Mulki Al-Sharmani, Associate Professor, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland
Abstract: Women Living with, Learning from, and Reasoning with the Qur’an: Selected Experiences from Finland and Egypt
A burgeoning scholarship has shown the active roles undertaken by contemporary Muslim women in diverse contexts in religious learning as well as production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge. Such processes have often been found to be located in women’s daily pursuits of living ethical meaningful lives.
This presentation is located within and builds on this literature. I investigate the intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and embodied engagements of ten Muslim women in Finland and Egypt with the Qur’an as a source of Islamic knowledge and as a mode of communication with God. My interlocutors in this study come from different walks of life. I examine how they interact with the Qur’an in their daily lives; what they learn from it at different junctures of their lives; and how they reason with it as systems of meanings, values, and norms. In particular, I shed light on how the women navigate their lived realities through Quranic principles, concepts, and language, and at the same time how their life trials and achievements shape their engagements with the Qur’an. I also look at the ways in which the women’s understandings of the Qur’an is mediated through their claim to other forms of religious and non-religious knowledge. I draw on an analysis of in-depth life story interviews that I conducted in Helsinki and Cairo in the period from 2020-2022.
Bio
Mulki Al-Sharmani is an associate professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Helsinki. She also served as the first lecturer of Islamic theology, Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki from September 2018 to December 2019. She was Academy of Finland research fellow working on her own five- year research project titled Islamic Feminism: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics (2013-2018). She was also the lead researcher of the main study in the Academy of Finland research project titled Transnational Muslim Marriages in Finland: Wellbeing, Law, and Gender, led by Marja Tiilikainen (2013-2017).
Mulki is a member of the knowledge building working group of Musawah, a network of scholars and activists from across the world producing research-based Islamic feminist knowledge to inform and train different relevant actors in Muslim majority contexts with regard to the question of gender and the reform of family laws.
Mulki’s research interests include Qur’anic ethics and Islamic feminist exegesis; contemporary Muslim women’s engagements with the Qur’an and Islamic interpretive tradition in Finland and Egypt; Muslim family laws and gender in Islamic legal tradition; and modern diasporas and gender relations in the family domain, with a focus on transnational Muslim families.
The following is a selection of her publications: a 2022 book chapter ‘Quranic Ethics of Marriage (co-authored with Omaima Abou-Bakr and Asma Lamrabet); a 2022 edited volume Beauty and Justice in Muslim Marriage: Towards Egalitarian Ethics and Laws (co-edited with Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Jana Rumminger and Sarah Marsso); a 2020 book chapter ‘Islamic Feminist Tafsir and Qur’anic Ethics: Rereading Divorce Verses’ (co-authored with Omaima Abou-Bakr); a 2019 edited volume Wellbeing of Transnational Muslim Families: Marriage, Gender and Law (co-edited with Marja Tiilikainen and Sanna Mustasaari); a 2017 single-authored book Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt: Negotiating Muslim Family Law (2017); a 2015 edited volume Men in Charge? Authority in Islamic Legal Tradition (co-edited with Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Jana Rumminger). Mulki also single authored and published numerous articles and book chapters on modern Somali diasporas, Muslim marriage and divorce practices in Finland, and the work of Finnish mosques in family dispute resolution. She is currently working on a manuscript on Islamic feminism, scholarship and activism.