My work focuses on the history of Islamic legal thought, primarily in the 11th-15th centuries CE, with an emphasis on issues of gender and ritual. I’m particularly interested in the conceptual structures of legal works and how Islamic legal thought relates to other normative discourses that were authoritative for premodern Muslims. I’m also interested in the ongoing life of these texts (and of Islamic law) in modernity.
My most recent book, Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity (2022), uses the disputed status of wives’ domestic labor as a window into deeper debates about the structure of the Muslim marriage contract and the nature of the rights and obligations that were exchanged between the spouses. In these debates, issues of gender were deeply intertwined with issues of social status. While most jurists agreed that on a strictly legal level wives had no obligation to provide housework to their husbands, the same thinkers often passionately affirmed that they had an ethical obligation to do so. Tracing this conversation through works of renunciant piety (zuhd), Greek-influenced philosophical ethics, and Sufism, the book shows how Islamic law functioned within a larger landscape of normative discourses. Here is a short interview about the book.
Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (2014) examines the evolution of legal doctrines and argumentation regarding women’s participation in mosque-based prayer and brings this normative material into dialogue with evidence from other kinds of sources for women’s presence and activities in mosques. It uses a longitudinal survey of legal texts to trace the historical evolution of legal doctrines on women’s mosque attendance and identify their inflection points, and examines what these doctrinal developments reveal about the evolution of normative assumptions about gender. In particular, it examines the changing categories wielded by the jurists and the varying degree to which “women” functioned as an organizing category. In juxtaposing the evolving legal debates with evidence for concrete social behavior, it explores both the relationship between legal discourse and social practice and the limited degree to which legal categories capture what can be reconstructed of women’s religious aspirations and practices.
The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad (2007) looks at the religious goals and assumptions driving the development of rituals commemorating the Prophet’s birth (the mawlid). It seeks to go beyond the conventional focus defined by the controversy over bida’ (religious innovations) to interpret mawlid ceremonies as coherent and powerful forms of religious expression in themselves, drawing extensively on the voluminous devotional literature associated with them. Mawlid texts emerged from the intersection between the professional chanters who performed mawlid ceremonies, the laypeople who hired them, and the religious scholars who sought to discipline their practices. Falling in the interstices of conventional Islamic disciplines, mawlids offer a unique window into premodern Islamic piety.