Please join us for the next lecture in the Care Ethics Zoom Lecture Series:

March 4, 2022, 12:00 – 1:30 pm (Central Time Zone, Houston-Chicago, USA): Sarah Munawar, “A Care-Based Epistemology of Islam.” Joan Tronto will provide commentary.
Zoom registration link:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__uh-2Dedu-2Dcougarnet.zoom.us_meeting_register_tJEtd-2D2hrjMiHNV5dUeZVkssdui2Dvy6ssLV&d=DwIGaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HUp8-bkYMlNgd3ZJBxWBKsBsFAFGHrEZg21p9gxugJA&m=zLQMNWjxu8ZpRTxpGa9nmyYBAZPMef6jIPt-H3CZ9Pk&s=rzPIPWL_DVfJHVAgPER93al1qkBrzbwHxCoulxgFVws&e= 


Abstract:

Title: A Care-Based Epistemology of Islam

Can you be a Muslim and do political theory in a way that does not come at the expense of your relational responsibilities, witnessing capacities, and situated knowledges? What kinds of responsibilities arise from a care-based epistemology of Islam for Muslim political theorists? Instead of journeying to other shores, I argue that before assuming the “work” of comparative inquiry, we must open up the boundaries of political theory as a tradition and the moral inscrutability of political theorists as subjects. This requires unlearning and disinheriting white-orientated textual sensibilities and orientations of knowing the Muslim Other.  Through embodied tafsir (quranic exegesis), I introduce care as a decolonizing intervention into how we come to know Islam and study Muslim subjectivities and communities in political science.  Instead of bifurcating my scholarship into the Islam/political theory binary, or sanitizing my sense of Islam to make it intelligible, I illustrate how the notion of tradition, within both political theory and patrilineal Islamic knowledge systems, is mutually imbricated and relies on matricide as an epistemic orientation. Conceiving of tradition as a linear trajectory of inherited knowledge  relies on a matricidal conception of citizenship and interpretive authority as birthrights. The subjectivity of able-bodied man as a knower is b/ordered by and sustained through the appropriation and exploitation of caring labours and care-based modes of knowing. In this paradigm, knowledge production and subject formation require one to expunge all marks of dependency—including our dependency on our mother to be born.

Instead, through a care-based epistemology of Islam, I redefine tradition not as birthright, but as birth-work. I visualize the ecology of Islamic knowledges not as a chain but as a multi-directional care web that is nested within our relational interdependencies and sustained by the defining features of ethical Islamic knowledge production (care-knowing, collective accessibility, moral witnessing, interrelationality, social location, and giving). I offer a care-based epistemology of Islam that is intersectional, de-colonial and contextual by which Muslim political theorists can make space within our gatherings for marginal others. It is only through such comparative inquiry, that de-centers whiteness, that Muslim scholars can imagine, in Jodi Byrd’s words, “a hermeneutic of alternative contact”, of just relations, between Muslim Settlers and Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial societies, of addressing anti-Blackness within Muslim communities and of articulating an Islamic praxis of disability justice. Islamic mode of care-knowing are inherently rooted in the principles of collective accessibility and pave openings for creating more caring worlds.

BIO
Sarah Munawar (She/Hers) is a Punjabi-Muslim and settler living on and sustained by the occupied and unceded lands and waters of the the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.
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 and mother, 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 Muslim women as knowers of the “Islamic” and care-based modes of knowing Islam. 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, moral witnessing and collective accessibility in knowledge consumption and knowledge production.
 Sincerely,

Daniel Engster
Professor, Hobby School of Public Affairs
Director of the Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership
The University of Houston
[cid:image001.jpg@01D82277.8AF982D0]



############################

To unsubscribe from the FEAST-L list:
write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
or click the following link:
http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=FEAST-L&A=1