Asma Barlas is a Pakistani-American writer and academic. Her specialties include comparative and international politics, Islam and Qur'anic hermeneutics, and women's studies.
Barlas was one of the first women to be inducted into the foreign service in 1976. Six years later, she was dismissed on the orders of General Zia ul Haq. She worked briefly as assistant editor of the opposition newspaper The Muslim before receiving political asylum in the United States in 1983. Barlas joined the politics department of Ithaca College in 1991. She was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity for 12 years. She held Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2008.
Research
Barlas has focused on the way Muslims produce religious knowledge, especially patriarchal exegesis of the Qur'an, a topic she has explored in her book, "Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an. She rejects the designation of her views and interpretations of Islam as "Islamic feminism," unless that term is defined as "a discourse of gender equality and social justice that derives its understanding and mandate from the Qur'an and seeks the practice of rights and justice for all human beings in the totality of their existence across the public-private continuum." In her first book, Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia, Barlas explored the relationship of militarism in Pakistani politics to British colonialism.
Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia
Confronting Qur'anic Patriarchy ??
"Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an
Essays
"Reviving Islamic Universalism: East/s, West/s, and Coexistence," in Abdul Aziz Said and Meena Sharify-Funk, Contemporary Islam: Dynamic, Not Static.
"Women's and Feminist Readings of the Qur'an," in Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an.
"Globalizing Equality: Muslim Women, Theology, and Feminisms," in Fera Simone, On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era.
"Amina Wadud's Hermeneutics of the Qur'an: Women Rereading Sacred Texts," in Suha Taji-Faruqi, Contemporary Muslim Intellectuals and the Quran: Modernist and Post Modernist Approaches.
