Bio

I joined Ithaca College in 1991 and am currently the director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and a tenured professor in the Department of Politics (separate units).  In 2008, I also held the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

My research interests have tended to shift over time but, overall, they engage with the ideologies, epistemologies and practices of violence.  In my Ph.D. dissertation, I traced the genealogy of Pakistan's chronic militarism to the political-economy of British colonial rule in India (Democracy, Nationalism and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia, 1995).  After graduate school, however, I was drawn to study Muslim sexual/ textual politics, especially the relationship between patriarchal interpretations of Islam's scripture, the Qur'an, and violence against Muslim women ("Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an, 2002).  This interest in Islam then shifted to examining Western epistemic and polemical violence against it and Muslims (Islam, Muslims and the U.S., 2004, and Re-understanding Islam, 2008).  More recently, I have contrasted Qur'anic and Biblical accounts of the prophet Abraham's sacrifice as a way to contest homogenizing definitions of "the" Abrahamic tradition (2011).  I have also drawn on Paul Ricoeur's argument about abuses of memory to critique the dominant narratives about September 11, 2001. (2011).   At present, I'm studying anti- and post- foundationalist approaches to the Qur'an, a topic on which I gave a paper last year and which I hope to continue exploring at the Istanbul Seminars in May 2012.

My work on the Qur'an has been translated into several languages (Arabic, Bengali, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Urdu), and I have also been invited to speak about it in a number of venues in the U.S. and abroad (Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Italy, U.K, and the Netherlands).

I began my career as a section officer (diplomat) in Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs but this was terminated on the orders of the country's military dictator, General Zia ul Haq, for having criticized him as well as the judiciary which backed his rule.  I then worked briefly as the assistant editor of an opposition paper, the Muslim, before leaving for the U.S. where I eventually received political asylum.  My educational trajectory is also rather eclectic. I have a Ph.D. in International Studies (Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver), an M.A. in Journalism (University of the Punjab, Pakistan), and a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy (Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan).