Asma Barlas

Professor Emerita, Politics

School: School of Humanities and Sciences

Specialty: Research Interests: Islam; Qur’anic hermeneutics; Muslim sexual politics; Colonialism and Decoloniality.

I was hired by the Politics department in 1991 and retired from it in 2020. For half this time, I served as the (Founding) Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and, in Spring 2008, also held the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. However, my career path dates from 1976 when I joined Pakistan's Foreign Service, but from which I was fired in 1982 for having criticized General Zia ul Haq, who had become president through a military coup. I then worked as the assistant editor of The Muslim, an opposition paper, until I left for graduate school in the U.S. in 1983, where I was also granted political asylum.

University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.

For the most part, I've written about colonial, sexual/ textual, and epistemic politics and power. In my first book, I trace Pakistan's militarism and India's electoral democracy to the legacy of British colonialism, while, in the next, I counter patriarchal interpretations of the Qur'an that discriminate against women, with a hermeneutics that draws on its conceptions of a God beyond sex/gender and the absence of a definition of gender itself in the text. (For these reasons, I've critiqued secular/ feminists who interpolate gender oppression into the Qur'an as a way to dispute its sacrality.) I continue to argue for an ungendered Islamic theology and a praxis of mutual guardianship between women and men that draws on Qur'anic affirmations of their ontic equality.

Following the 9/ 11/ 2001 attacks on the US, I explored the West's millennium-long history of recycling pejorative images of Islam in my second Spinoza Lecture, as well as in several op-eds in The Daily Times (Pakistan). My popular writings also include a weekly column for the Muslim, op-eds in Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, Open Democracy, and New Statesman, as well as poetry and short-stories.

Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore, Pakistan.

Believing Women in Islam : Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (University of Texas Press, 2002) was published in a revised second edition in 2019 (in the U.K. by Saqi) along with A Brief Introduction, co-authored with David R. Finn. It has been translated into Bahasa Indonesian (2005), while derivative essays have appeared in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Dutch, German, French and Portuguese.

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.