Critical-Progressive Muslims: On Islamic hermeneutics, Gender and Interreligious Dialogue

The Burqini Dilemma By Dr.Adis Duderija Islamic Studies  University of Melbounre What do we do when competing ethical systems with incommensurate ethical conceptualizations of the ‘good’/’reasonable’ and ethical priorities clash? The burqini issue is yet another in a series of other dilemmas that have emerged in the recent years in the context of immigrant Muslims’ presence in the West. Other examples of similar aporias include what to do with ‘radical’ imams, infiltration of ISIS fighters via refugee routes into Europe, Muslim male polygamy, the issue of niqab, female genital cutting, western nation-states foreign policy in relation to the Muslim majority world, shaking of hands with the opposite sex, establishment of Muslim arbitration tribunals to name but the most prominent.  Both Muslims and non-Muslim disagree with each- other and within their respective communities as to what the real causes and solutions to these dilemmas are. The possible answers can be approa

The Hermeneutical Fight for Muslim Women’s Rights: Toward a Scriptural Hermeneutic of Islamic Feminism Dr. Adis Duderija, Islamic Studies, University of Melbounre The fight for women’s rights in the Muslim majority world has a long history. The idea of Islamic feminism as part of this struggle is of more recent provenance and probably dates back to the 1980s.Since that time many Muslim scholars, particularly women, have attempted to dislodge the firmly entrenched male epistemic privilege  on the basis of developing  their own  interpretations of the Qur’an  and Sunna/hadith as well as the larger Islamic  tradition ( turath) as they realised, especially in the post-revolutionary Iranian context,   that women’s rights cannot be secured in the long run unless they are systematically justified in religious terms. In my article    Toward a Scriptural Hermeneutic of Islamic Feminism that was published in late 2015 in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion I outline a number of

I often read articles (or engage in online debates) that either conflate progressive Islam with liberal Islam or employ the term progressive /liberal without much conceptual theorizing. So I have decided to reproduce a chapter from my 2011 book in which I outline some delineating features of progressive Muslim thought ( in relation to the modern period- in chapter 2 I do it in relation to the pre-modern) that are not available in my other separate publications on the topic in hope to clarify some of these conceptual/terminological issues :https://www.academia.edu/27992301/CHAPTER_FIVE_PROGRESSIVE_MUSLIMS-CONCEPTUALISING_AND_ENGAGING_THE_ISLAMIC_TRADITION

https://www.academia.edu/27572114/TOWARD_A_SCRIPTURAL_HERMENEUTICS_OF_ISLAMIC_FEMINISM