Università Roma Tre

The Islam and Gender course aims to provide heuristic and methodological tools for students to analyze the complex and multivariate dynamics surrounding gender relations in Muslim societies and in the Islamic theological and legal tradition. Primarily, stereotypes and imaginaries concerning Islam and gender relations among Muslims will be contested, for instance, the idea that Muslims are ancestrally patriarchal and religiously zealous, as well as the idea that Muslim women are only oppressed and victimized. Contesting these clichés serves to furnish a more comprehensive outlook on gender in Muslim societies to avoid monolithic, essentialist and culturalist views. Part of the course is devoted to the exploration of normative and theological arrangements on gender in the Islamic tradition: therefore, the features of male and female sexuality will be explicated. A part will be spent on the analysis of feminist and historically contextualized readings of Islamic sources. The interplay of gender relations in modern Muslim communities will then be dealt with, emphasizing the breakthrough of colonialism, the rise of nation-states and globalization. In this, it will consider developments such as the surfacing of Islamic reformist movements (including Salafism and Jihadism) and Islamic and secular feminist movements. Matters of the construction of patriarchy in Islamic societies, their norm-setting as well as the establishment of the diverse emotional and embedded agency of women and men will be central to the lessons.

Duderija, Adis, Alina Isac Alak, and Kristin Hissong, Islam and gender: major issues and debates, London: Routledge 2020.

Wadud, Amina. Qur'an and woman: Rereading the sacred text from a woman's perspective. Oxford University Press, USA, 1999;

Ahmed, Leila. Women and gender in Islam: Historical roots of a modern debate. Yale University Press, 2021;

Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Mulki Al-Sharmani, and Jana Rumminger. Men in charge?: rethinking authority in Muslim legal tradition. Oneworld, 2014.