Gender and Epistemology in Islamic Medical Ethics

In this talk Ayubi discusses the limitations of fiqh-based medical ethics in addressing gender concerns and argues that ethical epistemology of Islamic medical ethics ought to center women and non-binary Muslims’ experiences. She does a close reading of jurisprudential opinions (fatwas) and the queries that originate them and also presents research from interviews that demonstrate a mismatch between the issues important to the questioners and jurists (muftis). Ultimately, Ayubi shows that a gender contentious epistemology in Islamic medical ethics is achieved through centering women’s experiences and interpretive authority.

Zahra Ayubi is an associate professor of religion at Dartmouth College. She specializes in women and gender in premodern and contemporary Islamic ethics and has published on gendered concepts of ethics, justice, and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women’s experiences. She is the author of Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia, 2019). Her current book project, Women as Humans: Life, Death, and Gendered Being in Islamic Medical Ethics, is a textual, ethnographic, and philosophical study of gender and gendered experiences with Muslim medical ethics.

Presented by the The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation.