I joined the Politics department in 1991 and retired from it in 2020. For half this time, I was the director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and, also held the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, for a semester (in 2008). However, my career path dates from 1976 when I was recruited into Pakistan's Foreign Service (Diplomatic Corps) but from which I was fired in 1982 on the orders of General Zia ul Haq, the country's military dictator. I then worked for a year as the assistant editor of The Muslim, an opposition paper, until I left for graduate school in the U.S., where I was later granted political asylum.
Asma Barlas
Much of my scholarship examines configurations of violence and power, specifically, colonial, sexual/ textual, and epistemic. My first book traces the post-1947 political trajectories of India and Pakistan to British colonialism, while the next counters patriarchal readings of Islam’s scripture, the Qur'an, with a hermeneutics that draws on its conceptions of a God beyond sex/gender and the absence of gender in the text. More recent work has offered critiques of secular/ feminist attempts to dispute the Qur'an's sacrality in the name of women's rights and gender justice. And, currently, I am exploring the the concept of an ungendered Islamic theology and of reading some allusions to men's and women's roles in the Qur'an as time/ culture-bound as a way to recuperate its ethics of mutual care and guardianship between them.
Following the 9/ 11/ 2001 attacks on the US, many popular writings detailed the West's millennium-long history of recycling pejorative images of Islam, a theme I explore in one of my Spinoza Lectures as well.
Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (University of Texas Press, 2002; 2019), has been translated into Bahasa Indonesian (2005), while derivative essays have appeared in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Dutch, German, French and Portuguese. A revised second edition was published in 2019 (in the U.K., by Saqi), along with a brief introduction, co-authored with David R. Finn.
My non-academic publications include poetry, short-stories, a weekly column for the Muslim and The Daily Times and op-eds for Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, Open Democracy, and New Statesman.
I have a Ph.D. (with distinction) in International Studies from the Graduate School of International Studies (now the Josef Korbel School), University of Denver, U.S., an M.A. (first position) in Journalism from the University of the Punjab, Pakistan, and a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy from Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan.