1,720,968 research outputs found
Displaced Ornaments: Naiza Khan's Critique of Sexual Difference in Muslim South Asia
No full textThis article brings together a Muslim theologian from colonial India and a contemporary
artist from postcolonial Pakistan, namely Ashraf 'Alī Thānvī and Naiza Khan, respectively.
In their different yet related ways, Thānvī and Khan both repurpose the idea of “ornamental
femininity.” Khan's artworks further problematize some of the key assumptions about
sexual difference in Thānvī's body of work, such as “women's ruination,” feminine
fragility, and chastity. Khan eschews the reduction of the feminine to the ornamental,
but also embraces the transcendental possibilities of the ornamental. She thus welcomes
the mediating function of ornaments, which facilitate experiences of transcendence
that are essential for becoming an aesthetic subject. Khan is able to achieve this
because of an internal contradiction in the logic of ornamental femininity within
Thānvī's moral theological tradition. By becoming attuned to her art objects, we are
in a better position to analyze how traditionalist theologians construct the idea
of sexual difference in Muslim South Asia. The article also comments on Khan's more
general theoretical contribution to contemporary art, which consists of highlighting
the ongoing tension between our named, sexed bodies and the potentialities of flesh.
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Allah: God in the Qur’an by Gabriel SaidReynolds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), x + 327 pp.
No full text
Troubling Technology: The Deobandī Debate on the Loudspeaker and Ritual Prayer
No full textThis article contributes to Islamicist scholarship on the relationship between modern technology and Muslim thought and practice by closely reading and historicizing a twentieth-century South Asian Ḥanafī treatise on the use of the loudspeaker in ritual prayers. In this treatise, the Ḥanafī jurist Muḥammad Shafīʿ discusses the reasons for changing his legal opinion. The jurist first argued that the use of the loudspeaker invalidates the ritual prayer of the congregant (muqtadī). In his revised position, however, he held that the loudspeaker should be avoided in ritual prayers, but that its use does not invalidate the prayer. While Muḥammad Shafīʿ appears to have revised his position in response to newfound scientific knowledge about the ontological status of the loudspeaker’s sound or for the sake of public benefit (maṣlaḥah), I suggest that his revised fatwā was based on distinctive Ḥanafī modes of legal reasoning. By grounding his revised position in casuistry, the muftī renewed his commitment to his law school’s methodologies in a social context in which scientific knowledge and legal pluralism were weakening Ḥanafī modes of reasoning.
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