I AM
a scholar of gender in premodern and contemporary Islamic ethics. I specialize in feminist philosophy approaches to the Muslim intellectual tradition and the akhlaq genre, in particular. My work includes a serious look at masculinity and gendered childhood, in addition to studying more “traditional” gender topics such as constructs of femininity, women’s experiences, marriage, divorce, sexuality, feminism, etc. I have published on gendered concepts of ethics, justice, and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women’s experiences.

My book, Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. In it, I call for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition.

I am currently taking that philosophical turn in my second book project, Women as Humans: Life, Death, and Gendered Being in Islamic Medical Ethics, which was supported by a three-year grant from the Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholars Program. The project is a textual and ethnographic study of gender and gendered experiences in Muslim biomedical ethics. In addition to a focus on practical ethics, in this project I examine what are Muslim ontological, metaphysical, and existential conceptions of women.

I am an associate professor of religion at Dartmouth College, where I started in 2015 upon completion of my PhD in Religious Studies from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before that, I completed my undergraduate studies from Brandeis University where I double majored in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies with highest honors and Health, Science, Society, and Policy and double minored in Legal Studies and Women’s Studies. I am the current president of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics.