Islamic Feminist Ethics: Spirituality and Justice (Professor Sa'diyya Shaikh)

Using feminist theories and decolonial approaches emerging from a South African context, this research project contributes to Islamic feminist scholarship advancing gender and sexual justice, and human rights. Attentive to core questions of personhood and ethics, work in this project aims to produce innovative feminist analyses that include topics of religious legal debates on contraception and abortion, sexual diversity, gender-based violence, marital, reproductive and sexual norms amongst Muslim minorities within pluralist, secular societies. By connecting Islamic ethics to the lived experiences of historically marginalised groups, scholarly work and theorisations produced within this project are informed by empirical work that foregrounds women’s realities and experiences.

Shaikh brings these into a creative dialogue with a set of rich and diverse spiritual resources within the Muslim archives, which have often been marginalised by prevailing authoritarian discourses. Increasingly her research has draws on Sufism to inform a constructive Muslim feminist ethics attentive to contemporary issues of inclusivity, diversity and social justice. Scholarship within this project aims to enable egalitarian pathways to build inclusive, justice-based ethics for contemporary Muslim communities as they engage and contribute to religiously pluralist societies. Drawing on indigenous Muslim resources while engaging dialogically with a variety of feminist and queer thinkers in gender studies more broadly, this research seeks to contribute to animating a decolonial archive for feminist ethics beyond purely secular cosmologies