Asma Barlas

Professor Emerita, Politics

School: School of Humanities and Sciences

Specialty: (Research Interests) Islamic/Muslim religious and intellectual history; Qur’anic hermeneutics; "Third World" Politics; Colonialism.

C.V. - barlas.cv24 (pdf)

I joined the Politics department in 1991 and retired from it in 2020. For half this time, I served as the (Founding) Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and, in Spring 2008, also held the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. However, my career path dates from 1976 when I was recruited into Pakistan's Foreign Service, but from which I was fired in 1982 for having criticized General Zia ul Haq, who had become president through a military coup. I then worked as the assistant editor ofThe Muslim, an opposition paper, until 1983, when I left for graduate school in the U.S., where I was later granted political asylum.

University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.

Most of my work is about colonial, sexual/ textual, and epistemic politics and power. In my first book, I drew on Antonio Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and a passive revolution to explain the differing political trajectories of Pakistan and India after their independence from British colonial rule. In the next, I countered the Qur'an's patriarchal interpretations, both canonical and secular/ feminist, by interpreting it in light of its conceptions of God, the absence of the concept of gender in it, and its affirmations that women and men proceed from a single "self," are God's subjects, and each other's guardians. I thus continue to argue for an ungendered Islamic theology and an ethics of mutual care between men and women. Following 9/11/01, I explored the West's millennium-long history of Othering Islam both in a Spinoza Lecture and popular writings. The latter also include a weekly column for the Muslim, op-eds in The Daily Times, Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, Open Democracy, and New Statesman, as well as poetry and short-stories.

Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore, Pakistan.

Believing Women in Islam : Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an (University of Texas Press, 2002) has been translated into Bahasa Indonesian (2005), while derivative essays have appeared in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, Dutch, German, French and Portuguese. A second, revised edition was published in 2019 (in the U.K. by Saqi) along with A Brief Introduction, co-authored with David R. Finn.

I have a Ph.D. (with distinction) in International Studies from the Graduate School of International Studies (now the Josef Korbel School), University of Denver, U.S., an M.A. (first position) in Journalism from the University of the Punjab, Pakistan, and a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy from Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan.