Dr. Kecia Ali - Muslim Scholars, Islamic Studies, and the Gendered Academy

take my very much doesn't sound okay in 2005 when my first book was forthcoming I was invited to speak about gender and crayon interpretation at Loyola in Chicago by a our member Murcia Hermanson during the Q&A session I know I blame her for this 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 should explore the doubt of his LOM I shared 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 important but unpersuasive for my purposes and then I pointed out that as the cover clearly states the book was not written by chidduck at all but rather why Sachiko Murata chidduck is her husband this was not acceptable to audience guy who could not let it go and clarify that they both wrote it now the mansplaining was not yet in circulation 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 members 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 in that woman me a white Muslim academic doing engaged scholarship challenged by a non-white Muslim community member sighting though erroneously another academic scholarship in a university space tonight's gathering is also a hybrid calm though with more food and the triple I team is an academia adjacent religiously ground an organization with explicitly constructive aim of performing Islamic thought and the scholars after whom this lecture is named Lois and Ismail Farooqi about whom I will say more in a little while also have hybrid careers roots in academia and also in political and social organizations as you already heard Ismail Farooqi was a founder and chair of this study of Islam group here at aar which is the largest American organization for Religious Studies some of you are probably more familiar than others with the history of AR so I just want to say a few brief words about it which are germane to the larger questions amazing here tonight the AAR itself has deep roots in protestant the jia city it was founded in 1909 as an organization for biblical instructors and even were the acronym nemi for decades the National Association of biblical instructors before adopting its it's been a our since the 1960s and that name change was the fruit of internal debates over the proper approaches to the study of religion which continued to reverberate throughout the organization in the Academy the AAR is a big tenth this is a phrase I hear in my board meetings but should it be do Theological approaches fit 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 effect those of us who study Islam and Muslims whether Muslim or not Islamic Studies is a contested and a fluid-filled at the intersections of area studies fillol adji 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 the question of 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 have accelerated inside academia we have a crisis of a jump defecation you've seen the signs if you've been wandering the halls only about a quarter of faculty are in tenure line positions we have soaring publication expectation at the same time we witnessed the decline of humanities research funding and even in some cases of 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 the demolition of certain title 9 protections for women in the Academy in our local and national spaces we have what you Liana hammer has called gender dinislam or phobia we also have racialized discrimination against Muslims alongside and overlapping with anti black racism also gendered we have the Muslim man we have continued American military interventions overseas you have the never-ending war on terror we have trauma there and I would be remiss 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 in context matter but I want to ground my remarks firmly in the academic study of Islam especially within the AAR so as my colleague alluded to in the introduction I've been at a a lot I've been attending AR for nearly two decades I came to my first conference in 1999 coincidentally here in Boston and the rise in terms of a number of people studying Islam at the AR in that time has been dramatic from a single 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 Percy an increase in the proportion of scholars who 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 in appropriately constructive Islamic theological work has been done is the program unit being run by a cabal of progressive Muslims with activist agendas as some charge 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 for Muslims uncomfortable with the seeming irregularity heterodoxy or even apostasy of the individuals involved or perhaps has been asked more recently are there just simply too many Muslims involved for there to be good old-fashioned objective of the scholarship and this is not I would say a question that's often raised about our colleagues and Jewish studies though there of course the question of what it means to be a Jewish scholar operating in the Academy continues to raise a lot of significant and nuanced internal debates 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 their deeply held beliefs 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 ethical commitments might be for in seeking racial justice or ending domestic violence or opposing persecution of religious minorities outside of the Natural Sciences at least the ideal of the detached objective scholar has been largely discredited women scholars feminist scholars especially black women and older women of color were essential to poking holes in the myth of the 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 I want to start 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 are less well represented at the other end of the spectrum there's discrimination and 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 study after study has found discrimination at every stage in every sort of department in every sort of 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 a scientific email faculty all-male panels are shockingly frequent as are all or mostly male anthologies and lecture series pay disparities persist at all levels the study recently that I found the most galling absolutely the most galling 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 benefitted and it had no discernible outcome for female faculty so despite all of this academia has a reputation as a bastion of liberal values a haven for feminists and other impractically utopian social justice advocates in reality the Academy remains thoroughly although unevenly sexist as well as racist ablest transphobic homophobic and the list could continue women in Islamic studies are not by any stretch of the imagination monolithic group but we confront challenges related both to who we are and what we study the Academy can be a potential haven for Muslim women scholars sometimes frustrated and marginalized in patriarchal community spaces however as I shadowed 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 who work on tough steer are unfit for and hadith may face criticism for pursuing knowledge without sufficient traditional creators 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 fill illogical tech 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 wrongheaded apologetics Muslim women 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 fuckness Yvette and Venice city of enemy la 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 in or living in the global South in failing to engage these scholars and practitioners on their own terms these critics argue again I think correctly that Western scholars replicate colonial power structures those in the Academy the Anglo American Academy 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 - activist and the same of course is sometimes said of Muslim women academics own scholarship on Islam within Islamic studies broadly writ 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 orthodox interpretive tradition to other realms he barely mentions the extensive gender aware scholarship on Islam and Muslims let alone integrates its insights sadly his is by no means the only recent studies to ignore women's scholarships in fact there are two trends somewhat at odds that characterize scholarship over the last decade on the one hand there's been a flourishing of works under the rubric of studies or Islamic gender studies dozens of significant articles and books have appeared on women's Quran interpretation on medieval Islamic mysticism on Muslim feminism on gender and Islamic law on Muslim of theology women engage with classical and modern lossless or psa's and explicitly or implicitly discuss the parameters of that Kaman is it scripture only is it interpretive works if so 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 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 let me give you some salient features of these books which were all published by respected university presses author one 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 two hundred and forty individuals authored two published two books about black American Muslim thought and identity that do not mention Amina Wadud an african-american Muslim thinker whose Quran and woman has had global impacts and whose ideas about the quranic' creation narrative as essentially egalitarian have become common sensical too many even if they do not cite her or reference her when they echo it one of this scholars books has in its index 187 men and eight women the other has a hundred and thirty seven men and for women Walther three wrote a book about Muslim reform that names only for 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 twos books the second book this second author makes no pretense 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 and thereby the world yet despite his pleas for Muslim women to contribute to this process he ignores those who have done so in print over decades the first author however might have the most answer for his study of the modern Muslim tradition deals with major shifts in educational and potable 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 ten subheadings the book names formative period scholars medieval luminaries and contemporary pundits academics as noted a scamp three of them barely more than one percent are women all teaching in contemporary Western universities at none so far as I know identifying publicly as Muslim and certainly not writing from that identity these omissions notwithstanding women people the pages of this book especially in the chapter women lawn society they are victims of honor crimes they're objects of harassment they're unwilling Brys 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 in 1985 provoked an uproar over Islamic law and spawned me ironically named Muslim women protection of Rights on divorce Act she appears sort of in the index as shabonneau controversy parenthetically India there are no female scholars thinkers or leaders cited concerning either of the books major topics religious authority or internal criticism even the 30 page bibliography is light on works by women with no more than two or three female authors per page Leila admits canonical 1992 women and gender in Islam is missing so too is Samira Hodges 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 a time and place the book discusses extensively there is no mention of the prolific women's press early Muslim nationalist feminists or the writings of Aishah of the dark men 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 one looks in vain for Muslim women's ideas how is this possible I've gone into some detail here 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 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 a pattern of surface-level a lie ship that does not actually impact scholarship the year after my essay appeared a major study of Islamic law was 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 eyes shut and kinesia contemporary iranian lawyers Sharia body and most surprisingly Monica Lewinsky the context there this needs a little context it was one Muslim leaders claim which the author terms blatantly absurd which i think is fair 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 the omission from 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 gun this is the best treatment of women and Islamic law that I have read in the past 20 years profound i opening and even exhilarating it is difficult for me to take seriously any student or scholar 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 this 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 xiv amir Hosseini have been publishing on women and islamic law including on questions 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 women's ideas should be taken seriously and women's scholarship 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 when women point out bias we are often accused of whining of being perpetual malcontent 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 and a feel for current 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's a serious scholar make this possible and again the problem is by no means limited to Islamic studies 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 were engaging with qualified scholars brings hollow when qualifications have been defined 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 mean a credential that could have two becomes less valued so if women stopped getting PhDs and started attaining the title of asada or sheikha 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 labour remaining with this question of devaluation the devaluation of work that is conventionally considered feminine is pervasive the Academy as a gendered spaces in tandem with broader gendered patterns of social life even as the Academy values certain kinds of products the life of the mind over others healthy balanced people 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've also really wanted books to get done so to be continued as to the gendered organization of social life speaking in generalities caregiving child rearing home making 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 of how we divvy up the 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 Fergie's the academic couple in whose honor tonight's lecture is given one cat discussed the gendered Academy without mentioning the two-body problem now for those who might be unfamiliar with the term if they're any civilians in the audience the true 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 attaining the holy grail of to tenure track jobs in the same location perhaps through a spousal hire any of you on the market this year good luck for 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 childcare difficulties or unequal distribution of department service as an individual problem 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 Lambie on Farooqi recognized persistent societal issues around the way Western societies organized gendered family and work she was primarily a scholar of music and the arts concerned with Muslim cultures in her articles and in a posthumously published slim book of essays and I talked about to it but the computer is a little twinge II tonight so we're dissing stay right here she tackled a number of issues women Muslim society in Islam that revolved around the ridiculous American expectations for women around career and family and home making she pointed out and she criticized very pointedly the devaluation of women's unpaid care work her solutions involved what she considered is 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 the ways in which it is bad are heightened when considered to 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 to scholar marriage the male is the more prominent partner and the more desirable higher at least one reason for this as another study released this month showed is that women with partners are often 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 says true as in any other field and for most of you here tonight Ismail Farooq is likely to be the more recognizable name if you google Lois al-farouq II Temple University you get information about him not her so I'm gonna give you a sampling from newspaper headlines from the 1980s renowned Temple University Islamic scholar dr. smile Alfred and his musician wife Lois an internationally known Islamic scholar and his wife Islamic scholar comma wife Temple University professor Ismail of Haruki and wife Lois Ismail Farooqi a professor at Temple University and his wife Lois and arts called Jesus called the New York Times referred to them as an Islamic scholar and his wife and in another article it identifies Ismail Farooqi as a religion professor at Temple University where his wife also taught and went to linger on that phrase his wife also taught this is not about Muslim Paige chiaki this is good old-fashioned american gender discrimination and it's every bit as potent today as it was thirty years ago when that headline was written we've moved from print newspapers to online crowd-sourced encyclopedias and her Wikipedia blurb reads lois la mia Farooqi was an expert on Islamic art and music and was married to is mal Fergie Israel al Fergie's Wikipedia summary says nothing personal it's smile Rachelle Farooqi was a Palestinian American philosopher widely recognized by his peers as an authority on Islam and comparative religion and it goes on now the politics 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. Berube'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 familiar with him I what Muslim women Muslim society in 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 a newlywed I 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 of the validity of her critiques but leery of her proposed solutions 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 dwama 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 home making parenting and caretaking especially in addition to us career and especially in a society that refuses to value those things and I want to toggle back from the home to the Academy just as Louis al-farouq II insisted that a full life could include both meaningful work and valuable caregiving activities and she herself found ways to do both I wouldn't suggest that we also need to think about care work as work and care work at work I noted earlier that 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 women in the Academy are meaningful and valuable yet because they are most often performed by women they are devalued in much the same way that al-farouq he pointed out that women's care work within the family is devalued even though it is crucially important Alfred P reminds us to ask not just whether a particular value system is gender equitable but also whether it's valuing the right things how do we struggle against the devaluation of deep mentoring work that's done disproportionately by women do we reward it with money with horse releases with writing support with research leave reshaping the division of labor and academia is important and individuals like 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 to come back to books and to publications that will by definition include research and writing because that's how we share our ideas that's how we 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 is not happening now now talking about citing women 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 we do what we do in our hiring what we do in our grant-making what we do in our committee assignments and our speaker invitations and our honor area and our syllabus construction and 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 and of women's 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's scholarship or publicly affirms feminist ideals might still be a predator there are no guarantees but refusing to take women's ideas seriously 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 ideas are public property that they are freely available for the taking now another seemingly opposed practice which I explored at some length is failing to engage with women's ideas at all continuing to write and publish as the 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 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 that any solution to problems of harassment and abuse and assault must 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's 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 a really excellent way to celebrate the legacy of the Fergie's thank you [Applause]

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Length: 42min 11sec (2531 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2017