RELS 131
Islam Podcast Transcript
Interview with Sadaf Ahmed

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the podcast for this module on Islam. And I’ve got someone wonderful to speak with today. Her name is Sadaf Ahmed. Sadaf is a PhD student who researches contemporary Islam in Canada.

She has an MA in gender studies where her work focused on shifts in Muslim maternity practises in Muslim-majority regions during the colonial period. Her doctoral work is focused on contemporary everyday Muslim parenting practises in a context where Muslims and Islam are minoritized in national discourse and politicized in particular ways in the broader geopolitical sphere. Muslim parent practises are also situated in the modern mode of nuclear family arrangements, which are often seen in both religious and non-religious contexts as the paradigmatic site of not only the reproduction of people but the reproduction of morality and personhood.

So, Sadaf, thank you so much for joining me today. I am dying to hear more about your research. First, can you speak for a minute to the Muslim maternity practises during the colonial period that you focused on in your MA?

Sure. Yeah, I’d love to. So essentially, I looked at literature that had talked about the role of midwives and medical practitioners, more broadly women medical practitioners in the pre-colonial versus colonial periods in certain Muslim majority regions. So specifically, the literature covers areas like Egypt, Sudan, and Morocco.

And I tried to draw out some of the shared effects of coloniality. I mean some of the differences as well. So in some, the literature highlighted that there was a real importance and significance influence of women as medical practitioners for a number of areas of human health, not just women’s health in the pre-modern period, although particularly, women’s health in the pre-modern period. And this shifts quite drastically during the colonial period as European science and medicine, which was largely seen to be the domain of European men, enters the colonies.

Yeah. So in the pre-modern period, women medical practitioners were considered to have a kind of everyday medical knowledge. They were regularly solicited by the masses for sort of matters mundane and larger, exercising a sort of stable and expansive epistemic authority in people’s ordinary lives. But this changes with the infiltration of European medicine, which occurred primarily through state building projects.

So setting up armies, hospitals, setting up schools of medicine and science. And then meeting native subjects, as they were referred to, to then being called so that the native people of those societies could kind of carry out this colonial work as effective translators. So there’s a notion in the colonial literature, or on the literature on this period of colonial middle fingers– excuse me. –middle figures– we should really edit that out– where you know, natives were seen to be particularly effective in transferring sort of European knowledge by way of being native themselves, having the capacity to interact with fellow natives, both through language and through gesticulation, et cetera, that they were closer of course, to fellow indigenous people. And so they really relied that– European officials really relied on them as translators of their knowledge and therefore, for a more effective transfer of authority to European science and medicine.

So theorists describe colonial medicine as its own sort of concept, right? Like as its own kind of conceptual frame. So method medicine as essentially a form of indirect rule, rather than separating medicine say, from politics. There was an understanding of colonial medicine as in fact, a colonial endeavour, as sort of giving itself a kind of self-sanctioned right to define health, to define illness, and then to treat it. So laying claim to that domain is what makes it irrevocably colonial in character, both in the metropole and in the colony.

Right. And so then what happens to that largely female– like in this specific instance, like, midwife community of practitioners? Like, how are they sustained through this? Or do they just not survive?

I mean there’s a– yeah, that’s an important question. So the ways that this took shape in the realm of women’s reproductive health and reproductive domain is that midwives again, as being trained as colonial middle figures were often of course, used to then impart colonial knowledge, specifically in shifts, in certain birthing practises. The most stark shift can be seen through changing experiential tactile knowledge of birth to one that relies on sight.

So for example, for Indigenous women, it was certainly not necessary to view the birth like with the eyes for the midwife to be able to see that the birth was taking place. So women often used upright birthing positions where they were covered from the waist down. The midwife relied on a certain kind of tactile knowledge base where she could feel her way around a woman’s vulva, vagina closely to sense what was taking place and how things were progressing or not.

This really radically shifts in the colonial period, where it’s seen as a necessity to be able to see what’s going on. And so we have the introduction of what’s called the supine position, namely the you know, the fact that what we take to be actually quite ordinary in contemporary modern contemporary times, that a woman ought to be lying down on her back so that the practitioner has full access visually to what’s going on. And so that’s actually quite a significant shift alongside certain other epistemological shifts that took place around what was present in the birthing room that was seen to have influence, right?

So the notion of invoking prayers to invoke spirits, or in this case, Jinns, which are considered to be other beings that also partake in everyday life. They’re not necessarily evil forces, but that they are present. Or certain kinds of herbal medicine. Of course, that would be extremely common to rely upon. And instead of course, there’s like a real significant shift to an aesthetic being used to mute the birthing experience, mute birth pain of course, but also the sheer kind of obliteration of other things like herbs or invoking other things to assist you.

That sounds like such an interesting master’s thesis. I hope that you’ve published a paper from that. Or that you will one day.

I’m thinking about it. Yeah.

Thank you for sharing that. I also wanted to ask you a question that’s sort of a certain favourite topic of mine. So, thank you for humouring me. I appreciate it.

So in this class, we focus primarily on historical and textual understandings of world religions like Islam. And it’s certainly a necessary foundation for studying global religions. We need to know sort of the roots of these traditions before we can talk about what happens to them now, maybe as lived traditions.

What I love about your research, and one of the reasons I’m so eager to talk to you is that you show us how studying religion can mean looking at so many different parts of life, such as parenting or birth practises, highlighting how things like religion and parenting or religion and family– they don’t exist in a vacuum on their own. They continually shape and challenge each other. So can you speak to this whether in relation to your masters or your doctoral research, can you speak to this a bit?

Yeah. Certainly. And even maybe even in a more broad way than that as it pertains to Islamic traditions more broadly.

So I would say that for everyday Muslims, the scripture matters in a particular kind of way in everyday life. It’s frequently invoked, whether through the source texts of the Quran and Hadith. If you folks are not already familiar with what those scriptures are, just let me know when I can explain.

I think my students are– they have an idea about those two different kinds of literature, one being revealed and one being the words and actions of the prophet Mohammed.

Yeah.

The recorded– what’s understood to be the recorded words and actions of the prophet Mohammed. And a certain kind of canonization of that, right? But actually not at the time of the prophet, but quite a bit later. So those are certainly treated as authoritative texts in a certain way that I’ll elaborate on in a moment. And then there’s what we call the juristic tradition.

So it’s the idea that there’s a category of legal jurists. We might call them in English, which is essentially folks that have been interpreting Islamic law, which is not a set of codified rules. And that’s an important distinction to make with our common sense contemporary understanding of what law is, which is a code of ethics or a– or sorry– a coded set of presuppositions in general, right?

That’s a really important distinction.

That’s a very important distinction that it was definitely much more ad hoc than that. So depending on your particular region or your particular situation, a local leader would then assess– that would be considered in the place of a jurist or an Imam or somebody that has interpretive capacities– would help you work with your particular circumstance, which includes your sociality too. So rather than drawing on a centralized authority, analogous to say the pope in Rome– even though that’s not a perfect analogy– but there was no sense in the pre-modern period for certainly of relying on a sense of a centralized authority that lived and derived rulings about what the sharia or what Islamic law to be how one should live their life effectively, outside of your very particular locale. So that’s an important distinction.

Now that being said– so the juristic tradition is theoretically still alive and well in certain ways. And that being said, there is a great deal of interaction between the text. So the Quran, the Hadith and the juristic tradition and Muslims lived realities in certain kinds of ways. So we might assume that there is these set of scriptures that then Muslims try to apply in their everyday life. Right?

So there is a code of law that says one ought to not partake in interest in terms of– for their financial kinds of endeavours in life. interest is haram or prohibited, that that is legally impermissible. Muslims are not allowed to draw on interest, sensibly. That being said, there are a series of ongoing interpretations of what interest even is, depending on a given economic circumstance that one lives in and then on the purposes of why interest would or would not be prohibited.

So a lot of contemporary Muslims– in other words– sorry– to sum it up for a moment, in other words Muslims are constantly interpreting the law according to the lens with which they view life at a given historical moment, right? So this idea that there is a set of rules that then need to just simply be applied just doesn’t work in an Islamic context really, right?

So first, there is always a changing kind of definition of economics, of financial well-being that we use our understanding of what interest is or isn’t and whether it can be prohibited or not. So a lot of contemporary Muslims decide to in fact, take out a mortgage– to have a mortgage on their homes, because they see that the broader principle of the law that prohibited interest, was in fact, to promote rather than prevent someone’s financial flourishing or economic well-being and flourishing, right? And more importantly, there is a way in which jurists themselves, who are ongoing, like, the Hadith tradition or the Quran or not still in formation, but the juristic tradition is. And jurists are constantly drawing from a social reality from which to then interpret the text, right?

So, yeah. So I think those are important distinctions to make that the text and social reality are not distinct from one another, but also, they interact with one another bidirectionally. Like they don’t– yeah.

I think that’s a really important detail that you mention. This idea that it’s like a conversation that’s happening between lived reality and this textual tradition and juristic tradition like you mentioned. And it’s something that I want to emphasize with the students and people interested in religion is that yes, we learn about these texts and these historical moments.

But these traditions are living traditions. And so these kinds of conversations are always happening. So thank you. That actually was a fantastic answer. Thank you so much.

I actually also just realized one other thing to make it a little bit more tangible is that there are a number of course of matters in everyday life that are of course, constantly changing as the world changes that scripture simply does not make pronouncements about. Right? So we simply cannot be encompassed in kind of like an overarching principle that is- or an overarching ruling of some kind, a legal ruling.

So for example, going back to the birth and maternity context, if Muslims want to think about you know, should I or should I not take anaesthetic during my birthing experience? Should I or should I not take certain kinds of drugs in general, medications or drugs in general?

There are no pronouncements on those matters. So they have to, of course, look to broader principles. But their interpretation of those broader principles, right? So that the text is also just simply silent on a number of Matters.

Of course, of course. Thank you. Turning to a different topic, I wanted to ask you how has the study of Islam impacted the humanities, generally?

I think I mean, related to what we have just been talking about, this very kind of divide between the text and social reality comes out of I think, a broader assumption about what religion is in our contemporary kind of commonsensical understanding of it, which is that religion is a set of propositions to which we ascend or don’t– you know, that to which you either believe– in which you believe or do not believe, right? It’s sort of a number of tenants of faith.

And life outside of that is therefore, separate from religion, which is sort of you know, propositional belief that you assent to or do not assent to. But that fundamentally, does not work within– does not work to understand the Muslim traditions or Islamic life. And it comes out that that sort of understanding, that everyday understanding of religion comes out of a kind of Protestant history of understanding religion in the academy.

And so the study of Islam has really shed light on that sort of– the way so we can historicize just the very idea of this category of religion. What even is religion? Oh, it’s this particular set of propositional beliefs to which we do or do not assent to. And we try to then kind of map that on to other traditions. And it just simply doesn’t work.

So the study of Islam has really made significant interventions in this respect to show us how, one, to point that out– the fact that it can be historicized and traced to a certain genealogy that comes out of Protestant Christianity. But also that the category of religion– this idea that we’ve come up with that there’s something called religion– that is separable from this other thing that we call the domain of the secular actually works by– they actually work to continually define each other based on how we define those things in any given moment of time.

So what is called religion is based on what is called secular. And what is called secular is based on what’s called religion. And that definition changes over time. So they’re mutually imprecated, we would say, but they’re also not stable fixed categories. So that’s– I mean, that’s one thing.

The other a way to extend sort of the implications of this is to look at how when we separate religion in this way, we sort of put it in its own sphere of life, like I was touching on earlier. And that’s how we come to see it as an object of study as well. So this is very much present in our academic study of religion.

And so these interventions have been made by a really well-known theorist and anthropologist named Talal Asad whose work has deeply informed the humanities at large. And many of Asad’s students have also emphasized that our notions of secularism are not simply about dividing church and state, as we commonly sort of refer to it in idiomatic expression, but also about managing religion by drawing the spheres of– drawing the line, excuse me, between religion and other spheres of life like politics, economy, or anything else, a family for example.

And with its relegation into the private sphere, the way that religion can or cannot be then present in the public sphere becomes managed by political authorities. We see of course, a lot of our contemporary sort of political debates revolving around this question, whether it’s in Quebec for a number of bills that are passed around religious accommodation often centring on things like the hijab, Muslim sartorial choices, or other things.

Another example of it though, is the way– hearkening back to an earlier part of our conversation– this also really lends itself– this dividing and then managing– lends itself to a kind of codifying of religion that’s not natural to certain traditions in the first place. So for example, theorist Saba Mahmood, who is also a theorist of Islam and who is an anthropologist– or was an anthropologist of Islam and recently passed– she has a small but significant case study on how, in the context of early modern Egypt, the Coptic church or COPs rather, Coptic Christians more broadly, did not really have a sort of one dimensional or singular I should say, understanding of the permissibility or not of divorce in the tradition, right?

But because of the nature of secular statehood, the way that the secular state then was required to draw or saw itself as being required to draw upon religious authorities to come up with a rule, to come up with a legal ruling, soliciting one particular leader within the Coptic community whose view– personal view was that it was impermissible.

And now you have a statewide position that Coptic Christians are not allowed to have a divorce under state law, right? So the sort of former diversity or ad hocness that I was talking about that existed regionally with different groups, has to then be boiled down and kind of rendered sort of like a– it needs to be boiled down for the sake of formulating a kind of legal rule, a singular legal rule.

And it’s really important to emphasize the way in which this is really a product of secular statehood. So in terms of the intervention that the study of Islam has made, it has really been I would say, at the forefront of theorizing secularism in the first place, which are often seen to be sort of you know, the notion of secularism is often taken to be a neutral standpoint, right?

Absolutely.

And that religion is something we can point to and ascribe traits to and culture to. But a norm or a base line, in virtue of its neutrality, is actually something called secularism. But the study of Islam actually points out I think very effectively, how secularism is also a very specific cultural orientation of the world that brings with it its own set of assumptions. And it also is revealed, even if ostensibly, if it seems neutral initially, the way that it’s sort of laden with its own cultural traits really come out in instances of disapproval or offence or making pronouncements about other traditions.

Yes. And I think that that’s a really helpful distinction you’ve made, this idea that these categories themselves, they’re shaped and formed in response to one another. And something that seems neutral in a cultural– from a cultural standpoint that we’re in right now, is in fact, not a neutral category. And that’s one of the reasons why I asked this question was to point out or just to recognize that fluidity that exists between all of these different– I don’t know, I’m going to call them traditions.

But what I find is when we think of religion as this category that’s sort of untouched and also itself a neutral category– that’s how it’s presented. You know, religion is just a thing that exists. –and we combine it with something like a cultural or political moment in time, sometimes people will say, well, even if religion is implicated in that cultural or political moment in time, they’ll say, but that’s not the authentic religion. The authentic religion is something outside of that category.

So even if a Muslim or a Christian or a Hindu is involved in something politically, and they implicate their religious tradition in forming sort of their reasoning behind what they do, people will then say, oh, but religion isn’t political. The pure religion, the authentic religion is something else. And I always want to remind people that these categories and these separations are created and constructed. And but when in fact they share so much with one another. And I think even at the point of a class like this one, where we’re learning about the history of these global traditions, I want to always keep that constructed nature of these categories at the forefront.

And so thank you. That was a really helpful explanation. Is there anything more you wanted to add to that before I go on to the next question?

Yeah, I mean, no. I mean, I think it’s really helpful for you to point out sort of the political saliences of these questions as well, which you know, is very– it makes the whole thing very tricky, because people are of course, often making those kinds of pronouncements of distinguishing religion from culture in an attempt to kind of salvage or to protect what they might also view as undue surveillance and scrutiny upon minoritized religions.

Yes, absolutely.

Right? And so you’re what you’re saying is totally, analytically true. Religion is how people live their lives and choose to live their lives. And that changes all the time. Yeah. On the other hand, you know, we also have to then be aware of how I think, particular– this particular moment in time, this sort of surveillance that’s ascribed to particular kinds of traditions and not others.

Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, it’s a tricky thing. I also just wanted to quickly mention that it’s important, I think, to call to the forefront some of our very basic– more of our basic kind of common sense understandings about what religion is, which might help us as we’re engaging in these political or other social conversations. For example, where we think of religion today as something going back to the notion of faith, as something that is essentially unprovable or not empirically verifiable, as opposed to rationality. Right?

So this sort of demarcation in the first place between religion and rationality is also something that Asad has spent a great deal of time trying to undo our kind of secular assumptions around, showing that the secular is also a deeply historical category, by which he simply means it’s also a product of human mind striving for truth. Right?

So there is a way in which the study of Islam tries to show or tries to present a kind of radical parody between these enterprises. So between Muslim philosophers and theologians for example, trying to go out into the world and ascertain truth, versus biologist also trying to do the same thing, right? And trying to kind of level the playing field a bit showing, as you’re saying– to sort of piggyback off of what you’re saying– that these are deeply constructed categories. Yeah.

Oh, thank you so much, Sadaf. I’m going to take you somewhere else now. So I mentioned before that this is mostly a historical class. But one of the more contemporary issues we do raise in this course is when we’re talking about Islam is failing. And it seems you can’t take two steps when talking about Islam in the West without hearing many, many opinions about what it means for Muslim women to wear the hijab.

Our class is no different in the sense that our students are asked to watch this documentary about Muslim women’s views on wearing the hijab in Dubai, in this particular context. Would you be able to comment on why the West is so concerned with this issue in particular? And I don’t know if you have time for this as well, but could you also speak to sort of the feminist, including Muslim feminist responses to this?

Yeah. I mean, this is a very, very important question I think that can shed light on a lot of our sort of unreflective you know, engagement with kind of Muslims and Islam in a broader kind of geopolitical sense. So I thank you for raising the question. So it’s one– I think the sort of hyper visibility of hijab is something that we need to really think about carefully, both in our society at large, and all of the kind of political and policy debates that it informs, as well as in academic research.

In fact, I have a forthcoming article, as I mentioned to, that kind of tries to grapple with this phenomenon of a kind of focus on veiling within academia, actually, that I argue reflects a broader kind of hyper focus on it socially and politically. I sort of argue that it acts as a mirror in spite of academic researchers’ aspirations to sort of diminish that kind of political hostility and scrutiny of the hijab.

And so what I’ve observed is that largely based on the post 9/11 social and political circumstance, there has also emerged a post 9/11 research focus on Muslim women in an attempt to restore their agency and multiplicity, right? It’s an attempt to give voice where they’ve been silenced in policy debates as objects, like where they’re talked about in policy and political debates without being participants of those debates.

And people– I mean, lawmakers and political authorities are quite literally making decisions about their lives without soliciting them or simply by ignoring what they have to say, which is that you know, typically, it’s something in the lexicon of, I choose to wear the hijab. It’s deeply important to me. It does not not only not hinder my life, but it is part of my human flourishing.

Right? And they’re trying– researchers are really trying to restore sort of silenced voices. But I argue that there has been such a proliferation and ongoing proliferation– it’s still occurring– of ethnographic research that solicits with some women to talk about why and how they veil, in particular, that it kind of ends up re-flattening Muslim women just as they have been kind of flattened at the level of policy and politics in our in our world outside of academia. So I know that that’s just a little bit different from your questioner that your question was focused–

No, it’s fascinating.

– –on– yeah, on society. But you know, it’s interesting how we also as researchers mimic what’s happening around us, because we are situated in our broader social context. And so hijab is used both to solicit– or hijab is used in research both as something to ask Muslim women about, but it’s also used as a lens to explore other kinds of discourses of multiculturalism, of pluralism at large. Right?

So it’s also often used to point to unequal or inequitable social and political circumstance to say, look at how hijab is instrumentalized in policy debates. Look at how there is you know, this particular debate on hijab was unfair in a certain kind of way, et cetera, et cetera.

And yet we don’t seem to be all that much further along, socially. We still have these debates arising across liberal societies, including in our own nation here. And so I argue that we really need to think about possibly instituting a hijab ban in scholarship too. Right? Like that sort of this hyper visibility of hijab, even if toward sympathetic ends, to actually point to inequality and to restore it, doesn’t seem to be doing much good at this point. In fact, it seems to be erasing from view or invisiblizing other aspects of Muslim life that we might do really well to enquire after.

And that might actually be eye opening for us in the secular academy. By us, I mean, those of us who are trained in the Western academy with, as we were talking about earlier, certain kinds of assumptions about what religion is, for, example what secularism is. And that informs all kinds of things about how we see the world. And if we were to be willing to look toward other aspects of Muslim life, this might really be something that would open our eyes to new ways of doing things in the world, new ways of living in the world altogether.

So to more directly answer your question, I think that there is something very particular about the visibility of hijab that comes out of again, a very specific history that attaches secularism to a certain view of the sexual liberation of women. Right? Those two are seen to be sort of occurring in tandem. Right? And that specific view of sexual liberation means actually a certain kind of– a certain kind of presentation of women that has to do with making sure they are unveiled in a certain kind of way, that they are visible in a certain kind of way.

So that’s what my research tries to draw out is that it’s actually this kind of nexus between sexuality and secularism in a very uniquely Western history that has relegated both religion and sexuality to the private sphere in the first place. That it’s not something that’s supposed to be– religion itself is not something that’s supposed to be made public in the first place.

So here, we have kind of a combination of factors that are at the confluence of which make life very difficult for Muslim women living in the West, namely that they are seen to have the wrong kind of sexual presentation by concealing some part of their body that is not concealed by their non-Muslim counterparts, and moreover, it’s a display of religion in the public sphere. Right? Or at least this is the argument.

I think that it’s also very clear to see the racialization of Muslims within this entire sort of phenomenon of seeing the hijab as hyper visible in the first place, because of course, women from other traditions, notably nuns in sort of acceptable religion, cover themselves actually in deeply similar ways. So it’s always important also to look at histories of racialization as they– as they influence Muslims.

Well, and I mean, here in Toronto, there’s a very large orthodox Jewish community. And the women in that community tend to cover their hair as well. And they are certainly not the same object of this kind of discussion as the Muslim women who are wearing hijab in Toronto are. I think from what you’ve said today, I think you’ve given us a real gift to think about secularism and the narratives around that. And I hope my students take that, for sure.

I think you’ve given us a really good place to think from. But before I let you go, I just have one more question. And it kind of follows what we were just talking about. I want to know given what you’ve done so far in your own research, I’d love to hear your advice for students who are interested in the study of Islam. And what kinds of questions do you find most interesting? What are we under-studying when we look at Islam?

Right. So, I mean, this is of course, related in some part to the previous question where the hyper visibility or discursive density really, around certain kinds of topics, for example, the hijab, renders other aspects of Muslim life and Islam invisible. So the kinds of questions I personally find most interesting or compelling are the ones that look toward examples of Muslim life to make us, namely we, in the academy, we take secular pre-suppositions to be starting points, and who take the study of religion using Christianity as a starting point, to challenge us and inspire us.

So for example, what can Muslim ways of life or Muslim modes of understanding the world reveal to us about pressing social issues that concern all of us, like for example, climate change, or ways of redistributing wealth in a global context of profound inequality. Right? There are particular– every tradition has its own mode of interacting with the world on everyday matters that don’t have to do with sort of philosophizing you know, arm-chair style reflections about the world. But those understandings academically can really be derived by looking at how everyday people live their lives. Or at least this is– maybe I’m making a case for anthropology, which is what I really value about it.

That’s what I really value about it as a methodology, is precisely the way that it allows us to have proximity to the everyday ways that people live their life that really operate– that can really reveal really new ways of doing things and looking at things and interacting with the world, be they other humans or non-human entities, animals, plants, the world around us. There are actually two recent books in each of these respective areas of climate change. And you know, a context of how to redistribute wealth in a– amidst global profound inequalities. But that certainly doesn’t make them exhaustive.

I would also say that the study of Islam is, I would say, a thriving location for those who also identify as Muslims. It’s not simply a way of speaking to or speaking back to a Western gaze, which, is I think more the way that I’ve been setting things up here in this conversation, but a route for Muslims themselves to delve into the histories of their own tradition, legal, social, regional, and to think of new ways of making sense of those things, and therefore then, offer ways that Muslim communities can reimagine life as Muslims for themselves. So I think that there are kind of a couple of different starting points there.

Danielle, I also realized that you had asked about a question in your previous– sub-question your previous question around with some feminists and I should have. I wanted to– yeah. I wanted to say in terms of how Muslim feminists have kind of tackled this question of hijab, I would say that there are multiple– I mean, multiple answers. Many Muslim feminists have– Muslim feminists are just as much a product of modern historical processes as non-Muslim women or non-Muslims. Right?

So in many ways, their responses can be read through that kind of lens. So in other words, many of them of course, feel strongly that you know, that hijab ought not to be something that differentiates a gendered practise in this kind of way. Right? That the hijab ought not to be something that is particularly asked of women and not of men.

On the other hand, Muslim feminists I noticed do a sort of very dexterous job of balancing homophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment, kind of a colonialist gaze upon Muslim life, as well as trying to work within and against the patriarchal aspects of the Muslim tradition, what they see patriarchy within the Muslim tradition. So they’re incredibly kind of– Yeah, they’re incredibly kind of dexterous about that, I would say. So the responses are varied. But I think Muslim women in general, people who describe themselves as– to be feminists or not, feel very tired of the hijab question.

I think if you’re up for it, after we’re done here, maybe you could give the names of a few of those Muslim feminists that, if my students are interested in doing any further reading. And also, I would like to– I would love to add the Talal Asad, a book or two or an article or two, because I think there’s so much that can be learned from those readings. So if I could get that from you, I’ll pick your brain after.

Yeah, for sure.

Thank you so much, Sadaf, because like I said before, you’ve given us some really great things to think about. And I hope everyone can take away some good questions to think about later. And especially given what we’ve done in this course, you know, to think through the historical and textual traditions we’ve been learning about, and to think through to today and the kinds of questions we can ask in contemporary scholarship. So thank you very much Sadaf, for joining us today.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Wonderful. OK, thank you so much.

Last updated: 6/2/202 By TS

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