Sadiyya Shaikh
University of Cape Town, Religious Studies, Faculty Member
- Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Islamic Studies, Sufism, Mysticism, Religion and Sexuality, and 17 moreIslamic feminism, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Qur'anic Studies, Ibn Arabi, Feminist Theory and Religious Studies, Gender and Islam, Feminist Methodology, Sufi Metaphysics, Religious Studies, Contemporary Sufism, Transforming Feminisms, Women and Gender Issues in Islam, Religion, Islamic Mysticism, Spirituality & Mysticism, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, and Feminist Theory and Gender Studiesedit
- Sa’diyya Shaikh is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions at the University of Cape Town. Her study ... moreSa’diyya Shaikh is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions at the University of Cape Town. Her study of Islam began with an abiding interest in existential questions and their connections to issues of social justice – effectively, a curiosity about the relationship between the spiritual and the political. Her book Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (UNC Press, 2012) was part of an ongoing journey of grappling with these formative concerns that still animate much of her work. This book presents a contemporary reading of the work of the 13th century Andalusian Sufi polymath Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi, to address questions of human purpose, the nature of reality, and the ethics of gender relationships. In 2013 the book was shortlisted for the American Academy of Religion Book Awards for Excellence in the category of Constructive-Reflective Studies.edit
A first-ever collection of contemporary Muslim women’s khutbahs (sermons) drawing on their social, religious, and spiritual experiences and framed by original reflections on an emerging Muslim feminist ethics Within the Muslim world,... more
A first-ever collection of contemporary Muslim women’s khutbahs (sermons) drawing on their social, religious, and spiritual experiences and framed by original reflections on an emerging Muslim feminist ethics
Within the Muslim world, there is a dynamic and exciting social change afoot: a number of communities across the globe have embraced more gender-inclusive and representative ideas of religious authority. Within some spaces, women have taken on the role of preacher at the Jumu’ah (Friday) communal prayers. In other communities, women have been leading the prayers, officiating at marriage and funeral ceremonies, or participating on mosque boards or executive committees. These new developments signify a transformation in contemporary positions on gender and religious authority.
This pioneering book makes an innovative contribution to Muslim feminist ethics. It is grounded in a collection of religious sermons (khutbahs) by contemporary Muslim women in a variety of new and emerging contexts, in South Africa, Senegal, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Canada, Mexico, the United States, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom.
Within the Muslim world, there is a dynamic and exciting social change afoot: a number of communities across the globe have embraced more gender-inclusive and representative ideas of religious authority. Within some spaces, women have taken on the role of preacher at the Jumu’ah (Friday) communal prayers. In other communities, women have been leading the prayers, officiating at marriage and funeral ceremonies, or participating on mosque boards or executive committees. These new developments signify a transformation in contemporary positions on gender and religious authority.
This pioneering book makes an innovative contribution to Muslim feminist ethics. It is grounded in a collection of religious sermons (khutbahs) by contemporary Muslim women in a variety of new and emerging contexts, in South Africa, Senegal, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Canada, Mexico, the United States, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom.
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Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his works through a critical feminist... more
Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his works through a critical feminist lens, Sa'diyya Shaikh opens fertile spaces in which new and creative encounters with gender justice in Islam can take place. Grounding her work in Islamic epistemology, Shaikh attends to the ways in which Sufi metaphysics and theology might allow for fundamental shifts in Islamic gender ethics and legal formulations, addressing wide-ranging contemporary challenges including questions of women's rights in marriage and divorce, the politics of veiling, and women's leadership of ritual prayer.
Shaikh deftly deconstructs traditional binaries between the spiritual and the political, private conceptions of spiritual development and public notions of social justice, and the realms of inner refinement and those of communal virtue. Drawing on the treasured works of Sufism, Shaikh raises a number of critical questions about the nature of selfhood, subjectivity, spirituality, and society to contribute richly to the prospects of Islamic feminism as well as feminist ethics more broadly.
Shaikh deftly deconstructs traditional binaries between the spiritual and the political, private conceptions of spiritual development and public notions of social justice, and the realms of inner refinement and those of communal virtue. Drawing on the treasured works of Sufism, Shaikh raises a number of critical questions about the nature of selfhood, subjectivity, spirituality, and society to contribute richly to the prospects of Islamic feminism as well as feminist ethics more broadly.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Religion and Sexuality, Medieval Islam, Mysticism, and 9 moreFeminism, Islamic Studies, Sufism, Women and Gender Issues in Islam, Islamic feminism, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Islamic Mysticism, Ibn Arabi, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies in Religion
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
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Drawing on the work of thirteenth-century Andalusian Sufi Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), this article explores the ways in which mystical ideas present a radically destabilizing view of human nature. Bringing Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas into a contemporary... more
Drawing on the work of thirteenth-century Andalusian Sufi Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), this article explores the ways in which mystical ideas present a radically destabilizing view of human nature. Bringing Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas into a contemporary feminist conversation on gender, I theorize gender, arguing that his mystical method pushes the reader to the limits of a binary and patriarchal rationality, resulting in a productive entanglement of normative gender categories. Paradox, ambivalence, and contradiction—organic elements of Ibn ʿArabī’s Sufi epistemology—facilitate generative spaces of tension that creatively interrupt fixed conceptions of gender. I argue that within this Sufi cosmology, apophatic modes of being demand an existential mode of receptivity, fluidity, and constant movement—all of which can be applied to critiquing gender hierarchies and heteronormativities within Muslim traditions while reimagining more capacious alternatives. The article contributes to a larger Islamic feminist project of retrieving a creative, expansive, and inclusive Muslim archive while making connections to broader feminist theories in contemporary scholarship, including the ideas of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Catherine Keller.
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Scholarly research on Muslim ethics is attentive to the ways that contemporary Muslim subjectivities and ethical concerns are informed by multiple sources and complex relationalities. These include relationships to what is thought of as... more
Scholarly research on Muslim ethics is attentive to the
ways that contemporary Muslim subjectivities and ethical
concerns are informed by multiple sources and complex
relationalities. These include relationships to what is
thought of as tradition or the Muslim archive in all its
diversity, as well as other prevailing intellectual and political
traditions of virtue and justice. Muslim ways of being and
becoming in the contemporary world are often derived in
relation to cosmopolitan imaginaries, and this is in fact no
different from other significant eras in Muslim history.
Islamic feminism in its scholarly and activist iterations
represents one such development among Muslims in the
contemporary period, focused as it is on fostering ever more
comprehensive forms of gender and social justice within
their communities, and on expanding the ethical archive. In
this paper, I trace key animating sources and developments
in my scholarly trajectory focusing on Islamic feminism
over the last 20 years by exploring metaphors of journeying
and of in-betweenness (the barzakh) as a theoretically and
epistemologically helpful posture. I conclude with some
reflections on my current theorising on Islamic feminism.
ways that contemporary Muslim subjectivities and ethical
concerns are informed by multiple sources and complex
relationalities. These include relationships to what is
thought of as tradition or the Muslim archive in all its
diversity, as well as other prevailing intellectual and political
traditions of virtue and justice. Muslim ways of being and
becoming in the contemporary world are often derived in
relation to cosmopolitan imaginaries, and this is in fact no
different from other significant eras in Muslim history.
Islamic feminism in its scholarly and activist iterations
represents one such development among Muslims in the
contemporary period, focused as it is on fostering ever more
comprehensive forms of gender and social justice within
their communities, and on expanding the ethical archive. In
this paper, I trace key animating sources and developments
in my scholarly trajectory focusing on Islamic feminism
over the last 20 years by exploring metaphors of journeying
and of in-betweenness (the barzakh) as a theoretically and
epistemologically helpful posture. I conclude with some
reflections on my current theorising on Islamic feminism.
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This article aims to explicate the tensions on issues of gender and sexuality that arise at the intersection of lived reality and the inherited Islamic tradition, primarily regarding but not limited to Islamic law. We do three things in... more
This article aims to explicate the tensions on issues of gender and sexuality that arise at the intersection of lived reality and the inherited Islamic tradition, primarily regarding but not limited to Islamic law. We do three things in this paper: we first explore the notion of an in-between space that serves as a conduit between an inherited religious tradition and the plethora of lived realities of being Muslim. Second, we provide examples of how Islam as a religious identity and faith and the prescriptions set out in Islamic law operate through this in-between space. Third, based on the above, we conclude that the pedagogy of Islam, gender, and sexuality stands to be enriched if this in-between experiential space is acknowledged as an epistemological portal to Islam. This article aims to expand the epistemological category of experience and lived realities of Muslims as constitutive of Islam and Muslim ethics. 3 Such an exploration is critical in light of an increasing sense of the incommensurability between dominant clerical and textual articulations of the inherited tradition on the one hand, and the real lives of everyday Muslims, on the other. More precisely, the central question it seeks to answer is how Islam is produced, constructed, and assembled by Muslims in relation to their experience of gender and sexuality. Both the Qur'an, as the word of the divine transcendent made material through rhetoric and the Hadith, as the corpus of narrations that provide details of the life, sentiments, and instructions of the Prophet Muhammad and the nascent community of believers, are in the contemporary period, increasingly viewed through the regulatory framework engendered by Islamic law. These discourses often, but not entirely or consistently, centre narrow
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This essay seeks to explore the intersection of disability and religion within our South African context. All the authors are South Africans concerned with human rights and social inclusion issues. Swartz was born into a Jewish family but... more
This essay seeks to explore the intersection of disability and religion within our South African context. All the authors are South Africans concerned with human rights and social inclusion issues. Swartz was born into a Jewish family but identifies as atheist, and has a long history of academic and personal engagement with emancipatory disability politics in southern Africa. Claassens is a Christian theologian who as part of her work on human dignity, religion and social inclusion has over the past few years become more concerned with disability issues and with questions of how a disability studies lens may enrich theological scholarship. Shaikh is a Muslim religious studies scholar who has worked on issues of gender justice and Sufism, and has more recently become interested in disability issues. We have formed a group to explore religion and disability issues in our context, and to use various forms of engagement (including engagement with academic and faith communities) to work towards greater social inclusion and human rights for persons with disabilities. We recognise and value our differences but also believe that engagement across divides is essential for emancipatory practices. The next two sections of this chapter, the first of which was formulated chiefly by Claassens and the second by Shaikh, explore issues at the intersection between Christianity and Islam respectively. The final section of the chapter, formulated chiefly by Swartz, considers the implications of these views for practice in the global south. Despite our obvious differences, we share common questions. How can we explore issues of religion and existential meaning in a manner which takes account of legitimate concerns about the potentially oppressive role of religion? How do we reread important religious texts in the context of disability activism? What is an engaged scholarship of disability and religion which allows for contestation, difference and debate, and which is inclusive enough to honour what at surface level may appear to be contesting views of the world, but which, we believe, may have underlying commonalities?
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Like many feminist initiatives, this special issue has its origins in long and nourishing conversations about abundance and absence, convergences and missed connections and the possibilities we dreamed of amid the complex terrain of... more
Like many feminist initiatives, this special issue has its origins in long and nourishing conversations about abundance and absence, convergences and missed connections and the possibilities we dreamed of amid the complex terrain of feminist debates and Religious Studies in South Africa. In 2010-2011, the three co-editors of this issue were colleagues in a space that was most hospitable to such discussions, the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town. In the course of the year, our talks often centred on the rich history of gender theory in our disciplines of African literature and Religious Studies, yet we also noted the absence of a truly fertile exchange between two areas in which the country had produced much-lauded and influential scholarship: feminist theorising and Islamic Studies. In our discussions, we imagined a space that could generate such an exchange and thus emerged a collaborative feminist research project on "Theorising Experience, Subjec...
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"Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his works through a... more
"Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. Reading his works through a critical feminist lens, Sa'diyya Shaikh opens fertile spaces in which new and creative encounters with gender justice in Islam can take place. Grounding her work in Islamic epistemology, Shaikh attends to the ways in which Sufi metaphysics and theology might allow for fundamental shifts in Islamic gender ethics and legal formulations, addressing wide-ranging contemporary challenges including questions of women's rights in marriage and divorce, the politics of veiling, and women's leadership of ritual prayer. Shaikh deftly deconstructs traditional binaries between the spiritual and the political, private conceptions of spiritual development and public notions of social justice, and the realms of inner refinement and those of communal virtue. Drawing on the treasured works of Sufism, Shaikh raises a number of critical questions about the nature of selfhood, subjectivity, spirituality, and society to contribute richly to the prospects of Islamic feminism as well as feminist ethics more broadly."
Research Interests: Sociology, Gender Studies, Applied Ethics, Feminist Theory, Religion and Sexuality, and 13 moreMedieval Islam, Mysticism, Feminism, Islamic Studies, Sufism, Women and Gender Issues in Islam, Islamic feminism, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Multidisciplinary, Islamic Mysticism, Ibn Arabi, Social Dynamics, and Routledge
Religion is enormously important for many disabled people, their families, and communities, especially in the Global South, but it is not given a great deal of attention. This chapter is a collaboration between religious studies scholars... more
Religion is enormously important for many disabled people, their families, and communities, especially in the Global South, but it is not given a great deal of attention. This chapter is a collaboration between religious studies scholars from different faith traditions (Christian and Muslim) and an atheist disability studies scholar. We explore the central role of religion in many disabled people’s lives, and we suggest that a new theology taking clearer account of disability may be productive in understanding the central role of faith in people’s lives. We acknowledge the historical and contemporary nexus between religion and oppression but suggest that there are far more productive ways of engaging with religion than seeing it unidimensionally and solely as an instrument of oppression.
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This article aims to explicate the tensions on issues of gender and sexuality that arise at the intersection of lived reality and the inherited Islamic tradition, primarily regarding but not limited to Islamic law. We do three things in... more
This article aims to explicate the tensions on issues of gender and sexuality that arise at the intersection of lived reality and the inherited Islamic tradition, primarily regarding but not limited to Islamic law. We do three things in this paper: we first explore the notion of an in-between space that serves as a conduit between an inherited religious tradition and the plethora of lived realities of being Muslim. Second, we provide examples of how Islam as a religious identity and faith and the prescriptions set out in Islamic law operate through this in-between space. Third, based on the above, we conclude that the pedagogy of Islam, gender, and sexuality stands to be enriched if this in-between experiential space is acknowledged as an epistemological portal to Islam. This article aims to expand the epistemological category of experience and lived realities of Muslims as constitutive of Islam and Muslim ethics. 3 Such an exploration is critical in light of an increasing sense of the incommensurability between dominant clerical and textual articulations of the inherited tradition on the one hand, and the real lives of everyday Muslims, on the other. More precisely, the central question it seeks to answer is how Islam is produced, constructed, and assembled by Muslims in relation to their experience of gender and sexuality. Both the Qur'an, as the word of the divine transcendent made material through rhetoric and the Hadith, as the corpus of narrations that provide details of the life, sentiments, and instructions of the Prophet Muhammad and the nascent community of believers, are in the contemporary period, increasingly viewed through the regulatory framework engendered by Islamic law. These discourses often, but not entirely or consistently, centre narrow
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For many queer Muslims, there is an intense struggle between sexual identity and religious affiliation, exacerbated by broader global discourses of Islamophobia in the 'Global North' and queerphobia within Muslim communities. Based on... more
For many queer Muslims, there is an intense struggle between sexual identity and religious affiliation, exacerbated by broader global discourses of Islamophobia in the 'Global North' and queerphobia within Muslim communities. Based on this intersectional location, we critically examine queerphobia debates in relation to the context of Muslims in South Africa. Our approach is informed by Jasbir K. Puar's (2007), critique of the prevailing " Queer as Regulatory " formation, where a liberated queerness is defined by resistance to religious norms, rather than a reformation or a broader set of engagements with these norms. In this regard, we examine modalities of being queer that reside outside of such regulatory frameworks, as reflected in the activities and work of The Inner Circle (TIC), a South African queer Muslim community. A core objective of the TIC is social and spiritual transformation that includes faith-based reflections on the lives of queer Muslims situated at the complex intersections of Islam, sexual orientation and gender identity. We examine TIC's approach of presenting progressive interpretations of the Qur'an as a primary source of religious identity, making a claim to the deepest spiritual and authoritative source of Islam, and the ways in which they challenge gender and sexual discrimination within the broader Muslim community.
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... In fact, in one widely accepted tradition the Prophet tells the believers to take half of their religion from al-humayra, the red-cheeked ... 3. See L. Ahmed (1992) Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) and... more
... In fact, in one widely accepted tradition the Prophet tells the believers to take half of their religion from al-humayra, the red-cheeked ... 3. See L. Ahmed (1992) Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) and F. Mernissi (1991) Women and Islam (Oxford ...
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Review in Journal of Sufi Studies 3 (2014) 221–230
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Review in The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 31:3 (2014) 146-148
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This paper examines South African Muslim women's opinions of the acceptability of microbicidal products to prevent HIV infection if these were to become available in the future. In the context of the HIV... more
This paper examines South African Muslim women's opinions of the acceptability of microbicidal products to prevent HIV infection if these were to become available in the future. In the context of the HIV pandemic, prophylactic methods such as male circumcision, vaccines and microbicidal preparations are increasingly thought of as ways to reduce the incidence of infection. We examine the extent to which participants' religious beliefs and the implications of religious norms and ideals might influence decision-making concerning hypothetical acceptability to use a microbicide. We conducted qualitative interviews with 29 Muslim women residing in South Africa, a country with one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world. Four themes emerged from the data, namely, (1) participants' questioning of the need for microbicides; (2) reasons they gave in favour of microbicide use; (3) the juxtaposition of microbicide use and religious ethics; and (4) the role of religious authorities in decision-making regarding microbicide use. The juxtaposition of microbicide use and religious ethics was further informed by three sub-themes, namely, the life-promoting nature of both Islam and microbicide use, the possibility that microbicide use could encourage sexual risk-taking among male partners, and that the use of these products contradicted womens' notions of ethical agency and ideals about marriage. These themes and sub-themes are analysed in the context of gender relations among South African Muslims. The study findings are significant in light of recent data showing the effectiveness of a microbicidal preparation in reducing the risk of HIV infection in South Africa. We also show that the acceptability of microbicidal products is to a certain extent linked to a variety of religious persuasions and ideals. When microbicides become available in the future, proponents of their use will need to consider religious reasoning of potential users, including that of Muslim women.
Research Interests: Religion, Sociology, Cognitive Science, Treatment, Developing Countries, and 17 moreHealth, Islam, Ethnicity And Health, Medicine, South Africa, Population, Humans, Female, Male, Young Adult, Aged, Middle Aged, Adult, Public health systems and services research, Microbicides, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and Religion and Sex
Sa'diyya Shaikh Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Postapartheid is a pioneering study that examines historical and contemporary representations of Islam and Muslims in South Africa. With intellectual sophistication and creativity, Gabeba... more
Sa'diyya Shaikh Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Postapartheid is a pioneering study that examines historical and contemporary representations of Islam and Muslims in South Africa. With intellectual sophistication and creativity, Gabeba Baderoon examines varying forms of visual, culinary, artistic and popular representations in ways that speak back to official historical and colonial records. She reads against the grain of dominant narratives and is keenly attentive to " genres that hover between fiction and fact, and generate the kind of knowledge that fills the spaces between the more authoritative sources " (23). Yet hers is neither a simply reactive nor redemptive response to colonial hegemonies. Baderoon succeeds in presenting intricate and complex analyses of her subject matter, and the reading practices that she adroitly employs are both methodologically and analytically instructive to feminist postcolonial scholars interested in re-imagining archives and authoritative canons. Throughout the book, Baderoon illuminates the seamless interweaving of forms of public and intimate violence defining colonial slave history, and their lingering legacies in South Africa. Her work also retrieves dissident memories, histories and counter-narratives of Islam and Muslims in the South African archive from the 17 th century until the contemporary period. She avoids a clichéd approach to culture, religion and politics, approaching these fraught areas obliquely, through the lens of etymology, cuisine, sexuality and gender, gangsterism, and contemporary literature. This refreshing approach manages to avoid the traps that await any scholar of society and politics, namely, cultural essentialism on one hand, and political correctness on the other. It seeks to place on the agenda the diversity of identities within Islam as a global faith even as it celebrates the local, contextual and nuanced nature of its emergence as a minority yet vocal religion in contemporary South Africa. Most