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 as the assistant editor of The Muslim, an opposition paper, until 1983, when I left for graduate school in the U.S., where I was later granted political asylum.
Asma Barlas
Professor Emerita, Politics
School: School of Humanities and Sciences
Email: abarlas@ithaca.edu
Specialty: Research Interests: Islam; Qur’anic hermeneutics; Muslim sexual politics; Colonialism and Decoloniality.
C.V. -
barlas.cv24.pdf (134.51 KB)
University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.
My scholarship is mostly about differing configurations (colonial, sexual/textual, epistemic) of violence and power. My first book traces the post-1947 political trajectories of Pakistan and India to British colonialism, while the next counters interpretations of Islam’s scripture, the Qur'an, that discriminate against women with an anti-patriarchal hermeneutics that draws on its conceptions of a God beyond sex/gender as well as on the absence of gender in the text. For some years, I focused on--and critiqued-- the work of secular/ feminists who dispute the Qur'an's sacrality in the name of women's rights and gender justice. And, currently, I am exploring the concept of an ungendered Islamic theology that counters the tendency to masculinize God and that can also help to recuperate the Qur'an's ethics of mutual care and guardianship between men and women.
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, as did my second Spinoza Lecture, "Would Spinoza Understand Me? Europe, Islam, and the Mirror of Difference."
My non-academic publications also include poetry, short-stories, a weekly column for the Muslim and The Daily Times (in Pakistan) and op-eds for Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, Open Democracy, and New Statesman.
Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore, Pakistan.
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.
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.
