When stories and bibliographic accounts of Egyptian Muslim women are investigated and highlighted by anthropological sources, the results can foster a closer understanding of how individuals from certain populations stand on Muslim male-female customs and their interactions, as well as how particular perceptions are assessed. Culturally speaking of course researchers, as well as first-hand empirical... Continue Reading →

Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments carefully offers an in-depth study of Awlad ‘Ali, term refers to Bedouin tribes that settled in Egypt’s Western Desert after migrating from Eastern Libya over 200 years ago. The remarkable complexity of the social system of these communities grabbed my attention on the particular male-female relationships while their roles are set... Continue Reading →

As a scholar of religion, one of the core topics I pursue aims at Muslim feminist responses to systems of repression from historical past; more closely, women in Islam during early twentieth-century British colonial times in Egypt. With that in mind, I seek to dissect contemporary critiques of Islamic ethical and political behaviour that usually... Continue Reading →

Colonial Discourses on Egyptian Women, Islam, and Gender The assessment in which the British colonial administration in Egypt (1882-1945) portrayed Muslim women is difficult to synthesize in a few pages. On the other hand, it can also be straightforward and reduceable to only a few words. The irony behind this dichotomy comes to light at... Continue Reading →

In Islamic theology, an accurate English interpretation of the expression al-insān al-kāmil, Arabic الإنسان الكامِل , translates as “the perfect human” or “the perfect being.” In Sufism, this expression is closely linked to Ibn ʿArabī, who identified The Prophet Muḥammad as “the perfect man”[1] and is viewed by Muslims as the archetype of the perfect... Continue Reading →

“The cultivation and embodiment of a perfect balancebetween jamāl and jalāl are exactly the same for male and female aspirants” - Sa’diyya Shaikh Sa’diyya Shaikh situates her research by interjecting Islamic and Gender Studies, which involves gender-sensitive readings of Hadith, Quranic exegesis, and Sufi texts; theoretical and political debates on Islam and feminism; religion and... Continue Reading →

A reading Response to Professor Rory Dickson's Paper Just as the answer to the quintessential question about ‘culture’ is that “There is not such a thing as pure culture,”[1] one can get the same gist when Professor William Rory Dickson ponders what Sufism is. His writing style, filled with passion for the subject he presents,... Continue Reading →

تحليل ودراسة، لكتاب "ما هو الأسلام" فصل: ست أسئلة عن الإسلام ( أهمية آن تكون أسلامياً ) لأحمد شهاب. في الفصل الأول من ما هو الإسلام: أهمية أن تكون إسلاميًا وبعنوان "ست أسئلة عن الإسلام"، يطرح شهاب أحمد ست أسئلة تأخذ القارئ في طريق الصعب لتعريف "الإسلام". من المهم مراعاة أنه مع ازدياد اختلاف وتنوع... Continue Reading →

An Interpretation of the Hijab’s Symbolic Meaning: Perspectives of Islamic Scholars and the Colonial Remains That Influence Modern Western Discourses ________________________ Contemporary debates surrounding women in Islam and الحجاب, the hijab or the veil often revolve around a homogenized view that groups an entire community under one single definition. In addition, it is concerning to... Continue Reading →

In the first chapter of What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic entitled “Six Questions About Islam,” Shahab Ahmed asks six questions that take the reader on the challenging path of defining “Islam.” It is important to consider that as societies, persons, ideas, and practices become more diverse, the more difficult is to circumscribe... Continue Reading →

The Secular, Religious, and Cultural Essentializationsof the Hijab in France and Quebec Rawdah Mohamed, wearing a hijab, holding up her hand, which says "Hands off my hijab." (Photo: Rawdah Mohamed) The predominant concern Seyla Benhabib stresses in The Rights of Others, The Claims of Culture, Another Cosmopolitanism, and Dignity and Adversity is the essentialization of... Continue Reading →

Reading how Seyla Benhabib approaches legal concepts such as universal citizenship, constitutional law, asylum law, as well as the concept of self-determination, is an enriching experience for a reader interested in intersection of humanities and law. Benhabib can shed some light on how liberal and democratic values conflict when it comes to immigration policies. It... Continue Reading →

Key Writings of Political Philosopher Seyla Benhabib in The Rights of Others and The Claims of Culture Subjects such as sovereignty and state centrism, cultural-religious views, and political membership are crucial elements that shape principles of human rights in a continuum manner. As they are commonly depicted in an us-versus-them-binary opposition, this opposition flows, on... Continue Reading →

“I insist on this because I will be speaking above all of political theology and of the religion always present at the death penalty, of the death penalty as religion” – J. Derrida The book The Death Penalty (Volume I) offers the first of two years of seminars Jacques Derrida devoted to the subject of... Continue Reading →

“Being-jew would then be something more, somethingother than the simple lever–strategic or methodological–of a general deconstruction; it would be its very experience, its chance, its threat, its destiny.”–Jacques Derrida When Jacques Derrida was invited to The International Colloquium Jude´ite´s: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, held at the Jewish Community Center in Paris on December 3–5, 2000,... Continue Reading →

“We need to start with language for the divine as redeemer, as liberator, as one who fosters full personhood and in that context, speak of God as creator, as source of being.” Rosemary Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk brings strong statements regarding her critique of key Christian symbols and content, the patriarchal hegemonic rhetoric that suppresses... Continue Reading →

Modern society has a political, social, economic - and of course a religious - history that has shaped it thus far. On the subject of religion, and for purpose of our studies, findings have allowed scholars to observe, dissect, and diagnose today’s modern society by digging into historical roots to assess current social conventions. In... Continue Reading →

“The question is whether the world religions discourse can be in any way enlisted, and trusted on the side of historical scholarship.” –Tomoko Masuzawa Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions provides a wide, historical spectrum of research on the construction of the religious paradigm that emerges from nineteenth-century scholars. Masuzawa presents the difficult task... Continue Reading →

As researchers of religion, our assignments engage material from scholars or historians of the field as part of an implicit task of any study. While we explore what they have to say about religion, we also recognize a trace of the authors’ idiosyncrasies embedded into their writings. There are personal experiences, revelations, and reflections projected... Continue Reading →

Thomas Christiano writes that “the aim of democracy as public justification is reasoned consensus among citizens,”[1] but what does the term “public justification” means in this context? This short paper aims to explain and elaborate that term. The modern vision of democracy has itself been strongly challenged from a number of perspectives, one of them... Continue Reading →

“Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those judgments of values, “Good” and ‘Evil”? ˗˗Nietzsche The three essays in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals showcase the philosopher’s most consistent and solid work, which aligns with his foundational critique of Christian morality set forth in Beyond Good and Evil. However, and for the purpose of... Continue Reading →

Midrash is a body of Jewish literature from late antiquity, and a method of reading sacred text. It combines close reading with far-ranging imagination to create law and stories. Biblical narratives are retold, and non-narrative passages are explained through parables. The Genesis 6:21 (King James Version, KJV) is what I consider one of the earliest... Continue Reading →

“Ours is, after all, the only civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if the urge to talk about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing so, have far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that some individuals have... Continue Reading →

“Why are you yourself [doctor] so dedicated when you don’t believe in God? Well, if I believed in an all-powerful God, then I would stop healing people and leave it up to Him.” —Albert Camus, The Plague Evil, represented in juxtaposition of Good, manifests itself beyond words and is hardly easy to be discussed in... Continue Reading →

The road that symbolizes a journey, a conquest, and a test for survival in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road plays with our senses to describe a world of anguish and despair where humanity needs hope and a saviour to stop the disasters that, in the first place, started from humanity itself.         This is my second time reading... Continue Reading →

“Your claim of conscience counts if it is based in religion; my claim of conscience doesn’t count if it is not based in religion. That, it seems to me, is a pernicious and indefensible inequality in the existing legal regime.” ˗˗Brian Leiter Debates over religious toleration is not a contemporary concern. Disputes can be traced... Continue Reading →

“Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those judgments of values, “Good” and ‘Evil”? ˗˗Nietzsche The three essays in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals showcase the philosopher’s most consistent and solid work, which aligns with his foundational critique of Christian morality set forth in Beyond Good and Evil. However, the focus of this paper... Continue Reading →

Jacques Derrida Deconstructs the Notion of Rogue States Democracy, the supreme goal to reach openness, pluralism, and the ultimate peace. However, the efforts to attain and maintain democracy carry a heavy history of violence, from political confrontations to the wars that intended to preserve its sovereignty. But the concept of democracy, if we try to... Continue Reading →

In a matter of a few years, starting in Iraq and later in Syria during its civil war, ISISslowly grew as the Sunni insurgency was largely defeated, or at least reduced in size.Meanwhile, as global news reports showcased back in 2010, the Baghdad government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, negotiated with U.S.... Continue Reading →

In Salafi-Jihadism: The Story of an Idea, Shiraz Maher offers a clear and accessible way to comprehend a topic that is by essence exceptionally complex to follow: the Salafi-Jihadism movement. This movement has been one of the hardest subjects to deconstruct and at the same time the world struggles to understand how this movement is... Continue Reading →

“…for manifesting the last extremity of racism, its end and the narrow-minded self-sufficiency of its intentions, its eschatology, the death rattle of what is already an interminable agony, something like the setting in the West of racism but also, racism as a Western thing.”˗Jacques Derrida, 1983. Jacques Derrida’s 1983 text “Racism’s Last Word” is an... Continue Reading →

“Ours is, after all, the only civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if the urge to talk about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing so, have far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that some individuals have... Continue Reading →

Benjamin’s “Theses” deals with the question of social transformation where revolutions are necessarily experienced as rupturing the continuity of history. Past events are given their historical meaning retrospectively, in messianic moments (due to despair). Those moments in the past are comprehensible only from the position of redemption (thesis III), while the idea of ‘redemption’ is... Continue Reading →

The brilliant Canadian philosopher explores modernity and the view from many that it reflects nothing but loss or a decline of civilization. Charles Taylor’s book The Malaise of Modernity, which is essentially the fruit of a series of presentations that he made at the Massey Lectures hosted by Massey College and CBC, was originally published... Continue Reading →

Among discussing extensively on technology, Derrida explores the troubled place of religion in late modernity. The question of religion is that of an aporia produced by two sources: one of abstraction and dislocation, and the other of reacting to the resentment of capitalism. The conflict here implies, for example, that a religion which seeks to... Continue Reading →

Sigmund Freud, “Infantile Recurrence,” in Totem and Taboo (page 166-268). Freud presents his theory on the origin of religions, from start he affirms that “psychoanalysis will be tempted to drive anything so complicated as religion from a single source,”[1] mainly on the psychoanalytical thesis of the Oedipus complex and on totemism. The reader need not... Continue Reading →

Interpretations of what constitutes a secular state and analyse it from what Turkey claims to be its perspective of secularism, pluralism (if not democracy) and from the standpoint of Islam and state-law relations. (Presented as a research paper for Islamic Law course at University of Winnipeg, Nov. 2018) “Secularism is a way of life which... Continue Reading →