Ethics and Religious Authority (A/Prof. Fatima Seedat and Prof. Sa'diyya Shaikh)

1. In this collaborative project, A/Prof. Seedat and Prof. Shaikh hosted a series of high-profile public events on “Gender Ethics and Religious Authority” surrounding the visit of Islamic feminist scholar and pioneer, Prof. Amina Wadud in August 2019, celebrating 25 years of revolutionary work on Muslim women’s religious authority. The programme involved scholarly and public talks, and workshops, entailing a total of 11 events across Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg, collaborating with colleagues at UKZN AND UJ. During Professor Wadud visit, Shaikh and Seedat together with Roshila Nair, hosted the first Khutbah writing workshop for Muslim women at UCT. 

2. Shaikh and Seedat’s co-authored and co-edited volume “The Women’s Khutbah Book: Contemporary Sermons on Spirituality and Justice” published by Yale University Press (2022), emerges from this within this project. It has been enthusiastically received by reviewers: 

“By turns inspiring and poignant, insightful and incendiary, the sermons collected here are a treasure-trove of wisdom from an impressive and impressively diverse array of scholars and community leaders. The Women’s Khutbah Book is an essential resource.” Prof Kecia Ali (Boston University)  

“Shaikh and Seedat interweave inspiring sermons by present-day Muslim women with the eloquent voices of historical women, bringing intersecting experiences of injustice to the center of Muslim ethics. The result—an original and transformative feminist theology—is a pleasure to read.”—Prof Ziba Mir-Hosseini (SOAS) 
  
“This delightful, inspiring book enables ‘ordinary’ women (and men) to transcend the limits of the private and reshape Muslim publics. The khutbahs collected here have created a world not seen before, embodying, in the beautiful words of their editors, ‘a tafsir of possibility.’" – Prof Gabeba Baderoon  (Pennsylvania State University) 

“This book illustrates beautifully and persuasively the diverse types of new female religious actors and the ways in which they are transforming religious authority.” Prof. Mulki Al-Sharmani (University of Helsinki) 

“This book is a monumental event, heralding an expansion and recognition of Muslim women’s religious authority. These bold, tender, and fierce women are not asking for permission to preach: they are marching ahead with a luminous presence. The diversity of these preachers is astonishing, as is their integrity, brilliance, and the shared commitment to life of the spirit, love, and justice. This book will uplift, transform, and inspire Muslims and scholars of Islam alike.” Prof. Omid Safi (Duke University) 

3. Research collaboration: Prof Shaikh is collaborating with honorary research fellow, Dr Margherita Picchi, whose research project is hosted at the CCI. The project is “Khutba activism in South Africa: A history of the Claremont Main Road Mosque’s community tafsir in late Apartheid and post-Apartheid period”.

Project Description: The outbreak of the 1979 Iranian revolution dramatically brought to Western attention the discursive power of the Islamic sermon (khutba), and particularly its rhetorical potential for promoting transformation in Muslim societies. However, the existing literature on the role of sermons in shaping religious discourse mostly lean towards an anthropological approach, while there is a serious lack of scholarly work taking into account the sermons as a form of Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir) in a historical perspective. This research attempts to fill this gap in academia by taking into analysis sermons delivered in Cape Town’s Claremont Main Road Mosque (CMRM) in the late Apartheid and post-Apartheid period. Main goal of this research is to explore how the Qur’an has been relied on by CMRM’s interpretive community to legitimize the mosque’s mission (risala) in its five key dimensions: namely the empowerment of youth, jihad against poverty, gender jihad, interfaith solidarity and environmental justice. A special attention will be devoted to explore the relation between the explicit tafsir - performed through explanatory analysis of the meaning of certain verses - and implicit tafsir as found in Qur’anic translations.  

Brief Biography: Margherita Picchi earned her doctoral degree in Women’s and Gender History at the University of Naples “l’Orientale” in 2016, with a dissertation focusing on women’s agency in reclaiming religious discourse in contemporary Egypt. Her research interests include modern Muslim intellectual and exegetical history, postcolonial and decolonial theory, gender and queer studies in Muslim contexts. She is currently a Humboldt experienced research fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität), and an honorary research affiliate of the Centre for Contemporary Islam at the University of Cape Town.