his surviving wives who don't know anything about his marriage with Khadija because he didn't have other wives at that time. So it's a completely separate period where you",
      "particular precedents that might be deemed legally exemplary, they do show up for the jurors. And in fact, the third chapter of the book talks about the division of time among wives and so how one goes about thinking about companionship and how spouses should relate to one another. The Prophet appears as a model of fairness and justice. So his precedent is cited but it's that precedent. Interestingly, it's not the precedent for polygamy because",
      "for granted that this was completely and totally permissible, and they weren't worried about that. We're worried about it! And so we have books about polygamy. They don't have chapters on polygony. They assume that it's okay, and then they talk about within the structure how do you create fairness? So they are asking very different questions."
    ]
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    "text": [
      "That's one of the dramatic points, I think in History of Ideas is that people are interested in questions that are very different from ours but they're making opinions that have effects for us today and we can't ignore. So looking at books there are three terms seem to be very prominent marriage slavery and analogy. Could you say something about the importance of analogy in this formative period? And why in some respects",
      "they saw an analogy between marriage and slavery, but also how in what ways marriage isn't slavery for them. Right. So actually this was the second part of your question which I didn't mean to avoid, I just sort of got distracted. So analogy comes to be this central element in some soul effect because the text can only tell you so much there are lots of things that they don't address directly and so the notion that one of the ways you make law is by taking a case",
      "taking a case and then extracting a principle from it to govern a decision in another case, this is part of how you extend cases for which there are specific textual precedent to cases for what there isn't. Now as I was talking about earlier, part of what's happening in this period is the systematization of law, the attempt to make things consistent,",
      "and you don't want weak points. One of the ways you do that is by ruling on similar cases according to similar principles. Now, back to the question of the analogy between marriage and slavery. Slavery is a common institution in the ancient Near East, right? This goes back again. We think of it today as this tremendously worrisome thing, and it's really a problem that it exists,",
      "we deal with it, you know. It was just part of social life right? It was part of what went on, it was part society and so thinking about the analogy to slavery is not a big problem. The common term that marriage and slavery and other kinds of property ownership share is mimic from the term for dominion right? Ownership control there's",
      "semantic range of terms derived from this. It's where we get the word for matic, right? Or matic king, right you know God is the owner or sovereign over the day of judgment it's that same kind of dominion that one uses for ordinary possessions and again for the control over them that's transacted in some kind of exchange having said",
      "that the Muslim jurists used. Their paradigm for nearly everything was the sale contract, right? I mean if you look at the Qur'an there's commercial terminology for the relationship between individual human beings and God. That doesn't mean we think there is actually a sale going on there, right it's used metaphorically for all of these kinds of things. It was used to talk about property transactions more specifically. Buying a slave was a very common example of a property transaction that got discussed",
      "discussed because slaves were what was called a non-fungible commodity. Like you buy a bushel of apples, it turns out the bushels rotten, you can substitute another bushel right? They're fungibles like cash. You know one dollar bill is as good as another dollar bill. Slaves aren't like that. Real estate isn't like certain kinds of animals aren't that. They are more like baseball players. More like rare baseball cards perhaps but baseball players works too and so this",
      "And so this is why there's a lot of discussion of slaves in these books, because they were sort of ubiquitous and because you could think about them as representing non-fungible commodities. However when you buy and sell people including people who in other respects are moral persons right? If they're Muslim they have to pray, they have fast, they",
      "also possible to think about structuring that transaction or seeing that transaction as a model for another kind of transaction where one person is acquiring a certain kind of dominion over another person, right? And in this case the husband over the wife. The transaction is that he pays downer, but the transaction it's a contract, its consent, it's offering agreement exactly like",
      "is discussive. And then if there's payment, he gets something in exchange. What does it get an exchange? He doesn't own her right this is the second part of your question doesn't oner in the way that you might want to slave that is to say he can resell to a high bidder. Right it doesn't work like that okay so but what does he get to do well he becomes",
      "becomes the one who possesses control over the linkage between them. It's a sort of abstract notion, right? But what this means is first of all that this transaction something the jurors can talk about by analogy to slavery they can understand the dower as being like purchase price and then they can explain you know if it turns out the dour isn't the right amount what do you do about that well let's look at",
      "with the slave that you've purchased, right? Because there's some analogy there. What the milk and nikah, the ownership of the marriage tie does for the husband is it puts him in a position like the owner of a slave to unilaterally release that tie so just like the own of a slaves can manumit that slave,",
      "of marriage for these jurists of this era. Talak, this ability to sort of unilaterally dissolve the marriage bond is one thing that the husband gains by virtue of making the contract. The wife gains the dowry in exchange. And if you think about it, this makes sense. If the wife gains a dowry with marriage but then has equal right to simply dissolve the married tie at her convenience, well, you could make a lot of money that way.",
      "Things are linked in legal thought. And so the exploration of what it means to be able to pronounce divorce, what conditions the husband has to fulfill, whether the wife has any say about this gets explained by virtue of the analogy between a master and slave. A slave can't just walk up to the master one day and say I can't admit myself because that would be",
      "of control, nor can the wife walk up to the husband and say I divorce myself. Well, looking at more modern times where in the Nika contract many women will put in the right to verbal talat, they give back the dower, the three rupees they usually get anyway, but that was not an acceptable thing",
      "an acceptable thing to do back in the day? Well, what was acceptable in practice and what the jurists wrote about are also two different things. I mean, I think it's really important to note that one of the doings in this book is really looking at a kind of ideal discourse, right? Yes there could be wiggle room in all kinds of ways in all kind of situations. People are ingenious, right, they come up with those things. And the jurist allowed for certain kinds",
      "certain kinds of delegated divorce. I mean, talakh is an oath, right? He can say if I ever take another wife you are divorced and she can insist on it as a condition of merit just to be sure she insists on your triply divorced otherwise it could just be one divorce and he could take her back without consent You know, you have to be careful about loopholes But, you know, she can exist on that but why does that work? It works because Talakh is his right. He could say if it rains a week from Tuesday you were divorced",
      "And that has happened. Sure, yeah, absolutely. So in that sense it's certainly possible to make these rules serve women's interests and there have been savvy women always who've done that. As far as the women pronounce tala and give back the da'wah in exchange for doing that, the way these jurists talk about that is khut, right? Where and what they say almost without exception",
      "exception and there are some jurors who hold a slightly different view but these jurors will say no that requires the husband's consent right now it's automatically irrevocable they can negotiate a different kind of settlement because if it's revocable and he can just take her back then what's the point right um they can",
      "can certainly do that. And they make the analogy here between and a slave buying his or her manumission over time, right? Because if they're trying to understand this and they say well, the slave can't just give the master money in and kind of have it be settled. The master has to consent to disagreement. Right. This is really fascinating. Maybe I'll cover some of the grammar",
      "already a little bit just because this is such a new way of thinking about things we kind of have to familiarize ourselves with it so you're saying that the in this ideal discourse this ideals thought world the jurists have the husband doesn't own the wife he owns the marriage time yeah he does not know what life is even if she is a slave because remember slaves are people too right even if",
      "the dowry would go to her master because she doesn't own property, because she's a slave. But he's not... The owner does not become her master. That's a necessary distinction. If she's free woman, she has her own property rights. She has her autonomy in all of these spheres outside of marriage. As a wife, she doesn' have the same kind of control over the marriage tie but if two of them say they bought real estate together as co-owners, they will be precisely equal in that and this is really important thing actually",
      "thing actually because married women don't get property rights in European countries for a very long time, right? In the United States a married woman couldn't get credit for her own name. These are really significant things and it's a really important way of thinking about the marriage relationship and that isn't entirely that kind",
      "because she's a free person. Right, and I think that's really important point because very often when we read about the history of Islam and Islamic law we make like the comparison this is what they're doing this is where we're doing when in fact the real comparison is what was at the time they were in so in comparison to the rest of the world we I think working for your book is that there's patriarchy was actually being restricted in",
      "the wife has property of her own. And as you say, if they bought real estate together it would be totally equal partners. Right. I mean, I think it's also probably...I understand the temptation to say well patriarchy was everywhere and Muslims were less patriarchal. Muslims were differently patriarchal, right? Property rights operated a particular way and that was a huge source of power for some Muslim women.",
      "Having access to your own money. Anybody who reads Jane Austen knows that this matters, right? To what kind of marriage you can have and what kind life you can now. Different communities did it differently. And perhaps women in those marriages, Roman women for instance later end up being able, there's a big shift in the Roman marriage law, end up be able to divorce on fairly equal terms with their husbands which doesn't happen at least in theory in Muslim communities.",
      "for those periods where the ideal is still very heavily based on unilateral male divorce, the practice ends up being a lot more women giving back to others and getting divorces from their husbands that way. We don't know about that for the 8th or 9th century because we don't have court archives. The Ottomans were exceptional bureaucrats and they kept really good archives so we have lots of evidence for that kind of divorce there. Well I think it's still a better deal than many South Asian countries",
      "South Asian countries where the woman has to pay the dowry and she's still the only person like I don't know enough about Hindu marriage practice to say anything about that. I will say about in India one of the things that happens with the coming of the British, and I'm certainly by no means an expert in it law is That you end up with a sort of worst-of-both-worlds approach because they're not comfortable with the idea of women having property so women's inheritance rights which have been really sacrosanct in",
      "in religious law, even as you know in some communities especially rural communities they were sort of ignored. In practice if you went to the court the judge, the Muslim judge would always rule in favor of the fixed inheritance share then the British come in and they sort of assume certain things about what's fair and reasonable and one of the things that's fair",
      "Muslim law in India is that you get sort of a mishmash of British ideas mixed up with elements of country jurisprudence."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Islam _ Authors Dr Kecia Ali Part 3_gilzyZwqxGU&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748699959.opus",
    "text": [
      "You know, one of the other things that struck me when you read legalese is sort of the absence of the whole poetic side of relationships. I mean it's found in a Quran where your garments are to each other and mercy in your hearts and perhaps the legal language just takes it out or... Yeah, these guys were doing something very specific here",
      "specific here. This is a genre of writing in which they were concerned with, they were concern with ethics it's not all this is what you can enforce and abort or this you can't enforce some of it is ideally its recommended that you do this particular thing or it would be a good idea for you to do this or I would discourage you from doing that but you know they're really not dealing in these texts",
      "And you know, in some of his poetry he does like a different perspective on some of these things. So I think we have to really be very aware that this is one piece of a very large picture. It's one piece the picture of intellectual culture it's one pieces of a picture of legal culture because what's actually happening in the courts is very very different than what's happening in",
      "So for the final question, in terms of practical relevance. If a Muslim is reading your book and coming across these legal concepts, ways to thinking that are very different from modern sensibilities, what recommendations would you give for navigating? What's some possibilities that we have?",
      "century, thinking about history in general can be useful if potentially not immediately relevant in the way some other things might be is that it's really helpful to recognize that our ways of thinking about things aren't the only ways they've ever been thought. That",
      "we got here from a particular place and it might be possible to do things differently in the future. I think Americans, in particular tend to be perhaps suffering from a kind of collective historical amnesia like the 70s are sort of the distant past. And maybe this is partially because they teach a lot of undergraduates and you know they went alive during the Cold War and so if I say oh well yeah and you",
      "like the Russian mafia. It's ancient history and it seems irrelevant. So in that sense, you know, the fact that people don't realize that it was really common up until some point of the 20th century for ordinary Christian wedding ceremonies to have the bride promise to love honor and obey while the husband promised to love, honor and cherish. And I say that to people now when they say yeah right",
      "Yeah, right. You're making that up.\" But it was very common and so I think there's a part of the smugness that goes along with contemporary certainty is in part you know a failure to recognize that the ancient world is the ancient World and we have to think about it but I think part of what can be useful about thinking about this is also thinking about well what parts of this are we still carrying with us today then we're not comfortable with?",
      "with. If we still think of Palak as being this kind of central Islamic institution, well does thinking about the fact that its centrality in Muslim marriage law perhaps derives from the ease with which the jurists were able to make this other kind of comparison? Does that perturb us enough to rethink how we might treat Palak today? I'm really not trying to say anything particular about the contemporary situation",
      "situation and I'm certainly not attempting a kind of prescription about where we ought to go from here except that I think having more data to think with about this incredibly rich, and also in some ways deeply problematic tradition can only really help us. Great thank you so much. Thank you. Professor Keisha Ellie and we're ready for questions and answers from the audience?",
      "And it was one of those things that just struck you and... Was it both ways? Your men's service and your women's service also.",
      "socially acceptable modes of sexual relationship was between a man and his own slaves. What exactly slavery meant, the Quran says, مَا مَلَكَتْ امَنُوا Right? What your right hands own or possess that term مَلاكة again, right? What that meant exactly are these people who were captured in war, are they people bought and sold certainly marriage by capture as far as we can tell",
      "can tell was reasonably common tribal practice. We do know to the extent that we're willing to rely on sources like Bukhari and Muslim and other hadith collections of the Sira literature, that the Prophet Muhammad had a concubine. Her name was Maryam Qubziya. She was a gift just to show you how common this was in the ancient world beyond the borders of Arabia.",
      "of Alexandria, we have actually an expert on her in the audience who wrote a master's thesis about her. And there were other women as well, certainly he was not the only member of the community to do so and this became enshrined in jurisprudence as a perfectly permissible practice unlike in certain other legal systems the children born to these women",
      "became what was known as, mothers of children, and they would be freed on their master's death. So this was a permissible form of sexual relationship that relied on ownership by the right hand which was very much like. And so you know the discussions where I said sort of purchase of a slave marriage contract with dower payment to the wife these are often cases that are discussed jointly.",
      "As far as women taking their male slaves as concubines, that was a big no-no. Okay? And really almost nobody talks about it, right? It's just so far outside what people are willing to think about. But there is this one wonderful anecdote which shows up in an 8th century legal text where this woman comes to the caliph Omar and she says well you know I've taken my slave",
      "my male relatives are getting kind of upset about this. And Omar says, well you know what on earth possessed you to do this? And she says, Well, men have slaves and they have sex with them and I'm a slave so why not? And Omar goes and consults with a bunch of the companions and comes back and says, She's given the Book of God an interpretation that is not its interpretation. And that's kind of his answer to this.",
      "So and then Imam Shaikh Ali comes along 150 years later. And he actually, this earlier situation is sort of ad hoc right? It's a problem and they deal with it by saying yeah not permitted. Imam Shaikali by them using analogy, by them thinking systematically about what this might mean is confronted by this hypothetical questioner who says to him",
      "why is it that a woman can't take her male slave as a concubine like a man takes his female slave as the concubine? And he says, The woman is the one who is taken as a Concubine who is married right in the passive. Mankur and the man He is the One Who Takes A Concubine Who Marries Now what's particularly interesting about this is that the questioner is asking about a free woman and a male slave whom she loans",
      "slave whom she owns, right? The response is about a free man and female slave who he owns because in Shafiq's thought this wasn't the only position. Malik thought male slaves could take concubines but Imam Shafii says no because you have to be able to own property to do this it would have to a free men so he just you know this whole edifice of thought yes property",
      "comes specifically to the question of sex, for him it's the gender of the person that's at stake. And it's not an accident that he moves from the question about concubinage to precisely the question",
      "I have two further information. I would like you to please see how, first of all the accuracy of the information and secondly how they apply to our current understanding. One is that at the time of Prophet Muhammad, a young man wanted to get married and he definitely had to have dowry but did not have any materialistic meaning",
      "Okay, so let me ask you a question.",
      "So let me ask a clarifying question. What do you mean the person holding authority on the marriage contract? I'm not sure I understand the question specifically.",
      "does that qualify for whether this is accurate or not?",
      "Whether it's a fair exchange from an ethical perspective is tricky. The other thing, of course, is that you asked about the relevance for the contemporary situation in quite a number of Muslim-majority societies extrajudicial talaq is no longer valid and you have to go to a judge and get a divorce, right? And so certainly Muslims living in America at least in theory are obliged to process things through the secular legal system.",
      "that case, you know what's being talked about there is different. I also think it's really important to recognize that the point of that story is a sort of ethical point about the importance of the Qur'an and the irrelevance of worldly wealth. The jurists are not interested for the most part in answering those kinds of ethical queries they're interested",
      "So it's a genre question as much as anything else.",
      "because of the level of perhaps economic situation or social status of women were not as high as men, so man was in a better position to dominate their contract. But yet the woman did have option to tell up"
    ]
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    "file": "kecia/Kecia Ali - Contesting Muhammad_ Contemporary Cont_7UHYWLysEwI&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748700765.opus",
    "text": [
      "Speaker tonight is Professor Kisha Ali. She is a professor of religion and chair of the religion department at Boston University",
      "Her research ranges from Islam's formative period to the present and focuses on Islamic law, gender and sexuality, and religious biography. She is the author of several books including Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam and Sexual Ethics and Islam, Feminist Reflections on the Quran Hadith and Jurisprudence.",
      "and a study of the gender politics of academic Islamic studies. She recently completed a term as status committee director for the American Academy of Religion, and is a past president of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. And tonight's lecture is based on her book The Lives of Muhammad, an amazing book about which I'll say more later",
      "more later when Rakesha and I will have a conversation. But for now, I leave you in the able hands of Professor Ali, and please help me welcome her virtually to the Center. Thank you. Thanks very much. First of all thank you professor Majid, and thanks to the center for global humanities",
      "strange Zoom world we're living in. Now, in the decades since I began speaking sort of regularly about Muhammad in lead up to writing my book, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. and beyond has risen really dramatically. And so I want to just begin tonight by acknowledging that this is a fraught topic",
      "harassment, and violence have risen precipitously even in Massachusetts since the lead up to the 2016 election. Rhetoric from individuals and groups ranges from merely ugly to murderous to genocidal. In December 2016, shortly after the last election, my mosque got a letter saying that Trump would do to Muslims what Hitler did",
      "in my university mailbox from a self-described infidel who said he and others were armed, locked, and loaded. The letter was scribbled on the back of a hate group flyer, and it took the time to levy specific insults including pedo pervert against Muhammad. Accusations of sexual deviance are of course a time honored tactic in interreligious polemics but their specific contours",
      "aren't a manifestation of some timeless antagonism between Islam and the West, about which we hear an awful lot. Rather they are very much an artifact of their time in their place as I'll talk about in my remarks this evening. So In The Lives Of Muhammad, the book which you so helpfully used for show-and-tell, I look at how the Prophet Muhammad's life has been understood over the centuries by a wide variety",
      "and especially how in the last two centuries, Muslim and non-Muslim, especially European and North American non-muslim perspectives on his life have grown closer. And that might seem counterintuitive given what I just said about contemporary anti-Muslam sentiment. But what I mean is that looking at how Muhammad's life has been told and retold reveals transformations and fault lines within Western societies as well as among Muslims.",
      "And we see how ideas about Muhammad that many contemporary Muslims hold fervently and defend passionately actually arose in tandem with Western European and North American intellectuals' portraits. Now, before the colonial era when European powers conquered and occupied many Muslim majority societies in Africa and Asia, polemical non-Muslims and hagiographical Muslim accounts of Muhammad",
      "accounts of Muhammad's life flowed in largely separate streams. Muslim writing about the Prophet included biographies which recounted the events of his life, but these narratives coexisted with other more influential stories including about his night journey and ascension to heaven. Muhammad's role as intercessor for Muslims on the Day of Judgment, as the original light in creation, God's beloved, and the perfect mirror of divine beauty",
      "were far better known, Anne-Marie Schimmel writes to the medieval Muslims than the historical facts of the Prophet's life. At the same time during the first centuries of Islam's existence Europeans knew little and cared less about accuracy in what they had to say about Muhammad. They associated him with paganism and idolatry. Somewhat later medieval European polemics coerced Muslims into believing that",
      "polemics commingled fact and fabrication. As the Crusades increased European familiarity with Muslim beliefs, and paganism became less of a concern for Christians than dissent and heresy, Muhammad was refashioned into an antichrist and false prophet. By the early modern era, roughly between the Reformation and the French Revolution, he'd become",
      "over and over, when we look at these European accounts of Muhammad's life, that their writers who were often clergy tailored their accusations about Muslims and Muhammad to current local theological and social worries. They used Islam as a foil to address the preoccupations closer to home. So for Protestants, Muhammad and the Pope were twin antichrists or jumping forward to the 19th century and across the Atlantic",
      "across the Atlantic, anti-Mormon polemicists called the latter day American prophet Joseph Smith, the Yankee Muhammad. So this kind of insult has, of course, persisted as the Enlightenment transformed ideas about religion. More recently, humanistic European and North American thinkers came to see Muhammad as sincere",
      "world religions, a category which is itself of modern invention and part of the rise of the academic study of religion. The Muhammad that these scholars sought was the historical Muhammad who Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike often portrayed as a political and military leader and social reformer. This is different from and distinct from the luminous Muhammad",
      "But this isn't the Muhammad who typically shows up in biographies, which typically focus on his deeds. The publication by European scholars of early Muslim historical and biographical texts generated new ways of interacting with these sources and a great deal of argument polemic and exchange between Muslim and non-Muslim scholars and pundits. And today some of my colleagues in Islamic studies are working with these enemies",
      "working with these and other sources to try to retrieve a very accurate biography of Muhammad and knowledge of Islam from the seventh, eighth, even sixth century sources. Their debates are ongoing and contentious, and some argue vociferously that we can know nearly nothing with any degree of certainty about Muhammad's life. And others",
      "constructing a solid account of who he was and what he did. But these are specialist squabbles, and they've had remarkably little effect on how most accounts of Muhammad's life proceed. Because I know that there will be folks in the audience who are unfamiliar with the key points of this account that I want to talk about later, I'm going to give a very quick summary.",
      "employed by and then married to the wealthy widow Khadija when he was 25, she was 40. They had two or three sons who died in infancy and four daughters. After some years, he began meditating in a cave on the outskirts of Mecca where when he is 40, he has some kind of an experience. Muslim sources say he was visited by the angel Gabriel who brought him the first verses of the Qur'an. Muhammad sought solace and reassurance from Khadijah",
      "Khadija, then began to preach. Preaching the oneness of God, the inevitability of judgment and his preaching with egalitarian undercurrents attracted converts among the disadvantaged and hostility from local elites in part because his recent religion threatened the economy which depended on pilgrims visiting the Kaaba, a bastion of idolatry. Hostility turned to persecution after",
      "He remarried Sauda, a widow and Aisha the young daughter of his close friend and follower Abu Bakr. He and his family and followers emigrated to Medina where he eventually married several more times. He led the community politically as well as religiously alternately cooperated with and fought local Jewish tribes and feuded and engaged in warfare with Arab pagans capturing Mecca in 630 when he died in Medina two years later Islam already dominated",
      "already dominated much of the Arabian Peninsula. Today, most biographies whether in Arabic or English by Muslims or non-Muslims in Wikipedia or in textbook journalistic accounts or PBS documentaries stick fairly close to this outline providing more or less detail as the genre demands. Hostile biographers weave a tapestry of improper motives and acts around this war while pious accounts embroider it with evidence",
      "it with evidence for Muhammad's prophetic status and extraordinary virtues. They may also add details of certain miraculous religiously meaningful experiences, but not always. Despite these important differences in tone the contours of the story are largely the same and they're derived from a handful of 8th 9th and 10th century texts. The details are old",
      "particularly distinctive in what I'll say most about this evening is the central focus on Muhammad's marriages, sometimes separated into a thematic chapter and also distinctive disproportionate attention given to Khadija. Muhammad's modern biographers whatever their intent whether hostile or laudatory saw his character manifested in his relationships with women first and foremost Khadijah but",
      "but also, and as a clear contrast, his other wives as a group. And my favorite example of the centrality of his marriages is an early 20th century Egyptian biography titled The Genius of Muhammad. And when it was published, there were vibrant public debates going on about sovereignty and politics and power. But the author of this book devotes nearly 10 times as many pages to Muhammad as a husband",
      "its wives and marriage is so important. It's particularly because the woman question in Islam had become prominent. Now, as Mojakaf has shown, the medieval and early modern Muslim woman was portrayed as a termagant by Europeans. And the oppressed but alluring Muslim woman, as Leila Ahmed and others have shown, is an invention of colonialism. And as Muslim biographers",
      "European scholars and critics, they began reformulating their approaches to Muhammad's life to refute perceived errors of interpretation. Thus Khadija becomes a pious active female role model and Muhammad as her husband a new kind of modern man. Now there are a variety of ways these things manifest in sympathetic modern accounts of",
      "his marriage to Khadija. And this might seem like an obvious thing to do because by the usual reckoning, she was married to him for more than twice as long as any other woman. And of course, early sources associate her with crucial turning points in his life, his marriage, his prophetic commission, and then in the wake of her death, his departure from Mecca to Medina. But pre-modern accounts while praising her and giving her epithets like Khadijah the Grand",
      "pure, tend to say relatively little about their conjugal life compared to the wealth of information about his later marriages which transpired during the course of his public prophetic mission and leadership of the community. But for some modern authors again Muslim and non-Muslim we see the importance of this marriage as a way to praise Muhammad",
      "as comforter in the wake of Muhammad's first encounter with Gabriel become grounds for depicting comforting as a wifely duty and marriage as an institution designed to nurture emotional closeness, right? She's his faithful wife and helpmate, as Montgomery Watt puts it. Or as Pakistani author Jan Jalbani comments, she no doubt knew him better as no one can be",
      "positioned to have free access to his heart. They're making Muhammad relatable. Now these descriptions of marital intimacy and wifely comforting even take on religious overtones, so the Egyptian modernist Muhammad Hussein Haikal calls Khadija an angel of mercy, a coinage which is strange enough that even though Arabic books typically omit vowel markers,",
      "then we see other authors adopt the stock phrase angel of hope and consolation, which is a British 19th century phrase. We see it first in sympathetic non-Muslim books about Muhammad, and then in English language works by Muslim South Asians sporadically up through the late 20th century. This imagery of a wife as an angel, however metaphorical, at least partially displaces",
      "the actual angel whose initial appearance had led Muhammad to seek her comfort. The emphasis, even in works by Muslims has changed from the eruption of the divine into Muhammad's life to the importance of a domestic sanctuary where an angel of the hearth awaits him. These ways of speaking of Khadija, of course draw on early Muslim biographies that celebrate",
      "but they're decisively modern in the way they depict Muhammad's marriages as a center of his emotional life and the couple and the nuclear household as the proper pattern for family living. They are emphasizing Muhammad, the man rather than Muhammad, The Prophet is a shift from type to individual. What do these biographers do with the fact that in the wake of Khadija death, Muhammad remarries repeatedly?",
      "At that point, the perfect nuclear household and companionate marriage these authors envision becomes trickier to imagine. Not only because his other wives didn't bear him children but specifically because they're not monogamous. Now there's a narrative link that goes back to early sources between Khadija's death and Muhammad's remarriages, specifically to Aisha and Sauda. But those early works are concerned primarily with which context",
      "with which contract was made first and not at all with his motivations for contracting two marriages in quick succession. This is because the idea that polygamy itself was problematic and needed justification didn't occur to any of Muhammad's pre-modern Muslim biographers. They spent no time discussing it, but when hostile modern writers began to speculate about Muhammad's motives",
      "also responded. So we have texts like the early hostile life written by the Anglican clergyman Humphrey Prideaux in 1697. He criticized Muhammad for having contracted multiple marriages for worldly aims. He was trying to tie himself to influential fathers-in-law, but by the 20th century, we see those concerned with defending Muhammad from what are now accusations of lustfulness turning back",
      "turning back to Prideaux's argument and in fact holding the marriages blameless precisely because they were motivated not by lust but by the desire to forge strategic alliances. Where lustfulness was the medieval and early modern accusation about Muhammad, by the late 19th century and into the 20th polygamy became understood by critics of Islam",
      "Hence the emphasis by those biographers seeking a positive portrait on his long monogamous marriage to Khadija and then the political justification for his later marriages. Now it's only quite recently, comparatively speaking, that Aisha's youth, which is the source of the insult in that threatening letter that I received, became a concern. In the second half",
      "which early Muslim sources mostly declared to have been six or seven at marriage and nine or occasionally ten at consummation, was first flagged as a problem. So earlier critics like Prideaux had deplored Muhammad's calculated plotting to cultivate powerful allies including Aisha's father but Aisha youth caused him no qualms. This is a quote from Prideaux.",
      "he did not bed her till two years later when she was full eight years old, for it is usual in those hot countries as it is in India all over which is in the same climb with Arabia for women to be ripe for marriage at that age and also bear children the year following. We find similarly orientalist allusions to climate's effect on maturation in the 1830s biography by George Bush an American Methodist minister",
      "distant relative of the recent president's Bush, who remarks that Aisha was married, such as the surprising physical precocity peculiar to an eastern climate at the early age of nine and survived her husband 48 years. And the novelist Washington Irving, who's a rough contemporary of Bush is likewise untroubled. As he puts it echoing Prideaux and Bush,",
      "Now there were other authors, other biographers less interested in titillating accounts of the precocious development of young girls in what Prideaux called the torrid zone. But they still raised no objections to Aisha's age and the book gives a lot of examples here. Even as late as the 70s and 80s American and British biographers gave accounts of Aisha childish habits without giving excessive condemnation or extensive condemnation.",
      "But by then, sensibilities had shifted and not only among Westerners. It had become increasingly common over the preceding century for accounts including by Muslims to refer to the original contract as a betrothal and the consummation as marriage. In the 1960 Arabic translation of Washington Irving's book, a translator's note appears discussing Aisha's age at betrothsal and marriage.",
      "What was acceptable for Americans in the 1850s, was troubling for Egyptians a century later. Now by the last decade of the 20th century and especially the first decade of 21st, Aisha's age had become a favorite argument of anti-Islam polemicists, especially but not exclusively online. In 2002, the Reverend Jerry Vine Southern Baptist Convention speech called Muhammad quote,",
      "Vine's accusation is interesting because it merges this new epithet with an old slander, the medieval charge of demon possession. When challenged, Vine cited early texts, these early Arabic biographies, texts which contain facts, facts available to Western biographers for centuries who repeated them as we saw without any particular condemnation. Now those who wanted to contest Vine's argument took two tacks.",
      "One was historical contextualization, things were different then. Or arguing that these particular texts were not reliable sources of facts. Some Muslim rejoinders to Vines for instance rejected the particular accounts on which his story of Aisha's marriage was based as do a number of more recent biographies which tend to cite other reports or to challenge those ages based on the timing of different events in early Muslim history.",
      "But what's striking to me is that even as people disagree about how reliable specific texts are, they all agree, nearly everyone agrees, that these authentic texts contains facts which are how one knows and judges key elements of Muhammad's life. So to wrap up, and then we can have a conversation. Women in sex remain very much key loci for criticism of Muhammad.",
      "of Muhammad, even as medieval emphases on debauchery and lustfulness become modern concern with oppression. Looking back from our vantage point, it may be nearly impossible to understand how in the middle of the 19th century evangelist and British colonial official and Arabic scholar William Muir was untroubled by Aisha's youth but highly critical not only",
      "debased women. Today, divorce carries very little stigma and even polygamy is quaint but unthreatening in a lot of contexts. We see it on television dramas and reality shows as an exotic curiosity. On the other hand, what previous generations treated as child marriage, a primitive practice to be eradicated by the adoption of progressive Western norms has become abuse or most frighteningly put pedophilia.",
      "So by the 20th century, Muhammad had largely stopped being viewed as evil, even by people who didn't much approve of him. But the rise of the pedophile epithet, largely after 9-11, had to do with a resurgence of the idea of evil and the idea",
      "Anti-Muslim and anti-Catholic sentiments, which deserve a full exploration in themselves, remain connected. Muhammad's marriage to Aisha has become for contemporary polemicists a firm and unbreachable barrier to any attempt to portray Muhammad as an admirable figure. All of these contemporary polemiques about Muhammad's marriages draw from an unwieldy jumble",
      "which have in common mostly that they provide a language to denigrate others. The historian John Tolan, who's the reigning expert on medieval Christian accounts of Muhammad, suggests that, and I'll quote him, European discourse concerning Muhammad is often best understood as a deforming mirror. And I agree, what we celebrate or repudiate",
      "correspond to a real individual on the other side of the text. But it does give us, I think, a really fascinating glimpse of our own preoccupations. Wow. Thank you so much. Thank You, Kisha. So I want to begin this session by saying that I don't remember reading the conclusion of a book",
      "It was so satisfying. It was just enjoyable to an extent that I really at the end of it, I wrote bravo at the other end because what you did is after talking about different aspects of Mohammed's life and how the complexities and the transformation of the biographies and so on,",
      "together in the end, in a literary tour de force I would say. It's high literature. I mean it's high literary analysis. I don't know whether you would agree with me but it's amazing. So I'm going to start with a couple of specific questions because they're striking. One sentence is especially striking at the conclusion and then if you don't mind we'll just have a series of reflections open-ended kind",
      "The striking, I wrote a statement you make here is modern Islam is a profoundly Protestant tradition. Okay. All right. So that one gets me the most questions maybe of anything in the conclusion. I stand by it. Yes. Although I think I should really say modern Sunni Islam to be more precise",
      "more precise. And you do say that, and you do certainly it's not the case that you can make a complete analogy but I also think some of the same things that made Protestantism Protestantism which is to say the availability",
      "of really almost sort of DIY exegesis, those are patterns that we see very much in Muslim communities. I mean, somebody who knows Catholicism will have to tell me whether modern Catholicism is also a profoundly Protestant tradition, right? I mean I do think that some of what I'm talking about when",
      "coexistence of a variety of trends that come to the fore. But I do think that looking at biographies and biographys alone doesn't at all give us the complete picture of devotion to Muhammad that continues to suffuse many Muslim societies.",
      "What we talk about when we talk Muhammad in today's world. Okay, what is striking also on your book it's like you play with these biographies You put them together you look at them side by side Then you go back and forth in time and do all kinds of things with his biographys Until we come when we come to the modern period something very interesting happens It looks like as it seems to me as if everybody whether its Westerners and Muslims are writing the same",
      "are using the same genre basically to tell the story of the prophet. So let's say beginning in the 19th century, it seems to me that everybody was writing a Western style biography of the Prophet. What do you think? Well so I think there are two western texts that are...two texts one by a Brit and one by an Egyptian which is sort",
      "I think William Muir's four-volume Life of Muhammad, based on the original sources, which he publishes in 1860s in India, where he's been stationed as a colonial officer,",
      "who thinks that part of his job, part of mission is to evangelize. He's initially contracted to write a missionizing life in a vernacular language and he decides he can't do that so he wants to write you know a life of Muhammad that will convince Muslims to convert Christianity okay but he's also",
      "And he tries to, on the one hand be scrupulously responsible to his sources. But on the other hand show that Muhammad is bad and Muslims should convert right? And so he produces this kind of tour de force biography that sets historicity",
      "with which all later biographers have to contend. So this really changes the playing field, and we start to see a lot more books that are – a lot of our biographies that are really focused on what can we reliably know? And what does this tell us? And so we get concerns about the truth of his prophecy but then also his personal behaviors.",
      "It's not an accident, of course that this is sort of the historical Jesus time right I mean you're is here in sync with broader trends in the study of religious figures and of biblical traditions and so forth. So this happens in the 1860s. The other biography This is where I argue that you start to really see the merging emerging of these traditions.",
      "separate Muslim and non-Muslim biographical tradition is Muhammad Hussein Haikal's 1935 Hayat Muhammad, right? It's life of Muhammad in simply translated into Arabic. That is not a traditional title for a biography. You call them the Sira of the Prophet or prophetic Sira or something that has a grounding",
      "in the Arab and Muslim tradition. Now, Haeckel knows it is a direct Arabic translation of English and French European biographies title. And that's very fitting because his biography actually originates as a series of long critical responses published in periodical reform to a French biography by Emile Dörmingham.",
      "By this point, it's just all one kind of thing. And Haeckel's biography was deeply controversial when it appeared and now it's sort of an old favorite in a lot of instances and it was a thoroughly not a desanctified Muhammad exactly but a disenchanted one in the sense that this Muhammad",
      "not a figure of cosmic light. He was a social reformer, he was a political leader, right? He was A man and the story of his life was told as the story up a man an extraordinary man but I mean Yeah, I mean you talk about that too with the you know The different kind of the kinds of virtues",
      "that were valued in the 19th century and so on, how Muslims continuously respond to that and trying to prove the case and so one. One of things that strike me about this conclusion and all the entire book actually is the how eventually people end up being trapped in discursive traditions not of their own making let's say the Western tradition for example one other interesting fact you mentioned more than once is that religion",
      "creation concept, that there wasn't people before that didn't think of Islam as a religion the way we think of it today because of the tradition. I always used to tell people students just for fun I would say in 1850 for example or thereabouts people didn't have an ego nobody had an ego because they simply didn't exist as a concept so when concepts come into existence",
      "to histories, to the ways people relate to themselves and the tradition. So you say here I'm going to quote you again, I'm gonna ask you to comment a little bit. There was no pure Islamic tradition prior to the encounter with Western modernity. Okay. Yeah, I can say something about that. One of the biggest challenges for anybody who wants to talk",
      "to talk to Muslims or non-Muslims about Islam in the world is this idea that there is Islam and then there's outside of Islam, right? And that if we talk about Islam and the West, there's this hermetically sealed entity called Islam",
      "entity called the West. And neither one of those things is true, right? The very earliest Muslim community, the community around Muhammad, right, was a community that was negotiating Arabic tradition, new religious traditions,",
      "can continue and what must stop. So does that mean that if something was an Arabic tradition, that Muhammad didn't stop? Right? That now it is Islamic? And what does that do when you move to another part of the world? That question about religion and cultures is really, really tricky. But for purposes of this book specifically, what I wanted to make really clear",
      "clear is that there's a tremendous amount of internal Muslim diversity in terms of how Muhammad gets portrayed. That changes over time, long before we have encounters with Europeans, right? So even if you're looking at",
      "the difference between Ibn Ishaq's earliest biography and then Ibn Hisham's slightly later recension of that biography, right? Which takes things out and puts things in. There's already been a shift in terms of what's perceived as the most efficacious way to make clear what a really cool guy Muhammad is. Yes.",
      "kind of cultural encounter. You know, first of all, when we say Islam, we mostly mean the Arab Muslim Middle East and we say the West, we most mean like Northern Europe maybe Central Europe and North America and actually really just the US and Canada. We don't mean like Indonesia and Chile right? That's not what we're talking about when we're",
      "But those who study South Asia, those who studied sub-Saharan Africa, those will look at West Africa and East Africa right. Those who think about intra Muslim encounters but also Muslim encounters with others who aren't Western others I think find that we also see really important",
      "really interesting ways of thinking about who Muhammad is and what he does. And that those also get expressed in a variety of local idioms, right? Symbolic idioms and of course obviously languages. Yeah, no I mean there are so many provocative things you say here",
      "of civilizations between Islam and the West, people who appeal to that based on this notion also for timeless Islam or a timeless image of Muhammad. And which absolutely as you show it's an ever changing narrative about the story of Muhammad and what gets emphasized, what gets de-emphasized over time.",
      "does impel Muslims to somehow be on the defensive a little bit, to respond to this accusation, to response to the narrative, to the distortions and so on and so forth. But what's... you know, the idea that I keep now—I'm gonna open it a little further—just as reflections on, it does seem to me,",
      "is a literary, you know comes from the literary tradition. Biology in this case which is the ultimate fact of existence so to speak really doesn't matter. I mean to me implicitly what reading your book what comes out very strongly to me and it's something that I've known instinctively and otherwise even though before I read",
      "biology, the fact that somebody was born and died between this year between 570 and 60 whatever 10 and so on but people care mostly about biography. And biographies have ever-changing narrative that keeps changing. So it almost makes you wonder whether we actually...whether these figures we are defending,",
      "are basically necessary for a culture to perpetuate, to preserve its traditions. And it's not necessarily about fact. You talk about devotional biographies which eventually in the modern age become untenable because everybody is insisting on facts. Everybody wants facts. Everyone wants the truth. But you said that for most of Muslim history Muslims were",
      "the truth, the fact. They just wanted to experience the divine and however it was whatever narrative enabled them to do that they were fine with it. What do you think about these ruminations? I don't know how... So i think it really depends who you're asking um and i will say i don't",
      "in a seminar I'm teaching this semester from a wonderful book called In Praise of Prophetic Poems and Praise of Prophetical Reaction. Professor Obunaki is a scholar of, among other things, the West African poetic tradition. And so there are these lengthy poems that use accounts",
      "as points of departure for reflection and devotion. And they're meant to, yes, you know, convey certain kinds of things but also to induce certain kinds affective states in the reciter and also in the audience. And so those are really important things. And then on the other hand there are folks like Sean Anthony another colleague who's published a book",
      "published a book which is looking very much at evidence for the historical law, right? He's interested in what can we actually know using a set of letters from one of the members of his community. Can we authenticate these letters? What can we prove? What",
      "are, I think a compliment to Marian Katz's book about the Mawled where she looks at the origins of the Mowled tradition and contemporary celebrations of the birth of the prophet Muhammad. This is sort of sidestepping your question a little bit because I think our biographies necessary. Are these stories necessary? Absolutely. I think they are. Do they,",
      "Do they overshadow the historical figure? Probably. I mean, given my own tendency, even my own scholarly preoccupations, they certainly have in the things that I've written. But one thing that I have learned if nothing else in doing this project is that my perspective is always partial",
      "partial and there is a wild and wonderful world out there of other people who care about very different things about the prophet than I do. And they're doing really interesting and remarkable scholarly and cultural work with those. Today,",
      "It's called Tel Kel. I don't know, probably you're familiar with it and there is an article by an interview with Jacqueline Chabi the French scholar and she's like You know, I mean very reasonable very reasonably says that you know The emergence of the hadith and the seerah what they did is a sacralized History in other words There was there was a historical event in the life of Muhammad",
      "written and everything, they sacralize that history. So basically you had a shift from the historical to the ahistorical. And now it seems to me now I was thinking in light of reading your book, now we are trying to come back because of the Western discursive practices and cultural expectations. We are trying",
      "I also don't think that necessarily folks would have seen what they were doing as sacralizing in a meaningful sense. So, you know, I wrote this book about biographies but really, I'm a fake person which is to say most of my scholarship Islamic law and jurisprudence,",
      "I thought it was actually going to be a study of how Muslim jurists drew on Muhammad's example and when they thought of him as exemplary, and when the thought of them as exceptional. And that's really what I thought I was doing. And I think if we look at it through that lens, if we looked at it from the lens of ninth century jurist so there are two or three hundred years after Muhammad",
      "years after Muhammad, they are concerned with did he do this or did he that? They're concerned with historicity because they want to know what's the precedent from which they're going to draw. This is not simply a question about how do we create a sort of devotional portrait",
      "portrait that will enable our worldview in this kind of way. No, it's about we need a rule about rendering judgment among competing claimants for property or we need to know how Muhammad allocated his time among his wives so that we can then",
      "have a role model so that we can then have a norm that we appeal to, right? Or maybe don't. Maybe he was exceptional and we don't have to. So I wouldn't necessarily take that sacralizing history, historicizing the sacred as applicable to all genres. One of the people you mentioned in the book,",
      "you have a pause, let's say you're convinced by the argument Robert Spencer's book did Muhammad exist and you use a description that I can't remember what it was like but again very funny made me laugh. But you know the question, let suppose theoretically we don't have enough historical information about the life of the prophet between",
      "whatever, and 620 or 632. So but does that matter? Since in light of what you're saying now about the biography, does it matter? I think the question is, does this matter to whom? Right? Yes.",
      "scholars asking very real questions about the historical sources for the life of Muhammad. And it's not my area, so I'm not in a position to evaluate the strength of the proof that they bring. There's a book called The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad that has some very good articles in it that lay out",
      "Anthony's new book, Stephen Shoemaker's book. Patricia Crona of course has written quite a good survey article that I think is accessible on that question to historians who are interested in late antiquity and early Islam yes I think it matters very much",
      "you know, the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, I think the question of can you find historical evidence that proves according to a particular standard of proof whether or not Muhammad existed? The answer will be no it doesn't. Yes, thank you. And the question is also true for people like other",
      "people like Jesus, Moses, the Buddha. For some reason because you showed and other people have shown it as well, you could see over time the figure of the prophet becomes more sacralized as we keep going. Qadi Ayyad for example who lived in Ceuta and probably died in Marrakesh is one of the saints in Marrakish. He's I think, I don't know but one of",
      "added peace be upon him after every mention of Muhammad. It wasn't there. Nobody said it before apparently, I don't know. And of course you create a list of absolutely unacceptable behaviors towards the Prophet and many of which actually incurred death penalty or the death sentence. So there is a secularization of the Prophet",
      "it over time that makes you wonder whether those other people who are so preoccupied with historical facts and to get to the real, what happened in 600 and 630 when he died, 632 whatever. But it almost seems to be slightly relevant to the discussion because people have created",
      "It's an experience that people, it's not accessible to this insistence on absolute scientific purity. So I think Muhammad as I show in the book and as my students and I were talking about today gets used",
      "to define a lot of boundaries. And so I think, you know, when we're talking about penalties for insulting the prophet, this is not something that sort of goes up or goes down in a neat line through history, right? It ebbs and it flows.",
      "particular kind of authority. So if we look at blasphemy laws in Pakistan, right? We see they emerge at particular times. They are subject to popular feelings on one side or another. The same is true",
      "moments at which there were public conflict over insult to the prophet. They're very specific, and you can look at what else is happening and how you trace the origins of these controversies. And that's the case with many sorts of rules that seek to enforce cultural boundaries if you look at when are penalties for illicit sex being imposed? When our rules",
      "are rules about interactions between Muslims and dhimmi's being implemented in particular kinds of ways. And while it's a very sweeping generalization, I am comfortable saying that often you find harsh penalties imposed not when Muslim rulers feel very secure",
      "at the moments that they feel politically, economically, culturally threatened in some way. Keisha do you think we are comfortable let's say members of the Muslim community are comfortable with the notion that humans create their own history? In what sense? Well I mean in the sense that you know I mean",
      "there was this kind of anecdotal information, or maybe not so anecdotal like when Marx was asked about how God and so on. And he replied, he says all I know is humans create their own gods. So in other words because he's such a materialist in terms of his understanding and treatment of history.",
      "Is it part of the tension? We write biographies in order to prove something to ourselves, to create something for ourselves. Or is it we are writing biographys for some other metaphysical reason? I think it depends on the biographer. Yes. The authors of the praise poems that Professor Obunai gave",
      "writes about and records and translates are doing something very different than Haeckel or Temem Khan has a biography, sort of collective biography of the wives of the prophet. Which is another kind of way of approaching him and of approaching that",
      "that household, that community, that power, that meaning, right? That locus of devotion. I do think that if my book is successful it makes it much harder to sustain the notion that any one biography gives us the scoop, right,",
      "That's the whole story. Yes. You know, are there some that feel closer to the mark than others? Are there some more responsible or less responsible to their sources? Absolutely. If my book is about anything it's really about how much the biography reveals about its audience and also its author.",
      "I taught English composition for many, many years at the university. And I always used to, again just to be provocative with my students, used to say they emphasize the significance of the text and I would say there is nothing beyond, just like I would says biology doesn't exist, there's nothing beyond the text. Even the Bible is called a scripture",
      "the scripture. And so to ask in a Christian context, how do you know God exists? They would say oh because it's in the Bible and so well the text proves it. So in other words we need our texts and continually rewrite our texts to keep the faith alive?",
      "But I don't think it's just a question of faith. I think it is a question reimagining our communities, the Muslim community but the ummah is an abstraction that can be pressed into service to do really good things and also obscures the tremendous diversity among Muslims. One biography does not fit all.",
      "Yes. But every generation will write its own biography, biographies of, I mean whether it's Shakespeare or Napoleon or Abraham Lincoln there is this impetus and if it were just about fact you know nobody, people would have stopped a long time ago writing biographys about these great men or great women the ones you mention in the book so there is an interesting",
      "interesting there is this need for each generation or for each to write its own story basically, or to record its own store in relationship to the past. That's right but I also think you know that can be even the same set of and B put together and elaborated on an analyze",
      "analyzed in a way that ends up giving a very different flavor. Yes. A different result. And the other piece about fact, so you know, in a longer presentation of the material about Muhammad's marriages and modern biographies I like to talk about Khadija. Any biography",
      "25, she was 40. He was 25, he was 40 every single time, right? He didn't take another wife while she lived. He wasn't 25, but he was 20. That number is there in the early sources although there are also a couple of mentions of 28 or something else. So she was 14, right this is what the texts say. Muhammad was 40 when he had that first revelation and you know 40 is kind",
      "meaningful sort of round number. Does it mean she wasn't 40? No, but the fact that she was 40 and supposedly bore him six or seven children, right, it makes you sort of wonder like is she really older? Is she that much older? What's the meaning of this? And so the early people don't really talk about it because they say",
      "modern Western sources get really hung up on this. So she was 40 and he preyed on her vulnerability as an older widow, right? To get her to marry him. It's not very flattering to Khadija or, you know, she was so therefore he wasn't motivated by lust because we all know that 40 year old women aren't desirable, right.",
      "Right. Thomas Carlyle, in his lecture on Muhammad, you know, in this series of heroes says not that she was beautiful but that she wasn't still beautiful. I mean, that's really right. You know, this is so interesting to me so something that passes that there, what sort of passes in these texts that law and Khadija for all these other reasons",
      "reasons, right? Now becomes the source of a fact that can be marshaled to prove these other things about Muhammad. Right? Including then by Muslims as well as non-Muslims. And so when did this become a fact as opposed to just something that was there?",
      "a ubiquitous fact. Yes, I have. So for some reason when I talked about Qadi Ayad, I thought of the Grand Inquisitor Dostoyevsky's novel that was in the Brothers Karamazov. When Jesus appears to the inquisitors and says you know I didn't call for this punishment or treatment of people and so he himself at that point was condemned by the church.",
      "And so in a way, it's just an intro. It's a wonderful illustration of the inquisitor that tells him you just bring the message of peace and love but we are the ones who have to take care of business. And so, in the end is that the function of prophets? They bring the messages of love and peace and then human beings have to negotiate the rest or the morals among us? I mean, that's a potential question",
      "potential question, right? I'm not sure I'm ready to pronounce metaphysically on that. You know we find an incredible array of things that people have found in Muhammad's life story and of course in the Quran as well. And you know whether that is, and I talk about it in the book a little bit, you know um the incredible general,",
      "military strategist, the blooded warrior or you know the peaceful man who resorts to warfare only in self-defense. You know we see these shifts over time alongside much broader questions about what does it mean",
      "it mean to use violence and who is allowed to, under what circumstances? And how can it be justified? Well I warned you before. I can go on forever with you. The book is so inspiring, so rich, so the style, the literary style is just incredibly almost mesmerizing. I was home and I was delighted by the whole thing. So thank you so much.",
      "I wish you were here in person. We could take you to Portland, we have nice restaurants and everything but we'll do that. I'm sure, I hope you can accept to come back again when things... I will be glad to take a rain check. Yes. And so thank you so much again."
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "Hello, and welcome to hashtag what the patriarchy where we are working to completely uproot the patriachy from Islam. Hashtag inshallah hashtag it's ambitious I know but we got this thank you so much for being here this is",
      "more than 30 pages of notes and I refuse for my time and for those notes to go to waste. So we're going to do separate episodes on just a couple of chapters at a time for this book. In this video, we're gonna talk only about the introduction, the main points of the book, some of the main point of the books, the introduction and chapter one. So I've read this book many times since the very first time I read it which was in 2008",
      "who actually has read the book, who doesn't like the book. I have met plenty of people who have never read the and don't like it because that's a thing that exists. I know folks who teach contemporary Islam courses who have ever read this book. Can you really call yourself a scholar of Islam or a researcher of Islam at all if you've never read this? The answer is obviously no but people think",
      "or feminism appears in the title of a book, then you can't assign it in a general Islam class. Or that it's relevant only to gender stuff as if that's supposed to make any sense at all. My point is if you teach an Islam class and don't usually assign this book, you're not teaching Islam right. You're going to have to fix that like yesterday. And no, not just an Islam Class on Gender, like an Islam & Gender class. This is also an essential read for Introduction to Islam courses, Islamic Ethics, Contemporary Islam, Historical Islam.",
      "historical Islam. This book is relevant to it. Dudes think that they don't have gender in the same way that white people don't think they have a race and so that books on gender, especially if written by feminists aren't relevant to their courses and that attitude needs to be fixed. Also a word on the title I really don't like the word reflections in the title. The word reflection is dismissive. It's as if anything on gender",
      "only when in fact these are actual serious critical engagements with patriarchy, with Islam. It's an analysis it's a scholarly thing to do the chapters here are on marriage and its many facets like the da'wah or mahar sex inter-religious marriage she talks about women's marriage to non-Muslims another chapter is on divorce of course there's a chapter on sexual slavery or the idea",
      "like premarital sex, same-sex sexual relations, female genital cutting. Chapter 7 is called Female Bodies and Male Agency in the Quran, and it's one of my personal favorites. For me personally and intellectually, the book also does something significant in other ways. It's an excellent reminder and also an excellent illustration",
      "of misogynistic dudes or misoginists, dead misogonists who have interpreted the text, the Quran and Islam historically. If the misogginistic interpretations and practices of Islam are supposedly valid, and in my opinion they're not, then so are the feminist or the non-misogynist, any non-miscogynic or egalitarian interpretations and practice of Islam too. And the book does this by totally questioning what",
      "So what makes something Islamic? Is it in the Quran? And if so, is it clear or has it been debated? Is It Islamic because it's in the hadith? Is Islamic because its in fiqh? And If it has been debated who was involved in those debates? In my objective and professional opinion something isn't Islamic just because a bunch of male scholars said so. And needless to say any unprofessional words or phrases or tones that I use in this episode as in any of my other ones are my own",
      "are my own and not the author's, and probably not endorsed by the author. There are several key points of this book that I want to highlight here before I get to specific points from each chapter. Okay so first is the point about the inconsistent ways that Islam is defined and approached in questions of gender, sex, sexuality, women, men, feminism, and so on. So if we accept one hadith in Bukhari like the idea that women must be sexually available for their husbands at all times",
      "you know, even if she's on the back of a camel or even if he is at the stove or whatever because it's Bukhari and so many Muslims wrongly believe that everything in Bukharis collection is correct. Then what do we do with hadith like the Prophet Muhammad's consummation of his marriage with Aisha at the age when she was nine years old? If we claim that polygyny is allowed for all times and all contexts because the Quran authorizes it then what do",
      "which also the Quran permits. Whatever we do, we have to recognize that our interpretations are choices. They're not objective facts but we choose from a set of options that are available to us and so there are judgments that we make based on what hopefully our conscience is telling us is right. And we have",
      "impacts of those consequences. So one of Ali's recommendations, and there are many, is that our values be guided by, and I quote here, deep ethical reflection on the overarching divine purpose of human life on earth to command what is right, to forbid what is wrong, to do good deeds, and to be ever conscious of God. And she does this on, she says it's on page 199 in the 2016 edition. A second point",
      "classical teachings and ideas of Islam, contemporary present-day values, and actual sexual practices. These gaps allow for a very fluid practice of Islam. A third point is the question who gets to speak about Islam authoritatively especially when it comes to sex related stuff? Fourth what gets to count as Islamic? For example while historical fiqh allows a father",
      "by the way, in some madhhab without their consent. Today's Muslims like those with positions of power and authority invoke hadiths on consent for marriage and do not allow child or forced marriages anymore. A fifth point is that our understanding of Islam is very much rooted in what's important to us as a community or society at a given place and time. So Islam never happens",
      "vacuum as academics like to say. It's the product of larger things and phenomena. So for instance, historical fiqh took for granted the presence of something like slavery and developed a system of marriage that was very much founded on slavery. More specifically, for instance a man was allowed to have sex with anyone that he owned or had ownership of whether through marriage or slavery and I'm so sorry for this language. Marriage was",
      "through marriage or nikah, or possession of the right hand which is euphemism for slavery. Now people think that just because slavery is no longer officially present this conversation is irrelevant but the book shows us that actually slavery remains integral conceptually to the regulations of marriage and marriage related stuff so the jurists in my opinion shamelessly used similar language",
      "So a husband gained access to his wife through mahar, sort of like a man gained sexual access to a woman by enslaving her, by purchasing her. And both would let go of the woman whenever they felt like it. Oh and people often ask what so are you saying that all the scholars of the past are wrong just because they said these things about women? Yes I am! Like is it not possible for all",
      "wrong about slavery and child marriage and wife beating because they all allowed these things, these very, very wrong and unethical and in my opinion, un-Islamic things. So yes, they could all be wrong. And it's possible to reject what they have to say on those things and adopt new ideas and move toward a more ethical kind of Islam which is what this book is doing for us. So like fun fact, did you know that Al Ghazali who everybody loves for some reason",
      "appreciate, advises a man who can't afford to marry a free woman but has sexual urges and so he wants to satisfy them to go ahead and marry a woman who is enslaved by another man. Basically marry a slave woman so that at least he won't masturbate. So for Ghazali in other words marrying an enslaved woman whose kids will be enslaved if you marry her",
      "That is why not everything that dead dudes had to say about Islam is Islamic. Now there are gems in each chapter, so let's walk through each of them beginning with the intro. So in the introduction we get the whole point of the book obviously we get problems with the idea of the status of women in Islam and the different ways that this phrase is often approached and imagined depending on who is talking And we also get a problem with the phrase Islam and The West or Islam versus the west as if they two are mutually exclusive",
      "are mutually exclusive as if there's any as if no such thing as Western Muslims or Western Islam, as if the two are inherently contradictory or in a constant battle with each other because they're not. Basically you get an either-or. Either Islam is oppressive and the Muslim woman is a poor oppressed women who needs saving by the colonizer or now the descendants of the coloniser or the Muslim Woman is a queen and royalty and that's why you can't shake her hands",
      "in the world that treats women like precious little diamonds and pearls and covered lollipops. The worst of the West, in practice is compared with the best of Islam in theory as if that is supposed to make any sense and as if Muslim women don't literally have identical problems that women anywhere in the World have. So the Muslim woman is juxtaposed against the Western woman presumably non-Muslim woman. The western woman being the oppressed one because look how she has",
      "look how her boyfriend won't marry her, and look how husband cheats on her as opposed to polygamy. In both cases Muslim women are talked about either by Western feminist women or by Western misogynist men or by Muslim misogonist men. Muslim women were never talked to in either case. The introduction also highlights the point that the way Islam talks about marriage, wife-lead obedience, slavery etc is not unique",
      "is not unique to Islam. Other religions and religious texts, including biblical texts have had nearly identical ways of talking about these things as well. So for example did you know that up until the end of the 20th century Christian wedding vows included a statement on wifely obedience because it was that important to the biblical idea of a wife? And in the introduction also the author explained why she's engaging",
      "is because of the assumptions that shape these texts. And here I'm going to quote the author, so she says in part this book is an attempt to demonstrate that constructive and critical engagement with the Islamic intellectual heritage can be important in providing a framework for renewed and invigorated Muslim ethical thought end quote. In other words, the tradition does offer a lot that's valuable especially for moving forward for considering new ways",
      "new, ethical, better, egalitarian, more just ways of practicing Islam. And to quote the author again, she says a careful investigation of the legal tradition illustrates that some of the doctrines taken for granted as quote-unquote Islamic emerged at a particular time and place as a result of human interpretive endeavor and need not be binding for all times end quote. So these men's interpretations",
      "It's going to make you really angry, but it'll also reinforce the need for a feminist or egalitarian or ethical fiqh and also the death of patriarchy. So it's ultimately not so bad, I think. First on mahar. So mahar is something that virtually all Muslims agree theoretically is required of husbands to give to wives at the time of marriage. Virtually all Muslims also agree that husbands are required in Islam to financially provide for their wives and children, their families.",
      "their families. Yet in practice, neither is universally or necessarily true and most Muslim women that you know probably can speak to that. Now the author's focus is on US Muslims or Muslims in America where Muslim wives largely contribute financially to their households and this isn't just an American thing. Muslim women as women generally anywhere in the world universally contribute financially",
      "which is very much related to the rest of the book, is that the arguments that are used by Muslim scholars and often adopted by regular lay Muslims, ordinary Muslims, have to insist that classical rules on marriage in Islam be followed because they're Islamic and all, but actually not compatible with other commonly held ideas about marriage. These rules, these theoretical doctrines don't take into account the contexts",
      "in the United States or contemporary Muslims anywhere else. So, the author suggests and I agree that we may need to reconsider the ways that we think about Dower or Mahar spousal support and women's inter-religious marriage so that a more ethical, more egalitarian structure of marriage is made possible and again the Islamic tradition provides us with the foundation to make these new ways or new avenues",
      "of the chapter. We'll begin with mahar. Did you know that the purpose of mahar is actually for the wife to provide exclusive sexual access to her husband, to the man who has given her the mahar? It's literally called saman al-bud'ah in some of the fiqh, literally translates to price of the vulva. Mahar wasn't invented by Islam or by Muslim jurists or the fuqaha or Muslim scholars. It was a common practice",
      "exchange for considering her children as belonging to the father's tribe rather than to the mother's tribe. So mahar was a symbolic thing given in exchange of some form of property or control. The Muslim jurists kept the idea of mahar, but they gave it a different meaning and we can do this today as well. So instead of making it about children or lineage or essentially purchasing lineage rights, they made it about sexual access to the wife. This is not a Quranic",
      "everything in the Quran is open to debate but for sure, the Quran does not force the woman to accept mahr. The fiqh forces a woman or requires the woman accept her mahr in order for her to stay married to the husband and now you know, now you understand why it's because he basically can't have sexual access to his wife if she won't accept the mahr oh and we also learn in the chapter on divorce that women actually have",
      "So here's a breakdown of mahr. According to fiqh, a bride accepts mahr from the groom in exchange for giving him sexual access. She is entitled to mahr so long as she is giving him sexuall access. If she chooses to divorce him then she has to return the mahr to him. There are exceptions and we'll talk about that in a bit. And that's because she is choosing to deny him sexual",
      "If he himself initiates the divorce, however, then she gets to still keep the mahar because she's not the one making the decision to not give him access. Basically, the symbolism of mahar is problematic. The author suggests that if the daur or mahar IS supposed to be intended as economic security for the wife like some Muslims in America think,",
      "something like wages lost and earning potential and the length of a marriage and childbearing and such should be the ones who should be that things taken into account instead in my opinion as feminists we can keep mahar if we want as an Islamic thing but we would just give it a whole different meaning because again its symbolism it's symbolic just like the fukaha did they took a pre-existing",
      "this new meaning that we attach to mahar can be something that reflects our egalitarian values or ethical values rather than the patriarchal ideas of a woman's body as the husband's sexual property. Let's now talk about another theme from this chapter, nafqa, or spousal maintenance or support. Today's Muslims explain nafquas as well the husband works and provides financially for the family and the wife takes care of the kids in the home but it's not what",
      "the wife gets nafqa in exchange for sex with the husband. They actually do not require the wife to take care of the kids or the household stuff at all. She has only one obligation, and that is to be available sexually for her husband whenever he wants it, regardless of her own interests and wishes and feelings and needs. And this is important because the jurists agreed that the wife does not have",
      "like it. So he's not required to have sex with her whenever she wants, so it's not reciprocal. He could have sex either occasionally or whenever he wants to. She on the other hand is required to grant him access to her body and vagina whenever he want but that doesn't mean that the wife has no rights sexually whatsoever. So let's talk about sex now which is another theme in this chapter. Muslims be like hey look how sex friendly Islam is while invoking fiqhi ideas",
      "did you know that while that's somewhat true, it's men's sexual needs that are prioritized and female sexuality is recognized. Yes, but mostly in a negative way like shit let's regulate women's sexuality and make sure that her husband is sexually satisfying her or else she'll cause fitna the bad kind not the feminist kind that I try to produce",
      "women and there's extremely high sex drive they literally thought this y'all and it's also not framed as the wife's right but as a part of the husband's obligation it's his duty that if he fails to fulfill the wife sexual desires will create a fitna in society because women's sex drive is that high they said but yes they did stress the obligation of the man to make his life orgasm hashtag dear dudes",
      "dear dudes. But so much for the whole, oh my god, the fiqh toads recognizes and honors a woman's sexual needs. Don't get too excited about that. The woman as a temptress trope is nothing to be excited about. It's nothing to appreciate. This is how it works, okay? Men need to satisfy their wives because if not, we women will go out into the world",
      "aren't satisfying them so that we end up having sex with the men that were not married to and destroy other families and the whole of society because we're powerful like that. But note how the woman is the evil one in both cases, no matter what she does as the wife of man A where a isn't sexual sexually satisfying us our strong uncontrollable sex drive will tempt us to go and seek sexual intercourse with Man B",
      "man be who will agree to have sex with us because his wife isn't sexually satisfying him? The second woman is why all women need to be sexually available for their husbands. The first woman is women's sexual activity needs to be regulated. Bad, bad women! And this isn't just a classical thing. Talk about the classical ideas still affecting our lives today. Today's Muslims largely",
      "that the wife needs to be readily available to her husband whenever he wants. And yet, the power of women's high sex drive isn't recognized in the contemporary. Oh and fun fact, and this isn't from the book it's just me talking. If your wife doesn't like to have sex with you or if you know a woman who doesn't likes sex while I can speak conclusively to that, I can assure you that it is because you're not doing a good job sexually satisfying her. So do better",
      "probably want more sex with you. And we know that there's no shortage of hadiths that talk about or demand that wives be sexually available for their husbands at all times. We will talk another time about the falsity of those hadith because clearly, those hadits are invented by dudes who weren't interested in satisfying or who weren' able to satisfy, sexually satisfy their wives so that the wives would not look forward to sex with them. So they decided to attribute their rage and misogyny to the Prophet Muhammad",
      "and lo and behold it worked oh and here's an interesting and really wonderful fact sex by force or marital rape in this case while not haram was still viewed as unethical by the jurists so even though they said wives are supposed to be sexually available to their husbands they still viewed marital",
      "still considered entitled to sex from her husband. Almost all of the madahib or almost all of legal schools agreed that impotence, for example, was reasonable grounds for divorce but here's the catch-the wife could leave her husband only if he isn't able to consummate the marriage. Once consummation has occurred she can't use impotent against him later on to get a divorce. The final theme of this chapter is intermarriage it's one of my favorite things",
      "Muslims and the people of the book understood as Christians and Jews. There's a very long debate in the Islamic tradition, Sunni because Shia scholars didn't allow any man's marriage to any non-Muslim person but generally they didn't prohibit men's marriage from non-muslims in the way that they did women's. This is a topic of my current research so I'm very passionate about this and I promise to come back to it and we'll talk about it in more detail later but for now fun fact and this",
      "does allow women to marry people of the book, contrary to everything that everyone and their imam has told you. The author tells us that Quranic verse 5-5 or chapter five's verse number five al-Ma'idah grants explicit permission for men to marry People of the Book but no explicit prohibition for women exists in the Quran. Quranic Verse 221 of Surat Al Baqarah of the second chapter prohibits all Muslims from marrying",
      "And fun fact, and this is very important. The scholars have never agreed on the definition of the word mushrik, of who's included in who's not. In a Quranic verse 6, verse 10 of chapter 60, so 6010 prohibits women from returning to their kuffar husbands. And also that verse also prohibits men's marriage to kufar women tells them that they need to not stay married to their wifes. Nobody talks about that ever now talk about selectively relying on fiqhi ideas",
      "fiqhi ideas and such. While the majority of the scholars historically understood these verses collectively to prohibit women from marrying all non-Muslims, while allowing men to marry virtuous women of the people of the book, and they also historically claimed that a marriage is automatically dissolved if a non- Muslim woman converts to Islam while her husband remains",
      "have a different view on the latter part. There was historical minority view that a woman who has converted to Islam and is married to a non-Muslim for years, a man who refuses to convert to Islam or who does not convert to can stay married to this non-muslim husband of hers. Many scholars today support this view even though it was historically a minority view because they think that divorce and breaking the family apart is",
      "non-Muslim. It was historically assumed that it makes total sense to forbid a Muslim woman from marrying any non-muslim man while allowing a man to marry a Christian or Jewish woman. That no longer makes sense, of course, it's not an obvious choice anymore but here is the logic of prohibition. Again we go back to this scholar's conception of marriage as a form of slavery, ownership over someone through nikah. Two significant very unquranic",
      "very un-Quranic assumptions are the pillars of this very un Quranic prohibition. And the un-quranic is my word, it's not the author's word. She's far more careful and professional about how she talks about what's Islamic and what's not. I'm not and we have different audiences. And these two assumptions are all men are superior to all women and all Muslims are superior",
      "Yeah, that's instrumental to this prohibition. For these men, for the fuqaha, marriage between a Muslim woman and non-Muslim man would disrupt the hierarchy they read into Islam because both spouses are superior to each other in some way. The wife because she is Muslim and the husband because he is male. However, marriage",
      "according to the hierarchy, the man is superior because he's a man and he's superior because He is Muslim. Do you see how brilliantly that works out in favor of the patriarchy? Exactly. And again today's Muslim scholars seem to agree it's I don't think it's a huge agreement but there's there's a general sense of agreement that contrary to what the fiqh says right with majority view in the fixtas if a woman converts to Islam and Is married to a non-muslim man then she doesn't have to leave her husband",
      "to leave her husband and their marriage is not dissolved. The historical scholars said, no, the prohibition that they invented out of their mouths was so important that no marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man can ever be legitimate no matter what. But again there was a minority view that has now become the majority it looks like right? There's literally no evidence and no good reasons for why women cannot marry other monotheists",
      "I highly recommend especially this section of the book because there's very little research on the topic currently. I do have a blog post on it and i do have an article coming out on it soon inshallah, and I discuss this in my dissertation and I will have a book on this eventually so you're welcome to ask me for recommendations or resources if you're looking for more on this topic until the video the episode on this comes out. And then in the conclusion of this chapter the author provides what",
      "do about the problems that are raised in this chapter, like alternative more egalitarian, more ethical ways of thinking about mahar, divorce marriage, sex and so on. After all, and this is my thought there's literally no reasons to think that historical scholars opinions and interpretations of Islam are any more Islamic than our own. So alternatives are possible and certainly needed and they too can be Islamic. Okay, so I will pause here",
      "and continue chapter two in the next episode inshallah the bottom line so far this book is an excellent read highly recommended pick it up if you can and have fun with it"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Maximizing Ramadan with Dr_ Kecia Ali_ToIXHvIBfU8&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748700459.opus",
    "text": [
      "But I think that most of you know me and I know most of You. I'm Keisha Ali, I've been a member of this center for about a quarter century, I think. I remember back in the old days when Ramadan speakers gave their talks before the Iftar no one could focus on anything, the speaker couldn't be heard over the grumbling of people's stomachs so hopefully now everybody is a little bit full",
      "little bit full, a little bit satiated and inshallah a little better able to reason and appreciate but that also means the stakes are a little higher for the speaker so I hope that inshAllah you will treat me kindly and forgive any mistakes.",
      "on the topic of al-amr bil ma'roof wa an-nahi anal munkar. So we usually translate this as commanding right and forbidding wrong, and I chose this topic very selfishly because like most of the people that I encounter in my day to day life these days,",
      "like the world is on fire. And if you look at LA, it literally is. Executive orders are coming fast and furious, right? Education, refugees, immigrants for an aid. Eggs cost a million dollars just for a dozen. And new viruses keep turning up. A long delayed ceasefire is holding very tenuously",
      "And I could go on, but the point is the moment feels and in fact is very precarious. We are of course not the first people and not the Muslims to confront chaotic and difficult times. The Mongols sacked Baghdad. There was the Black Plague. There were transatlantic trade and enslaved human beings.",
      "and lots of places over the course of human history. But we may be, roughly speaking, the first generation to confront some of these crises with a constant stream of news alerts about things that we feel are powerless to change. We get apps, we get notifications, we",
      "It is all happening everywhere, all at once in our phones and in our newspapers if anybody still reads those and on the television screens. We cannot escape the news that is impinging on us from all sides. So thinking about what it means to join good and reject evil which is another translation seems to me one place",
      "think about how we navigate in the moment, how we find a foothold individually and collectively from which to engage everything that is happening right now. So in the 20-ish minutes allotted to me this evening I'm going to do three things. I'm",
      "on the sacred sources that are the basis for our understanding of it. And second, mostly because as you know if you know me I'm an Islamic law nerd, I'm going to talk about the kinds of things that the jurists argued about because they were lawyers of course they argued when they talked about it and reflected on it. Last, I am going to offer some thoughts about what useful guidance we might take",
      "from this tradition of thinking about this duty as we concentrate on our worship and our obligations to God in this month, but also in practice connect to our community more than we often do at other times of the year. So what is commanding right and forbidding wrong? They sound like separate things, right?",
      "They get talked about together in the Quran on multiple occasions. We are told numerous times that commanding right and forbidding wrong is a characteristic of believers. For instance, in Surah Al-Tawbah we learn, and here I'm quoting, the believers both men and women are guardians of one another. Maybe they're also allies.",
      "allies or friends. They command what is right and forbid what is wrong, establish prayer, pay zakat, and obey Allah and Allah's messenger. It is they who will be shown Allah's mercy. Surely Allah is almighty, all wise.\" Meanwhile in Surah Al-Imran we see the importance of this duty of commanding",
      "that we're told that a group should be established to do this, right? Let there be a group among you who command what is called to goodness, command what it's right and forbid what is wrong. It is they who will be successful. There are other examples I could quote more but the crucial thing to know is that commanding, enjoining, encouraging people",
      "matters. As with the other duties that the Quran lays out, of course we don't necessarily get all the details about what it is we're supposed to do. Now in many places when the Quran tells us to do a thing and doesn't provide a lot of details, we turn to the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. And here we do get a little help but still enough to leave plenty of room for the scholars",
      "So there's a hadith collected in Sahih Muhsim, according to which Abu Sayyid al-Khudri said, I heard the messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, say, whoever of you sees something wrong should change it with his hand. If he cannot, then with his tongue. If",
      "And that is the weakest form of belief. In this hadith, these three means of commanding right and forbidding wrong, a term that is not used but is understood to be connected, appear here in the order first you physically do something, you change it with your hand, you make it happen. Then you use the tongue,",
      "And then only if you are powerless in those ways, you do the heart work. You cultivate the appropriate sentiments, the appropriate objection, which maybe it could be argued isn't changing anything at all. But of course not everything that matters happens outside the human heart. The prophet came for the perfection of morals. It's being streamed. You don't even have to record.",
      "record. I feel like the last time i was up here Tariq was about five and he came and hid under the podium with me, he won't fit anymore, he's the tallest person in the house. Things change. So how have Muslim scholars mostly but not only the jurists talked about this over the centuries? How have they thought",
      "There is a professor at Princeton who has written a book on Muslim approaches to commanding right and forbidding wrong. It's 724 pages long! I have never written a",
      "globe and over the centuries, there is at least one exception for every generalization. But one thing is really clear. The jurists tend to reorder these three modes of forbidding wrong. So then the tongue comes first. You speak, you persuade,",
      "and maybe they obey you. Maybe you cajole, maybe you remind them of something that they should have known or did know and weren't paying attention to. Then if we don't listen, you escalate maybe. Maybe do something physically, intervene, break the loot or smash a bottle of alcohol or",
      "of an attack. For the jurors, it's these two modes that mostly receive the lion share of attention. The hitting the wrong in your heart receives less. But say something and do something are still extraordinarily vague so the main things that the jurists",
      "pages and pages. Who is obliged to forbid wrong? Who is permitted to do it? To whom are they permitted, and in what ways? So it's really important to remember that a thousand years ago, 1200 years ago as the jurists are arguing with each other,",
      "this duty means and how it should be carried out. They're generally in agreement that some people are obliged, but they're also extremely cognizant that they live in a deeply hierarchical society. They not interested in changing that for everybody to be equal. That wouldn't have even occurred to them. And so for them, it is a matter of",
      "a matter of some consequence to think about the power relations between the potential for bitter of wrong and the actual doer of wrong right. Some people don't get to tell certain other people what to do or if they're going to, they have to be extremely careful about it now before we get to something more",
      "I'll note that one big disagreement that they had was whether only the state or also private individuals could engage in acts of physically forbidding wrong, right? Smashing instruments, confronting brigands. Do you need the permission of the ruler to set up your militia, right, does the mayor have to approve your neighborhood watch? There was disagreement on this. Another was if private individuals",
      "And here this applies to forbidding wrong with the tongue as well. Even the people who held that only the state could authorize physical force or violence thought there was a place for individuals to use the tongue to forbid wrong, but is it really just people? Or is it scholars? Or maybe the scholars are obliged and ordinary people might be permitted under certain circumstances.",
      "in certain circumstances. Most of their attention focused on the scholars specifically, this was slightly navel gazing reflection on his central duty. They also acknowledged that there might be conflicts of interest. How do we respect privacy? If we hear the tinkling of what might be a forbidden instrument, can we scare the whales to look and see if somebody is in fact violent",
      "violating the rules, or do we respect privacy and let it be? As always there can be conflicts between two different values. And people read those differently depending on the situations. What's most striking about the way that the jurors discussed the duty of commanding right",
      "risks of this situation. If you try to tell somebody something, or if you try physically intervene to stop a wrong from happening are you putting yourself in jeopardy? Are you putting someone else in jeopardies? Are your risking the destruction of significant property? It doesn't necessarily mean that there is some risk that you shouldn't intervene",
      "This is a real quietest attitude that not all of the jurors took. But it does mean that not only are you allowed to take potential harm to yourself into account, you're actually required to under certain circumstances, right? Risking a terrible beating in order to stop a minor infraction is not for them worth it, right.",
      "principle of a thing at all costs. Now sometimes, just to read this up differently, sometimes people prioritize the forbidding of wrong over the retention of privacy and sometimes people let a lot go in the name of social stability",
      "to chastise a ruler who maybe is acting inappropriately. And so this is something that comes up a lot and people weigh that differently. To step more broadly for a moment, we might say that commanding right and forbidding wrong sort of overlaps both ends of the spectrum that involves naseeha at one end, sincere personalized individual voluntary guidance",
      "Hizba, the market supervision enforcement in public places. Now today in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran and Afghanistan we might reasonably talk about the Hizb as a morality police but they're very concerned with things like hijab and beards and certain kinds of other public conduct",
      "the institution was mostly associated with marketplaces. And while there were some concerns about inappropriate mixing or the consumption of illicit substances, it's maybe a useful reminder for us as we think about how medieval Muslim scholars allocated resources toward preventing certain kinds of wrongs and harms that one of their central duties",
      "to ensure that merchants were not cheating on their weights and measures right so corruption and greed and fairness were major concerns for them i could go on a lot more about these particular arguments that the jurors had I'm not going to do so but i think",
      "agree on the centrality of commanding right and forbidding wrong. The Muslim tradition is capacious. Principled disagreement is a feature not a bug. Iqtilaf ummatiyy rahmah, right? The prophet reportedly said the disagreement among my community, among members of my community",
      "what we might take away from some reflection on this idea of commanding right and forbidding wrong. The first thing is that most of us, and I very much include myself in this category are probably doing less than we can to encourage what is right and try to stop what is wrong. Now there are limits of course",
      "and even limits to what people organized collectively can achieve realistically, especially under conditions of substantial political repression and even in some places brutal violence. It is also simply the case that because of the way news cycles work we cannot personally address every situation that comes to our attention.",
      "attention. There aren't enough hours in the century, let alone a day to do that. This is a central tension for all of us as Muslims right? Ultimately human beings are powerless to contest God's will in any possible way but that does not excuse us from action. The Quran tells",
      "they change themselves. But themselves is interesting, it also means their souls. So maybe here we come back to that notion of hitting a wrong in the heart and what that can do for us. We have just a few minutes before Tarawiyah so I think maybe I will let a scholar who wasn't known as a jurist but a philosopher",
      "a philosopher and a mystic have the floor for a moment as we come to a close. Al-Ghazali, who died in 1111 wrote a massive multi-volume compendium on the revival of the religious sciences. And the model of change he offered worked in concentric circles it started with the believer getting himself and I use the male pronoun advisedly",
      "his city, and so on in order. And this guidance is valuable in important ways. For one thing getting our own house in order gives us moral standing to be more effective as we try to forbid wrong and command right in other situations although many jurists say even if you're not living up to all of those expectations you're still required to",
      "just because you're not doing the other ones. It's also, of course, more straightforward to start where you are with yourself. But there are some ways we can maybe think with Ghazali in our present moment a little more broadly. My colleague Zahra Ayyubi whose parents and family have been members of this center for decades has pointed out that this model that Al-Ghazali used was very much predicated on the notion",
      "were the people whose moral perfection and improvement he was most concerned with, right? And who he saw as the movers and shakers in society. That doesn't necessarily hold for us today. And Al-Ghazali's model is also not necessarily appropriate in a moment where everything is happening everywhere all at once.",
      "Now, sometimes we're easily in a position to affect things happening half a world away than we might be an intractable problem next door. That doesn't mean of course that we don't have duties to our households and our neighbors but it does mean that we're not automatically excused from willing to establish all of the proper levels of justice locally before",
      "before we work broadly, right? So I think what is maybe helpful for us is to think back with the jurists about this effectiveness criteria. I'm not a political scientist. I am not a social strategist. I don't know what the levers are necessarily to make change work",
      "But I do know that there are some things that we can be doing in the face of major wrongs in the world today, but are not risky to us. Things like writing to legislators, things like op-eds in papers,",
      "pens and our keyboards and our phones to communicate broadly about some of the things that need to be changed. We are not putting ourselves at risk, the calculus of potential benefit to potential harm is in favor of these sorts of actions so I leave you with this",
      "And we as individuals and we as a community and a congregation are called. The jurists might quibble over the details, right? Which one is obliged to do what and how but we collectively have to be part of changing the conditions of our souls, of ourselves and of our people, of our ummah.",
      "May Allah help me and help you to do better. Ameen. Thank you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Professor Kecia Ali speaks at Jalsa Salana USA 201_FWMRN5Y9mtw&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748695987.opus",
    "text": [
      "Kisha Ali, she's a professor of Islamic studies at Boston University. She's held research and teaching fellowships at Brandeis University and Harvard Divinity School before joining the Boston University faculty in 2006. Her research addresses Islamic religious texts especially jurisprudence women in both classical and contemporary Muslim discourses and religious biography.",
      "project explores Muslim and non-Muslim biographies of Prophet Muhammad with a particular attention to modern thinking about his marriages, his personal life. And she is also the co-chair for the study of Islam section of the American Academy of Religion. We're delighted to have her and we invite her to share her remarks. After that lovely recitation of my professional biography I hope you'll actually pardon me",
      "to do with my professional qualifications. I visited Guyana in 1994 as a newlywed. My husband is from there, and his ancestors like most Guyanese originally came from India but they had been settled in the former British colony there on the northeast coast of South America for generations. We were traveling with his immediate family who had immigrated to the United States in the 1980s meaning that I could meet him",
      "But we were visiting his extended family, most of which was still in Guyana. During our visit to his father's village I wanted to attend Jummah, the midday Friday prayer service as I was used to doing in the United States. There was a small problem though women didn't go to the local mosque they do now but 20 years ago although there wasn't any sort of formal ban in place it just wasn't done so I was young and",
      "You know, should I show up and if somebody tried to bar my entrance then cite prophetic tradition about not keeping God's female servants from God's mosques. But really you know, Should I do that? And then before it came to that maybe an uncle or a cousin observed that there was another mosque. He was a little hesitant. It wasn't the mosque the family attended and they wouldn't accompany us but my husband",
      "That prayer service was my introduction to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, though at that time I will confess that I had no idea who the Ahmadis were, what your history was or where you fit into the global mosaic of Muslim life. Even later as a doctoral student in Islamic studies, I learned very little and though I know somewhat more now, I'm still far from an expert. What I have learned over the years through my study of Islam and other religious traditions",
      "is that Islam, like any other religion, is far more complicated and rich than it is often presented as being. And the Ahmadis of course are part of that tapestry. Now it's now commonplace for those of us like my colleague Professor Asad and others who are experts on Islam by virtue of our jobs, and I'll put experts in quotation marks to remind American audiences",
      "about Islam and Muslims, that only a fifth of Muslims are Arab. That the majority of the world's Muslims are Asian and that Muslims span the globe from the Americas to Australia. And looking at the flags that ring this room we have a very graphic representation of that. So geographic linguistic and racial diversity are frequently mentioned but what is much less",
      "is the diversity of belief and practice. We hear about Sunni and Shia strife in the United States, in the context of Middle East politics but we hear very little about different understandings about community leadership, varying interpretations of scripture or the centrality of different rituals to different communities of Muslims. For someone like me whose job",
      "teach about Islam, I strive to talk both about what Muslims have in common as you heard earlier veneration of the Prophet Muhammad but also what Muslims argue about including how Muslims today can best follow his model. Now part of this story of any religion and therefore part of the story of Islam is",
      "and counterclaims about purity and orthodoxy. Who best embodies the core message of the faith? As we've heard from a number of speakers, there are right and wrong ways to deal with differences of opinion. Persecution and violence are the wrong ways. The Quran which again is one",
      "about how to interpret it celebrates differences of opinion. It doesn't merely acknowledge that they exist, but it actively speaks of them as a good in some circumstances. But when it exhorts people to disagree, it asks them to argue beautifully with one another. And it's my view, both as someone who specializes academically",
      "of Islam and Muslims, and as a believer who has been welcomed in – not welcomed in! – a wide variety of Muslim communities that both scholarship and individual religious practice can only be enhanced by acknowledging differences among Muslims. This will lead us to a better understanding of Islam in all its diversity and complexity",
      "a better understanding of humanity and the diversity that is a fact, a fact of creation. Thank you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/Sexual Ethics and Islam with Kecia Ali_8uaxZhBpnSA&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748696830.opus",
    "text": [
      "Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Religious Studies Project. It's Monday and this week I'm on my own. We are increasingly busy, Chris and I, and this",
      "by Chris, and it's with Qisya Ali on the subject of sexual ethics in Islam. Quite controversial but that's good we like that here so I'll pass over to Chris who will tell you a little bit more about the interview. Alongside the problematic dominant caricature of Islam as a violent religion there is perhaps no issue so problematic in contemporary Western discourse",
      "and gender. Western stereotypes of the downtrodden Muslim woman are often countered by claims of Islamic scholars that women are more liberated, respected and secure within Islam than in other religions or in the secular West. Regular listeners to The Religious Studies Project will be unsurprised to learn there's a lot more going on below the surface of these dominant discourses. Why are we even having this discussion about sexual ethics and Islam? How might one begin",
      "a vast and problematic topic? What are some of the prescient issues that recur in this contested field, and what is the broader significance of this discussion for religious studies in general? To discuss these issues and more I'm joined today by Keisha Ali who is Professor of Religion at Boston University. Professor Ali's a scholar of religion gender and ethics whose work focuses mostly on the Muslim tradition with an emphasis",
      "AAR and as a past president of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. Her publication list is impressive, and features five monographs including The Lives of Muhammad, Marriage & Slavery in Early Islam, and most relevant to today's interview Sexual Ethics and Islam Feminist Reflections on Quran, Hadith, and Jurisprudence originally published in 2006 with an expanded",
      "So first off, Professor Ali, welcome to the Religious Studies Project. Thank you for having me. And thanks for joining us here in Edinburgh and the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World. That's a mouthful isn't it? It is a mouth full but they're graciously hosting us today and we'll be sure to shout out about your lecture that you're doing this evening when we publish this podcast.",
      "having this discussion. Yeah, it's sort of impossible not to be having the discussion really I think that challenges is to find ways to have it better productive and that don't just inadvertently reinforce force the power of certain dominant discourses by contesting them as if that's the only thing we do look at the question of gendered roles and rights and obligations",
      "obligations is one that has been present since as near as we can tell the first Muslim community, right? Scripture records specific questions about women's and men's respective roles, relationship to each other, relationship too religious obligations, relationship",
      "gendered descriptions and contestations. Now, obviously to what extent these reflect a seventh century community and to what extend they reflect eighth, ninth, tenth-century reflections on that community and attempts to ascribe certain later normative patterns onto that community, that's the subject of debate among historians of early Islam but for Muslims, pious Muslims lay folk scholars you know these are the stories",
      "the stories out of which accounts of virtuous ethical life are made. And so Muslims certainly have been having internal conversations and debates about gender norms since quite early on. Now, why are we having this conversation? Sexuality is always one of the things that comes up when someone wants to insult someone else, right?",
      "someone else, right? When one community or members of a community are looking for a way to stigmatize, oppose, define others, sexuality is very frequently something that gets pressed into service. Whether that's Protestants saying bad things about Catholics, Catholics saying bad thing about Protestants and Protestants say bad things",
      "frequently comes into play. What we know, if we want to just in very broad terms generally talk about the West and Islam, I object on principle to those categories but I'm going to use them anyway as a kind of shorthand, we see really that in the Middle Ages and in the early modern era it wasn't Muslim oppression of women that was a problem for anybody. It was Muslim lustfulness",
      "And it's really in the 19th century with the advent of European colonialism in Muslim majority societies, Egypt for instance and also India that Muslim men's oppressiveness towards women becomes part of a colonial discourse about civilization. What's very interesting is to look at the ways",
      "changed over time. So not only from wantonness to oppression, but also you'll find that today one of the things that tends to get said about Muslims is oh they're so intolerant of homosexuality, they're repressive look how awful. Well in the early modern era and even into the 19th century the claim was they are too tolerant",
      "us upright Brits usually, right? And look how awful they are compared to how moral we are. Which is basically the gist of all this. And of course there are Muslims equally scandalized by Western women's dress and the ways in which women and men outside the family interact.",
      "the Muslim perspective, because of course contemporary Muslims whether we're talking scholars or lay people going about their lives are having to articulate views against this dominant Western view. Yeah I mean I think part of what's particularly challenging for me as a scholar and for media, for lay folk, for religious studies teachers in",
      "in a way that actually recognizes the great diversity of perspectives among Muslims. Because even that phrase, the Muslim perspective, it's one that gets bandied about a lot including by many Muslims and of course part of what's interesting to me as a scholar of religion is how our claims to representing the authoritative Muslim perspective being pressed right? What are",
      "What are the extra textual authoritative norms being deployed? How much is it about where you got your degree from how much is It about whether you have a beard. How much Is it about You know, whether the media is calling you to speak on their programs And how much Is that about the content of your ideas yeah and that's something that comes up in as Aaron Hughes is Islam an attorney of authenticity",
      "We've had him on the podcast before and then we talked about something completely different. We're gonna have to get him on again for that But yes a very broad topic, we're talking about here sexual ethics in Islam How does one even go about studying that I know that you had your own particular approach but So the book sexual ethics and Islam Really has its roots in two different things. I was doing Around the turn of the millennium so I did my doctoral dissertation",
      "my doctoral dissertation at Duke University about marriage and divorce in eighth to tenth century Sunni Muslim jurisprudence. At the same time, from 2001-2003 I was working part-time for the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project at Brandeis University which was directed by Bernadette Bruton and funded by The Ford Foundation. And so for the dissertation,",
      "legal texts. And for the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, I was actually engaged in putting together a series of short essays for the site aimed at lay folks, not necessarily Muslim, looking for a general orientation to the Muslim textual tradition—so Qur'an, prophetic tradition, to some extent exegesis,",
      "issues, issues around female dress, issues about marriage, divorce, slavery and same-sex relationships but framed in a kind of general way that would make them accessible. And I also wanted to begin to address the ways Muslims today were talking about those topics. Sexual ethics and Islam really came together out of those two initiatives because on one hand what I found when I was looking at the contemporary Muslims who are talking",
      "talking about these topics is that they were often completely disconnected and in fact making claims that really contradicted sometimes the positions but far more often, the logic and the assumptions of the early legal tradition. And I wanted to put those two things into conversation, right? Put the 10th century and the 20th century, 21st century into conversation.",
      "the kind of Islam liberated women apologetic that a lot of Muslims were presenting and equally frustrated with this sort of patriarchal protective protectionist. Well, of course patriarchy done right is the only true Islamic tradition that protects and respects women which exists in a kind of funny tension",
      "know the Qur'an and the Prophet Muhammad gave Muslim women all their rights, so there's no need for patriarchy because Islam is against patriarchy. And none of these really grappling with what is it that's there in the texts. And that when you mention Prophet Muhammad is perhaps an excellent way for us to leap right into some of that analysis. I know that the undergrads at New College",
      "familiar with the chapter of the book that focuses upon the Prophet's relationship with his wife Aisha. So maybe we could use that as an example of just these various competing discourses and how people use claims to authority to negotiate sexual ethics? Sure, so of course for the pre-modern Muslim tradition Aisha is an absolutely vital figure right she",
      "say, his favorite wife, certainly after Khadija died, right? Who was the wife of his younger years. And she's a scholar and she's contentious political figure. And certainly for the construction of Sunni identity and Shi'i identity, she becomes a flashpoint in those debates over loyalty,",
      "And Chase Robinson, I'm going to paraphrase him now, says that early Christians argued about Christology and early Muslims argued over how 7th century Muslim's behavior should be remembered. So later Muslims are trying to construct their own authentic narratives, their own strategies of power by reference to these early Muslims.",
      "remembered end up being very central. The texts that are giving people fits today really are texts about her marriage in which she reports in the first person, in hadith narratives—narratives of prophetic tradition—that she was six or another version seven when the Prophet married her and nine when the marriage was consummated. And there are other details sometimes given",
      "Now, it's useful to point out that this isn't something people were particularly worried about for a very long time. And it's actually really unusual that any of his wives' age would be so important in texts about the marriage but this is there in the Hadith compilations that we have from the 9th century and this is similar to the ages that are reported by early biographers who maybe sometimes go as high as 10",
      "But really, it's quite a young age that's reported in these texts. And generally over the centuries Muslim biographers didn't particularly have any issue with this. Western biographers did not particularly have an issue with it. None of them took much notice of it until we get to just about 1700 when Humphrey Prideaux who was an Anglican clergyman writes a very nasty biography of Muhammad as actually part",
      "part of his ongoing debate with Unitarian Christians. And he says, oh isn't this sort of amazing there in Arabia which is the same climb as India? You know just like all these other hot countries right? The torrid zone how women mature so quickly. Right and for him Aisha's age of six and eight is an indication of something that is sort",
      "is marrying her to make an allegiance with her father, which shows that he is making a power grab in service of his fraudulent imposture. And basically it only is really in the late 19th early 20th century that people start to maybe wonder about this a little bit, Western biographers and by the late 20th Century it's making lots of people uncomfortable including some Muslims so the Arabic translation",
      "Washington Irving, for instance, who had thought this was all very romantic in the middle of the 19th century. In 1960 when it's been translated in Egypt, you know, the translator has a real note right and the original marriage has been demoted to a betrothal and then the translator feels the need to sort of explain this. But by the time I'm writing Sexual Ethics and Islam, the context is different and there are two very serious competing strains. There's",
      "polemical accusations that Muhammad is a pedophile, which the Reverend Jerry Vines has linked in an epithet as demon-possessed pedophile. So he's linking a very old accusation against Muhammad with a very new one, a sort of medicalized rhetoric of evil. And then you start to have Muslim apologetics around this question,",
      "One is that, well you know things were different back then right and a version of that is what a number of secular sympathetic western academics have also said. And then the other thing that you get is, well these texts really aren't reliable on this point right? Then the thing that I point out in Sexual Ethics and Islam is it's completely fine if you want to make that argument but then",
      "true on everything else. The thing that was really striking for me after writing Sexual Ethics and Islam, and moving onto the project that became The Lives of Muhammad which is an investigation of biographical texts specifically, is the ways in which so often in early text numbers have a particular kind of symbolic function and resonance. And while I don't know that six",
      "symbolic resonance that, say, 40 does in the accounts of Khadija's age. It seems to me that there is plausibly—I don't want to say probably and I don't think we can ever know with any kind of certainty if these are factually accurate unless we're willing to simply say these texts are all factually-accurate and we accept that—it seems to be plausibly",
      "are in service of praising her, actually. Of presenting her as a particularly pure figure which is very important given that her chastity was impugned during her lifetime or at least according to texts represent this as something that was challenged and so making her so young at marriage emphasizing her virginity becomes",
      "The other thing, it seems to me is that it's possible that making her say nine when the marriage is consummated after the hijra to Medina is also a way of making her age low enough that she's indisputably born to Muslim parents. So although virtually everybody in that first Muslim community would be a convert according",
      "texts are being compiled, having your parents already be Muslim, being born to Muslim parents is quite a status marker. It becomes important to have a genealogy of Muslim parentage going further back. So I mean we're all ready time is running on here in terms of positioning you so you know you're a woman, a Western academic, a feminist and a Muslim",
      "Muslim writing this book discussing these topics I mean how is it received? My stereotypical brain is going, this isn't gonna be that well-received in some circles so how do you position yourself in that respect? One of the more flattering things somebody once told me about the book was that her graduate advisor who",
      "read it because it would be dangerous. And I thought, oh, I must have done something right. But on the other hand, I think that my original intention for the book was not really to have it end up where it's ended up which was in the classroom mostly with students many of whom are not Muslim. This was written originally very much",
      "very much as a book that was engaged in a kind of intra-Muslim conversation to address some frustrations I had with the way intra-muslim conversations over issues of sexual ethics were going, I thought, and not particularly productive ways. However, I'm not writing it only as a Muslim feminist. I'm writing it as a scholar of religious studies",
      "do both of those things. But I have religious studies training and one of the things that, that training enables me to do is to look at the ways in which particular traditions are being constructed, in which particularly claims to authority are being made in particular ways. And so for instance, the chapter on female genital cutting in the book is really an extended meditation",
      "what does the category Islamic and what do claims to the category, Islamic or more pertinently un-Islamic tell us how useful are they? And where might things that are useful in particular kinds of activist campaigns really break down if we're trying to look at them historically or from within religious studies or from",
      "Yeah, and I can remember the students being a little bit frustrated in the sense that so many different points of view were being considered and not being necessarily condemned. And there was a whole, which is the right way?",
      "of the book, there are even more questions and even fewer answers. But look I don't think we're going to get better answers until we get better at asking the right questions. And the right question are very often, not just for Muslims and not just about Muslim questions, what's behind",
      "what we're being told? What's the evidence for this perspective? Where is this coming from and how much credit do we want to give it as an accurate representation of something in the world. And that leads me into where I was wanting to get to with the interview, you've been a fantastic interviewee. Religious studies, I can imagine",
      "area studies, Islamic studies. I don't need to go there.\" And everything that you've been saying, I think has been illustrating why this is important for the broader study of religion but wondered if you wanted to reflect on that from your perspective in multiple different camps?",
      "Islam and Muslims. Some come from area studies training, Middle East Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Islamic Studies. Some are really trained to do philological work with old texts. And there's a lot of good work that is being done with those texts.",
      "presentist, very ethnographic in ways that I think sometimes make it difficult to understand the resonance of the appeal to the textual tradition that many Muslims take. I'm very fortunate in that the American Academy of Religion brings together",
      "who have expertise and training in a variety of different disciplines, but who are committed at least some of the time in their professional engagement to religious studies as a discipline which is of course inherently interdisciplinary of necessity. And I think given that so many questions about Islam",
      "wrestling with, right? About the rights and roles and responsibilities of insiders and outsiders. With the formation of the category of religion. Look it's not an accident that orientalist imperialist categories are very much at play here. I think it's tremendously important that Islamic studies be having conversations",
      "that you can even draw distinctions between them. Absolutely, and so on the topic of conversations between different fields your work's taken a different turn of late. Yeah, a detour. Your latest book Human in Death Morality and Mortality in JD Robb's novels what has this got to do with Islam? Well at one level nothing",
      "level nothing, and at the other level I suppose everything. I read these novels recreationally it's a series that has been ongoing for more than 20 years published by Nora Roberts who is a premier American author of popular romance under the pseudonym JD Robb their police procedural set in New York circa 2060 and I read them and had things to say about",
      "with intimate relationships, about the way they deal with friendship, about how they deal work especially women's work. About the way that they deal violence including police violence, about what it means to be a human being, abilities and perfection and the idea of post-human future. And I think that to the extent this book connects",
      "around the questions of ethics, what it means to live a good ethical virtuous life in connection with other human beings in a given set of circumstances. I trained as a historian before I moved into religious studies and one of the things that comes up again in this series just like it comes up looking at eighth and ninth century legal texts",
      "is that understanding the present is sometimes best done from a distance. And so looking comparatively at the past, looking at one possible imagined future can give us a new perspective on the world we're living in right now. Wonderful and that also illustrates even more the importance of your work with Islamic texts",
      "And it's been fantastic that we've been having this conversation on International Women's Day. So I know this won't be going out for another few months, but just to get that onto the recording from the Alba Leeds Centre and I think we're gonna have to draw that to a close there. It has been fantastic speaking with you and I wish you all the best at the lecture this evening which will if the recording goes okay of the lecture will link to from this page and everyone can see it and hear it in all its glory. Thanks. Thank you",
      "very often definitional and theoretical issues are easier to show on the interesting sort of marginal cases. So things like new religions, indigenous religions, non-religion stuff like that give us more opportunities to talk about how these relate to the idea of religion and these kinds of ideas. But it's also because in some cases, this is the case with",
      "definitely with Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism to a degree in a slightly different way with Christianity but RS as a subject and particularly RS departments in universities are becoming more area studies orientated and our colleagues are perhaps more likely",
      "and broader theoretical issues than they were in the past. So it's actually quite difficult to get interviewees who are able to do the kind of cross-cultural and theoretical issues that we're very interested here at The Religious Studies Project. So when we do get one, we're always very pleased. And I'm happy to say we do have some others on Islam coming up soon.",
      "We stay with the idea of sexual ethics with an interview on Tantra. And that's an interview with Douglas R. Brooks, and it was recorded by Dan Gorman, one of our new interviewers. So do come back next week to hear that. Don't forget to come back for the Opportunities Digest on a Wednesday and The Response on a Thursday as always. I would also very much like to urge you",
      "to consider donating to our Patreon account. We've just set up a Patreon page and you can find that at www.patreon.com backslash project RS or just search Project RS when you get to Patreon. We're using this to raise money, particularly to have the episodes transcribed for you as we're going along. This should make it much easier",
      "easier for you to use these in your research and especially in your teaching, as well as making them more easily searchable on the web. But also if we get once we've got enough money to cover that any other funds will go to continuing to develop the religious studies project and keeping it free at point of use for you and to develop a new directions in the future. Chris and I have been working on this project for over five years now and completely for",
      "completely for free. We're giving up a lot of our time and this is becoming more and more challenging as we, uh, as our careers develop. And as the projects get larger and larger, um, we could hardly have believed the international scope of the project when we started at five years ago and in order to continue to develop it, we need to be working quite a lot behind the scenes",
      "internationally and setting up systems by which things work in a format that's never really been done before. So we would appreciate any support you would give us, even if one pound will go a long way to helping us out. You can set up one-off payments or a regular micro payment if you like. I would especially encourage you to think about this if you've used it in your teaching. Perhaps",
      "to the project given that you may have used our material which was given free in your teaching and that would help us keep that material free for students all around the world and members of the public and people who might be thinking about becoming students and might get interested in this subject through The Religious Studies Project and then sign up for a course at your department so we'd",
      "would consider contributing. That's patreon.com backslash project RS. Other than that, I'd like to say thanks for listening."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "kecia/The Woman Question in Islamic Studies with Kecia A_fy2GqICLC7M&pp=ygUPS2VjaWEgQWxpIGlzbGFt_1748696647.opus",
    "text": [
      "Welcome everyone to today's Monday Majlis which I hope will be a really fruitful and exciting conversation. As you've, I'm sure noticed in the last few weeks because it is Ramadan, I tend to finish these slightly earlier than normal but today certainly we should be able to go through till about 6.20pm which hopefully will be enough time for the conversation",
      "It is a real pleasure to have Professor Akeesha Ali with us today. For those who are my students, you'll be familiar if not generally familiar with her quite simply because we do actually read fair amount of her work in my MA class and for those who",
      "will certainly inspire them to go off and read her work if you haven't already done so in the various fields that she works in. I won't say much more because hopefully some of these things will emerge from the conversation just to say welcome Keisha it's a real pleasure having you, welcome for welcome to The Monday Majlis and thank you for agreeing to do this",
      "conversation with me. Oh, so I should also say Keisha Ali is a professor of religion at Boston University and let's make a start and what i'll do Keisha is just welcome once again and just ask you the starting kind of question which is",
      "which is if you could tell us a bit about your academic journey or maybe not just your academic but your journey in terms of how it is that you came to where you are today and how you've grown into the field. Thanks so much, I really appreciate this invitation to be here and i'm delighted",
      "and you are marshalling your last resources for concentration or you're sort of in the middle-of-the-day doldrums like we are over on this side of the Atlantic, I appreciate it. And I hope you will extend me some grace if I'm a little more scattered than I would like to be. So I'm from Boston. I live in Boston.",
      "a sort of roundabout journey to start here and go a number of other places, uh, and come back around to moving here at the close of my dissertation process. And then ending up at Boston University where I've been for going on 20 years now. I did not start out as a scholar",
      "in history and although I took some classes on the Middle East, even an undergrad intro to Islam. I was actually focused on Latin America and I thought I was probably going to write a dissertation about 20th century Brazil but it was going to be about women and gender. I started in the graduate program in History at Duke and started taking Islamic Studies classes kind of",
      "as it got closer to time to pick a dissertation topic, take exams. I ended up shifting over to the religion program and taking more coursework and starting off really not quite from scratch but definitely a lot further from the finish line than i had been. Why? Well because",
      "answers to had to do with the way Muslims were talking about gender. And in a lot of ways, actually, the work that I'd done on Latin America on 19th and 20th century Latin America clued me into a particular kind of Victorian modern way of talking about",
      "of the hearth type stuff. And I thought, gee really as a historian this is stuff I know from the 19th century, from the mid 20th century to assume that this is authentic seventh-century Islamic gender norms just seems suspect to me and so I started doing research on",
      "research on Quran, Quran interpretation. And this is in the 1990s right which was a really flourishing exciting time for scholarship about women and gender in Islam. And you know Laila Ahmed had published her book, Amina Wadud had published Her book and all of a sudden people are doing all this really fascinating research and I was thrilled and excited and really drawn",
      "drawn in. And then, this is to anticipate a little bit the story of this book that I'm here to talk about, I discovered that outside of the people who were already committed to working on women and gender, people just weren't reading it or talking about it or taking it into account in their work. So the field was wide open in terms of the research that I wanted to do ultimately on early Islamic law",
      "law, but also just lots and lots of places where talking about women in Muslim history wasn't happening. And I wanted to see it happen and all the places where it was happening in really exciting ways. And",
      "I mean, I guess it is a feature of those times. And I remember as an MPhil student starting out we were required to read Lail Ahmed and Babastawasa. But although Amna Wadud's work was out no one really thought of suggesting it even though I think some people were familiar with it",
      "it perhaps because it was something quite different and of course we now have a much larger literature you know both theoretical historical as well as more kind of engaged so the field is quite different. And I guess in some ways,",
      "which at least touch upon an aspect of gender, it's not something which comes across as being unusual for students. And there's a lot of very good material that we can actually point students towards. So that's a real change in a relatively short period of about 25 years. It is a change and I feel like the classroom",
      "classroom is still catching up. It sounds like you do a good job in your modules, but I know that some of your colleagues did research about a decade ago looking at modules in UK universities and found that the teaching about women and gender is very often one week near the end of term, right? And sort of segregated off from everything else.",
      "that's also still very often the case for syllabi in U.S. contexts, less than it was maybe 20 years ago but not substantially improved um in the way that one might expect given the richness of the material um that's available now in contrast to the you know I think that's definitely true and perhaps also a greater awareness of some of",
      "some of that diversity of that material as well in terms of different sorts of training. So whether people are trained in study religion or it's, whether it's in law or history or philosophy or whatever, as well as the different experiences from different parts of the world and different cultural contexts as well. And I think that's another question which often arises",
      "you're thinking about what's often considered to be the sort of Arabic normativity of Islamic studies. And so it's always about looking at Arabic texts and those kinds of contexts as being primary or elite, at least fundamental in rule forming. And yet in many ways some of the more interesting material comes from beyond",
      "context as well. There's certainly enough interesting work and important work being done in Arabic or on Arab speaking countries that one could profitably spend a whole semester there, but you're absolutely right that there is all this amazing work elsewhere that is very often treated",
      "You can get to it once you've got the basics, the core, the norm down. If you like. It's sort of optional in the same way that I think gender is often treated as optional. Yeah. You have to have al-ghazali but if you're lucky, you'll get nana asma'u. And I think that question of the voices of representation",
      "representation. I remember having, for example, a conversation with the colleague about philosophy quite a while ago and what kind of emerged was not a consideration of are there particular women philosophers or at least women who were making philosophical arguments who one can engage with but rather looking at how it is that",
      "women are perceived in philosophical texts, which of course is a very different kind of question. And saying well there's more material in the philosophical traditions on that and while I understand sometimes this argument about the limits of resources, I think partly the problem is we just don't make enough of an effort to look more broadly",
      "You know, we're quite used to the idea that yes there will be some important. You know women Sufis who might be out there but we don't necessarily look at the question of broader question of theology and philosophy in the same way and that's I think environment many ways it kind of a shortcoming i'm talking as someone who works primarily in the area of philosophy becomes becomes a bit of a challenge.",
      "Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that the two things sort of overlap. Right? There is a discussion about discussion to be had, right philosophical ideas about gender, the way that gender structures certain kinds of texts and it's not just ideas about women, right? It's also ideas about men. And what are norms of masculinity that often go unperceived",
      "unperceived as being gendered, right? They're just sort of how human beings are or should be. And I think it is more often, although not exclusively, people who aren't men who address those questions in their scholarship. So when you exclude those people, you exclude the scholarship on gender and when you",
      "and so there's a mutually reinforcing set of dynamics right around what constitutes not only the sort of real Islamic studies question, and the real Islamic Studies texts but also then who are the real scholars doing this work. Absolutely. So before we come to the book in a bit more detail if I ask you that kind of",
      "of more generic question which we often ask our guests, which is if there's a particular piece of advice that you would give either our students or colleagues who are listening in to this Majlis. Anything that you really think is essential based on your experience in the field? I'll say two things. One, notice just",
      "just pay attention. Who's on your syllabi? Who's in your reading list? How are scholars positioning themselves, talking about things? You just pay it doesn't have to be just a gender but once you start noticing a particular thing think about it share it with others because you",
      "The things that are obvious to you or that you begin to perceive aren't necessarily going to be obvious to everybody else. So, that's number one. Number two is advice that's easy to give and to my lasting regret I mostly do not follow it myself which is whenever you're writing something write a sloppy first draft of the whole thing before",
      "each of its constituent parts. I cannot tell you how often I have talks or chapters or books where, there's a really finely honed introductory paragraph or 10 pages that are really careful and gripping and properly footnoted and then things just trail off sort of into bullet points. So I would advocate hard for an iterative process",
      "you try to get the whole thing out and then loop back around so that you're not, you know, polishing something that ultimately is going to have to be cut or moved around or whatever. It's great advice when I have managed to do it. I'm always really glad. Um, I don't always manage to do what? I mean, to be honest, um, I've always had that intention, but it just never works out.",
      "It was magical. One book, one book! Not this one. I think partly sometimes it's also especially with articles, it's a function of time, especially when you're trying to meet something that you've promised someone and yes,",
      "and to write, and then to kind of rewrite. But it doesn't always work out like that. In my experience, it actually takes less time ultimately because you get the whole thing clear to some extent as you loop back around. Your mileage may vary. Writing advice is always very idiosyncratic and personal but when I have managed to do this, it has worked really well for me.",
      "really well for me. Okay, well let's move on to this particular book which is The Woman Question in Islamic Studies which came out with Princeton fairly recently I think it was a few months ago wasn't it? Yes so if i start off by that you've already alluded",
      "the question about why it is that you felt the need to write this book and how you came to this book? So I wrote The Woman Question because many scholars, especially women not exclusively have had work we've done or work our colleagues have done just ignored in really relevant conversations",
      "that doesn't do justice to the scholarship involved. Sometimes I think these moments are malicious, but I think mostly it comes down to the norms and the habits that govern our collective work in graduate school and beyond we are encouraged by professors and by colleagues to read certain things, to cite certain things to prioritize specific approaches, work people you know, the must-read book",
      "read book that we all must read and then we all most cite. It's not generally a book by a woman. Scholarly work is supposed to move iteratively towards better, more accurate, and more useful knowledge but we're not doing that if we're really paying attention to or substantively engaging or appropriately acknowledging a considerable proportion of what gets written",
      "are as a field. So what the woman question tries to do is show that practices of ignoring or downplaying scholarship by women and scholarship on gender are pervasive, insidious, and harmful, and also that they're structural, right? It takes aim at the way forms of exclusion are mutually reinforcing so people don't get invited",
      "to contribute to collective publications, and then their work doesn't get read there or it's less likely to be reviewed. Their publications don't make it onto comprehensive exam lists. And then when we become faculty, those lists are the basis for our syllabi. And so they don't get assigned in classes, right? And the cycle continues. It's not just one person didn't cite one thing",
      "things to rise to folks' attention, right? So a peer reviewer doesn't mention an absence. The editor doesn't notice or doesn't care. Readers don't object. And so what I'm trying to do with this book is think about how we individually and collectively shift those default practices,",
      "it's not just particular things. It's sort of the path of least resistance, right? Leads us to centering men's scholarship. But another central point that the book makes is that just as the forms of exclusion that we find are mutually reinforcing, so also habits",
      "move us from a vicious cycle to a virtuous circle, right? We spiral towards more expansive and better functioning scholarly community. And I hope that is true not only along axes of gender but something I talk about a little bit in the book is other kinds of axes of inclusion whether that's racial or whether it's global south, right. These are all things where I think",
      "where I think that we can collectively, iteratively move towards more inclusive practices both by changing some things about our own habits and also by working to shift professional norms. Right? I think it really... To focus exclusively on personal responsibility for these kinds of lapses",
      "of lapses actually reinforces this model of the lone genius which itself is really kind of a pernicious habit. It seems also that you know there's in some ways, there are two ways in which this book is quite timely I mean one of course is the fact that",
      "it seems that we're discussing more and more the question of how to do the study of Islam. And so, the question method is pretty much central to a lot of people's concerns. So, it speaks very well to that. But also I mean one can't fail to notice, and this is of course more acute in the US than here, you know the assault on diversity and inclusion.",
      "the timing of this, although I'm sure you might not have expected things to have gone so badly so quickly in the US context. But it's a really important work for that reason as well, the context in which it has been published. Yeah, I mean, I did not expect things to",
      "that they did, but it is certainly the case that there are disappointing strands I think of Muslim community discourses around gender that actually align in really problematic ways with some of the conservative",
      "conservative Christian and some of the white nationalist rhetoric around gendered community and things like that. And so I touch on this only very briefly in the book, but I do think that there are some difficult conversations to be had among Muslims",
      "who study Islam and Muslims, and those are obviously overlapping categories about how to confront this new moment. Yeah. And in some ways it kind of I see what you mean by the difficulty of those conversations as well because one's aware of the fact that politically also just being a Muslim",
      "many kind of contexts in the US and Europe is quite difficult. Being a Muslim man is even more being under siege for all sorts of reasons, and of course you know the classic accusation which would come out is that there's an element of demonization going on there. And I'm sure you've... well I know for a fact that you've come across that because I was following the Twitter conversations about this when",
      "the book. But that, of course can make things extremely difficult in terms of your interaction with networks and with people you're engaging with. Yeah I mean it really does and i think that is... It's complicated right because on the one hand there is a cultural tendency",
      "treat Muslim men as somehow uniquely or especially kind of patriarchal and misogynist. And that's just not, I think reasonable. It certainly isn't but at the same time there are problematic approaches to the study of gender and Muslim women scholarship",
      "scholarship that men from Muslim backgrounds in the academy are engaging. And so how do you talk about that? Right? How do you not scapegoat them for what is a much, much larger problem but also be clear about where the particular problems lie and I think this book",
      "This book, I hope doesn't fall into that trap in part because it criticizes a lot of people for this work. So some of the folks whose textbooks come under scrutiny or chapters about Islamic law that cite basically 98% men's work these are not Muslim men",
      "Muslim men, these are quite senior white colleagues in the academy who kind of set the tone for some kinds of conversations. But it is and continues to be a problem when scholars from Muslim backgrounds, scholars who explicitly claim Islam in their work talk about things,",
      "ways that Muslim women colleagues have already written about it, and they don't cite that work. They don't acknowledge that it exists. They do not acknowledge that they are responding to it. They repeat things other people have already said or make arguments that have been rebutted. That is just not helpful. It's especially not helpful when those are then the books",
      "the books that outsiders cite as well then this is the thing you need to read on this topic and so it really I think doesn't do justice to what the scholarship looks like. And there are concrete professional harms especially to junior colleagues whose work",
      "the increased reliance on algorithmic citation metrics and so forth, that being excluded from one thing means being excluded form this other thing which means that you don't show up on Google Scholar. Which means your article isn't highly ranked, it doesn't show in lists of things to read and so on and so fourth. And then when somebody wants to know your H index to see if you deserve to have tenure, it's a problem.",
      "it's a problem. Yeah okay so let's get a bit more to the book, so it seems that there are I mean there's obviously a diagnostic element to that and one element of the diagnostics sort",
      "structural sexism in the field is to look at this sort of citational indexical element to that. At the same time, I think the point that I'm sure you'd want to make is it's not merely about the indexical, right? It's not just about numbers. Those numbers are reflective or attitudes and practices because I think",
      "And reflecting on the Twitter kind of arguments when you were writing this, I think people were very much focusing on the numbers and saying oh so-and-so is not being cited or there's only like 98% of that article by Mac Dissy cites male authors and only 2%.",
      "significant in the field and what the trends are. And as you said, the eradication of arguments and contributions. So if we can start with the diagnosis before we move to your reparative practice. Yeah I mean I think the numbers are useful and not useful right?",
      "right um so there's a very good article by a couple of feminist geographers that i cite in the book on carrie mott and daniel cockane and they talk about um i don't know if i'm going to be quoting them exactly here but but not sort of subjecting oneself to the regimes of accounting of the neoliberal university right don't get sucked into the numbers that you have to use qualitative measures right",
      "Jackson, who's part of the Cite Black Women Collective writes about this and she talks about structural inclusion. So it's not just counting how many citations, it's thinking about who are you really engaging? Who are you thinking with? Whose scholarship are you attending to in meaningful ways? Who were you putting yourself in conversation with? And I agree completely that these things are very necessary",
      "Yet, right. The numbers in a way are a starting point in that they make some things starkly clear. Right. In a way that they otherwise might not be. So, you know, if you look at Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam? It's more than 500 pages long and it does not give a single example of a Muslim woman as a historical actor or cultural figure. Right across the whole of it.",
      "It just doesn't. It mentions Khadija and it mentions Qaya Sultan in passing, in sentences focused on their husbands or husband and father, right? And that's it. There are two literary characters and the rest are all modern academics. So you have a whole history of what is Islam",
      "So there's this new trend of like you write the history of international relations without men or the history art without men, which are reparative projects. But here we literally have a history of Islam without women and the numbers are I think really helpful to that but I also think that there are qualitative indicators too that can be really helpful so if we look at",
      "at the way scholars and scholarship get talked about, that gives us another reflection a different reflection of how the field is operating. So in 2022 Lola Serrano and I published an article in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion where we did quantitative and qualitative evaluation of 15 years worth of jar book reviews right which included the books on Islam but not only the books",
      "books on Islam. And our most striking findings, which were statistically significant was that the language of esteem being a leading or an eminent or a senior scholar was very deeply gendered terms like prominent and distinguished overwhelmingly applied to men. And when they were used for women it was nearly always white women. And some of the clearest examples here came from Islamic studies.",
      "in the Woman Question book, I also show how this works in a small sample of Islamic studies books. You find the male authors disagreeing at times quite sharply with other men in the field but doing this sort of reflexive naming them enumerating their qualifications engaging substantively with their idea my distinguished colleagues so and so regrettably whatever whatever whatever",
      "with whom these authors disagree, or even sometimes women with whom they agree are either relegated to the notes or just ignored. Right? Not there at all. So if you didn't know the existing literature, right, you wouldn't know that this is something that has been written about at length someplace else by someone else. And again within Islamic studies here, this is also often a place where gendered racism shows up, right?",
      "scholars who are named and cited or included in an edited volume, a journal special issue, or conference are fairly diverse and include men from Muslim backgrounds or men who explicitly claim Islam in their work. But the women who are generally fewer in any case are mostly white non-Muslims or sometimes white converts. And so this is a way that we see in sort of qualitative terms who has taken seriously",
      "seriously as a scholar and who isn't. And that shapes how the work gets done. Yeah, um...and in fact I mean you discuss that in different ways in the earlier chapters and then of course you have a long chapter on representing Islamic studies which are",
      "in many ways I think is probably the central chapter in the book. Oh, that's so interesting! Nobody else has said that but I'm really interested... I mean, I thought that was quite interesting because it seems to kind of like go sideways but also it like it's almost kind of a reflection on your own practice as well and how you're seen because I think that is an important element of it because",
      "reflective element to it. But I mean, we can as that we can talk. I don't know if you want to say something about that particular chapter but I did want to ask you a bit more about the reparative practice beyond the Yeah, I think the only thing that I would say about that chapter is that",
      "people in Islamic studies, like people in the humanities and social sciences more broadly, but especially I think the humanities in the U.S., are constantly being asked to justify their existence, right? So writing a book about 9th century jurisprudence, people want to know so what? Like being a good scholar,",
      "which is what we know about the past, um, is generally considered insufficient to justify, you know, almost anything. You've got to demonstrate your relevance. And it's certainly the case, obviously that I have things to say about how Muslims today draw on the historical tradition drawn a spiritual tradition drawn illegal tradition drawn an exegetical",
      "tradition. But being asked to kind of do public facing work with broader and often unsympathetic audiences is not something that when I started graduate school, I would have anticipated needing to do. And September 11th, of course, changed that for everyone.",
      "different, right? It is certainly the case that women in general and women online and women of color in particular get just really gross sexualized violent feedback and threats in a way that applies outside of Islamic studies and even outside",
      "actors and sports figures, meteorologists. But I think that in the context of Islamic studies it's sort of a perfect storm where you have religion and gender and sexuality all coming together. It means people often back away from those kinds of public facing opportunities because who has time for that?",
      "you to a journalist and then like there go your next three weeks because you're dealing with the fallout. And it's particularly bad, because of course especially nowadays in the field in many ways it really is about that public engagement. It's kind of unavoidable and if you're really going to make",
      "do need to have that engagement and if it becomes more difficult for certain people to do that because of the way in which they're being perceived, it's all the worse actually in many ways. Yeah, Sarah Sobieris who has a really interesting book, the title of which I have lost the fast but I cite it in the book talks about one informant who says she wants to be visible enough",
      "the conversation, but not so visible that she becomes a target. And that's absolutely my motto at this stage. Well let me ask you then about the reparative practice and in particular your concluding beginner's guide if you could talk us through that and how do you think that will change things?",
      "think it will change things, but I certainly hope it will. So the first thing here is that the first version of what became Chapter 5, what became The Conclusion was actually much less specific to Islamic studies and in fact it is absolutely true",
      "are actually nothing to do with our field, right? It's the rise of the gig academy. I don't know what the situation is like in the UK but in the US about three quarters of instructional positions today are off the tenure track and for junior scholars of course the figure is higher and pervasive sexism in academia means there are delayed promotion if you even make it to the tenure",
      "women of color, to a lesser extent for men of color. For white women as well. There are, of course specific things that relate to our areas of scholarly expertise but a lot of what we confront and need to change is just within the academy broadly right so that that is",
      "of going in. But, in terms of thinking about concrete things people can do I initially had it broken up by sort of your role. Are you doing something? Are you writing? Are organizing et cetera? Are being invited to do something right and ultimately the way I've chosen to break",
      "with invitations. I forget what the third thing is, and then with sort of what you're assigning in the classroom for all of these. Citing and assignment. Citeing, citing there you go so of course. So all of them begin with what I said earlier with noticing right? Noticing what you are doing yourself",
      "yourself, noticing in things you're reading. Who are you citing? Who aren't you citing who are you naming in the text or you naming and the notes but also if you're working collaboratively right? Who's on your team was choosing who's on the team? Are you crediting scholars differently does everyone or no one get their earned titles on publications",
      "and who are the outliers, right? When you're giving examples to your class. These aren't things where I'm trying to make anybody feel bad about where they are but more sort of attuning yourself to what are our unconscious defaults, right. What feels comfortable and how does that change?",
      "Another thing that I would say that is especially true for things if you're inviting people, if you are planning some sort of event. Parity inclusion is really mostly about planning right? So start early network carefully consult widely be transparent have contingency plans leave yourself time to maneuver and this is true I guess also for writing and citing",
      "writing and citing and assigning, right? Leave yourself enough time so that you have that sloppy first draft and you can get feedback on it. That's obviously easier if you're more senior and nobody... You're not worried somebody is going to take away your PhD when they see how bad your first draft is although I still sometimes worry about that but have people that you trust to be able to use as a sounding board earlier in the process because",
      "you get advice earlier in the process, you leave yourself time to course correct. An example where I didn't have time to coarse-correct is when I did my Lives of Muhammad book. I organized that project around texts that ended up mostly being by men. I was most",
      "seemingly extremely obvious story of using biographies of the prophet to understand the changing biography of the Prophet meant excluding most work by women authors, especially Muslim women who many of whom were writing about the Prophet by writing about The Women of his Household. Right? So a sort of form of indirect biography but you know we don't know what we don t know and by",
      "was what was going on, I was able to bring in a few things but not overhaul my research strategy and my research questions. But we also don't know what we don't now. My student Atib Gul who is now researching prophetic biography in Urdu while on pre-doctoral fellowship at Lums has found two 20th century Syratex by women from the subcontinent that haven't been widely studied,",
      "that haven't been cited in a lot of other work, which also then points to other limitations of my project and more broadly the field. So it's an exciting discovery. I couldn't have known about it 10 years ago but this is... We all have to be, I think comfortable with the provisional nature of our scholarly work. And I think we have to do",
      "we have to be really suspect of purity politics, right? We've all perpetuated these kind of exclusionary dynamics in one way or another. And I think we have get comfortable with nudging our colleagues to do better in their own work, with taking criticism of our own work which is absolutely much easier",
      "easier earlier in the process than having it happen once, you know, the book is in print or even gone to the printer might be worse. Right? Because it's too late to do anything about it but you don't have the satisfaction of it being done. So I think these sorts of baby steps, right, consultation, transparency, receptivity to critique and a lot",
      "And a lot of tolerance of ambiguity, right? That this is something that we are all kind of working with. Right? In the moment. This is not one person being a bad apple. Right. These are our default habits and unless we very consciously work to challenge them they're not going to change.",
      "And I think especially the point about the need for collaboration and just being a lot more aware of what's out there. Because, you know, again we tend to focus on particular languages and literature produced in particular languages, and don't really necessarily think about what might be out there in different works. And even within that there's both",
      "both the privilege of English amongst European languages, but also very much a privilege of Arabic amongst the sort of languages which are used in the study of Islam as well. Yeah, there's a note in Usman Khan's book Beyond Timbuktu that struck me as really telling in this regard. So he's talking about the way that even within West Africa,",
      "Africa, Francophone and Anglophone scholars are sort of talking past each other. Right? That there that there are publications coming from within the same region. And they're just not those scholarly networks are not in conversation right now. And people have limited time. People have limited energy. People who have limited research budgets. People with limited library access.",
      "why we read the things we read and don't read other things, um, and don t get invited to certain conferences and don s know about other publications. Um, but more consultation, I think, and more explicit attention to what we re leaving out can be really helpful. Yeah. I mean, um, I guess the question is,",
      "Are there ways in which we can kind of embed that, for example the way we train our students? Because I think lots of what you've mentioned in that conclusion and which we've been discussing. The question is yes how do we actually embed that into a training program or what would that mean",
      "in practice? I mean, I think some of it is crowdsourcing comprehensive exam lists. Right? If half the things on a list I'm providing to my student are things that I read when I was in graduate school, that's a huge red flag. Right. I think that reading lists tend to be conservative syllabi tend to",
      "conservative, right? I mean in a sort of conservation of energy principle sort of way as opposed to out of any desire to stifle innovation or anything like that. So I think that we have to get comfortable with updating ourselves.",
      "what books we review. Something close to seven out of ten of the Islam-related books that were reviewed in the JAR between 2006 and 2020 were by men. I don't think that's reflective of publications in the field. It is not reflective of the membership balance of the American Academy of Religion, and so thinking about why is that? How are certain decisions being made?",
      "So I think that those are good questions. There's a huge literature on citation, like a huge Literature, some of which I cite in the book but certainly not all of it and I think getting clear with ourselves about what we're citing and why is really important. Are we citing defensively?",
      "reviewers are going to expect that we've cited, you know the new IT book. And then we framed our whole organization of the argument around them. Sarah Ahmed who has a really terrific article on this on her blog I think it's The Feminist Killjoy Blog she talks about it as...",
      "in the book and if I think of it, I'll put it in the chat. But she basically talks about going to this conference around reproductive freedom and folks were organizing their, maybe it was reproductive justice, folks are organizing their presentations around the work of white male philosophers, right? Even though it's a conference specifically",
      "people who've worked on it, right? But that's how you show your serious is you bring the theory in and the tendency to treat. And this has been written about extensively over the years women's work as sort of empirical but men's work is where you get the theory from is a big problem. And that's precisely the thing that I mean decolonial kind of activists",
      "activists also point out that there's a difference between the subjectivity of theory, which comes from particular privileged group and being an object of inquiry, which is something quite different. And you don't necessarily expect that objective inquiry to throw up something theoretically significant, which may be kind of used to reverse the situation. Yeah.",
      "you sort of looped us back around to decolonial theory, because one of the things that has been raised at times as a critique of this project of looking at citations of women and paying attention to gender dynamics in the field is, oh, but the real problem is, you know, the plagiarism or the exclusion of scholars from the global South, which is, I mean, certainly",
      "have often not done well on that score. And it's not either or, right? I mean there are also women in the Global South and some of the important decolonial work pays attention to this but not all of it, right. So some of it does much better on the inclusion score",
      "not a lot of women from those places. And, you know it's... It's a frustrating dynamic to be told that these things are pitted against each other when they shouldn't be. Well thank you for that I think we should probably open it up at this point because coming up six o'clock, well it is 6 o' clock now and I'm sure there's a lot",
      "raise their hand i'm just going to um stop recording and then invite yasmin to start the this q a"
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    "text": [
      "Islam is not a monolith. It encompasses diverse interpretations and practices. Ali emphasizes the diversity within Islam, acknowledging the multiplicity of interpretations and expressions of the faith across different cultures and communities.",
      "teachings embodied in the life of the Prophet Muhammad, which serve as a guide for Muslims in their interactions with others. Number 5 Critical engagement with Islamic texts and traditions is essential for developing a nuanced understanding of the faith. Ali advocates for critical inquiry and interpretation of Islamic sources, emphasizing the importance",
      "analysis and intellectual rigor in Islamic scholarship. Number 6 Muslim women have historically played active roles in society, contributing to various fields of knowledge and leadership. Ali challenges stereotypes about Muslim women's passivity or marginalization, highlighting",
      "and political spheres throughout history. The Quranic vision of marriage emphasizes partnership, mutual respect, and shared responsibility. Ali interprets Quranic teachings on marriage as promoting egalitarian values emphasizing the importance of mutual respect and cooperation between spouses.",
      "Women's rights are human rights, and Islam affirms the dignity and autonomy of women. Ali asserts the compatibility of women's rights with Islamic principles, rejecting the notion that Islam inherently oppresses women and advocating for gender equality within the faith.",
      "Social justice is a core Islamic value that requires addressing systemic inequalities and advocating for marginalized communities. Ali highlights Islam's emphasis on social justice, calling for efforts to challenge oppressive structures and promote equity and fairness in society. Number 10 Interfaith dialogue is essential for fostering understanding",
      "understanding, cooperation and peaceful coexistence among people of different religious traditions. Ali advocates for interfaith engagement as a means of promoting mutual respect, empathy and collaboration across religious divides contributing to greater harmony and solidarity.",
      "So you don't miss out on new videos."
    ]
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]