Bio

I am currently a professor of Politics and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, New York.  In Spring 2008, I also held the Spinoza Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.  I have a Ph.D. in International Studies (University of Denver) a Master's degree in Journalism (University of the Punjab, Pakistan) and a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy (Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan).

For the past several years, I have been engaged in studying Islam.  In my earlier work, I proposed a Qur'anic hermeneutics that I believe allows Muslims to argue on behalf of sexual equality and against patriarchy from within a scriptural framework.  More recently, I have been exploring the historical and discursive continuities between medieval Christian and contemporary Western/ secular representations of Islam and Muslims.   Among my publications are three books (Islam, Muslims, and the U.S.: Essays on Religion and Politics, "Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an, and Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia); a monograph, Re-Understanding Islam: A double critique, and several book chapters and journal articles. For a full list, please see my c.v.

I have been invited to present my work on the Qur'an in several countries (Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands) and it has also been translated into Bengali, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Urdu.