Re-understanding Islam: A Double Critique / Spinoza lectures

"Spinoza Lectures

Asma Barlas is Professor of Politics and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, at Ithaca College in New York State. She is the author of Islam, Muslims, and the U.S.: Essays on Religion and Politics (2004), “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (2002), and Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia (1995). She has received awards from the International Center for Islam and Pluralism in Indonesia, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the American Association of University Women and the United Nations Department for Public Information. For her c.v. see http://faculty.ithaca.edu/abarlas/.

In these two lectures, Barlas offers a double critique: of Muslims for reading sexual inequality and oppression into Islam’s scripture, the Qur’an, and a critique of “the West” for failing to develop morally relevant ways of speaking about Islam and Muslims.

In ‘“Believing Women” in Islam: Between secular and religious politics and theology’ she considers some approaches to the so-called anti-women verses in the Qur’an (and to the Qur’an generally) that are putatively liberating for Muslim women. These approaches range from saying an outright “no” to the Qur’an to saying an unqualified yes to it. Barlas explores, and also critiques, the religious and political terrain that lies between this “no” and “yes” as a way to explain what is at stake for Muslims in different approaches to the text. While she does not build toward one conclusion, she illustrates both the problems with the secular Muslim politics of saying no to the Qur’an and the liberatory possibilities inherent in the scripture providing one reads it in light of certain theological and hermeneutic principles.

‘Would Spinoza Understand Me? Europe, Islam, and the Mirror of Difference’. Barlas asks this question as a point of departure for arguing that the ideological template that the West uses to make sense of Islam impedes thinking about it in morally relevant ways, hence also feeling solidarity with Muslims. It does this by treating difference itself as wild and oppositional, by re-inscribing a long history of Western violence against Muslims as discrete and episodic thus masking its continuities, and by reframing many Western transgressions as acts of reverse violence by Muslims thus transforming Westerners into victims. She substanitiates her critique by tracing three tropes about Islam/Muslims from medieval European Biblical exegesis to contemporary secular discourses."