Seminar: In Hagar’s Footsteps: a De-Colonial and Islamic Ethic of Care
The Abstract: This dissertation radically reimagines the boundaries of political theory as a practice and as a tradition in three ways. First, I surface the ableist and colonial paradigm of recognition that shapes the study of Islam and the “Muslim Other” in comparative political theory and care ethics. The colonial legacy of political theory lives on within the textual sensibilities of political theorists, inherited from white-orientated reading practices, epistemic white privilege, and matricide as an epistemological orientation. Refusing to (un)learn how colonial histories of sense-contact have shaped our practices of reading and writing compromises the witnessing capacities of political theorists. In turn, we become complicit in authoring and authorizing colonial world-building practices.
Second, I trace how white-orientated and heteropatriarchal conceptions of citizenship travel through the inheritance of the nation-state. Imperial readings of disability, (inter)dependency and care, both within and outside the Islamic tradition, render Muslim women and disabled Muslims as misfits in our knowledge relations. Through auto-ethnography I argue care-based modes of knowing Islam are needed to theorize accessibility because 1) disabled Muslims and care-givers remain visible only through frames of charity or tragedy; 2) situations of dependency care render one ontologically and epistemically incapable of sensing and knowing the Islamic; 3) interpretive authority is sanctioned by legal scholars, Muslim men, or white and secular scholars; and 4) narratives of informal care-giving, care-based epistemologies of Islam and the epistemic authority of disabled Muslims and Muslim women are denigrated within the ecology of Islamic knowledges. I design various care-based and intersectional Islamic technologies by which (non)Muslims can harness care as a critical sensibility that orients how we read, write and think about what is “Islamic”, whose bodies we identify as interpretive authorities, and which types of knowledge we authorize as “Islam.”
Third, I turn away from imagining moral epistemologies of care to focus on the praxis behind care-based epistemologies of Islam and its vast potential for coalitional politics and de-colonial movement building. By de-centering whiteness, I re-conceive what it means to be a Muslim on Turtle Island and practice Islam in a settler-colonial society.
The seminar will be held on Zoom (limited spots available with an opportunity for Q&A) and will be livestreamed on Facebook. Please note that the seminar will be recorded and uploaded on the CCMW website.
Zoom Meeting details will be provided closer to the date.
For more information or partnership opportunities, email us at events@ccmw.com.
*Please Note that this Event is Postponed until Further Notice*
About the speaker:
Sarah Munawar is a Pakistani-Muslim and settler living on and sustained by the occupied and unceded land and waters of the Coast Salish people. She received her Ph.D in political science from the University of British Columbia and is also a political science instructor at Columbia College.
As a primary care-giver, her research focuses on designing an intersectional and de-colonial ethic of care through Islamic thought that centres the epistemic authority of disabled Muslims and care-givers as knowers of the “Islamic” and care-based modes of knowing Islam. Writing from the borderlands, she interrogates the limits of comparative political theory and the colonial politics of recognition as paradigms for cross-cultural inquiry. Instead she offers political theorists, and Muslims, an Islamic-feminist and de-colonial epistemology that prioritizes body-sense, consent-based care, intentionality and collective accessibility in knowledge consumption and knowledge production.
ABOUT THE SERIES
The Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW) is pleased to present the Muslim Women Scholars Series. One of CCMW's strategic goals is to promote critical thinking among Muslims and non-Muslims to challenge stereotypes and assumptions about Islam, Muslim women and their families. One way of doing this is to feature the work of contemporary Muslim women scholars focusing on diverse topics related to Muslim women.
For more information or partnership opportunities, email us at events@ccmw.com.